There is still no free lunch re: information.

 The Displacement Fallacy: Evolution’s Shell Game

William A Dembski

Author’s note: Conservation of information is a big result of the intelligent design literature, even if to date it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. It quantifies the amount of information needed to increase the probability of finding a needle in a haystack so that the needle can actually be found. The upshot of conservation of information is that the information needed to find a needle in a haystack in turn requires finding another needle in a haystack, implying there is no free lunch in search. I just wrote up a full account of conservation of information for the journal BIO-Complexity in a paper titled “The Law of Conservation of Information: Natural Processes Only Redistribute Existing Information.” What follows is a section from that paper on the displacement fallacy. This section is accessible and helps clarify the intuitions underlying conservation of information. 

The discovery of conservation of information didn’t start with proving a mathematical theorem. Rather, its discovery came from repeatedly noticing how efforts to account for the success of searches whose odds of success were seemingly hopeless always smuggled in information that wasn’t properly accounted for. One hole was filled, but only by digging another, and so a new hole now in turn needed to be explained. This failure of explanation became especially evident in the evolutionary literature. Darwinian approaches to biological evolution and evolutionary computing sought to explain the origin of information through some process that directly used or else mimicked natural selection. Yet rather than admit a fundamental gap in explanation, this literature simply invoked selection as a backstop to explain the origin of information, the backstop itself being exempt from further explanation.

The move to explain the origin of information by invoking some separate unexplained source of information, typically via a selection process, was so common in the evolutionary literature that it deserved its own name: displacement.1 Displacement became the tool of choice among evolutionary critics of intelligent design as they tried to invalidate the logic of the design inference, which inferred design for events both specified and improbable. Critics claimed that once natural selection came into play, it acted as a probability amplifier that removed any seeming improbability that might otherwise have made for a valid design inference. Accordingly, critics argued that seeming products of design could be explained away through evolutionary processes requiring no design.

Improbable Products

But this attempt to invalidate the design inference was too easy. Products can be designed, but also processes that build products can be designed (compare a Tesla automobile with a Tesla factory that builds Tesla automobiles — both are designed). The design inference makes sense of improbable products. Conservation of infor­mation, through the search for a search, makes sense of improbable processes that output probable products. Making sense of displacement was a crucial step in developing a precise mathematical treatment of conservation of information.

Whereas conservation of information was a mathematically confirmed theoretical finding, displacement was an inductively confirmed empirical finding. Over and over information supposedly created from scratch was surreptitiously introduced under the pretense that the information was already adequately explained when in fact it was merely presupposed. In effect, displacement became a special case of the fallacy of begging the question, obscuring rather than illuminating evolutionary processes.

One of the more brazen examples of displacement that I personally encountered occurred in a 2001 interview with Darwinist Eugenie Scott on Peter Robinson’s program Uncommon Knowledge. Scott and I were discussing evolution and intelligent design when Robinson raised the trope about a monkey, given enough time, producing the works of Shakespeare by randomly typing at a typewriter. Scott responded by saying that contrary to this example, where the monkey’s typing merely produces random variation, natural selection is like a technician who stands behind the monkey and whites out every mistake the monkey makes in typing Shakespeare.3 But where exactly do you find a technician who knows enough about the works of Shakespeare to white out mistakes in the typing of Shakespeare? What are the qualifications of this technician? How does the technician know what to erase? Scott never said. That’s displacement: The monkey’s success at typing Shakespeare is explained, but at the cost of leaving the technician who corrects the monkey’s typing unexplained.

About That Weasel

In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins claims to show how natural selection can create information by appealing to his well-known METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL computer simulation.4 Pure random sampling of the 28 letters and spaces in this target phrase would have a probability of only 1 in 27^28, or roughly 1 in 10^40, of achieving it. In evolving METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, Dawkins’s simulation was able to overcome this improbability by carefully choosing a fitness landscape to assign higher fitness to character sequences that have more corresponding letters in common with the target phrase.

Essentially, in place of pure randomness, Dawkins substituted a hill-climbing algorithm with exactly one peak and with a clear way to improve fitness at any place away from the peak (smooth and increasing gradients all the way!).5 But where did this fitness landscape come from? Such a fitness landscape exists for any possible target phrase whatsoever, and not just for METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Dawkins explains the evolution of METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL in terms of a fitness landscape that with high probability allows for the evolution to this target phrase. Yet he leaves the fitness landscape itself unexplained.6 In so doing, he commits a displacement fallacy.7

Displacement is also evident in the work of Dawkins as he shifts from computer simulations to biological evolution. Indeed, his entire book Climbing Mount Improbable can be viewed as an exercise in displacement as applied to biology.8 In that book, Dawkins compares the emergence of biological complexity to climbing a mountain. He calls it Mount Improbable because if you had to get all the way to the top in one fell swoop (that is, achieve a massive increase in biological complexity all at once), it would be highly improbable. But does Mount Improbable have to be scaled in one leap? Darwinism purports to show how Mount Improbable can be scaled in small incremental steps. Thus, according to Dawkins, Mount Improbable always has a gradual serpentine path leading to the top that can be traversed in baby-steps.

But where is the verification for this claim? It could be that Mount Improbable is sheer on all sides and getting to the top via baby-steps is effectively impossible. Consequently, it is not enough to presuppose that a fitness-increasing sequence of baby steps always connects biological systems. Such a connection must be demonstrated, and to date it has not, as Michael Behe’s work on irreducible complexity shows.9 But even if such a connection could be demonstrated, what would this say about the conditions for the formation of Mount Improbable in the first place?

Mountains, after all, do not magically materialize — they have to be formed by some process of mountain formation. Of all the different ways Mount Improbable might have emerged, how many are sheer so that no gradual path to the summit exists? And how many do allow a gradual path to the summit? A Mount Improbable with gradual paths to the top may itself be improbable. Dawkins simply assumes that Mount Improbable must be such as to facilitate Darwinian evolution. But in so doing, he commits a displacement fallacy, presupposing what must be explained and justified, and thus illicitly turning a problem into its own solution.10

Examples of Displacement

In the evolutionary computing literature, examples of displacement more sophisticated than Dawkins’ WEASEL can readily be found. But the same question-begging displacement fallacy underlies all these examples. The most widely publicized instance of displacement in the evolutionary computing literature appeared in Nature back in 2003. Richard Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert Pennock, and Christoph Adami had developed a computer simulation called Avida.11 They claimed that this simulation was able to create complex Boolean operators without any special input or knowledge. One of the co-authors, Pennock, then went further to claim that Avida decisively refuted Michael Behe’s work on irreducible complexity.12 And given that irreducible complexity is a linchpin of intelligent design, Pennock in effect claimed that Avida had also refuted intelligent design.

