Yet more iconoclasm.

Evolving Icons of Evolution
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Peter and Rosemary Grant, the husband and wife pair from Princeton University, have spent 40 years studying four species of ground finch on one uninhabited island of the Galápagos archipelago. They are to be commended for their dedication, and for details that they have published over the years about the birds made famous by Darwin. (Design advocates appreciate the Grants for their findings that undermine neo-Darwinism, although they would not see it that way.)

In a new Perspective piece in Science Magazine, “Watching Speciation in Action,” they show that they are not the only ones who have witnessed the origin of species. Beginning with the Darwin quote about “grandeur in this view of life” that evolves, they describe a number of studies like theirs that illustrate organisms that have varied and diversified from parent stock. Let’s begin by listing the examples and what is known about them, both genetically and phenotypically. These can be considered their finest “icons of evolution” for 2017.

Darwin’s finches. The Grants witnessed variations due to five beak genes, two transcription factor genes, hybridization, climate forcing, and reproductive isolation.
Peppered moths. The black morph comes from one transposon, which “suggests that transposable elements may play a more important role in generating variation among species in ecologically important traits than is currently realized.”
Pentstemons and morning glories. Asymmetric loss-of-function mutations and inversions tend to change pollinators from bees to hummingbirds, but not the reverse.
Ruff, a wading bird “with an unusual mating system in which three male forms, differing in plumage and behavior, compete for females on a courting arena.” An inversion 3.8 million years ago, they say, was followed by mutations that produced this result.
Deer mice in Nebraska’s sand hills. The lighter coat colors, adaptive for the sandy environment, “were the result of selection on not one but multiple mutations in the Agouti”
Three-spined sticklebacks. Marine fish that have colonized freshwater environments repeatedly evolved into surface dwellers and bottom dwellers. They also lost the pelvic apparatus and armor through similar genetic pathways (involving a transcription factor and a signaling protein).
High-altitude birds. Hemoglobin adaptation to high altitude has been shown to involve “repeated use of the same genetic pathway.” It “may be the case generally” that “closely related species use similar genes, whereas more distantly related species use different genetic pathways that depend on their genetic backgrounds.”
Heliconius butterflies. The genes involved in Mullerian mimicry are shown to be due to introgressive hybridization, “that is, gene exchange between species as a result of hybrids backcrossing to a parental species.” This process is also seen in the Darwin finch study.
Mosquitos and mice. Cases of insecticide resistance have been “transmitted between populations” by introgressive hybridization.
Asian longhorn beetles. These eukaryotes, in a case “even more remarkable, and similar to introgressive hybridization,” obtained genes for digesting plant cell walls via horizontal gene transfer from bacteria and fungi.
High-altitude humans. They say that Tibetans may have obtained adaptation to high altitude via interbreeding with Denisovans.
Sunflowers. Members of Helianthus colonized salt marshes via “transgressive segregation,” a form of hybridization whereby individuals can “colonize novel habitats where neither parental lineage can survive.”
Blind cave fish. Mexican fish lost vision via “release of hidden [cryptic] variation.” In their case, the heat shock protein HSP90 masks variation for eye size in surface waters. “This variation is exposed in the altered conductivity of cave water and becomes available for selection.”
It’s an impressive list. The Grants have thrown down the gauntlet to Darwin skeptics, providing a baker’s dozen of clear examples of variation leading to populations with phenotypic change. But before we bow before these icons, we should ask some important questions — like those Jonathan Wells asked in his classic book, Icons of Evolution (2000). What kind of evolution have they really shown? Nobody doubts variation. It was clearly evident long before Darwin. Even today, the most ardent creationists allow for significant variability within what they call “created kinds,” while a good number of intelligent design advocates cheerfully accept universal common descent even as they reject neo-Darwinian evolution as the explanation for it.

To distinguish Darwin’s explanation from these positions, therefore, the burden on the Grants is to demonstrate adaptive variation arising by random mutations and positive natural selection. (Loss of function, while interesting, is not particularly helpful to their argument.) These adaptive variations, moreover, must be significant enough to create true novelties, innovations beyond mere reshuffling of existing information. And they must persist in new populations that are reproductively isolated, so as to branch off Darwin’s tree in new directions. We need to see something as significant as the presumed first tetrapod colonizing land, or the first dinosaur obtaining powered flight — something on a new fitness peak that has the appearance of being designed, but is now demonstrably explainable by gradual steps up the backside of Mt. Improbable. Furthermore, the selected random variations should be detectable in the genes.

A key point of the Grants’ article is that variation did not always arise by random mutation. In fact, most of the cases in their list involve reshuffling of existing genetic information by interbreeding, hybridization or horizontal gene transfer. This immediately takes #8-12 off the list. The challenge to Darwinism by hybridization was shown in our post last year, “Hybrids Weave Darwin’s Tree into a Web,” which mentions the Grants and the potentially devastating impacts of this “revolution” on their work.

Loss of function takes #13 off the list as well as #2, #3, and #6. None of these demonstrate Darwinian evolution. That leaves us with #1 Darwin’s finches, #4 Ruff, #5 Deer mice, and #7 High-altitude birds. To give the best benefit of the doubt, we might put #11 High-altitude humans back on the list with #7, High-altitude birds.

Jonathan Wells discussed three of these icons in his book: #1 Darwin’s finches, #2 Peppered moths (see his update last year), and #11 Human evolution. The Grants don’t offer any new solutions. In fact, the situation is worse now for Darwinians than it was in 2000. Now we know that hybridization was involved in the finches. Now we know that a transposon created the dark peppered moth — a case of shuffling of existing information. And now we know about interbreeding of modern humans with Neanderthals and Denisovans, proving they were compatible species and not “reproductively isolated” (a requirement for speciation). None of the variations in these cases are demonstrably due to neo-Darwinian mechanisms.

