Occam's razor to too dull for Darwinism?

With Two New Fossils, Evolutionists Rewrite Narratives to Accommodate Conflicting Evidence
Günter Bechly 

Two new fossils, described in August and September 2017, have again forced evolutionists to rewrite their fanciful narratives of how major transitions in the history of life occurred. In this case the new fossils disarrayed, respectively, the origin of tetrapod land vertebrates and of bird feathers and flight.

The first fossil, described by Lefèvre et al. (2017), is a feathered dinosaur named Serikornis sungei (nicknamed “Silky”), which lived about 160 million years ago during the Upper Jurassic era. Found in China’s Liaoning province, it is a beautifully preserved complete animal with visible dino-fuzz covering its body. It was about the size of a pheasant and its morphology suggests that it was unable to fly and “spent its life scampering around on the forest floor” (Pickrell 2017). The most striking feature is the fact that even though its arms and legs have long feathers, so that the fossil seems to qualify as a member of the four-winged group of “dino-birds” such as Microraptor, Anchiornis, and Xiaotingia, the arms are much too short for wings. The feathers also lack the second order branchings (barbules) of true pennaceous flight feathers.

There are two interesting issues with this remarkable feathered dinosaur (and no, it does not seem to be a forgery like the “missing link” Archaeoraptor, Rowe et al. 2001):

The distribution and type of feathers on its body are not consistent with the currently preferred scenario about the evolution of bird feathers and flight. That scenario assumes that long pennaceous feathers on arms and legs originated with arboreal four-winged gliders such as Microraptor (Pickrell 2017)

The new phylogenetic tree in the original publication by Lefèvre et al. again reshuffles the feathered dinosaurs and early birds into a new branching pattern, disagreeing with previous trees that, in turn, all disagree with each other. Constructing phylogenetic trees looks more and more like an arbitrary enterprise, evolutionary biology’s equivalent of other pseudoscientific methods such as psychoanalysis or the Rorschach test.

The second fossil discovery, by  Zhu et al. (2017), is a new species of lobe-finned fish named Hongyu chowi from the Late Devonian. Discovered at the Shixiagou quarry in northern China, it was about 1.5 metres long, and lived 370 to 360 million years ago. One of its describers happens to be the famous Swedish paleontologist Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University, who also made worldwide headlines this month (e.g.,“Ancient footprints in Greece trample on the theory of human evolution,” in The Times of London) with the description of 5.7-million-year-old human footprints from Crete (see Bechly 2017).

Barras (2017) announces at New Scientist that this “Weird fish fossil changes the story of how we moved onto land.” From the article:

The evolutionary story we have written to explain our ancestors’ move from sea to land  may need a rethink. …

[W]hen the researchers tried to fit H. chowi into the existing evolutionary tree, it didn’t fit easily.

That’s because in some respects, H. chowi looks like an ancient predatory fish called rhizodonts. These are thought to have branched off from lobe-finned fish long before the group gave rise to four-legged land animals.

But Ahlberg says H. chowi has aspects that look surprisingly like those seen in early four-legged animals and their nearest fishy relatives —an extinct group called the elpistostegids. These include the shoulder girdle and the support region for its gill covers.

This implies one of two things, the researchers say. The first possibility is that H. chowi is some sort of rhizodont that independently evolved the shoulders and gill cover supports of a four-legged animal.

Alternatively, the rhizodonts may be more closely related to the four-legged animals and the elpistostegids than we thought. But this would also imply a certain amount of independent evolution of similar features, because the rhizodonts would then sit between two groups that have many features in common – features the two groups would have had to evolve independently. …

The find confirms an earlier suspicion that there was independent or “parallel” evolution between the rhizodonts, the elpistostegids and the first four-legged animals, says Neil Shubin at the University of Chicago.