But in fact, as Winston Ewert and George Montañez showed by tracking the information flow through Avida, the amount of information outputted through newly formed complex Boolean operators never exceeded the amount of information inputted. In fact, Avida was jury-rigged to produce the very complexity it was claiming to produce for free: Avida rewarded ever-increasing complexity simply for complexity’s sake and not for independent functional reasons. Other examples like Thomas Schneider’s ev, Thomas Ray’s Tierra, and David Thomas’s Steiner tree search algorithm all followed the same pattern.13 Ewert and Montañez were able to show precisely where the information supposedly created from scratch in these algorithms had in fact been embedded from the outset.14 Displacement, as their research showed, is pervasive in this literature.

The empirical work of showing displacement for these computer simulations set the stage for the theoretical work on conservation of information. These simulations, and their consistent failure to explain the origin of information, prompted an investigation into the precise numerical relation between information inputted and information outputted. Showing displacement started out as a case-by-case effort to uncover where precisely information had been smuggled into a computer simulation. Once the mathematics of conservation of information was developed, however, the need to find exactly where the information was smuggled in was no longer so important, theory stepping in where observation fell short.

The Pigeonhole Principle

Theory guaranteed that the information was smuggled in even if the evolutionary simulations became so byzantine that it was hard to follow their precise information flow. By analogy, if you have a hundred and one letters that must go into a hundred mailboxes, the pigeonhole principle of mathematics guarantees that one of the mailboxes must have more than one letter.15 Checking this empirically could be arduous if not practically impossible because of all the many possible ways that these letters could fill the mailboxes. Theory in this case comes to the rescue, guaranteeing what observation alone cannot.

Displacement is a shell game. In a shell game, an operator places a small object, like a pea, under one of three cups and then rapidly shuffles the cups to confuse observers about the object’s location. Participants are invited to guess which cup hides the pea, but the game often relies on sleight of hand and misdirection to increase the likelihood that participants guess incorrectly. So long as the game is played fairly, the pea is under one cup and remains under one cup. It cannot magically materialize or dematerialize. The game can become more sophisticated by increasing the number of cups and by the operator moving the cups with greater speed and agility. But by carefully tracking the operator, it is always possible to determine where the pea started out and where it ended up. The pea here is information. Displacement says that it was always there. Conservation of information provides the underlying mathematics to demonstrate that it was indeed always there.

Notes

My first serious treatment of displacement occurred in Chapter 4 of William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

For an account of natural selection as a probability amplifier as well as a refutation of trying to use it to overturn the logic of the design inference, see William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities, 2nd ed. (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2023), Chapter 7.

“Darwinism under the Microscope,” PBS television interview of William Dembski and Eugenie Scott by Peter Robinson for Uncommon Knowledge, filmed December 7, 2001, on the Stanford campus, with video available online at https://www.hoover.org/research/darwin-under-microscope-questioning‌-darwinism (last accessed December 9, 2024).

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: Norton, 1986), 45–50.

For hill climbing, see Sheldon H. Jacobson and Enver Yücesan, “Analyzing the Performance of Generalized Hill Climbing Algorithms,” Journal of Heuristics 10, no. 4 (2004): 387–405.

As Stuart Kauffman puts it, “Life uses mutation, recombination, and selection. These search procedures seem to be working quite well. Your typical bat or butterfly has managed to get itself evolved and seems a rather impressive entity… Mutation, recombi­nation, and selection only work well on certain kinds of fitness landscapes, yet most organisms are sexual, and hence use recombination, and all organisms use mutation as a search mechanism… Where did these well-wrought fitness landscapes come from, such that evolution manages to produce the fancy stuff around us?” Kauffman answers his own question: “No one knows.” Stuart A. Kauffman, Investigations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 18–19.

For a counter-simulation of the Dawkins WEASEL simulation, see “Weasel Ware — Evolutionary Simulation,” by Winston Ewert and George Montañez at https://www.evoinfo.org/weasel.html. This counter-simulation shows how sensitive Dawkins’ simulation is to initial inputs and how easily it is set adrift when the fitness landscape is not as neat and tidy as Dawkins’s simulation demands.

Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: Norton, 1996).

See Michael J. Behe, A Mousetrap for Darwin (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2020).

The three previous paragraphs are drawn in part from a lecture I gave at Oxford University’s Ian Ramsey Centre on October 30, 2003 titled “Gauging Intelligent Design’s Success.” Though on faculty at Oxford, Richard Dawkins was not in attendance. The lecture is available at https://billdembski.com/documents/2003.11.Gauging_IDs_Success.pdf (last accessed December 13, 2024).

Richard E. Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert T. Pennock, and Christoph Adami, “The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features,” Nature 423 (May 8, 2003): 139–144.

Pennock, citing the 2003 Nature article, claims that “colleagues and I have experimentally demonstrated the evolution of an IC system.” IC here is “irreducibly complex.” Quoted from Robert T. Pennock, “DNA by Design? Stephen Meyer and the Return of the God Hypothesis,” in W.A. Dembski and M. Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, 130–148 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141.

For ev, see Thomas D. Schneider, “Evolution of Biological Information,” Nucleic Acids Research 28, no. 14 (2000): 2794–2799. For the best place to understand Tierra, see Thomas Ray’s website https://tomray.me/tierra. For a search algorithm purported to solve the Steiner Tree problem without the need for full prior information, see Dave Thomas, “War of the Weasels: An Evolutionary Algorithm Beats Intelligent Design,” Skeptical Inquirer 34, no. 3 (2010): 42–46 and then a follow-up by Thomas titled “Target? TARGET? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Target!” https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/07/target-target-w-1.html (last accessed December 10, 2024).

See the counter-simulations by Ewert and Montañez at EvoInfo.org: contra Avida, see their “Minivida – Dissection of Avida Digital Evolution” at https://www.evoinfo.org/minivida; contra ev, see their “Ev Ware – Evolutionary Simulation” at https://www.evoinfo.org/ev (last accessed December 13, 2024). See also Robert J. Marks II, William A. Dembski, and Winston Ewert, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2017), where we critique all these evolutionary simulations that purport to create novel information that exceeds their prior informational input. Dave Thomas is critiqued in this book on pages 119–120 and 241–242.

Martin Aigner, Discrete Mathematics, trans. D. Kramer (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 2007), 30.

One of the all time greats on becoming a titan.

 

The fossil record vs. The Darwinian narrative.

 

Occasinally the game puts even the GOAT in his place.

 

An infinite multiverse makes the mystical/magical inevitable?

 

The rejection of ID= The deification of physics?

 To Reject Intelligent Design, Here’s What You Have to Believe

Granville Sewell

While intelligent design (ID) is a term which is becoming more familiar in our culture it is safe to say most people still misunderstand it. Since critics often misrepresent ID, and paint ID advocates as a fanatical fringe group, it is important to understand what intelligent design is, and what it is not.

Some Form of ID

Until Charles Darwin, almost everyone everywhere believed in some form of intelligent design (the majority still do): not just Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but almost every tribesman in every remote corner of the world drew the obvious conclusion from observing animals and plants that there must have been a mind behind the creation of living things.

Darwin thought he could explain all of this apparent design through natural selection of random variations. In spite of the fact that there is no evidence that natural selection can explain anything other than very minor adaptations, his theory has gained widespread popularity in the scientific world, simply because no one can come up with a more plausible theory to explain the development of life, other than intelligent design, which is dismissed by most scientists as “unscientific.”

