The spectre of the cambrian explosion continues to loom over Darwinism

 Fossil Friday: Hemichordate Body Plan and Lifecycle Goes Back to the Cambrian Explosion

Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday we will discuss the abrupt origin of yet another animal phylum during the famous Cambrian Explosion. It is the marine invertebrate phylum Hemichordata, which is represented by the pterobranchs (including the extinct graptolites) and the acorn worms (enteropneusts) as well as the enigmatic Planctosphaeroidea, which might just be planktic larva of some unknown deep sea acorn worms. Like chordates, hemichordates are deuterostome animals and considered to be the closest relatives (sister group) of echinoderms such as sea urchins and starfish. They have a tripartite body with three body cavities. While pterobranchs are sessile filter feeders, acorn worms are detritivores living in U-shaped burrows in the sea floor. The fossil record of Hemichordata goes back to the Early/Middle Cambrian (Maletz 2014, Nanglu et al. 2020).

The oldest known hemichordate and oldest pterobranch is the zooid fossil Galeaplumosus abilus from the 525-518 million year old Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Konservat-Lagerstätte of southern China (Hou et al. 2011, also see Hou et al. 2017).

Only very few fossil enteropneusts have been described yet in just eight fossil species (Cameron 2018, Yang et al. 2024) from the Cambrian (Walcott 1911, Caron et al. 2013, Nanglu et al. 2016, Yang et al. 2024), the Carboniferous (Bardack 1997, Maletz 2014, Cameron 2016), and the Jurassic periods (Arduini et al. 1984, Alessandrello et al. 2004, Bechly & Frickhinger 1999). Possible trace fossils of acorn worms have been reported from the Lower Triassic of Italy by Twitchett (1996). This rarity is quite remarkable because some other soft-bodied worm-like organisms that burrow in the sea floor are much better represented in the fossil record. Actually, the only enteropneust specimen from the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria in Germany was described by myself as Mesobalanoglossus buergeri (also see Bechly 2015). The featured image shows the holotype specimen (no. SNSB-BSPG 1998-I-15), which is 68.8 cm long and 2.6 cm wide, and deposited at the Natural History Museum in Munich.

Abrupt Appearance, Yet Again

Recently, 39 specimens of the previously unknown acorn worm Cambrobranchus pelagobenthos were described from the Hayiyan Lagerstätte in China (Yang et al. 2024), which belongs to the famous Lower Cambrian Chengjiang biota. The scientists could also describe larvae and juveniles and thereby document the characteristic indirect development with a pelago-benthic lifestyle already for these earliest known representatives of acorn worms.

Thus, both major subgroups of the phylum Hemichordata are known from Lower Cambrian fossils with completely modern morphology and life cycle, which confirms the overall pattern of the abrupt appearance of animal phyla in the Cambrian Explosion. Furthermore, the putative stem-hemichordate Gyaltsenglossus senis was described by Nanglu et al. (2020) from the Cambrian Burgess Shale of Canada. However, with an estimated age of 506 million years, it is 10-20 million years younger than the oldest crown group representatives discussed above and thus requires an ad hoc explanation in terms of ghost lineages to be accommodated within a Darwinian paradigm

References

Alessandrello A, Bracchi G & Riou B 2004. Polychaete, sipunculan and enteropneust worms from the Lower Callovian (Middle Jurassic) of La Voulte-sur-Rhône (Ardèche, France). Memoire della Società Italiana di Scienze Naturali e del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano (Fascicolo I) 32, 1–16.

Arduini P, Pinna G & Terruzzi G 1981. Megaderaion sinemuriense n.g. n.sp., a new fossil enteropneust of the Sinemurian of Osteno in Lombardy. Atti della Societa Italiana di Scienze Naturali e del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano 122(1-2), 104–108. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/325194

Bardack D 1997. Wormlike animals: Enteropeusta. pp. 89–92 in: Shabica CW & Hay AA (eds). Richardson’s Guide to the fossil fauna of Mazon Creek. Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago (IL), 308 pp.

Bechly G 2015. [Chapter] Eichelwürmer (Hemichordata: Enteropneusta). p. 324 in: Arratia G, Schultze HP, Tischlinger H & Viohl G (eds). Solnhofen – Ein Fenster in die Jurazeit. 2 vols. Pfeil Verlag, Munich (Germany), 620 pp. [In German] https://pfeil-verlag.de/publikationen/solnhofen-ein-fenster-in-die-jurazeit/

Bechly G & Frickhinger KA 1999. Acorn worms. pp. 76–79 in: Frickhinger KA (ed.). The Fossils of Solnhofen 2: New specimens, new details, new results. Goldschneck-Verlag, Korb (Germany), 190 pp. [German PDF]

Cameron CB 2016. Saccoglossus testa from the Mazon Creek fauna (Pennsylvanian of Illinois) and the evolution of acorn worms (Enteropneusta: Hemichordata). Palaeontology 59(3), 329–336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12235

Cameron CB 2018. Class Enteropneusta: Introduction, Morphology, Life Habits, Systematic Descriptions, and Future Research. Treatise Online 109, 1–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17161/to.v0i0.7889 (dead link)

Caron J-B, Conway Morris S & Cameron CB 2013. Tubicolous enteropneusts from the Cambrian period. Nature 495, 503–506. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12017

Hou X-g, Aldridge RJ, Siveter DJ, Siveter DJ, Williams M, Zalasiewicz J & Ma X-y 2011. An Early Cambrian Hemichordate Zooid. Current Biology 21(7), 612–616. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.005

Hou X-g, Siveter DJ, Siveter DJ, Aldridge RJ, Cong P-y, Gabbott SE, Ma X-y, Purnell MA & Williams M 2017. Hemichordata. Chapter 22, pp. 250–251 in: The Cambrian Fossils of Chengjiang, China: The Flowering of Early Animal Life. 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (UK) / Hoboken (NJ), xii+316 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118896372.ch22

Maletz J 2014. Hemichordata (Pterobranchia, Enteropneusta) and the fossil record. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 398, 16–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2013.06.010

Nanglu K, Caron J-B, Conway Morris S & Cameron CB 2016. Cambrian suspension-feeding tubicolous hemichordates. BMC Biology 14: 56, 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-016-0271-4

Nanglu K, Caron J-B & Cameron CB 2020. Cambrian Tentaculate Worms and the Origin of the Hemichordate Body Plan. Current Biology 30(21), 4238–4244.e1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.078

Twitchett RJ 1996. The Resting Trace of an Acorn-Worm (Class: Enteropneusta) from the Lower Triassic. Journal of Paleontology 70(1), 128–131. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1306375

Walcott CD 1911. Cambrian Geology and Paleontology II: No. 5 – Middle Cambrian annelids. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 57, 109–145. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/34820

Yang X, Kimmig J, Cameron CB, Nanglu K, Kimmig SR, de Carle D, Zhang C, Yu M & Peng S 2024. An early Cambrian pelago-benthic acorn worm and the origin of the hemichordate larva. Palaeontologia Electronica 27(1): a17, 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26879/1356

Perfect solar eclipses and the case for design.