Thus, this fossil raises two important problems for evolutionary biology:

The character distribution is incongruent and implies independent parallel origins of the same tetrapod-like or rhizodont-like characters (convergence). The alternative explanations of independent origin (homoplasy) versus common origin (homology) of a character trait is not alone decided based on anatomic (dis)similarities but mainly based on the (in)congruence with other data. The same data that are considered evidence of convergence can become evidence for common ancestry when you switch positions in the tree, and vice versa. What most evolutionary biologists have exorcised from their mind is that such incongruences (homoplasies) per se are not evidence for evolution as some evolutionists boldly proclaim (Wells 2017) but, instead, prima facie conflicting evidence against it (Hunter 2017). Convergence, which Lee Spetner has called “even more implausible than evolution itself” (Klinghoffer 2017), and other incongruent similarities have to be explained away with ad hoc hypotheses. In past decades, convergence morphed from an inconvenient exception to the rule — to a ubiquitous phenomenon, found virtually everywhere in living nature. In his book Life’s Solution, paleontologist Conway Morris (2003) felt compelled to declare it a kind of necessary natural law. It thus cannot really be considered a success story for the Darwinian paradigm.

Rhizodontids,the group to which this fossil fish belongs, are believed to have branched off early from the lobefin-tetrapod lineage, more than 415 million years ago. However, the oldest fossils are dated to only 377 million years ago, implying a so-called “ghost lineage” of 38 million years when the group should have existed but left no fossil record at all. Such “ghost lineages” are one of the many instances of discontinuity in the fossil record and require ad hoc assumptions in order to be accommodated by evolutionary storytelling.

These two new fossils represent further evidence conflicting with previously accepted evolutionary narratives. But thank God evolutionary theory can easily adapt to such inconvenient evidence, simply by rewriting the story. That way, the new evidence fits perfectly.

Dubious procedures like these would be unthinkable in other natural sciences, such as physics. They call into question whether evolutionary biology really qualifies as a hard science at all. Arguably it is not a testable theory, or even a well-defined one, but merely a loose collection of narratives that are forged to fit the evidence — any evidence whatsoever.

Literature:

Barras C 2017. Weird fish fossil changes the story of how we moved onto land.  New Scientist 4 September 2017.

Bechly G 2017. Fossil Footprints from Crete Deepen Controversy on Human Origins. Evolution News September 6, 2017.

Carassava A 2017. Ancient footprints in Greece trample on the theory of human evolution.  The TimesSeptember 4 2017.

Hunter C 2017. The Real Problem With Convergence. Evolution News May 25, 2017.

Klinghoffer D 2017. “Convergent Evolution Is Even More Improbable than Evolution Itself.”  Evolution News September 5, 2017.

Lefèvre U, Cau A, Cincotta A, Hu D, Chinsamy A, Escuillié F, Godefroit P 2017. A new Jurassic theropod from China documents a transitional step in the macrostructure of feathers.  The Science of Nature 104:74.

Conway Morris S 2003. Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge University Press.

Pickrell J 2017. New Feathered Dinosaur Had Four Wings but Couldn’t Fly.  National Geographic August 28, 2017.

Rowe T et al. 2001. Forensic palaeontology: The Archaeoraptor forgery. Nature 410: 539-540.

Wells J 2017. Zombie Science: Jonathan Wells on Convergence Versus Common Ancestry.  Evolution News June 28, 2017.

Zhu M, Ahlberg PE, Zhao W-J, Jia L-T 2017. A Devonian tetrapod-like fish reveals substantial parallelism in stem tetrapod evolution. Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Talk about fighting for your life!

Wesley Smith Visits Jahi McMath
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer  

Jahi McMath is a neurologically disabled young woman who, like Schrödinger’s cat, is, or has been, both dead and alive. Our colleague Wesley Smith visited the patient and offers a powerful account for First Things.

In California, Jahi McMath is legally dead. In New Jersey, she is legally alive. Now, the deceased — or profoundly disabled — teenager is the subject of litigation that could make history.

Wesley witnessed what appeared to be a response on Jahi’s part to a request that she move her thumb and index finger — “I nearly jumped out of my shoes,” he reports. I think I would, too.

He has changed his mind about her status.

If Jahi is not — or, perhaps better, no longer — brain dead, this may be an unprecedented event, as there are no known cases of a properly diagnosed brain-dead patient experiencing restored neurological function. And I am stunned that the medical and bioethics communities generally show such a pronounced lack of curiosity about Jahi’s situation. True, there have been rare cases of the bodies of brain-dead people not deteriorating over time. But surely the other factors described by [Dr. Alan] Shewmon and the videos should pique their interest.

Perhaps it is just a case of “experts” not wanting to know — because if Jahi isn’t dead, it would have epochal legal, social, medical, and scientific ramifications. But so what? Jahi deserves justice. If alive, she is a full and equal member of the moral community.