But, in recent years, as scientific research has continually revealed the astonishing dimensions of the complexity of life, especially at the microscopic level, support for Darwin’s theory has continued to weaken, and since the publication in 1996 of Darwin’s Black Box by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, a growing minority of scientists have concluded, with Behe, that there is no possible explanation for the complexity of life without intelligent design. If scientists can spend time and money developing tools and algorithms to detect dubious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence in weak signals from outer space, why are they required to ignore the evidence in living cells where design practically leaps out at you?

What Intelligent Design Scientists Believe

But what exactly, do these “ID scientists” believe? There is no general agreement among advocates of intelligent design as to exactly where, when, or how design was manifested in the history of life. Most accept the standard timeline for the beginning of the universe, of life, and of the major animal groups.

Some accept common descent, although most recognize that this “descent” was not really gradual. (In fact, most of the animal phyla appear quite suddenly in the fossil record about 530 million years ago in the “Cambrian explosion,” as documented in Stephen Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt.) Probably all reject natural selection as an adequate explanation for the development of life, but so do many other scientists who are not ID proponents. So what exactly do you have to believe to be an ID proponent?

What You Have to Believe

Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to state clearly what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design. Peter Urone, in his 2001 physics text College Physics, writes, “One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena.” The prevailing view in science today is that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology completely explains the human mind; thus, physics alone explains the human mind and all it does.

This is what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design, that the origin and evolution of life, and the evolution of human consciousness and intelligence, are due entirely to a few unintelligent forces of physics. The new Video A Mathematician’s View of Evolution dramatizes this through reductio ad absurdum, pointing out that if you don’t believe there was intelligence involved in the origin or evolution of life, or in the origin of human intelligence, you essentially believe that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on Earth into computers and science texts and jet airplanes.

Contrary to popular belief, to be an ID proponent you do not have to believe that all species were created simultaneously a few thousand years ago, or that humans are unrelated to earlier primates, or that natural selection cannot cause bacteria to develop a resistance to antibiotics. If you believe that a few fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones, you are probably not an ID proponent, even if you believe in God.

Welcome Aboard!

But if you believe there must have been more than unintelligent forces at work somewhere, somehow, in the origin of life and the development of intelligent humans: congratulations, you are one of us after all!

Furthermore, the evidence uncovered in the last half century has forced many scientists who insist that unintelligent laws of nature explain everything to accept that design is required to explain the spectacular fine-tuning for life of the laws and constants of physics themselves.

These scientists are sometimes considered to be intelligent design supporters as well. One of the three discoveries discussed in Stephen Meyer’s 2021 book Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe is this well-documented fine-tuning. Notice the long list of distinguished scientists who have formally endorsed the book, including physics Nobel Prize-winner Brian Josephson who writes, “This book makes it clear that far from being an unscientific claim, intelligent design is valid science.”

Political messiah's are not saving the homeless?

 

Yet more on why the multiverse fails at explaining away the finetuning argument for design.

 

Neanderthals: disinherited no more? II

 Neanderthals May Be “Same Species” As Us

Evolution News

At ScienceAlert, David Nield Reports on a new study from the University of Padua:

Our species is defined by a long list of cultural and genetic traits that set us apart from our ancient counterparts.

New research suggests at least some key distinctions date back earlier than previously estimated, hinting that modern and archaic humans — including our close, extinct relatives — have more in common than we ever thought.

“Our results point to a scenario where Modern and Archaic should be regarded as populations of an otherwise common human species, which independently accumulated mutations and cultural innovations,” writes a team of researchers led by biologist Luca Pagani from the University of Padova in Italy. 

“Archaic Humans Might Actually Be The Same Species as Us, Study Suggests,” January 7, 2025

Or, as Justin Jackson puts it at Phys.org, “Findings challenge traditional models that attribute certain genetic innovations exclusively to modern Homo sapiens. Similarities observed in both modern and archaic human genomes suggest many hallmarks of the Homo sapiens genetic landscape arose before the lineages split.”

Coalescence Analyses and Molecular Clock Assessments

Specifically, the abstract of the open-access preprint reads,

Homo sapiens diverged from its ancestors in fundamental ways, reflected in recent genomic acquisitions like the PAR2-Y chromosome translocation. Here we show that despite morphological and cultural differences between modern and archaic humans, these human groups share these recent acquisitions. Our modern lineage shows recent functional variants in only 56 genes, of which 24 are linked to brain functions and skull morphology. 

Luca Pagani et al., Partitioning the genomic journey to becoming Homo sapiens, bioRxiv (2024)

Using coalescence analyses and molecular clock assessments, the researchers reconstructed a timeline of genetic events, according to which a population bottleneck of humans occurred about 900,000 years ago. Then modern humans diverged from Neanderthals and Denisovans about 650,000 years ago. And they also mingled again about 350,000 years ago.

This version of human history counters the usual tendency to keep Neanderthals and Denisovans separate from modern humans — most likely because in an evolution-based scheme, someone must be the subhuman. 

And now who will researchers draft for that role?

The forever schoolyard as a career?

 

Mind breaking puzzle demystified.

 

Our story in our own words.

 

A pledge of eternal sacred service.

 Psalm ch.19:10,11NIV"They are more precious than gold,

than much pure gold;

they are sweeter than honey,

than honey from the honeycomb.

11By them your servant is warned;

in keeping them there is great reward."

If you do not see sacred service according to JEHOVAH'S truth as it's own reward then paradise whether the heavenly paradise or the earthly paradise is not your thing. Because the perfect paradise is essentially sacred service on steroids,

Revelation ch.4:8NIV"Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying: “’Holy, holy, holy is the LORD God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.”"

Darwinists invite us to come see Darwinism for our selves.

 “Evolution in Real Time” (Yeah, Right)

Daniel Witt

The difficulty about denying evolution is that it’s happening all around us. I mean, just look — every few weeks or so another breathless press release or news article announces that scientists have observed “evolution in real time.” 

Although these reports do not often mention that there is a debate over evolution, they serve an important rhetorical purpose in that debate. After all, the biggest challenge to Darwin’s theory is that it might not work in theory — the math does not seem to add up. One way to deal with the theoretical problems is to simply sidestep them altogether: “Maybe it doesn’t seem that evolution should work — but look, it’s happening right before your eyes!”

And it’s true — countless experiments do show evolution in real time. The trouble is, “evolution” itself isn’t really the thing in question in the evolution debate. Everyone who knows anything about biology (and most who don’t) believes in evolution in some sense of the word. After all, Darwin was not the first to notice that variations exist within populations, or that children can be different from their parents, or that some of these variations confer survival benefits while others are detrimental. The big question is whether these factors alone can drive the construction of novel complex systems of interrelated parts, such as characterize biological life. 

With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few of the most recent “evolution in real time” proclamations, and see whether any of them actually bears relevance to the evolution debate.