 To Understand the Meaning of a Solar Eclipse

Jay W Richards

The sun and the moon are not just the same shape, but the same apparent size in the sky. It’s this happy arrangement that produces total solar eclipses as seen from the earth’s surface.

Americans got a chance to view such an eclipse on Monday — an event we won’t see again from coast to coast until 2045. The moon’s 115-mile wide central shadow entered Texas from Mexico around 12:29 p.m. over Eagle Pass before grazing the edge of San Antonio, and then passing over Dallas-Ft. Worth. It continued on a northeasterly pass over 11 other states until it reached Maine. (You can find the precise path at NationalEclipse.com.)

In a total solar eclipse, just before “totality,” the last bright bit of the sun’s photosphere looks like a pink diamond in an engagement ring. When the moon covers the sun’s disk, the sky goes dark; the temperature drops; the stars appear. Bugs and animals get confused and go quiet or start squawking. And the dim outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona, reaches out from the black lunar disk like the gray iris of an eye with a black pupil in the middle. At that point you can take off your protective glasses and see it with your naked eyes.

Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez (my co-author on The Privileged Planet) and I provided live commentary for an eclipse viewing in Waxahachie, Texas, south of Dallas — where totality lasted four minutes and 19 seconds. (You can find highlights at X on the @DiscoveryCSC feed.)

In order for a total solar eclipse to occur, the moon, sun, and Earth have to line up in a straight line. When the moon passes in front of the sun, you can see an eclipse if you’re in the path of the moon’s shadow.

Those fully in the shadow — the umbra — see the moon cover the sun. If you’re just outside that path, you see a partial eclipse — the penumbra. The difference between a partial and total eclipse is like the difference between day and night. It’s impossible to capture with mere words the experience of seeing a total eclipse. But words can help us ponder its meaning.

Finely Tuned

The sun is a giant ball of gas and plasma. The moon is a much smaller rock. And yet, during a total eclipse, they mark off the same space in our sky. They match. On Earth, we can see not just total eclipses, but what we might call perfect solar eclipses.

The moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun. But the moon is also about 400 times closer to the earth than is the sun. As a result, the size of the moon matches the size of the sun from our perspective. And since they appear as round disks, they match in both size and shape.

Physics doesn’t require this arrangement. There are 65 major moons in our solar system and many smaller ones. But only we enjoy perfect solar eclipses when a moon just barely covers the sun’s bright photosphere. If there were life forms on Mars or Jupiter, they wouldn’t see such eclipses.

So the best place to view total solar eclipses in our solar system is just where there are observers to see them. Let that sink in a minute.

A Habitable Planet

Most astronomers chalk this up to coincidence. And yet, without this precise arrangement of the earth, the moon, and the sun, we probably wouldn’t exist.

Let me explain. For lots of reasons, a planet almost surely needs liquid water on its surface to host complex life. Almost all places in the solar system and in the universe are either way too hot or way too cold for this. To be “habitable,” a planet needs to be in the “Goldilocks Zone” around its star: not too hot and not too cold. Think of this zone as a narrow, nearly circular ring of space around a star. (Netflix’s Three-Body Problem is fun science fiction, but any planet in a three-star system would almost surely be lifeless.)

The earth is, of course, safely inside the Goldilocks Zone. And as a result, the sun appears to be a certain size in our sky.

Our large, well-placed moon also plays a key role in making Earth habitable by stabilizing the tilt of its axis. That gives our planet a more stable climate. The moon also contributes to Earth’s ocean tides, which mix nutrients from the land into the oceans. The two tiny moons around Mars are much too small to serve in this role. As a result, Mars wobbles on its axis far more than the earth does. That’s bad news for Martians.

Now put these two facts together.

When a planet, like Earth, is in the cozy, life-friendly zone around a star, that star will appear to be a certain size in its sky.

A habitable planet like Earth also needs to have a moon of a certain size in its sky to create the right amount of gravitational pull to stabilize the planet.

Not just “certain” sizes, but nearly the same apparent sizes. So, two of the key ingredients for building a habitable planet also produce perfect eclipses for observers on that planet.

Our Eclipses Are a Gold Mine for Science 

That alone seems fishy. But there’s more: Our ability to see perfect solar eclipses has played a pivotal role in several major scientific discoveries. Those discoveries would have been hard to make on the planets that don’t enjoy such eclipses.

First, eclipses helped us unlock the mystery of stars.

Scientists since Isaac Newton (1666) have known that sunlight splits into all the colors of the rainbow when passed through a prism. But only in the 19th century did astronomers begin to observe solar eclipses with spectroscopes, which use prisms. This allowed them to discover how the sun produces its light.

The beginning and end of totality present the best chances to examine the thin middle layer of the sun’s atmosphere, called the chromosphere. It shines in the ruby-red light of hydrogen gas heated to more than 20,000° Celsius (36,000° Fahrenheit). Just beyond the moon’s silhouette during an eclipse, observers may also see solar prominences: brilliant red arcs, loops, and jets of hot gas propelled by the explosive release of the sun’s magnetic energy.

All of this gave astronomers a way to figure out the structure of the sun itself. Since the sun looks larger from the earth than from any other planet with a moon, we can discern finer details in its chromosphere and corona than we could from any other planet.

This knowledge, in turn, has allowed astronomers to make sense of the light from the distant stars. Perfect eclipses, then, have been a key that allowed us to unlock the physics of stars.

Testing Einstein’s Theory

Eclipses have done far more than help astronomers decipher starlight, however.

In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein predicted in his General Theory of Relativity that light passing near a massive object like the sun would be visibly bent. To test his theory, astronomers needed to measure the changes in the positions of starlight passing near the sun’s edge compared to their positions months later when the sun was in another part of the sky.