I hope that several prominent neurologists without a stake in the situation will step forward and volunteer to examine Jahi — and not just for a day or two but over an extended period of time, to test her brain and body functions thoroughly and determine whether she does indeed respond to requests. Then, if she lacks even one criterion for brain death, Jahi’s California death certificate should be revoked — let the chips fall where they may.

No longer brain dead? This is quite remarkable and testifies among other things to the tenacious commitment of Jahi’s mother, Nailah, whom Wesley also interviewed, to “choose life” on behalf of her daughter. Read the rest here.

Yet more on the undeniability of the case for design.

The Unmistakable Imprint of Purpose — Response to a Theistic Evolutionist
Douglas Axe | @DougAxe 

I’ve been discussing my book  Undeniable with Hans Vodder, who favors the evolutionary explanation of life. In our fifth exchange,Hans referred to what has been called a “natural nuclear reactor.” Whatever it was, it seems to have existed eons ago in the rock formations of what is now the Oklo region of Gabon. Hans thinks this so-called reactor may have exhibited the kind of functional coherence I point to as a hallmark of invention, making it a noteworthy counterexample to my argument.

I responded by suggesting that reactor is an overblown term for what was really nothing more than a reaction. Back in its day, that Oklo reaction required only: 1) a moderately large uranium deposit, and 2) a source of water to percolate through it. This, I said, doesn’t qualify as high-level functional coherence.

I brought up the comparison to an adjustable wrench — a very modest example of functional coherence. How is it, I asked, that people expected natural nuclear reactions to be found but no one expects a natural adjustable wrench to be found?

Here is Hans’s reply:

Your two-condition assessment of the requirements for the reactor seems a little minimalistic. The Kuroda study (cited in the  Scientific American article) mentions four general conditions, and Maynard Smith and Szathmary describe further particulars in  The Major Transitions in Evolution. The latter authors mention things like the 45 degree tilt of the sandstone and underlying granite layers which allowed the reactions to occur in a self-sustaining manner; the increased solubility of oxidized uranium, which helped it accumulate in the delta in the first place; and so on. So whether something is considered functionally coherent might depend largely on how relevant conditions are assessed.

But suppose we go with the two-condition assessment. There still doesn’t seem to be anything in the bare definition of functional coherence — “the hierarchical arrangement of parts needed for anything to produce a high-level function — each part contributing in a coordinated way to the whole” (144) — that would exclude Oklo. Consider this adaptation of figure 9.3 from your book:

A critic might reasonably argue that Oklo qualifies as functionally coherent. To make the case more “extensive,” all said critic would have to do is add a few more components or break down the current ones into further detail.

Now, I  suspect this doesn’t really capture the property of “functional coherence” that Undeniable is after. But here’s the rub: It does seem, so far as I can tell, to satisfy the definitional criteria laid out in the book. If that’s right, then one of two conclusions seems to follow. Either:

a) Oklo is a genuine case of functional coherence, with the result that nature can produce at least some functional coherence (pace the “Summary of the Argument” on p. 160 of Undeniable), or

b) Oklo is only a superficial case of functional coherence, with the result that further criteria are needed to distinguish Oklo-type cases from genuine ones.

Sure. Going strictly from my bare definition, one could easily call things functionally coherent that, as you say, don’t really capture the sense of the term as used in Undeniable.

So, I agree with your b option, except I would say context is needed instead of criteria, and I think the book supplies that context. In other words, my definition of functional coherence should make sense to readers who have followed the discussion up to the point where that term is introduced (more on that in a moment).

With respect to Oklo, keep in mind that Maynard Smith and Szathmary, being evolutionary biologists, wanted to “see some parallels with the origin of life” (p. 20 of their book). This raises the possibility that they saw what wasn’t really there.

Here’s a more objective account of the requirements for a uranium-235 fission chain reaction from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University:

If at least one neutron from U-235 fission strikes another nucleus and causes it to fission, then the chain reaction will continue. If the reaction sustains itself, it is said to be “critical,” and the mass of U-235 required to produce the critical condition is said to be a “critical mass.” A critical chain reaction can be achieved at low concentrations of U-235 if the neutrons from fission are moderated to lower their speed, since the probability for fission with slow neutrons is greater.