1. Evolving to Be Normal (in the Mountains) 

A recent case of “evolution in action” comes from a Study of human (for now!) women in Tibet. A news article dramatically proclaims: “Humans Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes on the Tibetan Plateau.”

So, what are the new features of these evolving humans? (Are they on their way to becoming an alien species?)

Well, according to the study, Tibetan women are able to deal with high altitudes better than women of other ethnic backgrounds, on average, because they have … unusually normal hemoglobin levels. Excessive hemoglobin makes the blood more viscous, impeding circulation, and no women in the study had excessively high hemoglobin. In other words, there was loss of variety in the population, as traits that caused problems were eliminated by the harsh environment. The study also found that Tibetan women with traits favoring circulation (a wide left ventricle in the heart, etc.) were able to have more live births than Tibetan women with poorer circulation.

Basically, the study shows that harsh environments can weed out the unfit — which isn’t exactly a controversial idea. The study does indeed prove “evolution,” in the broad sense of the word. But it does not prove anything that is currently being debated. 

2. Staying the Same — In the Blink of an Eye! 

According to a news report from October 2024, the recently published results of a 30-year-long study demonstrate “evolution happening in real time” in snail populations. The researchers introduced crab snails to an environment inhabited by wave snails, and watched as the poorly adapted crab snails evolved over generations to look more like the well-adapted wave snails. The article informs us: 

Normally, scientists have believed that it takes countless centuries for evolution to produce major changes in any species. However, a new study has witnessed this amazing process unfold in a figurate blink of an eye.

The rhetoric here should be obvious: If evolution can happen in just 30 years, why should we doubt that it can happen over millions of years? 

And what kind of amazing new features is evolution able to conjure up in the “blink of an eye”? 

Well, features that were already there:

What makes this study particularly fascinating is that the snails didn’t evolve these new traits from scratch. Instead, they tapped into genetic diversity that was already present in their population, albeit at low levels.

and possibly traits that slipped in through some hanky-panky with the locals

…This existing genetic variation, combined with possible gene flow from neighboring wave snail populations, allowed for rapid adaptation to the new environment.

3. The Importance of Already Existing

A similar example of “evolution in real time” comes from 2020 press release from the University of Vienna, announcing that Parachlamydia bacteria can adapt to their host to become more infectious.

So how do they adapt? Well, according to the Study, the population adapted largely by means of some genes that were already there getting passed on more than some other genes that were also already there: “standing genetic variation in the initial ancestral population — the founder Chlamydia and amoeba populations from which both regimes were initiated — appeared to be particularly important for the observed evolutionary changes.” 

I would submit that that is to be expected. 

4. “Evolving” into a Baby 

Of course, I am not denying that novel mutations happens. Sometimes, by random error, a truly novel genetic sequence appears, and sometimes the change is adaptive. However, complex systems don’t get built this way. 

So, a 2016 Article in Science boasted: 

Many people think evolution requires thousands or millions of years, but biologists know it can happen fast. Now, thanks to the genomic revolution, researchers can actually track the population-level genetic shifts that mark evolution in action — and they’re doing this in humans.

But you can probably guess the type of changes that are measured. Lactose tolerance, blue eyes, blond hair, etc. These are minor variations within complex systems, not the construction of complex systems. 

An especially ironic example is lactose tolerance. Babies consume lots of lactose in breastmilk, but human bodies are programmed to turn off that function after we stop nursing — or, that was the case until some humans started the practice of eternally nursing their bovine neighbors. Then (the classic story goes) “lactase persistence” was selected for, and the lactose processing facilities were never shut down. Michael Behe has compared this adaptation to “a small screw falling out of your car that renders the emergency brake inoperable.” The appearance of lactose tolerance doesn’t show evolution in action making any complex, new thing — it shows us becoming perpetual babies when we learned that some big, dumb animals would let us nurse them. 

Whenever you hear about evolution in action, you can be sure that it wasn’t caught in action building a novel structure — at best, it was seen causing a neutral tweak to an existing structure, and at worst it was caught jettisoning sophisticated equipment for short term benefits. 

5. Proving “Evolution” to the Yokels

A 2019 Article in The Atlantic tells the story of evolutionary biologist Rowan Barrett’s adventures capturing “evolution in real time” (as the title of the article puts it) in rural Nebraska. It’s a nice fish-out-of-water story:

Roughly a third of Nebraskans believe that living things were created as they are now. Another third think that evolution occurs, but through God’s design. Given those beliefs, I asked Barrett whether he ever encountered resistance when talking to his new friends about his work. “In the early trips, when first meeting people, I would talk generally about genetics and natural selection. I wouldn’t use the E word,” he said. “It’s one of those trigger words where, in certain parts of the U.S., people just stop listening to you.”

But he added that all of them comprehended the essence of evolution, even if they explicitly rejected it. “A lot of them are farmers, who have a very good understanding of inheritance, and genetics,” he said. “A lot of them hunt, so they’ve got the survival-of-the-fittest thing down. They understand variation, and they know that a slow deer is easier to shoot than a fast deer. Inheritance, variation, fitness … all the pieces are there.”

“I’d never push too hard. I never explicitly said, ‘Do you believe in it or not? Have I now convinced you?’” he told me. “I just had some long conversations over beers at BBQs and high-school football games. And I found that in subsequent trips, I could use the E word and not get the flinch.”

Yes, all the pieces are there…but what do they add up to? Barrett’s study is about changes in things like mouse fur color, which should be no cause for alarm even for the most science-hating creationist in Nebraska. A mutation that changes the color of a mouse’s fur is one thing, but building a mouse by compiling such mutations is another.

Yes, all the pieces are there…but what do they add up to? Barrett’s study is about changes in things like mouse fur color, which should be no cause for alarm even for the most science-hating creationist in Nebraska. A mutation that changes the color of a mouse’s fur is one thing, but building a mouse by compiling such mutations is another.

6. The Same, but Bigger 

Granted, some evolutionary changes are more dramatic — but only superficially so. 

For example, an April 2024 article reports that Dr. Tyrone Lavery at University of Melbourne has observed “evolutionary phenomenon happening rapidly” — lineages of large bats evolving from smaller bats multiple times across the Solomon Islands. 

However, as Lavery himself notes, “Although they are very different sizes, the bats’ DNA is very similar.” 

Some traits are dramatic, but don’t indicate an increase in complexity or a fundamentally new structure. And again (once again) fundamentally new complex structures are the main thing in question.  

7. How to Put Things in a Pile — Without God

Another report, from the University of Konstanz in 2021, claims that researchers found the genetic imprint of “the surprisingly rapid transition from unicellular to multicellular life.” The rapidity is less surprising, however, after the authors clarify that what was observed was actually evidence of the “first step” towards multicellularity. That first step? Growing in a clump. It turns out there is a mutation in single-celled algae that causes them to clump together. 

This is like putting a thousand identical screws in a pile, and saying you’ve accomplished the first step to making a car. That may be true, but the later steps — melting the bolts downs and forging them into more specialized pieces and then assembling them properly — are probably going to be more difficult. 