What about the Ruff wading birds? At best, these involve minor changes to existing information. Birds already were divided into males and females. Birds already had plumage. Birds already had behaviors. If all three male types can mate with the females, they are members of one species anyway; this is not a case of the origin of species.

What about the deer mice? This is another peppered-moth case, merely shifting the ratios of existing populations. Again, even if multiple mutations occurred in the Agouti locus, they only affected fur color. The mice already had fur. Lots of mammals, including humans, show wide variations in hair color. The paper in Science referenced by the Grants indicates that the coloration patterns fall on a continuum. The researchers used a highly-contrived artificial lab experiment to try to correlate fur color to predation, but even so, all the mice of all colors are members of the same species anyway. So, peppered mice? Much ado about nothing. See also what Casey Luskin wrote about stickleback fish (#6), and what Kirk Durston wrote about microevolution, which is what all the examples on the Grants’ list amount to.

In short, nothing the Grants presented rises to the level of evidence required to distinguish their view from those of intelligent design or even Young Earth Creationism. What’s perhaps most illuminating about the Grants’ article is the frank admission that, 158 years after Darwin’s Origin, and after 40 years on Daphne Major studying finches, evolutionists still do not understand microevolution, let alone macroevolution. In the first paragraph, they state:

Today, scientists are using genetics to understand how species multiply, and ecological and behavioral knowledge to understand why they do so [implying that they still do not understand]. However, many questions remain about the sources of genetic variation and how new phenotypes arise in response to environmental change [isn’t that what Darwin solved?]. Recent research has revealed unexpected origins of genetic variation, providing crucial insights into phenotypic divergence and the evolutionary effects of rare events triggered by global climatic change. [Emphasis added.]

Yes, be sure to mention climate change to score extra points with the editor. At the end, they state:

Future genomic and ecological research on natural populations will provide a more comprehensive answer to Darwin’s question of why the world is so extraordinarily rich in numbers, diversity, and complexity of organisms. Foremost among current questions is how gradual climate change and extreme climatic events cause rapid evolutionary change, and why some species groups diversify prolifically while others do not.


So exactly how much is understood about this theory that rules biology?

The parody defying absurdity of the war on human exceptionalism.

River to Receive Human Rights?
Wesley J. Smith

In  The War on Humans, I warned that radical environmentalists wanted to accord human-type “rights” to “nature.” The idea is to prevent development and human exploitation of natural resources. Under these laws, anyone can sue on behalf of “nature,” and courts have to give the rights of the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees “equal consideration” to the needs or desires of humans.

Toward this end, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River the rights of “personhood.” Now, a proposal is being pushed in the U.K. to give “rights” to the Frome River. From the SomersetLive story:

The River Frome could soon be capable of bearing the same rights as humans and companies, if proposals to establish a nature rights by-law go ahead.

Sustainable Frome is campaigning to get Frome Town Council to create a new type of by-law which recognises the river as a legal system capable of bearing the same rights as us humans.

The key elements of a nature rights by-law for the river were laid out at a town council meeting last July. These would be:

1. That the river be given appropriate rights stemming from the function of rivers within the wider whole of nature.

2. That local people and the council be granted the power to enforce these rights on behalf of the river. Currently anyone trying to defend the nature of the river has to show sufficient interest in order to bring a case.

3. That the river must not be subordinated to the rights and interests of companies of natural persons, whose property claims must respect the rights of the river.

Some here in the U.S. have also caught this radical infection: More than thirty U.S. municipalities — including Santa Monica, which has no “nature” left to protect — have instituted laws that recognize the “rights of nature.”


The message, of course, is that humans are not the least bit exceptional. Indeed, this view posits the subversive view that we are merely one species among flora and fauna possessing no special value nor entitled to unique rights.

Titan v. aspiring titan or One for the little guy?

Britain should have opted out of the war to end war?:Pros and con.

I.D is already mainstream? II

Light Sails: In Fast Radio Bursts, Harvard Scientists Seek Evidence of Intelligent Design - 
Evolution News

Some critics of intelligent design — the less serious ones — maintain that seeking to detect design in nature is akin to searching out fairies and unicorns. Tell that to Avi Loeb and Manasvi Lingam, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Their forthcoming paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters is “Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails.” It applies what is manifestly (albeit not by that name) a design filter to evaluating a mysterious phenomenon in distant space. So-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) could be natural. Or they could be an artifact of non-human intelligence, an unknown technology in use to power enormous alien spacecraft in “sailing” across the stars. Distinguishing nature from artifact is the main point on the agenda of all intelligent design research, whether it’s called that or not.

A statement  announcing the publication is fascinating:

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has looked for many different signs of alien life, from radio broadcasts to laser flashes, without success. However, newly published research suggests that mysterious phenomena called fast radio bursts could be evidence of advanced alien technology. Specifically, these bursts might be leakage from planet-sized transmitters powering interstellar probes in distant galaxies.

“Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven’t identified a possible natural source with any confidence,” said theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking.”

As the name implies, fast radio bursts are millisecond-long flashes of radio emission. First discovered in 2007, fewer than two dozen have been detected by gigantic radio telescopes like the Parkes Observatory in Australia or the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. They are inferred to originate from distant galaxies, billions of light-years away.

Loeb and his co-author Manasvi Lingam (Harvard University) examined the feasibility of creating a radio transmitter strong enough for it to be detectable across such immense distances. They found that, if the transmitter were solar powered, the sunlight falling on an area of a planet twice the size of the Earth would be enough to generate the needed energy. Such a vast construction project is well beyond our technology, but within the realm of possibility according to the laws of physics.

…

[Lingam and Loeb] asked, why build such an instrument in the first place? They argue that the most plausible use of such power is driving interstellar light sails. The amount of power involved would be sufficient to push a payload of a million tons, or about 20 times the largest cruise ships on Earth.

“That’s big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances,” added Lingam.