Strictly speaking, then, all that’s needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction is a critical mass of uranium-235. Uranium is number 92 on the periodic table of elements, so it literally belongs on the bottom layer of the hierarchy in that figure (you can’t get more elementary than an element). Despite all the fuss over Oklo, then, it really didn’t rise above the behavior of that one element.

Interestingly, Maynard Smith and Szathmary acknowledged the obvious fact that “the Oklo reactor does not look like a man-made reactor.” My question is — what makes this so obvious?

The answer is hinted at by the way these authors inadvertently portray the Oklo reaction as though it had been intended. For example, they say “some moderator material was needed to slow down neutrons.”

Needed?

The raw fact is merely that water happened to be present as a moderator, causing the neutrons to be slowed. To say that water was needed is to imply not just that something important was at stake but that this was somehow recognized at the time — as though the Oklo reaction had been arranged for a purpose.

Neither Maynard Smith nor Szathmary believed that for a moment, but somehow they couldn’t keep themselves from implying it. Their next sentence reads: “Perhaps most surprising of all, the reaction had to be self-regulating.” Really? Who says it had to be self-regulating? And what definition of “regulate” are we using here? All the usual definitions invoke purpose.

Returning to raw facts, the evidence suggests that the rate of fission at Oklo may have oscillated, peaking when water was present and dropping when it was absent. But again, so what? Fission chain reactions are always limited. They end when critical mass is exhausted. So the suggestion that Oklo was “regulated” is just plain odd. Regulated to what end?

By the time I introduce readers of Undeniable to functional coherence, they know the book is all about purpose. In that context, they know purpose is at the heart of this term. Our design intuition tells us that “tasks that we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.” Despite their exaggeration, Maynard Smith and Szathmary knew full well that the Oklo reaction wasn’t an accomplishment. Indeed, we can’t see Oklo as a task that required things to be cleverly arranged because it shows absolutely no sign of having been that.

With sufficient cleverness and determination, the elements from the periodic table can be arranged to accomplish tasks that aren’t even hinted at by the properties of the elements themselves — challenges whose solutions have to be dreamed up by fertile imaginations. We instantly spot the fruits of those imaginations by spotting their characteristic functional coherence. Dragonflies. Smartphones. Nuclear power plants. Even adjustable wrenches.

I’m sure this reasoning can be formalized, Hans, but do keep in mind that Undeniable isn’t meant to be that. Undeniable shows in a commonsensical way how it is that no one confuses things like radioactive rocks for inventions and, conversely, how no one confuses things like adjustable wrenches for accidents.

Nothing you’ve said so far challenges that main thesis, Hans. So if we’re in agreement there, I’m wondering why you think life should be exempt from reasoning that works everywhere else.

Intelligence is not magical.

Intelligent Design and Methodological Naturalism — No Necessary Contradiction
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Another  corespondent draws our attention to a comment from atheist and “poetic naturalist” Sean Carroll, in his recent book  The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Science should be interested in determining the truth, whatever that truth may be – natural, supernatural, or otherwise. The stance known as methodological naturalism, while deployed with the best of intentions by supporters of science, amounts to assuming part of the answer ahead of time. If finding truth is our goal, that is just about the biggest mistake we can make.

Such a statement may or may not be surprising to you, considering the source. Well, what about it? Methodological naturalism (MN) in relationship to intelligent design has been a source of some discussion and confusion over the years.

A Reasonable Definition

A reasonable definition of MN is: “The belief that, whether or not the supernatural exists, we must pretend that it doesn’t when practicing science.” This idea was neatly expressed in a letter to the editor published in Nature:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.

(Scott C. Todd, “A view from Kansas on that evolution debate,” Nature, Vol. 401:423 (Sept. 30, 1999))

For a list of other sources similarly claiming MN is a requirement of science, please see, "Primer: Naturalism in Science.”

Now obviously, many critics of the theory of intelligent design (ID) maintain that ID isn’t science because they claim that MN is a “rule” that all science must conform to and obey. For a moment, leave aside whether MN makes a good “rule” for doing science. Let’s approach the question of whether ID is science pragmatically, and, for the sake of argument, let us assume MN. Even if we accept the rationale behind MN, ID is not excluded from being scientific.