Have you ever tried to look at starlight right next to the edge of the sun? It’s a bad idea and wouldn’t work anyway. The test could only be done during a total solar eclipse. That’s why, during the 1919 eclipse, two teams of astronomers set out to confirm Einstein’s theory.

They succeeded, as did other astronomers during later eclipses. This led scientists to embrace Einstein’s theory, which is the basis of our current knowledge of the universe.

Conspiracy, Not Coincidence

There’s far more to this story. Indeed, the perfect eclipses we enjoy are just one of many examples of an eerie pattern Gonzalez and I discuss in detail in The Privileged Planet. That pattern points to a startling conclusion: Life-friendly places like Earth are also the best places, overall, for doing science. That is, the rare places where observers can exist are also the best overall places for observing. The universe seems to be designed not just for life but also for discovery.

Genesis 1 says that God created lights in the sky for “signs.” One of those signs has been hiding in plain sight all along.

Darwinism's God?

 Was God a Bacterium? 

Daniel Witt

University of Bonn biologist František Baluška has an explanation for the apparent design in biology. He believes that there was design involved in evolution — yet not from an outside designer, but from the organisms themselves. He maintains that all living organisms are sentient, even down to simplest bacteria, and that they used their minds to evolve.

You read that right. And it’s not a mischaracterization of his views. For example, here’s how Baluška and his collaborators William B. Miller Jr. and Arthur S. Reber summarize the thesis in a recent paper1:

The first eukaryotic cells emerged some 2–1.5 billion years ago, which implies that it took nearly two billion years to get from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells. Our cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) model states that all living cells utilize cellular sentience to survive and evolve. We argue that the prolonged timeline to evolve eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic cells was necessitated by the complex level of evolutionary novelty required to assemble unitary consciousness from several formerly independent prokaryotic versions of cellular consciousness, as successive orders of cognition…Once an initiating eukaryotic threshold of cognition was attained, eukaryotic evolution (based on its novel eukaryotic version of cellular sentience and cognition) proceeded relatively rapidly alongside an active unicellular sphere, including a huge diversity of protozoa and other protists that has thrived and evolved until our present day. Some 0.8 billion years ago, and on several occasions, colonial protists invented the multicellular forms that evolved into fungi, animals, and plants, emerging first in the sea and later also on land. Cellular cognition enabled multicellularity and permitted its successful continuous evolution toward the higher level of cohesive cellular complexities exhibited in multicellular organisms, with symbiotic fungal–plant/tree roots networks representing one of its most extensively integrated forms.

Notice the use of the word “invented.” For once, this is not a case of sloppy language or the tendency to anthropomorphize natural selection. They are really saying that protists invented complex multicellular life, using their minds. First life evolved the ability to think; then it used that ability to evolve everything else. As they put it later on: “Evolutionary development is creative not only through either mutations or natural selection but also — and mainly — through the linked cognitive activities and preferences of individual organisms.”

Poetic License? 

Peter Corning, an editor of the volume in which the paper appears, seems a little wary of going all-in on the idea of conscious microorganisms. In his introductory essay to the volume, he says that biologists who say primordial organisms exhibit sensation, choosing, and mind are exercising “poetic license.” 

Poetic license is well and good — in poetry. But poetry does not cut it as scientific explanation. If the idea of primordial consciousness is mere poetry, it does not explain. If, on the other hand, it is not mere poetry… well, that is something very astonishing. It speaks either to a non-physical intellect, or else to a level of ordered complexity much harder to account for than the complex systems it is invoked to explain away in the first place. Neither option is quite tolerable, apparently, so Corning seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too. Primordial “consciousness” can be invoked to get past the nasty difficulties with neo-Darwinism, but if it’s called out as too ridiculous, or demanding explanation, that charge can be brushed away with “poetic license.”

At any rate, I see no evidence that Baluška and his colleagues are being the least bit poetical. They make it very clear that what they are talking about is literally mind, cognition, consciousness, sentience — terms they seem to use interchangeably. They attribute mind to primordial organisms, and attribute evolution to the decisions made by these minds. 

Elsewhere, Baluška and Reber write, “let us be clear about what we mean by sentience or consciousess [sic] as it is manifested in unicellular species. We are referring to feelings, subjective states, a primitive awareness of events, including an awareness of internal states.”

But How Does It Work? 

We should acknowledge that this theory is, unlike some similar attempts, at least an actual solution: if true, it would explain how complex life evolved. However, in solving that problem, Baluška and his colleagues create another, equally formidable problem: how does this primordial sentience work, and where did it come from? 

While there does appear to be evidence that plants, fungi, protozoans, bacteria, and archaea respond to the world in a manner that is much more like “thinking” than we are typically taught to believe, there is a lot of mystery about how they do it. The following explanation, from the first paper, is typical:

The plasma membrane provides all cells with a sheltered space, allowing exotic biophysical phenomena based on charged ions, reactive oxygen species, and bioelectric as well as biomagnetic phenomena.

Throw in a random assortment of poorly understood phenomena, and boom! you have consciousness. Of course, the authors would admit that the exact mechanisms of cellular consciousness are still poorly understood. That’s fine. But do they really think that once they uncover the details of these primordial minds, those minds will be easier to explain naturalistically than, say, the bacterial flagellum?

A Cure Worse than the Disease

The thing is, if we ever came down to hard details about what Baluška et al. are proposing, all the old design arguments would still be waiting to be dealt with. There is no reason to hope that “cellular cognition,” “plant neurons,” or a “fungal mind” is less likely to be irreducibly complex or require foresight in its engineering than any other biological system. Actually, it would probably be much more complex than most. 

Essentially, what these researchers are doing is taking the most advanced and perplexing system in biology, the brain, and putting it at the beginning of the evolutionary process instead of the end. That’s a fascinating theory, and they are to be commended for their courage and willingness to think outside the box. If true, it’s revolutionary. But it’s not going to make things easier on unguided evolution.

For now, it might make things easier on scientists who prefer to hide from design arguments rather than face them head on. But in the end, there is no escaping the fact that if this theory is true it speaks to a level of design in nature far more exquisite and improbable than anything hitherto dreamt of. 

Notes

Baluška, František, William B. Miller Jr., and Arthur S. Reber. “Cellular Basis of Cognition and Evolution: From Protists and Fungi Up to Animals, Plants, and Root-Fungal Networks.” In Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems, edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross. 33-58. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2023. 

Synergies did it?