8. Even Darwin Underestimated the Power of Evolution! 

A Guardian article from this past July is titled “Biologist Rosemary Grant: ‘Evolution happens much quicker than Darwin thought’.” 

Of course, the implication is that, contrary to the claim that Darwin overestimated the power of evolution, he actually underestimated it. But what evidence is Dr. Grant referring to? Well, the average beak and body size of a finch changed as the result of drought, quicker than Darwin estimated. Again, this is proof that evolution is real — but not that it has creative powers.

 9. A Whole New… “Species

A related claim made about the finches in the drought is that that they evolved into a new species. This is true, but it may convey the wrong idea. When we talk about the origin of “species” it sounds like we’re referring to the creation of entirely different kinds of creature, with novel body plans, organs, and so forth. However, the most common definition of species, the “biological species concept,” is technical and much broader. Under this definition, any two populations of organisms are considered separate species if they are reproductively isolated; i.e., can’t or won’t reproduce with each other. 

In the case of the finches, the drought caused their average beak size to increase from generation to generation, since birds that could crush harder seeds were more likely to survive the drought — and this changed their mating call, eventually making it unrecognizable to non-drought-influenced finches. Thus they won’t mate with each other, and therefore, based on the biological species concept, they are different species. 

According to this definition of species, Democrats and Republicans are pretty close to achieving speciation. But that’s hardly an impressive evolutionary feat.   

 10. “Evolution” by U-Haul 

Yet another article announces that a sociological study has found that public attention towards the lionfish (pictured at the top) “is aiding in monitoring its evolution nearly in real time.” 

To be exact, it is the range of the lionfish that is evolving — they are migrating to different waters. 

(And that probably takes the cake for least impressive example of “evolution in real time.”)

11.Wait, There’s More!

They just keep coming. 

Mere hours ago (as of this writing) Georgia Tech put out a research press release announcing “some of the clearest evidence to date of evolution in action.” 

The study does indeed show evolution in action. The researchers were observing a species of anole lizards in the wild over the course of several years, when, fortuitously (for the researchers, not the anoles), another species of anole invaded. That meant that the scientists were able to see whether the presence of new competition changed the native species. 

And sure enough, it did. The original anoles were driven from their preferred perch locations in the trees, and had to spend more time on the ground. The population size plummeted, and the anoles that had longer legs and were therefore better at running on the flat ground were more likely to survive. As the researchers predicted, after a few years the average leg length in the population was somewhat longer than the average leg length before the invasion. The short-limbed losers had been weeded out by natural selection.

I find this interesting, from an ecological perspective. But, once again, it does not add anything new to the debate about evolution. Nobody doubts that natural selection can change a population. What biologists like Michael Behe doubt is that such selective pressure has limitless potential, to the point of even constructing whole new organs and body plans. That’s where the mathematical difficulties seems to show up: if a new bodily feature requires foresight to construct (because the adaptive function only appears after multiple requisite feature are in place and working in unison), then “evolution by means of national selection and random variation” would be no better at constructing it than pure “random variation” would be. 

The anole study, while interesting, has nothing to offer regarding that problem. 

If anything, it fits the predictions of the opposing camp. The researchers write that after they observed initial change, they expected to see leg length continue to increase. Yet, so far, it hasn’t. It seems that the anole evolution has hit a bump in the road. 

Perhaps, as the researchers are currently predicting, leg length will resume its increase after a few more years. Be that that as it may, I am making the prediction that however long the anoles’ legs become, they will never turn into something more sophisticated than legs. 

I am confident in this prediction, because, in spite of all the times evolution has been caught “in action,” no experiment or observation has ever falsified Behe’s key prediction: because natural selection lacks foresight and is not a true designer, it invariably runs out of power before it can construct anything new.  

In Conclusion

So, what is the verdict? 

As we established, for an observation to constitute a meaningful contribution to the evolution debate, it needs to show evolution’s constructive power, because that is the aspect of evolution that is under debate. Yet, consistently, the observations don’t show that. Instead, they fall into three categories: observations of (1) traits that were already present in the population, (2) traits that were already present in the genome, but were unexpressed, and (3) genuine novelties which, however, did not increase the design sophistication of the organism. 

Notes

For example, molecular biologist Michael Behe has (in)famously pointed out that although Darwin’s mechanism of random variation and natural selection can explain a lot, it has trouble explaining exactly what most needs explaining: the kind of intricately complex structures that characterize life. These structures need many components carefully in place before they can confer any survival advantage at all, so the mechanism of natural selection could not have done any good until the very end of the construction process. More recently, Behe has argued that natural selection should be expected to decrease complexity over time, on average, rather than increase it, because (a) loss and damage of sophisticated systems can sometimes confer a survival advantage, and (b) loss and destruction is always vastly more probably than construction.

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On becoming a titan 101.

The great floating plastic Island demystified?

 

More on why the multiverse is no counter to the design inference.

 

No player is bigger than the game.

 

Wizard vs. Mega Titan

 

Baby Titan?

 

The king of titans trolls his opponent to death?

 

The multiverse : just amother failed god?

 

AI overlords in waiting jockey for position?

 

The internal combustion engine redux?

Spaceship earth indeed.

 

Surrounded by the miraculous?

 

Separating hype from reality re:quantum computing.

 

Why gradualism is a loose cannon on Darwinism's deck

 

The undead continue to prowl Darwinism's badlands.

 Darwin’s Zombies Are Still Shambling Along

David Coppedge

The Icons of Evolution that Dr Jonathan Wells wrote about 24 years ago have not been put out of our misery. Like denizens of Zombie Science, they keep reappearing in popular science articles, cartoons, and even scientific journals. The perpetrators should know better. There is no excuse for perpetuating the mythic fables that Darwinians have used to popularize just-so stories of how natural selection supposedly works (but doesn’t under the spotlight).

Two of the icons appeared in publications recently. The old stories are retold without remorse, in spite of the fact that new evidence contradicts them.

The Peppered Myth Still Walks

Perhaps word of the falsification of the peppered myth has not yet reached the Far East. That’s doubtful, but the University of Michigan co-authors of a new study that could have told their colleagues in Singapore and Japan not to write as if the peppered myth is still a valid case of natural selection. News from the University of Singapore says bluntly,

Lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) exhibit a splendid diversity of wing colour patterns, and many species display black and white, or dark and bright, wing colour pattern variants associated with the presence and absence of melanin. Many of these wing colour pattern variants are textbook examples of natural selection and evolution. Iconic examples include the rapid increase in frequency of the melanic form of the British peppered moth Biston betularia, driven by the sootier and darker environment caused by carbon burning and industrialisation in the late 1800s in the United Kingdom, and the mimetic radiation of Heliconius butterflies, among others. 

Can this be dismissed as a minor slip? Did they perhaps mean that peppered moths “were” or “used to be” textbook examples of natural selection and evolution? Clearly not; the press release includes a YouTube video by Antonia Monteiro, one of the co-authors of the paper in Science.1 The narrator calls it a “classic Darwinian story of natural selection.” The video repeats the peppered myth in all its gory, hoary just-so story form, claiming that the coloration provided camouflage as the moths rested on tree trunks and that nature selected them because color changes helped them evade predators — false claims made by Kettlewell and never substantiated since. We remind everyone that both light and dark moths are variants of the same species: Biston betularia.There was no origin of species. In the quote, they state that “many species” display dark and light “variants” yet they call these “textbook examples of natural selection and evolution.” Within species? How is that kind of selection going to get brains from bacteria?