ID Doesn’t Violate the Letter of MN

MN states that science cannot appeal to the supernatural. But ID does not appeal to the supernatural, and thus does not require non-natural causes.

ID begins with observations of the types of information and complexity produced by intelligent agents. Intelligent agents are natural causes that we can understand by studying the world around us. This makes intelligent agency a proper subject of scientific study. When ID finds high levels of complex and specified information, or CSI, in nature, the most it can infer is that intelligence was at work. Because ID respects the limits of scientific inquiry, it does not make claims beyond the data by trying to identify the designer.

Stephen Meyer explains:

Though the designing agent responsible for life may well have been an omnipotent deity, the theory of intelligent design does not claim to be able to determine that. Because the inference to design depends upon our uniform experience of cause and effect in this world, the theory cannot determine whether or not the designing intelligence putatively responsible for life has powers beyond those on display in our experience. Nor can the theory of intelligent design determine whether the intelligent agent responsible for information life acted from the natural or the “supernatural” realm. Instead, the theory of intelligent design merely claims to detect the action of some intelligent cause (with power, at least, equivalent to those we know from experience) and affirms this because we know from experience that only conscious, intelligent agents produce large amounts of specified information.

(Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell, pp. 428-429 (HarperOne, 2009))

Many other ID proponents have pointed out that ID only appeals to intelligent causes, not supernatural ones. Michael Behe writes:

[A]s regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newton’s phrase hypothesis non fingo [“I frame no hypothesis”].

(Michael Behe, “The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis,” Philosophia Christi, 2 (3): 165 (2001))

William Dembski and Jonathan Wells explain:

Supernatural explanations invoke miracles and therefore are not properly part of science. Explanations that call on intelligent causes require no miracles but cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations.

(William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems, pp. 13-14 (FTE, 2008))

Likewise, an early ID textbook affirms MN, stating:

[I]ntelligence…can be recognized by uniform sensory experience, and the supernatural…cannot.

(Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, Of Pandas and People, p. 126 (FTE, 1993))

Now some might argue that ID violates MN by leaving open the possibility of a supernatural designer. It true that ID leaves open such a possibility. But ID does not claim to scientifically detect a supernatural creator. Again, the most ID claims to detect is intelligent causation. Many (though not all) ID proponents may believe the designer is God, but they do not claim this is a scientific conclusion of ID. In this respect, ID is no different from Darwinian evolution, which claims that if there is a supernatural creator, that would be beyond science’s power to detect.

ID Doesn’t Offend the Spirit of MN

Proponents of MN often justify this “rule” by arguing that it ensures that science uses only testable, predictable, and reliable explanations. However, ID generates testable hypotheses based upon our knowledge of how the world works, and can be reliably inferred through the scientific method. In this way, intelligent design does not violate any mandates of predictability, testability, or reliability laid down for science by MN.

For details on how ID makes testable predictions, please see the following:

• “FAQ: Does intelligent design make predictions? Is it testable?”

• “A Positive, Testable Case for Intelligent Design”

We’ve remarked on this before, but clarification is always in order.

Is it time to hit the reset button re:origin of life science?

Origin-of-Life Research: Start Over

Evolution News & Views 

Hardly a month goes by without a celebration in the news that the "building blocks of life" have been found somewhere in space, or that chemical reactions "show how life emerged" on the primitive earth. Recently, the University of Bern triumphantly announced that "Rosetta's comet contains ingredients for life." All that was detected was glycine (the simplest and the only achiral amino acid) and the element phosphorus (which is tantamount to calling any other element, like hydrogen or oxygen, an "ingredient for life"). New Scientist chimed in: "Building blocks of life spotted around comet for the first time." Meanwhile, PhysOrg suggested there might be life on the asteroid Ceres. Why? Because water ice probably exists under the surface.

The mainstream media typically report such findings uncritically. It's refreshing, then, to see a chemist and a space scientist take a hard look at the failings in origin-of-life research. In America's leading journal, Science, they ignore the hype about water and simple chemicals implying life. They "get real" about the limits of chemistry. And they seriously look for radically different ways to approach the problem -- some of which will be of interest to design theorists.