The Washington Post points out that space sails are an idea explored in science fiction. They mention a short story by Arthur C. Clarke (“Sunjammer”) and a 2002 Star Wars installment (Attack of the Clones). So is this just a case of more fairies and unicorns? Obviously not. Avi Loeb is known for his out-of-the-box thinking. But he is a highly regarded astrophysicist. The science seems sound. Solar sails, indeed, are probably the easiest way to imagine travel to the stars.

As the Post concedes, NASA is already on the verge of employing light sails, on an appropriately modest scale.

Solar sails are poised to jump into real life, too, in 2018. Two years ago, NASA announced its Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, which will use a reflective sail to travel toward a lump of space rock.

And if the technology of light sails seems beyond our present ken, that should come as no surprise. Do you think Aristotle could even begin to conceive of a TV remote? Or a cell phone? Not likely. So on what grounds do we suppose that advanced aliens would employ technologies easily comprehensible to us?

Even without evaluating the physics of FRBs in relation to the Lingam & Loeb hypothesis, it’s good to observe their use of a design-filter mode of reasoning. Seeing intelligent causation not as fantastic or inherently suspect, but another genuine causal possibility reached by objectively sifting evidence, is the first step to setting science free from its slavery to materialism.

In short, there’s no magical thinking in light sails. Only good ID science. Their hypothesis is speculative, but thoughtful and serious. It also rests on a good deal less evidence than the argument for design in our familiar world of terrestrial biology.


- See more at: https://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/03/light-sails-fast-radio-bursts-harvard-scientists-seek-evidence-intelligent-design/#sthash.u7Ed3AIb.dpuf

Origin of life science tosses up yet another Just so story

Cranky young sun kickstarted life? No.

Unless you believe New Scientist::

Giant flare-ups from the young sun might have kept early Earth warm – and any life nicely fertilised. By splitting inert nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, charged particles from the sun could have sparked chemical reactions that heated the planet and could be the precursor for life.

This suggestion is the latest attempt to solve a famous paradox known as the “faint young sun” problem. About 4 billion years ago, the sun was only 70 per cent as bright as it is today, which should have made the Earth a frozen snowball. But geological evidence shows that ancient Earth was warm enough for liquid water. The same holds true for Mars.

Now, Vladimir Airapetian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland suggests that blasts of protons from the hyperactive young sun could be the answer .More.

Physicist  Rob Sheldon writes to say,

This is a bit close to my field: magnetospheric particles, flares, etc. But its claim is rubbish:

a) The number of nitrogen molecules “split” by solar protons is miniscule, because we’re talking maybe 10 protons/cubic centimeter. This is ultra-high vacuum in any other location on the surface of the planet. And all that split nitrogen is high up in the ionosphere–unlikely to ever diffuse down to sea level.

b) Sea-level lightning splits nitrogen and generates the majority of the NOx in the Earth, which is gratefully used by life, the density of nitrogen being some 17 orders of magnitude larger here than in solar flares.

c) But to sustain life, neither flares nor lightning is important, life does it alone from nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria in the oceans or root-nodules of legumes. Nitrogen fixation is then one of those “irreducibly complex” problems for evolution.

But what this article does reveal–like so many Darwinian “breakthroughs”–is that nitrogen is a real problem for Origin-of-life (OOL). Every protein and nucleobase has nitrogen in it, which needs to be “fixed” or chemically bound for life to start, because fixed nitrogen is unstable. That is because the N2 gas that fills our atmosphere (“unfixed”) is so extremely stable, as organic matter decomposes in our garden, it loses nitrogen to the atmosphere, which never comes back. That’s why coal has no nitrogen content. Other than fresh organic stuff, (or mined organic stuff such as guano) farmers have to put (fixed) nitrogen back in the soil as “nitrates”, a popular version being “ammonium nitrate”, which is now made synthetically using the Nobel-prize winning “Haber-Bosch” high-temperature catalyst process.

So what OOL needs, in addition to energy sources, entropy barriers, miscible membranes, hot-springs etc, is some way to get fixed nitrogen in the environment as well. This article wants to tie it into solar flares and thence to a young sun to make OOL on Earth more likely. In contrast, Miller-Urey argued for lightning, which is indeed, far more efficient than solar protons. This fellow is either cheerleading for Darwin, or advertising his (overly-simplistic) 2-D computer modeling codes (having done some 3-D magnetosphere models ~20 years ago.) But that’s the way this

game is played–no matter how insignificant your result, if you want the media to notice your press release, claim it either supports Darwin or global warming or both.

Hardest puzzle ever?

Diminishing returns II

Is Russia'a war on religious liberty going to the next level?:The Watchtower Society's commentary.

Ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia Imminent?

On February 21, 2017, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation issued a new order to the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia. The Ministry is now demanding that the Administrative Center provide information on all 2,277 congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses throughout Russia.

The Ministry of Justice issued this latest order while it was conducting an inspection of the Administrative Center, ordered by the Prosecutor General’s Office. During that inspection, authorities focused only on the legal entities that the Witnesses use. These entities include the Administrative Center itself as well as Local Religious Organizations, which congregations use to hold title to properties for religious services. On February 27, 2017, the Ministry of Justice concluded its inspection and reported that the Administrative Center violated the law and showed signs of engaging in “extremist activity.”


Jehovah’s Witnesses around the world are gravely concerned for their fellow believers in Russia. With this second order, the Ministry of Justice has turned its attention to the congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Based on the authorities’ latest actions, the Witnesses believe that the Prosecutor General is moving not only to liquidate all legal entities of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia but also to ban Jehovah’s Witnesses throughout the Russian Federation.

Is Darwinism cleverer than Darwinists?

Vertebrates to Land Is an Evolutionary Transition Dripping with Teleology - 
David Klinghoffer


Cornelius Hunter, among other observers, has pointed out the recurring need on the part of evolutionary thinking to resort to the language of teleology. Darwinian evolution is supposed to have done away with the need for purpose or will in driving the history of life. The words of Darwinists themselves tend to refute that idea.