What’s ironic is that the scientific findings undermine natural selection as the cause of the color variants. As I mentioned in a recent article, researchers have been finding that microRNAs and noncoding RNAs are likely responsible for the color changes — not mutations to the cortex gene or to any other gene. This new paper identifies a particular microRNA named mir-193, a derivative of ivory, a long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), as the regulatory switch that turns on light or dark coloration. The outcome depends on the switch’s interaction with ivory or with the mRNA transcript of another gene called ebony. 

The video illogically says, 

It appears that the mutations that regulate the presence and absence of ivory and mir-193 across many different species are the go-to mutations that are repeatedly used to create the dark/light polymorphisms in insects.

Do the moths (or a blind Selector) “use” mutations to “create” on purpose? These are not genetic mutations assumed in neo-Darwinism. They are switches present in all butterflies that can produce one polymorphism or another. In the case of peppered moths, both the dark and light forms existed before and after the industrial revolution. All the story demonstrated, therefore, was “a shift in the proportions of two existing varieties of the same species,” as Wells stated in Zombie Science (p. 64). And it was not demonstrated, Wells goes on to say, that the moths routinely rest on tree trunks or that predation by birds altered the proportions of the pre-existing varieties. 

This is hardly a classic case of natural selection, therefore, and certainly not an instance of the origin of species. The new research merely finds a regulatory switching mechanism that can produce dark or light polymorphisms within species. MicroRNA transcripts of noncoding RNAs are likely implicated in variability in other animals as well.

Overall, our study identified a miRNA, processed from the primary transcript of a lncRNA, as the likely effector of a hotspot locus that underlies adaptive evolution in animals. This adds to a recent discovery of small noncoding RNAs being key regulators of adaptive flower color evolution and speciation. The burst of miRNA innovation at the base of Lepidoptera may have served as evolutionary raw materials to create a gamut of morphological diversity within this order, one of the most species-rich on earth.

This Is Not Your Grandpa’s Darwinism

The authors never mention genetic mutations, selection, inheritance, or fitness. The paper never says that phenotypic plasticity helps moths avoid predators. And Darwin the gradualist would have shuddered at any “burst of innovation” at the base of a taxonomic group. The authors did not witness a burst of innovation. They only asserted it. 

This and future investigations of noncoding RNAs will shed light on the long-standing hypothesis that it is the complexity of swiftly evolving noncoding components of the genome (cis-acting regulatory DNA elements and trans-acting noncoding RNAs), rather than the relatively static evolution of protein sequences, that drives organismal complexity

Here again they assert “swiftly evolving” parts of the genome without proof. The old gradualistic neo-Darwinism, updated for modern genetics, would only have produced “relatively static evolution of protein sequences” by mutations. Complexity within a species, genus or family because of regulatory elements is not the same as universal common ancestry due to natural selection of random mutations. How, then, can this be a “textbook example of natural selection and evolution” as the authors claim in the press release? The paper doesn’t even mention natural selection.

The authors do not say what cues — whether environmental or otherwise — trigger action by the mir-193 regulatory switch. They mention four times that the colors are “adaptive” in some way, but non-Darwinian interpretations are possible: genetic drift, or (as some ID researchers are proposing) internal engineering: i.e., switches that can be triggered by environmental cues. The return of the light-colored peppered moths after the industrial revolution suggests that the switching is reversible. Connecting the activity of miRNAs and lncRNAs to environmental cues sounds like a good follow-up experiment for non-Darwinian scientists.

The Miller Myth Still Walks

It the same issue, Science trotted out another zombie icon for celebration: the Miller experiment.2 In Darwinian style, Antonion Lazcano’s article, “On the origins of organisms,” praises both Aleksander Oparin and Stanley Miller. “The heterotrophic theory of the origin of life turns 100,” the subtitle announces triumphantly. Oparin’s 1924 book, The Origin of Life,

proposed that life had emerged in an oxygen-free primitive environment that led to the synthesis and accumulation of organic compounds that subsequently formed gel-like droplets from which the first heterotrophic organisms evolved. The volume became quite popular among student associations, workers’ clubs, and biology teachers, and the small edition quickly sold out, never to be reprinted. On its 100th anniversary, Oparin’s visionary work is worth revisiting.

Oparin the Marxist, who had been influenced by Ernst Haeckel, expanded his book for a 1936 edition whose 1938 translation was highly influential to Harold Urey. His PhD student Stanley Miller is pictured in a large photo standing by his spark-discharge apparatus.

Does Lazcano ever warn his readers that Oparin and Miller’s works have been demoted to irrelevant historical footnotes because the early earth likely had oxygen? Does he lament the fact that Miller used an improbable reducing atmosphere? Does he point out that the predominant product of the spark-discharge apparatus was tar that would have destroyed the desired products faster than they formed, had Miller not built a trap to separate them out? No; instead, he calls the experiment “spectacular” —

The 1938 English translation of Oparin’s second book played a seminal role in shaping Stanley L. Miller’s famous 1953 synthesis of amino acids and other organic compounds under possible primitive conditions. The spectacular results of Miller’s laboratory simulation marked the start of the laboratory phase of what we now call prebiotic chemistry.

Why Risky? And Useful to Whom?

Lazcano grants that “No scientific theory remains unchanged as time goes by, and the prebiotic soup remains a useful but risky metaphor.”

The fact that a number of biochemical components of contemporary forms of life can be synthesized nonenzymatically does not necessarily imply that they were also essential for the origin of life or that they were available in the primitive environment.

We do not know when, where, or how life appeared on Earth, but the current debates on the significance of extraterrestrial organic molecules, together with our laboratory reconstructions of primitive environments, are in themselves a recognition of the key role that prebiotic chemistry played in the processes that led to the emergence of the first life-forms.

Oparin and Miller had the right religion, in other words: materialism. They had the wrong atmosphere. They had the wrong ingredients. They interfered in the experimental design. But they had the right doctrine: some unknown form of “prebiotic chemistry” led to “the emergence of the first life-forms” — no intelligence allowed. 

For this reason — science notwithstanding — the mainstream media continues to allow these zombie icons to “shed light” on evolution, rising from the tombs, putting on Darwin costumes, holding up their sparking flasks, distributing samples of prebiotic soup to the townspeople as peppered moths flutter about their heads.

Notes

Shen Tian et al., A microRNA is the effector gene of a classic evolutionary hotspot locus. Science 5 Dec 2024, Vol 386, Issue 6726, pp. 1135-1141. DOI: 10.1126/science.adp7899.

Antonio Lazcano, On the origins of organisms. Science 5 Dec 2024, Vol 386, Issue 6726, pp. 1098-1099. DOI: 10.1126/science.ads5691.