 Synergies All the Way Down 

Daniel Witt

The turn of the 21st century saw the publications of several works that challenged the theoretical basis of Darwin’s theory, notably Darwin’s Black Box (1996), by Michael Behe, and The Design Inference (1998) and No Free Lunch (2001) by William Dembski. The books were generally ignored or disparaged in the evolutionary biology community. Yet around that time (no doubt by coincidence) the search began for a “grand unified theory” of evolution, that would provide “some single principle or some small set of principles” to explain the tendency of life to become more complex. 

Of course, “natural selection and random variation” was supposed to be that single principle. But unofficially, Darwin’s unifying theory had been deemed inadequate, and the quest was on for something that actually worked. 

Evolutionary biologist Peter Corning seems to be rather annoyed by this quest. After giving a summary of the state of things (including the quotes above), Corning writes that there already is such a unifying theory, and he invented it.1 It was proposed decades ago in his 1983 book The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution. 

This is how Corning explains his theory:

Synergistic selection refers to the many contexts in nature where two or more genes/genomes/individuals have a shared fate; their combined effects are functionally interdependent…Although it may seem like backwards logic, the thesis is that functional synergy is the cause of cooperation and complexity in living systems, not the other way around.

The idea is that pre-existing systems combine to make more complex systems, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Examples of synergy cited by Corning include: self-replicating molecules enclosed in cell walls; chromosomes linking those self-replicating molecules together relationally; the genetic code connecting RNA, DNA, and proteins; eukaryotes created by the absorption of one prokaryote into another; multicellularity; sexual reproduction; emperor penguins huddling together for warmth. 

Foresight, or Synergy? 

If you survey this list, you may notice something. Most of the examples are used by ID proponents, but for a different purpose — to point to the principle of planning or foresight in living systems. When a system requires many complex interworking parts to function, this can’t be explained by minor innovations building up over time, except perhaps by an insanely lucky fluke; another principle besides Darwin’s mechanism is needed, and that principle is design. 

Or perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it’s “synergy”?

Corning believes that this principle explains the complex interdependency of living systems, without the need for a designer. He sees his model as a Darwinian theory. It’s not that Darwinism needed replacing: it was just missing an ingredient, and synergy is that ingredient. 

Solving the Problem, or Just Describing It?

Okay, that’s a theory… or is it? Is synergy an explanation, or merely a description? The term “synergy” points to the reality that organisms are wholes much greater than the sum of their parts, with the parts working together in a symphony of complex relationships. It does not, in and of itself, explain how that came to be. The final cause is left unspecified. 

You can see this in the fact that Corning mixes up cases of synergy that are clearly caused by an identifiable intelligent mind (e.g., emperor penguins huddling together for warmth) with cases where no such mind is apparent (e.g., the appearance of chromosomes to connect genes together). In the case of the emperor penguins, penguin intelligence is the explanation for the penguin huddle. The synergy happens because they decide they want it to happen, using their intelligence. Can RNA, DNA, proteins, and cell membranes do the same? 

Yes or no? Neither answer helps Darwinian evolution out much. If the answer is yes, that’s truly remarkable, and itself requires intelligent design, since all the usual design arguments would apply to this undoubtedly complex (though apparently hidden) molecular intellect. If the answer is no, Corning has done nothing but describe the situation. He has not explained it. Yes — RNA, DNA, proteins, and cell membranes work together in beautiful synchronization to create a system greater than the sum of its parts — well and good, but how did this come to be?

Without foresight, why should two complex, compatible systems be sitting there, ready-made and waiting to be combined in intricate ways to form something greater? There is no reason implicit in the laws of nature why they should be. And the odds of it happening by chance, through a single random variation at a time, are not likely to be any better than the odds of simply building the whole system that way. If, on the other hand, the systems are not designed to be compatible, how are they to come together? How could evolution do the necessary random tinkering, a vast amount of it, without destroying the functionality of one or both systems?

If you doubt the difficulty of this, take a couple of man-made machines and try to combine them, preserving function in every step of the process. It’s not easy, even though you are using intelligent design to do it — unless the two machines were intentionally designed to be compatible.  

The funny thing is, these are the standard arguments for intelligent design in biology. Corning only calls attention to the problem. He does not solve it, because in the end his explanation just backs the question. He deals with the improbability of design by explaining it through synergy, not caring that this synergy is itself a design marvel in need of explanation. And why should he care? No doubt that design marvel can be explained by synergy, too — and on and on, back into the misty dawn of life where nothing is visible and therefore nothing needs to be explained.

“It’s Turtles All the Way Down”

Corning concludes his paper with a familiar story. He writes:

There is a story attributed to the famed twentieth century philosopher Bertrand Russell about a public lecture in which he discussed various properties of the Solar System. At the end of his lecture, an elderly woman in the audience approached him and told him he was wrong. The sun is held up on a turtle’s back, she said. A startled Russell responded by asking her, so what holds up the turtle? “You think you’re so clever,” she replied. “It’s turtles all the way down.” So what explains the rise of complexity in evolution? From the perspective of the Synergism Hypothesis and Synergistic Selection, it’s synergies all the way up.

Honestly, it’s a bit perplexing that he would choose such an example to sum up his views. The tone of his writing here is triumphant, but doesn’t he realize that the old woman is supposed to be either foolish, crazy, or pulling Russell’s leg?

I’m also not quite sure why he substitutes “up” for “down” in the phrase “synergies all the way up.” There is no logical reason to do so. You can envision the process of evolution from either direction, just as you can look at a stack of turtles from either above or below. Our actual perspective, however, is from the top, and we are looking down into the past in search of the final cause of complex systems. So the original phrasing is really more fitting. 

One has to wonder if Corning changed the word due to a subconscious realization that there was a rhetorical risk in drawing attention to the parallel between himself and Russell’s crazy turtle lady. But mixing up the phrasing isn’t going to solve that problem, because the logic is the same. “Synergies all the way down” may be good enough for Corning, but some of us would like to know what it all rests on.

Notes

Corning, Peter A. “Teleonomy in Evolution: “The Ghost in the Machine”.” In Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems, edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross. 11-31. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2023.

I evolved therefore I am not?

 

It's 2024 and the skilled trades are still the smart choice.

 

On trinitarians and their analogies.

 

The wisdom of the original philosopher king.

 Roman's Ch.2:4NKJV"Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?"

Firstly the Lord JEHOVAH is trying to teach mankind that we cannot become truly better off until we become truly better people. There is no shortcut ,not better laws,not better technology nor better organization.