That’s especially the case when they don’t have the defense of highly technical language to obscure what’s going on. As an illustration, see how researchers describe their idea about how vertebrates made the transition from sea to land some 385 million years ago.

Getting to solid ground, according to previous thinking, was driven by the evolution of limbs. These scientists, however, say it was all in the eyes.

Large eyes are unhelpful in water, but a necessity on land. So to make the launch to dry earth, sea creatures “evolved” larger eyes. They explain in an article for Science Daily, “Vision, not limbs, led fish onto land 385 million years ago.” “Led“? Note the language suggestive of teleology, purpose, forethought, in bold:

A provocative new Northwestern University and Claremont McKenna, Scripps and Pitzer colleges study suggests it was the power of the eyes and not the limbs that first led our ancient aquatic ancestors to make the momentous leap from water to land. Crocodile-like animals first saw easy meals on land and then evolved limbs that enabled them to get there, the researchers argue.

…

[E]yes nearly tripled in size before — not after — the water-to-land transition. The tripling coincided with a shift in location of the eyes from the side of the head to the top. The expanded visual range of seeing through air may have eventually led to larger brains in early terrestrial vertebrates and the ability to plan and not merely react, as fish do.

It sounds like it was not only the early terrestrial vertebrates that were doing the “planning.” More:

“We found a huge increase in visual capability in vertebrates just before the transition from water to land. Our hypothesis is that maybe it was seeing an unexploited cornucopia of food on land — millipedes, centipedes, spiders and more — that drove evolution to come up with limbs from fins,” MacIver said.

“Seeing” the food “drove evolution” to “come up with,” i.e., to invent, limbs. A longing for tasty treats on land! They saw that the millipedes and whatnot were good for food, and that this “cornucopia” was a delight to the eyes, or they would have if they had eyes adapted for seeing through air instead of water — no small thing.

What Big Eyes You Have!

The problem, again: Who needs larger eyes in water? Nobody. Yet they “evolved” larger eyes, appropriately situated. The researchers wondered what the “point,” the purpose, might be.

“Bigger eyes are almost worthless in water because vision is largely limited to what’s directly in front of the animal,” said Schmitz, assistant professor of biology at the W.M. Keck Science Department, a joint program of Claremont McKenna, Scripps and Pitzer colleges.

“But larger eye size is very valuable when viewing through air. In evolution, it often comes down to a trade-off. Is it worth the metabolic toll to enlarge your eyes? What’s the point? Here we think the point was to be able to search out prey on land,” he said.

Teleology is the study of such “points” to things. The article concludes: “Rather than limbs, it was eyes that brought our ancestors to land.”

Obviously, in ordinary English “bringing” things, “leading” them, implies purposeful action. A report on the same study for Quanta Magazine puts it in intriguing terms: “The ancient creatures who first crawled onto land may have been lured by the informational benefit that comes from seeing through air.” The early vertebrates were lured ashore by information!

The reference is to information about food. But researcher Malcolm MacIver doesn’t seem to realize how much he sounds like an ID theorist when he tells Quanta, “It’s hard to look past limbs and think that maybe information, which doesn’t fossilize well, is really what brought us onto land.” Don’t worry, he’s not a design advocate, but it’s amusing to think you could just as easily have lifted that sentence out of a book by Stephen Meyer.

Greetings from Burbank

The paper in PNAS (“Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates“) fills in the technical details and gives the theory a cute name:

The consequent combination of the increase in eye size and vision through air would have conferred a 1 million-fold increase in the amount of space within which objects could be seen. The “buena vista” hypothesis that our data suggest is that seeing opportunities from afar played a role in the subsequent evolution of fully terrestrial limbs as well as the emergence of elaborated action sequences through planning circuits in the nervous system.

If Buena Vista (“good vision”) rings a bell, by the way, that might be because it’s the street in Burbank, California, where the Walt Disney Studios has its headquarters, leading to a brand name, Buena Vista, long associated with Disney. The brand name is the result of the street name. It was chosen purposefully, consciously to match one with the other, a minor example of action directed toward an end.

As Dr. Hunter notes:

The teleology is not a mere slip-up. As we have documented many times, it is a common thread running throughout the genre of evolutionary literature. It is needed to make sense of the data, because evolution doesn’t.

Certainly, “buena vista” is a prerequisite to life on land. It seems to have been “selected” for, however, prior to there being much need for it. That kind of looking ahead to future requirements is a hallmark not of blind Darwinian shuffling but, of course, of intelligent design.


- See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/03/vertebrates-land-evolutionary-transition-dripping-teleology/#sthash.2eWJYL38.dpuf

Some speech is freer than others(With apologies to George Orwelle).

Bloggingheads TV and Me

Michael Behe 

I've just been through the weirdest book-related experience I've had since a Canadian university professor with a loaded rat trap chased me around after a talk I gave a dozen years ago, threatening to spring it on me. Last week I got the following email bearing the title "Invitation to Appear on Bloggingheads TV" from a senior editor at that site:

Hi, Michael--

I'd like to invite you to appear on Bloggingheads.tv, a web site that hosts video dialogues between journalists, bloggers, and scholars. We have a partnership with the New York Times by which they feature excerpts from some of our shows on their site.

Past guests include prominent thinkers such as Paul Krugman, Paul Ehrlich, Frans de Waal, David Frum, Richard Wrangham, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, and Michael Kinsley.

Here is one of our recent shows, a dialogue between Paul Nelson, of the Discovery Institute, and Ron Numbers, of Wisconsin-Madison:

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/21107

I'm hoping that you might be interested in participating, as well. First-time participants often report how refreshingly unconstrained they find the format--how it lets them present their views with a depth and subtlety not possible on TV or radio. We'd love to have you join us.

If you're available, please let me know, and we can see about arranging a taping. Thank you for your time.