One of the authors is Leroy Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow (where, incidentally, Darwin critic William Thomson -- Lord Kelvin -- had his long and distinguished career). The other is Sara Imari Walker from Arizona State where space science is big and aggressive atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is a campus celebrity; she's also a member of the Blue Marble Space Institute for Science here in Seattle.

They have no patience with the usual celebratory fluff. They want a revolution:

How can matter transition from the nonliving to the living state? The answer is essential for understanding the origin of life on Earth and for identifying promising targets in the search for life on other planets. Most studies have focused on the likely chemistry of RNA, protein, lipid, or metabolic "worlds" and autocatalytic sets, including attempts to make life in the lab. Butthese efforts may be too narrowly focused on the biochemistry of life as we know it today. A radical rethink is necessary, one that explores not just plausible chemical scenarios but also new physical processes and driving forces. Such investigations could lead to a physical understanding not only of the origin of life but also of life itself, as well as to new tools for designing artificial biology. [Emphasis added]

In one fell swoop, Cronin and Walker have cast doubt on essentially the whole history of origin-of-life research. Whether from Oparin, Miller, Orgel, Benner, Hud, Russell, Cairns-Smith, Wachtershauser, Shapiro, or maybe even "warm little pond" Darwin himself -- it's all inadequate and probably misguided. Otherwise, why would a "radical rethink" be necessary?

Here's what most of the previous work has been "narrowly focused" on: chemical reactions. From Stanley Miller's 1953 lightning flask to the present, almost all the work has assumed that if you can get some molecules that life uses, you're making progress to understanding life's emergence. One can speculate about a "scenario" where these chemicals would fit into a grand story of life's emergence.

Such thinking is flawed for a number of reasons, some of which we can glean from the paper and summarize here:

• Dilution and entropy: "Left unattended, sophisticated chemistry becomes more dilute and disordered."
• Oversimplification: "A quick route to complexity and enrichment that could lead to the development of evolvable units seems to be required to avoid this serious issue."
• Ends without means: "Yet, most research efforts have focused on detailing precise chemical mechanisms for producing high yields of individual bio-inspired products, without addressing the processes necessary to form increasingly complex molecules and networks."
• Improbability: "The molecular constituents of simple networks are more likely to arise by chance than the highly evolved molecules of extant life."
• Begging the question: "how did evolution begin if the complex machinery for evolution was not in place?"

Indeed, their last paragraph shows they are ready to sweep the field clean and start over:

Progress will be made by challenging all historical prerequisites assumed to be important in the origin of life.We should aim to develop measurable and collaborative routes to explore the physics and chemistry of life's origins and the living state. Not only is a comprehensive understanding of what it means for a physical system to be alive required but also a new multidisciplinary, multinational project to generate new life in the lab or in silico, to search for life on Earth that uses an alternative chemistry to that found in biology, and to explore the potential for life on other worlds. For this to be possible, researchers must challenge the current models and historical approach and be willing to work together across disciplinary boundaries to see if a process-based model can be used to understand and control the transition from inorganic matter to biology.

Having dismissed the obsession with "plausible chemical scenarios," what do Cronin and Walker advise for their radical rethink? What should origin-of-life research focus on instead? Here it is -- (drumroll) -- information. We'll understand life, they say, when we look at how information flows in networks.

What happens to our traditional perspectives if we do not restrict attention to the chemical substratesof known life? The development ofnetworks over time may be more important than the specific chemical nature of their molecular components....

A concept of information relevant to biological organization may be essential to identifying these networked processes. Adami and LaBar have described life at a basic level as "information that copies itself". Given that life not only copies information but also uses information to construct itself, we might instead describe the start of life as "simple machines that can construct slightly more complicated machines." Focusing on information in this way moves the narrative even further from a chemistry-specific mode than focusing on networks a lone butterfly may perhaps provide our best shot at uncovering universal laws of life that work not just for biological systems with known chemistry but also for putative artificial and alien life. For example, Walker et al. have recently shown that information-theoretic measures distinguish biological networks from random ones, even in cases where the biological networks share important network properties (such as topological features) with random networks. Life requires chemistry, but the properties of the living state emerge from the dynamical properties of that chemistry, including the temporal and spatial organization of molecular networks and their information management.