The fossil record on homoiothermic animals vs. Darwin.

 Fossil Friday: A Scientific Controversy About Warm-Blooded Animals

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the exceptionally well-preserved fossil bird Nahmavis grandei from the Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming, as an example for a fossil representative of warm-blooded animals. Nowadays, every high-school biology class teaches that mammals and birds, even though both are warm-blooded tetrapods, are not closely related and were derived from different reptilian-like ancestors. Their similar physiology is attributed to so-called convergent evolution, thus is claimed to have had an independent evolutionary origin. However, if generally anatomical, physiological, genetic, and behavioral similarities are mostly explained by common descent, why are all warm-blooded animals not grouped together as descendants of a common warm-blooded ancestor? Indeed, based on much earlier observations of John Ray (1693), Charles Darwin’s famous opponent at the British Museum for Natural History, the paleontologist Richard Owen (1866), who had coined the word dinosaur, had first suggested to group birds and mammals together in a taxon Haematothermia, based on their similar warm-blooded physiology.

This was mostly ignored by other biologists until about 120 years later, when the two maverick biologists Søren Løvtrup (1977, 1985) and Brian Gardiner (1982, 1993) took up the idea and again suggested that all warm-blooded vertebrates form a clade Haemothermia, thus birds and mammals would be most closely related sister groups. They both suggested that the complex physiological similarities are unlikely to be convergences and rather represent deep evolutionary homologies. Nobody less than the famous French vertebrate paleontologist Philippe Janvier (1984) even published a reconstruction drawing how a hypothetical ancestor of Haemothermia might have looked like (reproduced by Sivgin 2020). This went against a growing consensus among evolutionary biologists that mammals were derived from synapsid “mammal-like reptiles” like the Permian pelycosaurs, while birds were diapsids more closely related to dinosaurs and crocodiles as well as other living reptiles. Consequently, their suggestion was immediately met with harsh criticism (Benton 1985, 1991, Kemp 1988, Gauthier et al. 1988a, 1988b) and their “radical hypothesis” (Peters 2014) was ultimately rejected as absurd (Kuhn-Schnyder 2009). The reason were the numerous other similarities from skeleton to genomics (e.g., Janke & Arnason 1997) that rather supported the mainstream view.

Pterosaurs and Dinosaurs

However, it must be noted that Gardiner (1993) explicitly agreed that pterosaurs and dinosaurs are close relatives of birds, and “mammal-like reptiles” were relatives and ancestors of mammals. He simply included those reptile-like groups in Haematothermia, and indeed there has been considerable evidence accumulated in the past decades that they also were warm-blooded. Here is a quote from Gardiner’s (1993) abstract:

An exhaustive parsimony analysis of amniote phylogeny using 97 characters has substantiated the hypothesis that mammals and birds are sister groups. This deduction is further supported by parasitological and molecular evidence. The presumed importance of “synapsid” fossils in amniote phylogeny is questioned and it is concluded that they represent a transformation series which, when broken down into constituent monophyletic groups, does not support the separation of the Mammalia from the remainder of the amniotes. Fossil members of the Haematothermia include pterosaurs and “dinosaurs” (both stem-group birds) and Dinocephalia, Dicynodontia, Gorgonopsida and Therocephalia (all stem-group mammals). The Dromaeosauridae are the most crownward stem-group birds and the Morganucodontidae the most crownward stem-group mammals.

Thus, Gardiner (1993) rather suggested that Synapsida and Archosauria are sister groups, which is a hypothesis that is still endorsed by the highly controversial fringe paleontologist David Peters (2024) in his large reptile tree based on 2323 taxa and 236 characters.

Gardiner is said to still have embraced the Haematothermia hypothesis until later in his life (Naish 2008, 2012). Nevertheless, the idea of such a clade of warm-blooded animals was quickly buried and forgotten by the scientific community again, so that the work of Løvtrup and Gardiner is not even mentioned anymore in modern treatises on the origin of endothermy in vertebrates (e.g., Koteja 2004, Nespolo et al. 2011, Benton 2021, Grigg et al. 2022, Faure-Brac et al. 2024). After all, isn’t it really silly to just look at a superficial similarity like warm-bloodedness and ignore all the conflicting evidence. Yes, that might have been silly indeed, but it was not at all what Løvtrup and Gardiner did. Indeed they assembled substantial evidence for their Haematothermia hypothesis that went far beyond only a superficial similarity in physiology, but included a cladistic analysis of 28 specific similarities, of which even the most ardent critics recognized at least 8 as valid (Kemp 1988).

Also, other authors often admitted that birds and mammals share many similarities of the “cardiovascular, renal, gastrointestinal, endocrine and nervous systems” (Carvalho & Gonçalves 2011). Even more recently, a paper on the supposed convergences between birds and mammals published by Wu & Wang (2019) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, confirmed these similarities and suggesting even more:

Extant birds and mammals share a number of highly similar characteristics, including but not limited to, enhanced hearing, vocal communication, endothermy, insulation, shivering, respiratory turbinates, high basal metabolism, grinding, sustained activity, four-chambered heart, high blood pressure, and intensive parental care.

A Very Incomplete List

Here is a very incomplete list of a dozen complex derived similarities shared by birds and mammals, which I stumbled upon during a quick survey of the recent scientific literature I made for this article:

Visceral endothermy or warm-bloodedness means that birds and mammals share the ability to maintain a stable internal body temperature, a characteristic crucial for active living in a wide range of environmental conditions (Nespolo et al. 2011). If this endothermy would be homologous in birds and mammals we should expect that they acquired this trait at the same time, which is exactly what we find (Benton 2021), allegedly based on a shared adaptation to nocturnality in their early evolution (Wu & Wang 2019). Of course, the warm-bloodedness correlates with high metabolic rates in birds and mammals, compared to most reptiles, supporting their increased energetic demand for sustained activity and thermoregulation.

Mammals and birds possess a four-chambered heart that efficiently separates oxygenated and deoxygenated blood, facilitating high metabolic rates required for endothermy. However it must be noted that a four-chambered heart is also present in crocodylians, who may have secondarily reverted to ectothermy (Grigg et al. 2022). With this knowledge I suppose that Gardiner would have decided to include crocs in his Haematothermia clade of synapsids and archosaurs.

Both birds and mammals posses integumental structures (feathers in birds and fur in mammals), made from keratin and originating from placodes that are homologous to reptilian scales, as specialized body coverings for insulation to reduce heat loss, which is of course a crucial adaptation for endothermy (Chernova 2005, Dhouailly 2009, Di-Poï & Milinkovitch 2016).

Even though very different in organisation, birds and mammals have the most complex lungs among vertebrates and a highly efficient respiratory systems that support their high metabolic demands (Meyer et al. 1981, Powell & Hopkins 2004, West et al. 2007).