He seemed like such a nice fellow, so after a couple days I emailed him back to say, sure, I'd be glad to. The editor responded, okay, sometime next week, your discussion partner will be John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute. I had never heard of McWhorter before, so googled his name, and saw that he's a linguist who often writes on race matters. I didn't know what to expect because I know some conservatives (which he seemed to be from his bio) don't like ID one bit.

Everything was arranged for the taping Tuesday afternoon. When the interview started, I was surprised and delighted to learn that McWhorter was actually a fan of mine. He said (I'm paraphrasing here) he loved The Edge of Evolution and wanted the book to become better known. He said that this was one of the few times that he initiated an interview at Bloggingheads. He said he was familiar with criticisms of the book and found them unpersuasive. He said that Darwinism just didn't seem to him to be able to cut the mustard in explaining life, and he had yet to read a good, detailed explanation for a large evolutionary change. He also said that he had never believed in God, but that EOE got him thinking. In return I summarized my arguments from EOE, talked about protein structure, addressed his objections that intelligent design is "boring" and a scientific dead-end, and so on. At the end of the taping I thought, gee, those folks at Bloggingheads TV are a real nice bunch.

The next day I emailed the Bloggingheads editor to ask when the show would go on. He answered right back that at that very moment it had been activated, and thanks for participating. I clicked the link, and there was the show. I thought I looked older on screen than I am (my beard isn't really that white), but emailed some friends to let them know the interview was up anyway. That evening I got an email from one of them saying that he couldn't find the interview -- it had been yanked.

Let me emphasize this, dear readers. Here we are living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And yet a web site puts up an interview with an (ahem...) somewhat controversial figure, pulls it back down within hours, erases it, sends it down the memory hole. Why might that be? There would seem to be two possibilities: 1) maybe we aren't quite as free as we think, or 2) maybe not quite as brave.

I bet on possibility #2. Because of the magic of the internet, it turns out that shortly after the show's posting the comments section of the site was overrun by "bitterly virulent" (in the words of one principal in this saga) cyber bullies, some murmuring darkly about a grim future for Bloggingheads. After I found out the video was removed I emailed John McWhorter and the editor to ask for an explanation, and John emailed back that he himself requested the video to be pulled because people thought he was too easy on me, which was supposedly contrary to that old Bloggingheads spirit. I find that quite implausible (other shows on the site feature discussions between people who agree on many things). Rather, I suspect the folks at the website weren't expecting the vitriolic reaction, began to worry about their good names and future employment prospects, pictured themselves banished to a virtual leper colony, panicked, and folded.

Well, mobs, including internet mobs, are scary things, and it's understandable to panic when they unexpectedly show up at your door. But if you're going to set up a website to air discussions about contentious issues of the day, you should have a whole lot more guts than displayed by Bloggingheads TV.

'Birdbrained':Insult or compliment?

"Bird Brain" Is a Compliment
Evolution News & Views



Next time someone calls you a birdbrain, smile and say "thank you." Our feathered friends come well equipped with hardware and software for complex behaviors. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences puts birds on par with macaques and other mammals, and even suggests they can think.

Here's what the news from Vanderbilt University says about the results of a detailed study by researchers primarily from the University of Prague, with additional team members from Austria, Brazil, and the United States:

The macaw has a brain the size of an unshelled walnut, while the macaque monkey has a brain about the size of a lemon. Nevertheless, the macaw has more neurons in its forebrain -- the portion of the brain associated with intelligent behavior -- than the macaque.
That is one of the surprising results of the first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in the brains of more than two dozen species of birds ranging in size from the tiny zebra finch to the six-foot-tall emu, which found that they consistently have more neurons packed into their small brains than are stuffed into mammalian or even primate brains of the same mass. [Emphasis added.]

How is this possible? The answer includes miniaturization and efficient packaging:

That is possible because the neurons in avian brains are much smaller and more densely packed than those in mammalian brains, the study found. Parrot and songbird brains, for example, contain about twice as many neurons as primate brains of the same mass and two to four times as many neurons as equivalent rodent brains.
Not only are neurons packed into the brains of parrots and crows at a much higher density than in primate brains, but the proportion of neurons in the forebrain is also significantly higher, the study found.

The scientists note that even despised birds like pigeons show much the same brain power. Powered flight, obviously, takes a lot of hardware and software to operate in any bird; how much so in the supreme flyers Illustra Media showed in Flight: The Genius of Birds: starlings, Arctic terns, and especially the tiny hummingbirds? Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzl, lead author of the study, shows her delightful surprise in video clips in the news item. The small heads of birds belie the observations of complex behaviors they perform.

But it's not just routine tasks the brains must perform. Some birds can remember where they stored hundreds of seeds. Birds have been observed to hide a seed while another bird is watching, then move it when the neighbor is gone -- indicative of a possible 'theory of mind' that shows planning and recognizing what the other bird is thinking.

The study provides a straightforward answer to a puzzle that comparative neuroanatomists have been wrestling with for more than a decade: how can birds with their small brains perform complicated cognitive behaviors?
The conundrum was created by a series of studies beginning in the previous decade that directly compared the cognitive abilities of parrots and crows with those of primates. The studies found that the birds could manufacture and use tools, use insight to solve problems, make inferences about cause-effect relationships, recognize themselves in a mirror and plan for future needs, among other cognitive skills previously considered the exclusive domain of primates.

Indeed, crows have shown the ability to solve a puzzle made famous in an Aesop's fable (Reuters): dropping stones in a pitcher to raise the water level in order to get a drink. New Caledonian crows have shown the ability to use three tools in succession to reach a food source (BBC News). Owners of parrots know the cleverness of their pets; their ability to mimic human speech and singing is astonishing. Some cockatiels can even do the Riverdance.