First there must be a better man only then would a better world be possible Jesus Christ is the prototype of that new man.

Roman's Ch.13:14NKJV"But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts."

Secondly there is NO Political or legislative pathway to this new man.

1Timothy Ch.1:8,9NKJV"But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,"

The fact that one needs to be deterred or restrained by the threat of force/actual force from wrongdoing proves that one is not suited for a place in the coming better world of JEHOVAH'S Making. The New World is not going to be a police state or prison camp.

Here is what will guarantee the enduring liberty and security of JEHOVAH'S New World.

Jeremiah Ch.31:33,34NKJV"But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their [i]hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. 34No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”"

New people(Mental and moral clones of Christ) are what will make JEHOVAH'S New World truly New and not merely the old world 2.0.

Naturally selecting what exactly?

 

Revelation14:14-20 demystified.

  Son of Man Reaps - Rev. 14:14-20

"I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one "like a son of man" with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand.

"Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, "Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe." So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth and the earth was harvested.

"Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, "Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe." The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the winepress of God's wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses' bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia [about 200 miles]." - Revelation 14:14-20, NIV.

Noted trinitarian scholar William Barclay writes in his The Revelation of John, Vol. 2 (Revised Ed.), "The Daily Study Bible Series" that there are "difficult things" in this passage.

"... there is the fact that the one like a son of man reaps and also an angel reaps. We may regard the one like the son of man, the risen and victorious Lord [Jesus], reaping the harvest of his own people, while the angel with the sharp sickle reaps the harvest of those destined for judgment."

Dr. Barclay didn't go on to explain another difficulty: Why the scripture about the son of man reaping is so difficult for many trinitarians. So the purpose of this paper is to explain why this scripture is so difficult for trinitarians.

Notice these statements by respected trinitarian authorities which also confirm that it is Christ being spoken of in the passage in question:

Rev. 14:14: "Christ is come for reaping this time (Heb. 9:28) for the harvesting of earth (verses 15-17). - p. 414, Vol. 6, Word Pictures in the New Testament, A. T. Robertson (extreme trinitarian).

`Crown': "Hence in the Apoc. [Revelation] a crown is represented on the conquering Christ (Rev 6:2, 14:14)" - p. 530, Vol. 1, A Dictionary of the Bible (trinitarian), James Hastings, Hendrickson Publ., 1988 printing.

`Crown' (Stephanos in NT Greek) - "Stephanos is the crown of exaltation bestowed upon Christ (Rev 6:2; 14:14; He:2 9)." - p. 763, Vol. 2, The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (very trinitarian), Eerdmans Publ., 1984 printing.

"The linguistic usage of Revelation 1:13 and 14:14 reveals affinities to Dan. 7:13. Both passages speak of `one like a son of man' as walking (`amidst the lampstands') or `sitting' on the clouds of heaven. Note too how Rev. differs from the Gospels in leaving out the article; this is apparently an imitation of the text of Dan. 7:13: the apocalyptic `Son of man' is the figure found already in Dan. 7:13, but now as a glorified ruler and judge." - The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (trinitarian), p. 633, Vol. 3, Zondervan Publ. (trinitarian), 1986.

Also examine Acts 1:9; Daniel 7:13,14; Acts 1:11; Mark 13:26, 27; and Rev. 1:7:

"[the resurrected Jesus] was lifted up, and a cloud removed him from their sight [`a cloud hid him from their sight' - GNB; `he disappeared into a cloud' - LB]" - NEB, Acts 1:9.

"[Daniel saw in a vision:] behold, with the clouds of heaven one like a Son of Man was coming, and he came up to the Ancient of Days [God] and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion, glory and a kingdom." - NASB, Daniel 7:13, 14.

"`This Jesus, who has been taken away from you up to heaven [hidden in a cloud], will come in the same way as you have seen him go.'" - NEB, Acts 1:11.

"At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather [reap] his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens." - NIV, Mark 13:26, 27.

"Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him" - NASB, Rev. 1:7.

Notice how one scripture tells us that Jesus' followers will be `gathered by the sickle' (harvested) from the earth by Jesus the king who is still seated on the cloud (Rev. 14):

"So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth and the earth was harvested."

Does it say Jesus will actually physically return to earth? No. It clearly says he will still be seated in the clouds when he harvests his people from the earth. In the same way that the clouds hid him when he left (Acts 1:9), they could well be hiding him on his harvesting return ("in the same way as you have seen him go.")

Furthermore, Jesus doesn't even do it firsthand, but, instead, while "in clouds," actually sends his angels to earth to do it! (Mark 13:26, 27.) So, when it also speaks of Jesus being `seen,' we may decide that it really means we `see' in vision, or even `see' by means of our own understanding of what is happening. - see Insight, Vol. 2, p. 678, `Presence.'

After all, other righteous people described in the Bible as having `seen' God, did not physically see him, but, instead, actually saw a vision or even a representative (usually an angel) of God - See SF study paper. Job, for example merely heard Jehovah's voice coming from a windstorm (`whirlwind' - NRSV), but later he said ... "now my eyes have seen you." Job 38:1; 42:5, NIV. And the footnote for Job 42:5 in the New International Version Study Bible tells us:

"... now Job has seen God with the eyes of faith and spiritual understanding" - NIVSB, 1985 ed.

In line with this understanding is the rendering by many translators of Heb. 9:26. Here the inspired Bible writer tells us that Jesus has already "appeared once and for all" [hapax - see the NWT study paper]. - NEB, JB, NJB, GNB, Phillips; cf. RSV, NRSV, REB, NAB (1970 & 1991 revision). This would certainly seem to indicate that Jesus would not again physically appear to men.

But whether men actually, physically see him or not is not an important issue. Surely an honest misunderstanding of this would in no way threaten your standing with God.

An error in your understanding of who God is and, therefore, your worshiping God in truth (John 4:24), however, is a crucial issue which means everlasting life (John 17:3) or eternal destruction (2 Thess. 1:8, 9, NRSV).

- - - - - -

It is strange that so many respected trinitarian scholars admit that Christ is the `son of man' in Rev. 14:14. Of course the evidence overwhelms any other theory, but that doesn't stop many trinitarian "scholars" from constructing other poorly supported context-defying statements in other areas of the Bible.

Of course, they usually just ignore the great trinitarian difficulty of Rev. 14:14. And what is this great difficulty concerning Christ on the clouds in Rev. 14:14?