Both birds and mammals exhibit relatively large brains compared to body size, particularly in regions associated with higher cognitive function, such as learning, problem-solving, and social behaviors. More specifically, only mammals and birds possess a well-developed neocortex, called dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR) in birds (UChicago Medicine 2012, Kebschull 2020, Stacho et al. 2020, Ball & Balthazart 2021). Apart from the increased relative brain size and highly laminar telencephalic areas, birds and mammals also share a complex cerebellar folding, enhancing motor control and coordination, as well as advanced auditory circuits capable of processing complex sounds (Striedter & Northcutt 2019).

Only mammals and birds have episodic-like memory (Rattenborg & Martinez-Gonzalez 2011, 2013).

Even though sleep was for decades considered to be exclusive to mammals and birds, it is meanwhile shown to be a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom. However, “REM sleep, the major source of dreams, and slow wave sleep are unique to mammals and birds” (AAAS 2015, Hayashi et al. 2015). 

Birds and mammals have specialized hearing mechanisms, including middle ear ossicles (ossicular chain) that transmit sound vibrations effectively, allowing for acute auditory sensitivity (Köppl 2011, Anthwal et al. 2012: fig. 1).

Both groups possess complex endocrine hormonal systems that regulate growth, metabolism, and reproduction. Actually, “birds produce homologues of the vast majority of mammalian hormones. These can have similar roles in birds and mammals.” (Scanes 2015). For instance, the thyroid and adrenal glands play essential roles in metabolic rate control, and prolactin controls seasonality in birds and mammals (Stewart & Marshall 2022).

Both birds and mammals engage in complex social behaviours, including cooperation, communication, intricate mating rituals and significant parental care, including prolonged juvenile periods and provisioning of food, which enhances offspring survival in challenging environments. Play behaviour was long considered to be unique to mammals and birds (Dinets 2023), but it has been meanwhile recorded from a few ectothermic animal species as well, but it is still only widely occurring and well-developed in birds and mammals.

Both groups possess complex endocrine hormonal systems that regulate growth, metabolism, and reproduction. Actually, “birds produce homologues of the vast majority of mammalian hormones. These can have similar roles in birds and mammals.” (Scanes 2015). For instance, the thyroid and adrenal glands play essential roles in metabolic rate control, and prolactin controls seasonality in birds and mammals (Stewart & Marshall 2022).

Both birds and mammals engage in complex social behaviours, including cooperation, communication, intricate mating rituals and significant parental care, including prolonged juvenile periods and provisioning of food, which enhances offspring survival in challenging environments. Play behaviour was long considered to be unique to mammals and birds (Dinets 2023), but it has been meanwhile recorded from a few ectothermic animal species as well, but it is still only widely occurring and well-developed in birds and mammals.

A cladistic study of 16 ultrastructure characters of spermatozoa (Jamieson & Healy 1992) strongly supported the bird + mammal clade (Haemothermia) with three uniquely derived similarities, and did not substantiate the traditional grouping. This is significant because it is a totally independent source of evidence unrelated to warm-blooded physiology.

In spite of differential rates of transposable element accumulation “the genome size in mammals and birds shows remarkably little interspecific variation compared with other taxa.” The results of a study by Kapusta et al. (2017) imply that “DNA removal in both mammals and birds has proceeded mostly through large segmental deletions”, which has been called an “accordion model” of genome size evolution.

All these striking similarities would have to be considered as convergent adaptations, which were the result of similar selective pressures in birds and mammals that have led to the independent origin of these complex traits. So, both alternatives, the mainstream view and the Haematothermia hypothesis, imply a lot of convergences, so that many similarities cannot be readily explained with common descent. Ultimately, a bureaucratic counting of which alternative is supported by a few more similarities (see Kemp 1988) decides for evolutionary biologists, which common descent hypothesis is embraced and which is rejected as absurd. If you look at many of the publication dates of the references in my list above, you see that a lot more characters that would support Haematothermia have been discovered since the time of Løvtrup and Gardiner.

To be clear, I do not suggest that the Haematothermia hypothesis is a better alternative to the mainstream view, but rather suggest that the strongly conflicting data point to a deeper problem. In the view of us critics of neo-Darwinian evolution, the large amount of incongruent and conflicting evidence rather questions all alternatives and the very paradigm of common descent itself. Even though common descent may well still be true, either on a universal level or at least for more restricted groups, it cannot be convincingly demonstrated by just pointing to shared similarities. Those similarities would have to be overwhelmingly congruent and mostly point to the same nested hierarchy, if the story of a single tree of life would be true. But they don’t. Incongruent evidence is found abundantly in all groups and all levels of the taxonomic hierarchy. The theory of Darwinism made a prediction of similarities that neatly fall into a nested hierarchy without significant incongruence, but it failed the test by empirical data miserably. Other processes than common descent with modification have to account for the similarities and differences between organisms, and intelligent design definitely is a premier candidate.

Ignoring the Evidence

How do popularizers of Darwinism such as Richard Dawkins react? Unsurprisingly, they just ignore the evidence and boldly tell their gullible fanboys (and girls) that evolution is a proven fact because all data unambiguously suggest a single true tree of life. Is this mere ignorance or deliberate deception? The materialist-naturalist world view critically depends of Darwinian evolution and must defend it at all cost, even if it means that the facts have to be tweaked, fudged, and denied to fit the theory. And all critics must be silenced as dangerous science-deniers and peddlers of pseudoscience and evil religious superstition. More and more people no longer fall for this crude propaganda and rather follow the evidence wherever it leads. Isn’t this what science is all about, or at least should be?

References

AAAS 2015. Neurons that regulate sleep stages revealed. EurekAlert! October 22, 2015. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/746676

Anthwal N, Joshi L & Tucker AS 2012. Evolution of the mammalian middle ear and jaw: adaptations and novel structures. Journal of Anatomy 222(1), 147–160. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7580.2012.01526.x

Ball GF & Balthazart J 2021. Evolutionary neuroscience: Are the brains of birds and mammals really so different? Current Biology 31(13), R840–R842. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.05.004

Benton MJ 1985. Classification and phylogeny of the diapsid reptiles. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 84(2), 97–164. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1985.tb01796.x

Benton MJ 1991. Amniote phylogeny. pp. 317–330 in: Schultze H-P & Trueb L (eds). Origins of the Higher Groups of Tetrapods: Controversy and Consensus. Cornell University Press, Ithaca (NY) and London (UK), 576 pp. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv75d32t.13

Benton MJ 2021. The origin of endothermy in synapsids and archosaurs and arms races in the Triassic. Gondwana Research 100, 261–289. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2020.08.003

Carvalho O & Gonçalves C 2011. Comparative Physiology of the Respiratory System in the Animal Kingdom. The Open Biology Journal 4, 35–46. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2174/1874196701104010035

Chernova OF 2005. One More Example of Morphological Convergence: Similarity between the Architectonics of Feather and Hair. Doklady Biological Sciences 405(3), 446–450. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10630-005-0161-3

Dinets V 2023. Play behavior in ectothermic vertebrates. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 155: 105428, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105428

Di-Poï N & Milinkovitch MC 2016. The anatomical placode in reptile scale morphogenesis indicates shared ancestry among skin appendages in amniotes. Science Advances 2(6): e1600708, 1–8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600708

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