Finding such detail and complexity in the brains of birds poses a serious evolutionary problem. The old progressive gradualism of Darwin saw humans at the pinnacle of evolution, with everything that came before less advanced. To find that birds, so completely distant from mammals on the Tree of Life, having comparable brains to primates is unexpected from a Darwinian view.In the second video clip from Vanderbilt, Herculano-Houzl struggles to give an evolutionary account. She intimates that birds evolved intelligence first and then kept it at that level while mammals, evolving separately, arrived at comparable intelligence later. That only compounds the problem. The paper further compounds the problem by postulating that "songbirds and parrots independently evolved vocal learning pathways by duplication of preexisting, surrounding motor circuits." But duplication does not add information; it's an accident. The statement amounts to saying bird intelligence happened by chance.

As Denyse O'Leary has explored here at Evolution News, intelligence does not require a specific type of brain. What better way to dismiss evolutionary pathways than to show independent brain types with similar capabilities for cognition and intelligence? It's similar to Tim Standish's comment in Living Waters about a mind being able to know a solution to a problem (in that case, magnetic navigation) and applying it over and over again in different contexts. Isn't that a better explanation than admitting ignorance and tossing out suggestions?

What ultimate mechanisms drive the evolution of the enlarged, neuron-rich telencephalon, which sets parrots and songbirds apart from the more basal birds we examined, remains poorly understood. We suggest that this expansion has been due to simultaneous selective pressures on cognitive enhancement and an evolutionary constraint on brain size, which may stem from the constraints on body size imposed by active flight.
One cause we know that can optimize multiple, competing constraints is intelligence. When a cause is known to be necessary and sufficient to explain a phenomenon, that cause should be preferred as the vera causa (true cause). It would seem that intelligent causes are best equipped to take up the challenge the researchers leave at the end of their paper:

Our finding of greater than primate-like numbers of neurons in the pallium of parrots and songbirds suggests that the large absolute numbers of telencephalic neurons in these two clades provide a means of increasing computational capacity, supporting their advanced behavioral and cognitive complexity, despite their physically smaller brains. Moreover, a short interneuronal distance, the corollary of the extremely high packing densities of their telencephalic neurons, likely results in a high speed of information processing, which may further enhance cognitive abilities of these birds. Thus, the nuclear architecture of the avian brain appears to exhibit more efficient packing of neurons and their interconnections than the layered architecture of the mammalian neocortex.
Further comparative studies on additional species are required to determine whether the high neuronal densities and preferential allocation of neurons to the telencephalon represent unique features of songbirds, parrots, and perhaps some other clades like owls, or have evolved multiple times independently in large-brained birds. More detailed quantitative studies should assess the distribution of neurons among various telencephalic regions involved in specific circuits subserving specific functions. The results, combined with behavioral studies, will enable us to determine the causal relationships between neuronal numbers and densities and perceptual, cognitive, and executive/motor abilities, and greatly advance our understanding of potential mechanisms linking neuronal density with information-processing capacity.

Go ahead. With all this in mind, you can judge the credibility of the evolutionary explanation for yourself.

On the evolution of Darwinism.

Evolution, Then and Now
Guy Coe

Let's set the record straight; things have changed a lot since "then."
When Darwin first ventured to propose an explanation for the origin of species, he didn't really try to address the question of the origin of life. No one, at that point, had any good idea of what even really needed to be explained.
When early optical microscopy gave us our first images of cells, what we saw was puzzling, but not particularly awe-inspiring. As microscopy advanced, in conjunction with advances in physics and chemistry, what came clearer into focus was that cellular structure, function and metabolism, and thus biochemistry as a whole, was a universe awaiting new discoveries of its own.
Who could have guessed that the micro-world would dwarf in complexity and organization the macro-cosmos we had only recently come to more fully appreciate? Or that additional discoveries on all orders of scale would point more cogently to deliberative design than ever?
A parable might help. Two people are walking down the beach; one is a philosopher, the other a geologist. As they walk along, they take in the view, and appreciate the beauty of the scene. The geologist explains the visible coastal rock formations, the action of plate tectonics, erosion and sedimentation, and -- wait; what is that?

Both stare in unbelief. There in the sand, about six foot square, is... well, apparently, a sand painting. Miles from anywhere, on the open beach, is an image of the Mona Lisa.
They study it. It's not perfect, but awfully close. The philosopher begins to form a hypothesis. Perhaps the image we call the "Mona Lisa" is just an archetype of a fundamental pattern recurring in nature. The painting by Leonardo da Vinci was, perhaps, just a particular manifestation of this pattern. A closer study of the grains of sand show that the various pigments each possess are a function of the weight and size of each grain. The areas of lighter sand lay, mysteriously, a little lower than the areas with darker, denser sand.
If swirling coastal winds had selectively removed the lighter sand from some areas, the remaining image could be an accidental production of chance variations in the sedimentary deposition of the underlying sand.
The geologist is not convinced. The odds against a pattern match this good, on this scale, are just too improbable. It looks like a product of deliberate artistry. They decide to come back in a few months, to see what changes, if any, develop in the pattern. Six months later, they return. It seems to have changed, imperceptibly, but the pattern is undeniably the same.
Ten years later, it's a tourist destination. It has still only changed imperceptibly. In a concerted effort to explain it, several forensic scientists have decided to sample various grains of the sand, to see if there are any telltale signs of human manipulation or manufacture. Under powerful microscopes, the individual grains reveal something astonishing -- they're not sand at all! They're three-dimensional crystalline-compound computer chips, complete with micro-circuitry and logic processors.
It turns out the persistence of the pattern derives from pre-programmed electro-chemical affinities, specified individually within each grain, mapping to surrounding grains, with reference to the pattern as a whole, which is also present within each grain. The electrical force each uses derives from tiny solar cells embedded in their structure.
The case for random sedimentary origination becomes untenable, and a whole new generation of scientists sets itself to work on understanding the logic of the programming in these chips.
As a parable of the developments of the last 50 years of biochemical research and discovery, this is not an unreasonable characterization of the situation. The closer we've looked, the more we've understood, the more we've been challenged to be able to hold onto theories of chance or unaided development which used to seem adequate.
Lifelong academic atheist Antony Flew, before his death at age 87, summarized his change of mind about the issue of intelligent design in an October 30th, 2007 interview with Dr. Benjamin Wiker. When asked to explain his reasoning, Flew said:

There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself - which is far more complex than the physical universe - can only be explained in terms of an intelligent source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a lucky chance. If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion.