He is in all respects like an angel (Dan. 10:5; cf. Rev. 1:13; 14:15 - `another angel' besides that of 14:14 [Christ])." - The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (trinitarian), p. 633, Vol. 3, Zondervan Publ. (trinitarian), 1986.

Notice that the "son of man" on the clouds is given a command by "another angel" and he obeys that command. The command, of course, comes from God (the Father alone) through the angel. Both the "son of man" and the other angel are servants of God (the Father alone).

The wording " another angel" (although not certain, because of the description of other angels before the appearance of the "son of man") at least strongly indicates that the "son of man" here is an angel of God.

But we find absolutely no indication whatsoever in this account that the angel who orders Christ to harvest the earth is giving orders to God Himself! Can anyone believe that an angelic servant of God would speak this way to the Most High God Himself? Or that he would have to tell the omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing) Most High "God the Son" when and how to do anything?

Isn't it obvious that Jesus here is in the role of a reaping angel of the last days and performing a task similar to the other reaping angel? Would the Most High Only True God actually wait subserviently for a command from the Most High Only True God to be brought to him by an angelic servant of God and then obey like any other servant?

Isn't the great "difficulty" for trinitarians here the fact that this scripture is actually strong evidence that the resurrected Son (and installed heavenly King) is still not really God ?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Although Watchtower Society (WTS) research and scholarship is usually at least the equal of (and often superior to) that of other sources, I have tried to rely most heavily on other sources in Christendom itself (preferably trinitarian) or my own independent research to provide evidence disproving the trinitarian `proof' being examined in this paper. The reason is, of course, that this paper is meant to provide evidence needed by non-Witnesses, and many of them will not accept anything written by the WTS. They truly believe it is false, even dishonest. Therefore some of the following information may be in disagreement with current WTS teachings in some specifics. Jehovah's Witnesses should research the most recent WTS literature on the subject or scripture in question before using this information with others.

Posted by  Elijah Daniels 

We should prepare to welcome our AI overlords?

 

Quantum technology?

 

The fossil record sides with devolution?

 Fossil Friday: New Study Confirms “Feathered Dinosaurs” Were Secondarily Flightless Birds

Günter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features one of the most well-known fossils of all, the famous Berlin specimen of the ancient bird Archaeopteryx from the Late Jurassic Solnhofen lithographic limestone in Bavaria. This iconic fossil was often considered to be a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, and thus a poster-child for fossil evidence in favor of Darwinian evolution.

In several past articles at Evolution News I have discussed the work of paleo-ornithologist Alan Feduccia, who courageously challenged the current consensus view that birds evolved from dinosaurs, as first suggested by Yale paleontologist John Ostrom in the mid 1970s with his Birds-are-Maniraptoran-Theropods (BMT) hypothesis. Feduccia elaborated his opposing views in numerous technical articles and four popular books titled “The Age of Birds“ (Feduccia 1980), “The Origin and Evolution of Birds” (Feduccia 1996), “Riddle of the Feathered Dragons” (Feduccia 2012), and most recently “Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs” (Feduccia 2020). In a highly recommended review of the latter book, James (2021) wrote that “Every school child knows that birds are dinosaurs. Numerous magazine articles and popular books on the topic are available,” which is a remarkable success of selling a relatively recent scientific hypothesis to a wide general audience as an established fact. James continues that “in spite of all this confidence that the problem of the origin of birds has been solved, strong grounds exist for regarding the issue as unsettled, … Surely, admitting that the hypothesis that birds are maniraptoran theropods has serious problems would be better than to defend it so strongly.”

Three General Objections

In a review of Feduccia’s earlier book on the “Riddle of the Feathered Dragons,” Leigh (2014) listed three general objections by Feduccia to Ostrom’s dinosaur-to-bird hypothesis:

1.Most of the fossils used to support the theropod ancestry of birds are 20 million or more years younger than Archaeopteryx [this was famously labeled by Feduccia as a “temporal paradox”].

2.Theropod dinosaurs, Deinonychus included, were runners. It is much more reasonable to believe that, like bats and pterosaurs, birds descended from arboreal animals that evolved flight via the ability to glide.

3.The fossil record suggests that feathers evolved in connection with gliding and flying, rather than as insulation, or as part of an apparatus for catching insects, as Ostrom had suggested.

James (2021) listed several further problems that Feduccia has identified in his most recent book, which support his alternative view:

Neoflightless problem: Some flying and flightless birds are being misclassified as theropods.

Data analysis problem: Standard phylogenetic analyses are unable to detect complex evolutionary processes like convergence. Flightless birds converge on the body plan of theropods. To estimate basic similarities (homologies), anatomical studies are needed before the phylogenetic analysis.

Reduced forelimb problem: Complex characters, once lost, are unlikely to reevolve. Dollo’s Principle.

Protofeather problem: “Protofeathers” may be degraded collagen fibers.

Digit problem: The frame shift is a verificationist explanation, designed to fit the BMT.

Behavior problem: Studies that infer bird-like behavior in dinosaurs are about misidentified birds.

Confirmation problem: Scansoriopterygids have no distinctive theropod characters. An assumption that they are theropods is a form of confirmation bias. 

Geist (2022) commented in his review of the same book:

Feduccia leads readers through case after case where scientists, to accommodate the cladograms supporting the BMT hypothesis, have gone to extraordinary lengths to work around data that directly contradict their conclusions. Such efforts violate another bedrock, though not ironclad, philosophy of science: Occam’s Razor, stating that given multiple hypotheses, the simplest of competing theories be preferred over the more complex. Feduccia elegantly illustrates cases where conclusions drawn from cladistic analysis that dictate the connection between birds and dinosaurs violate this principle. At the very least this book might convince supporters of BMT to reevaluate the data.

This failure of cladistics was admitted by John Ostrom (1994: 172) himself, who commented that “reasoning of such dubious quality demonstrates a fundamental flaw in cladistic methodology. Preoccupation with compilation of lengthy lists of shared derived characteristics at the expense of a well-reasoned analysis will result in an erroneous phylogeny every time.”

Responding to Feduccia

So, how did the proponents of the dinosaurian ancestry of birds respond to Feduccia’s profound challenges? They did as Darwinists always do when their pet hypotheses are challenged with actual data: they ridicule and marginalize the critique or reduce it to a straw-man caricature. Here is what Ruben (1997) wrote in his review of Feduccia’s second book:

Specialists who are concerned with avian origins, especially those advocating a dinosaur-bird lineage, will be forced to confront a variety of previously ignored data that argue against this lineage. Thus, it hardly comes as a surprise that the book has been dismissed in recent reviews by several particularly zealous, cladistically oriented paleontologists. However, readers should not be misled by such shenanigans.