There is more to explain now than ever before. A half a decade of studied observation has brought us closer to an answer for the origin of life, mostly by virtue of failed research paradigms. And that's the way of science; we gain in knowledge not merely by validating hypotheses, but by rejecting those which fail. The more we've rejected hypotheses involving mere chance, and allowed for a theory of intelligent organization, origination and even perhaps periodic intervention, the more we've come to understand the distinctives of the fossil record, the prospects for rapidity of change, and the subtleties of genetic programming.
Research into "junk DNA," pseudogenes, and other areas of supposedly vestigial code degradation, is yielding avenues of new discovery and practical application, as active functions are discovered for these areas of former confusion. The odds are too long to continue to bet against, much less exclude by definition, the involvement of a designing intelligence.
Despite millions spent in research, a myriad of discoveries made, and many legitimately helpful applications of that knowledge, a strictly naturalist paradigm is becoming vestigial, and it's more necessary now than ever to seek to understand the instrumentalities employed by life's intelligent designer.

File under "Well said" XLVII

The learned Fool writes his Nonsense in better Language than the unlearned; but still 'tis Nonsense.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Minimum function v. Darwinism.

The Designed Body, Continued: Coherence Wins, Gradualism Fails -
Steve Laufmann

In a post yesterday, I explored seven insights from Dr. Howard Glicksman’s 81-part series, The Designed Body. Glicksman takes us on a remarkable exploration of the ways that the human body works to stay alive in a world that’s essentially trying to kill it. To survive, the human body must control 40 chemical and physiological factors. Failure with any one of these results in death.

Coherence, Interdependencies, and Fine-Tuning

Though Glicksman uses medical rather than engineering terminology, the human body is an engineering marvel — an amalgam of interlocking chemical and engineering solutions, sort of like chainmail armor — with dozens of diverse, interdependent control systems driving hundreds of functional subsystems, composed of tens of thousands of specialized parts, and comprised of ~37 trillion individual cells. Each cell is itself an engineering marvel, comprised of thousands of interdependent parts, precisely arranged and coordinating their actions. To make this work, the human body generates around 200 specialized cell types and well over ten thousand specialized proteins. All this “unfolds” from a single cell at fertilization, in a precisely choreographed process.

This is not gratuitous complexity — the complexity is real and necessary for survival:

Finely tuned control systems to manage each of the 40 chemical and physiological factors.
Functional coherence across multiple levels of systems and subsystems.
Process coherence across systems, and throughout an individual’s lifecycle.
Interdependencies among systems and processes.
Failure prevention systems to detect and defend against threats, correct errors, and keep everything working.
Coherence is a distinctive property in which each piece-part is necessary for function, but none by itself is sufficient. Only when all the parts operate as a coherent whole does the body survive. Coherence is difficult to achieve and maintain under any circumstances. But survival of the human body takes functional coherence at a scope and scale that we can scarcely fathom — so far beyond our experience as human engineers that we have no comparable systems to compare it to.

At the same time, coherence makes change more difficult. In a coherent system, a major change in one component (or subsystem) usually requires corresponding changes in other components (or subsystems). The more interdependencies, the more work is required to change a component, yet retain overall function of the whole. As any systems architect can attest, once a complex, coherent, interdependent system is built, it takes no small effort to adapt it in significant ways (e.g., to meet new functional requirements).

Are other organisms similarly fine-tuned?

Is similar coherence present in other body plans? Given that survival depends on controlling so many factors, it seems likely that every body plan must have its own version of coherence. Though the types of control systems and their tuning parameters may vary, we’d expect all such controls to be similarly fine-tuned.

Asked the other way, are there any body plans, currently active or anywhere in the fossil record, that do not exhibit finely tuned coherence? I’ve not heard much discussion of this subject, suggesting that either the question is not being asked, or the answers are not defensible.

How to generate a fully functioning, coherent system

Coherent interdependent systems, like the human body, are tough to “bootstrap.” This occurs in two different processes that must overcome the same basic problems:

Phylogenesis (How does a functioning body plan come into existence?)

If all 40 factors must be controlled at all times, else the organism dies, how can a complex control system like any of those presented by Glicksman come into existence? How do you control a chemical or physiological factor while the body waits for evolution to generate a complete control system capable of controlling that factor?

For example, how do you supply oxygen to every cell in a large, complex body without every part of each required body subsystem (e.g., for oxygen exchange, carbon dioxide removal, circulation, iron harvesting, hemoglobin manufacture, and many more). Sure, we might theorize a simpler system to perform these functions, but it’s hard to imagine a partial system that still gets the job done.

Regardless of how simple the simplest possible version of a control system might be, it still requires all the basic functionality of a control system, and these are, by definition, irreducibly complex. In the human body, and most (all?) other complex body plans, the control systems are also interdependent, so having just one of them, or even all but one, isn’t enough.

How many generations are required for random causes to generate the dozens or thousands of parts needed for even one control system, with the correct control logic and just the right fine-tuning? No one knows, but it’s a lot — certainly more than could fit into the age of the universe.

How many generations are available in the absence of all the needed control systems? Exactly zero, since no individuals will survive long enough to reproduce, and any gradual steps toward a functional whole disappear from the population.

Ontogenesis (How does an individual of the body plan come into existence?)

Humans have an elegant solution to the body plan assembly problem — one we’re quite familiar with.

At the moment of fertilization, the human body consists of a single cell. As it grows into thousands and then to hundreds of millions of cells, it must bootstrap the control systems for all 40 survival factors. Each of the systems and subsystems (and their component parts, and the specialized cell types, etc.) must be generated, assembled, and activated, in the right places, in the right order, at the right times. It takes about 9 months for that single cell (aka, zygote) to grow into a coherent, independent whole (aka, tax deduction).

As it’s developing its internal controls, this new life is extremely vulnerable to the forces of nature, so must rely on outside help to survive. With humans this occurs in the mother’s womb. In this extraordinary process, the mother and unborn child coordinate their activities, such that the mother’s systems “cover for” the growing child’s inability to control all the necessary survival factors.

Only when all of its internal control systems are assembled and functioning can the child survive on its own. At the right time, through coordinated signaling (!), birthing occurs and the child’s body switches over to its internal systems to perform their survival chores (e.g., respiration).

It’s important to note that this process involves two different individuals, using completely different yet perfectly integrated mechanisms. Not only does this illustrate the survival challenges facing a complex body while it’s generating its systems, it also highlights the extraordinary engineering required to overcome those challenges — precise, interdependent, finely-tuned, coordinated functional and process coherence, in this case between two different individuals at two very different points in their life cycles.

Just because this is common does not mean it’s ordinary. Aside from the wonder of what’s happening in the process, it’s uncommonly nifty engineering.

Gradualism Fails

How could any gradual process generate coherent, finely tuned systems, when a failure in any part of those systems prevents an individual organism from surviving? This is problematic no matter how much time is available.

As an example, suppose I want to build a car that’s capable of getting me from point A to point B. It minimally takes several dozen parts to make a drivable car. I’m allowed to add only two or three parts at a time (gradual changes), but at each step, I can only keep what I’ve got if it meets the minimum functional requirement of getting me from here to there (survival requires a minimally functioning whole).

Based on these rules (which parallel the survival constraints of living systems), it doesn’t matter how I begin, where I begin, or in what order I add parts — if I start with a tire and add only a couple of parts, I will never get to minimal functionality, even if they’re the right parts and I add them in the right places!

When gradualism faces a complex assembly task, it inevitably fails unless (a) only a couple of parts are required, or (b) there are a number of intermediate stages, each of which is capable of minimal function, and each of which can be reached from a previous viable stage by only a couple of changes. Complex control systems fail on both counts, and thus present an insurmountable hurdle to gradualism.

And this is true regardless of whether the process is directed or undirected!

Knowing what, where, and how to bolt the parts together doesn’t get the whole built (when it must be done in discrete, gradual steps). Bolting random stuff together in random configurations is astoundingly unlikely to produce any useful function, much less ones that will enable survival at each discreet step. Random, undirected changes simply make the impossible even less possible.

This is the basic flaw in the various genetic algorithms that purport to show how life can build itself randomly — minimal functionality is needed in every area at each step along the way, or the whole endeavor crashes.

The Burden of Proof Grows

Coherent interdependence is an intriguing property — extremely difficult to achieve, and equally difficult to change. When coherent interdependence is essential to survival, as it seems to be for all living organisms, the systems view tells us to expect new body plans to appear suddenly, in a functionally complete form, and change rarely, generally in functionally minor ways.

The fossil record aligns almost perfectly with this view. Nearly all body plans appear suddenly, with essentially no precursors, and are followed by long periods of stasis (invariance) — in many cases hundreds of millions of years — during which only minor variations occur.

This greatly increases the burden of proof for anyone espousing gradual causation, like neo-Darwinism. It’s incumbent upon gradualist proposals to address two key requirements:

Hypothesize (and eventually find in the fossil record) a viable organism at each and every discrete step from a single-celled critter to a complex body plan like a human being (i.e., the theory must propose an adaptive continuum). Viability must account for all 40 of Glicksman’s survival factors at each step.
Explain how any proposed causal mechanism(s) are sufficient to produce all the necessary changes for that discreet step within a single generation. Random causes, for example, cannot explain more than a couple of coherent changes at any given step, much less at every step.
Efforts to date along these lines have been woefully lacking. Admittedly, this is an enormously hard problem, so perhaps we’re being too hard on the Darwinists. But science offers limited compassion for failed theories, especially when the supporting arguments consist mainly of vague story-telling about happy accidents in large quantities, using cool-sounding made-up words like de novo origination (new stuff that pops into existence out of nothing).

Any gradualist theory that fails to address these most fundamental issues with more than an appeal to authority (we’re smarter than you), or an appeal to faith (trust us, we’ll find the answer), should be viewed with skepticism at best.

Think Different

Of course, doctors like Glicksman, who face the real-world implications of body subsystems that have stopped working, and engineers, who need to build systems that work in the real world, already know these things.

Coherent, finely tuned, interdependent, systems of systems are essential to life. They’re needed at the outset, and at each step along the way. Even single-celled organisms cannot live without coherent, finely tuned internal subsystems.

Coherence is thus a prerequisite for life — not the outcome of life, as Darwin supposed. This simple fact is profoundly problematic for material causation. Gradual changes simply cannot produce such systems. Neither can random causes. For Darwinists, the burden of proof grows, while the explanatory power of neo-Darwinism fizzles. Maybe it’s time to rethink everything.

In the human body, Glicksman exposes a world of coherent complexity that we rarely think about, yet which demands a rational conversation. The questions raised are intriguing. Regardless of personal worldviews, any proposal that aligns with the preponderance of the data deserves less knee-jerk derision and more thoughtful consideration, both in the scientific community and in the public square.

Glicksman’s series, The Designed Body, is worth a read. Think, understand, and be amazed. And also, maybe, be thankful to the designing engineer — the architect of life — who made the human body, and you, possible.


- See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/03/designed-body-coherence-wins-gradualism-fails/#sthash.dYZcIjAM.dpuf