Zealous shenanigans? This is quite revealing for an alleged unbiased quest for scientific truth.

The Neoflightless Hypothesis

But, how does Feduccia explain the indisputable great similarity between vane-feathered bipedal dinosaurs (called Pennaraptora) and true birds? Actually, he does not dispute a close relationship at all, but suggests that Pennaraptora were not theropod dinosaurs but rather secondarily flightless birds, which he called the neoflightless hypothesis. Incidentally, the same claim has been made by skeptics of Darwinian evolution.

Now, a new study by Kiat & O’Connor (2024) published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides strong additional support to the neoflightless hypothesis (also see the press releases by Field Museum 2024 and Koumoundouros 2024). The scientists studied the wing feathers in hundreds of different living bird species of all major orders, and detected a simple pattern that reliably distinguishes secondarily flightless birds from those that can fly: the latter always have 9-11 asymmetrical flight feathers called primaries, while the former have either significantly more or none at all. Furthermore, the degree of primary vane asymmetry turned out to be strongly related to flight. This allowed the researchers to look at 65 species of fossil birds and feathered dinosaurs to estimate their ability to fly. Unsurprisingly, Archaeopteryx and the four-winged Microraptor passed the litmus test for flight.

Much more surprisingly, the study suggests that feathered dinosaurs like “Caudipteryx possessed the correct number of primary feathers but they were almost completely symmetrical, ‘almost certainly’ ruling out flight” (Koumoundouros 2024). The authors concluded that “applying these data to extinct pennaraptorans suggests that anchiornithines and the oviraptorosaur Caudipteryx are secondarily flightless. The phylogenetic position of these species suggests that volant abilities are plesiomorphic to Pennaraptora.” In other words, all those feathered dinosaurs originally had wings like birds and could fly, and thus do not represent transitional stages in the evolution of avian flight from cursorial dinosaurs. They are no help at all to explain the origin of pennaceous feathers and wings. This also makes very recent studies obsolete, which proposed scenarios to derive the bird wing from more primitive structures in maniraptoran dinosaurs, such as the propatagium in Caudipteryx and Microraptor (Uno & Hirasawa 2023, also see University of Tokyo 2023). As new data accumulate at an ever faster rate, the shelf life of evolutionary story telling is plummeting from decades to only months.

Trust the Science?

Should you really just trust the science (but not too long)? Alan Feduccia can rightfully claim an important empirical confirmation of his theory, and Darwinists may have to say goodbye to some cherished assumed transitional forms and the evolutionary just-so stories built upon them. But there is more: Kiat & O’Connor (2024) explicitly admit that “the results of these analyses support a single origin of dinosaurian flight and indicate the early stages of feathered wing evolution are not sampled by the currently available fossil record.” It looks very much like flying vertebrates with feathered wings appeared fully formed and abruptly in the Jurassic, which resonates perfectly with intelligent design theory, but with Darwinism (in the sense of unguided gradual evolution) not so much.

References

• Feduccia A 1980. The Age of Birds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), ix+196 pp.
• Feduccia A 1996. The Origin and Evolution of Birds. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT), 420 pp. 
• Feduccia A 2012. Riddle of the Feathered Dragons: Hidden Birds of China. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT), x+358 pp.
• Feduccia A 2020. Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology. Brown Walker Press, Irvine (CA), 336 pp.
• Field Museum 2024. The hidden rule for flight feathers and how it could reveal which dinosaurs could fly. Phys.org February 12, 2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-hidden-flight-feathers-reveal-dinosaurs.html
• Geist N 2022. Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology. Ornithology 139(3), 1–2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ornithology/ukac013
• James FC 2021. How Many Dinosaurs Are Birds? Bioscience 71(9), 991–994. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab060
• Kiat Y & O’Connor JK 2024. Functional constraints on the number and shape of flight feathers. PNAS 121(8): e2306639121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2306639121
• Koumoundouros T 2024. Scientists Discover an Ancient Pattern Hidden in The Feathers of Birds. ScienceAlert February 25, 2024. https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-discover-an-ancient-pattern-hidden-in-the-feathers-of-birds
• Leigh EG 2014. Alan Feduccia’s Riddle of the Feathered Dragons: what reptiles gave rise to birds? Evolution: Education and Outreach 7: 9, 1–3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-014-0009-0
• Ostrom JH 1994. On the origin of birds and of avian flight. pp. 160–177 in: Prothero DP & Schoch RS (eds). Major Features of Vertebrate Evolution. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville (TN), 270 pp.
• Ruben J 1997. The fuss over feathers. BioScience 47(6), 392–395. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/1313154
• University of Tokyo 2023. How birds got their wings. Phys.org February 24, 2023. https://phys.org/news/2023-02-birds-wings.html
• Uno Y & Hirasawa T 2023. Origin of the propatagium in non-avian dinosaurs. Zoological Letters 9: 4, 1–8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40851-023-00204-x

Even Darwinists are admitting that junk DNA is junk no more?

 

Yet more on junk DNA's exposure as junk science.

 

There is no man called Jesus Christ?

 Luke ch.2:11NIV"Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord."

JEHOVAH Continues to school his would be correctors

 Is the Panda’s Thumb Suboptimal?

Stephen Dilley

In a classic argument, Stephen Jay Gould claimed that the panda’s thumb was suboptimal and, thus, counted as evidence in favor of evolution over special creation. In the contemporary era, this argument has become something of an icon as well as a broader symbol of the apparent problem of suboptimality in nature.1 If nature is the product of an intelligent designer, why are some biological phenomena so poorly made? In a recent peer-reviewed essay in the journal Religions, I revisited Gould’s argument as a way into this question and others like it.2 In a series of five posts here, of which this is the first, I will analyze the subject in some detail.

Here is the abstract of my article for Religions:

The panda’s thumb argument, championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, stands as one of the most famous polemics for common ancestry. In this essay, I analyze Gould’s argument in several steps. First, I attempt to reconstruct the argument in both deductive and likelihood formulations. I contend that both versions of the argument rest on a theological claim — roughly, that God would not (likely) create or allow a suboptimal panda’s thumb. I then argue that a wide range of people are not rationally obligated to accept this theological claim. Next, I give special attention to the likelihood formulation’s emphasis on a contrastive argument for evolution over special creation. I contend that a great number of people are not rationally obligated to accept this formulation either. I next consider and reply to an objection that Gould never intended the panda argument as an apologetic for evolution (and an attack on special creation) but rather as a critique of adaptationism. Finally, I argue that the panda argument conflicts with Gould’s broader views about the human mind and the relationship between theology and science. I also note along the way that the shortcomings of the panda argument apply to a number of other arguments for evolutionary theory. To be sure, I do not criticize evolution itself or the comprehensive grounds for it. Instead, my primary aims are to analyze the panda argument and suggest that caution is in order about similar arguments as well.

Let’s first consider the crucial empirical question of whether the panda’s thumb is indeed suboptimal. Is it “clumsy” and “highly inefficient,” as Gould claims it to be? Or does it perform its function just fine? In subsequent posts, I will analyze more philosophical questions and topics: Is the panda argument a problem for intelligent design scientists? And is the panda argument a problem for evolutionists? 

Clumsy, Clumsy, Clumsy

As to the question of suboptimality, the answer centers on the thumb’s function. Gould thinks it does its job in a mediocre way. He notes that Darwin thought much the same about orchids. Gould explains:

The panda’s thumb provides an elegant zoological counterpart to Darwin’s orchids. An engineer’s best solution is debarred by history. The panda’s thumb is committed to another role, too specialized for a different function to become an opposable, manipulating digit. So the panda must use parts on hand and settle for an enlarged wrist bone and a somewhat clumsy, but quite workable solution. The sesamoid thumb wins no prize in an engineer’s derby.3

He also explains:

The panda’s “thumb” demonstrates evolution because it is clumsy and built from an odd part, the radial sesamoid bone of the wrist. The true thumb had been so shaped in its ancestral role as the running and clawing digit of a carnivore that it could not be modified into an opposable grasper for bamboo in a vegetarian descendant.4

At the heart of Gould’s argument is the claim that the panda’s thumb is “clumsy” or, as he says elsewhere, “highly inefficient.”5

Gould explains that suboptimality favors evolution whereas “ideal design” favors special creation.

[I]deal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution — paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.6

The basic argument is that “[o]dd arrangements and funny solutions” point to evolution whereas “ideal design” points to a “sensible God.” Given that the panda’s thumb “wins no prize in an engineer’s derby,” it supports evolution rather than divine design.

The Empirical Evidence

Yet the scientific data say otherwise. As I explain in the article:

Oddly, Gould does not give strong reasons to accept this claim [that the panda’s thumb is suboptimal]; nowhere in his writings does he provide a detailed empirical study that demonstrates the suboptimality of the panda’s thumb. The major research that Gould relies upon, Dwight Davis’s study, used a dead panda for its conclusions about comparative morphology; it did not examine how effective living pandas are at stripping bamboo leaves. Biologist John Gittleman notes that the analyses of both Davis and Gould arose “despite any real information on how the giant panda lives in nature.”7

Two major studies gave high praise to the function and efficiency of the panda’s thumb:

The first major study of living pandas — focusing specifically on their adaptation to bamboo — was conducted by George Schaller’s team, which published its results in The Giant Pandas of Wolong. They observed that pandas “efficiently bring food to the mouth with their forepaws” and “handle bamboo stems with great precision by holding them as if with forceps in the hairless groove connecting the pad of the first digit and pseudothumb.”8

Schaller and his team reported:

When watching a panda eat leaves, stem or new shoots we were always impressed by its dexterity. Forepaws and mouth work together with great precision, with great economy of motion, as the food is grasped, plucked, peeled, stripped, bitten and otherwise prepared for being swallowed. Actions are fluid and rapid…9

Similarly, in 1999, a team of Japanese scientists conducted perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of the panda’s thumb to date. They used “computed topography, magnetic resonance imaging, and live observation to analyze the structure and function of the panda’s thumb.” They reported that the thumb 

and its accessories enable the panda to “manipulate objects with great dexterity.” In fact, the “way in which the giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, uses the radial sesamoid bone — its ‘pseudo-thumb’ — for grasping makes it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in mammalian evolution.” They conclude that “the hand of the giant panda has a much more refined grasping mechanism than has been suggested in previous morphological models,” including Davis’s model.10

Turning the Tables

Gould’s claim is mistaken. The panda’s thumb is not suboptimal. The best studies we have conclude that the thumb is anything but “clumsy” or “highly inefficient.” Instead, they describe it as having “great precision,” “great economy of motion,” and “great dexterity.” It may even rank as “one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems” among mammals. That is quite an accolade.

Indeed, one might rather regard the thumb as positive evidence for intelligent design. A system of such precision, efficiency, economy, and dexterity is a spectacle of a high order. That sounds very much like the kind of sophistication that only engineers produce. 

On this score, recall the way Gould himself framed the panda argument: “[o]dd arrangements and funny solutions” point to evolution whereas “ideal design” points to a “sensible God.”11 So, by this logic, the panda’s thumb appears to count as stronger evidence in favor of design. Perhaps it’s time to champion the panda’s thumb not as an icon for evolution but for intelligent design

Notes

See Dilley, “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb,” p. 1.

Stephen Dilley. 2023. “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb.” Religions 14: 1006. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel14081006.

Stephen Jay Gould. 1980. The Panda’s Thumb. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 24.

Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 29, original emphasis.

Stephen Jay Gould. 1986. “Evolution and the Triumph of Homology, Or Why History Matters.” American Scientist 74: 60-69, esp. p. 63.

Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 20-21.

Dilley, “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb,” p. 11. For the Gittleman quote, see John L. Gittleman. 1985. “Review of The Giant Pandas of Wolong.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 60: 524. 

Dilley, “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb,” p. 11. For the Schaller quote, see George B. Schaller, Hu Jinchu, Pan Wenshi, and Zhu Jing. 1985. The Giant Pandas of Wolong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 4, 215.

Schaller et al., The Giant Pandas of Wolong, p. 58.

Dilley, “God, Gould, and the Panda’s Thumb,” p. 11. See also Hideki Endo, Daishiro Yamagiwa, Yoshihiro Hayashi, Hiroshi Koie, Yoshiki Yamaya, and Junpei Kimura. 1999. “Role of the Giant Panda’s ‘Pseudo-thumb’.” Nature 397: 309-10.

Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 20-21.