Well, Chris Adami of Avida fame has tossed out one point of agreement on which to advance the discussion: information must be central to discussions of life. But doesn't information presuppose sentient agents, or systems designed by sentient agents? Otherwise, how do they recognize and respond to information? How can they perform "information management"? A falling rock that triggers an avalanche can hardly be thought of as managing information in a network. In our uniform experience, machines and networks that share information have been intelligently designed (read Dembski's bookBeing as Communion for a detailed exposition of the concept of information).

So close, yet so far away. Cronin and Walker immediately return to a chemistry focus of their own, trying to compare the emergence of life to a "phase transition," using one of the origin-of-life field's favorite magic words, emergence, a dozen times.

One appreciates their call to scientific rigor: "speculation should be restricted to the development of experimentally testable hypotheses that address key questions and provide a focus for progress." And one appreciates their insertion of the design-rich terms machinery, information, and networks in the discussion. Unfortunately, their own "radical rethink" relies on the same materialistic assumptions that have stifled and baffled researchers since Darwin.

More just so stories to explain away human exceptionalism.

From The Economist story:Of bairns and brains
Babies are born helpless, which might explain why humans are so clever

HUMAN intelligence is a biological mystery. Evolution is usually a stingy process, giving animals just what they need to thrive in their niche and no more. But humans stand out. Not only are they much cleverer than their closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, they are also much cleverer than seems strictly necessary. The ability to do geometry, or to prove Pythagoras’s theorem, has turned out to be rather handy over the past few thousand years. But it is hard to imagine that a brain capable of such feats was required to survive on the prehistoric plains of east Africa, especially given the steep price at which it was bought. Humans’ outsized, power-hungry brains suck up around a quarter of their body’s oxygen supplies.

Sexy brains

There are many theories to explain this mystery. Perhaps intelligence is a result of sexual selection. Like a peacock’s tail, in other words, it is an ornament that, by virtue of being expensive to own, proves its bearers’ fitness. It was simply humanity’s good fortune that those big sexy brains turned out to be useful for lots of other things, from thinking up agriculture to building internal-combustion engines. Another idea is that human cleverness arose out of the mental demands of living in groups whose members are sometimes allies and sometimes rivals.

Now, though, researchers from Rochester University, in New York, have come up with another idea. In Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd suggest that humans may have become so clever thanks to another evolutionarily odd characteristic: namely that their babies are so helpless.

Compared with other animals, says Dr Kidd, some of whose young can stand up and move around within minutes of being born, human infants take a year to learn even to walk, and need constant supervision for many years afterwards. That helplessness is thought to be one consequence of intelligence—or, at least, of brain size. In order to keep their heads small enough to make live birth possible, human children must be born at an earlier stage of development than other animals. But Dr Piantadosi and Dr Kidd, both of whom study child development, wondered if it might be a cause as well as a consequence of intelligence as well.

Their idea is that helpless babies require intelligent parents to look after them. But to get big-brained parents you must start with big-headed—and therefore helpless—babies. The result is a feedback loop, in which the pressure for clever parents requires ever-more incompetent infants, requiring ever-brighter parents to ensure they survive childhood.

It is an elegant idea. The self-reinforcing nature of the process would explain why intelligence is so strikingly overdeveloped in humans compared even with chimpanzees. It also offers an answer to another evolutionary puzzle, namely why high intelligence developed first in primates, a newish branch of the mammals, a group that is itself relatively young. Animals that lay eggs rather than experiencing pregnancy do not face the trade-off between head size at birth and infant competence that drives the entire process.

To test their theory, Dr Piantadosi and Dr Kidd turned first to a computer model of evolution. This confirmed that the idea worked, at least in principle. They then went looking for evidence to support the theory in the real world. To do that they gathered data from 23 different species of primate, from chimps and gorillas to the Madagascan mouse lemur, a diminutive primate less than 30cm long.

The scientists compared the age at which an animal weaned its young (a convenient proxy for how competent those young were) with their scores on a standardised test of primate intelligence. Sure enough, they found a strong correlation: across all the animals tested, weaning age predicted about 78% of the eventual score in intelligence. That correlation held even after controlling for a slew of other factors, including the average body weight of babies compared with adults or brain size as a percentage of total body mass.

The researchers point to other snippets of data that seem to support their conclusions: a study of Serbian women published in 2008, for instance, found that babies born to mothers with higher IQs had a better chance of surviving than those born to low-IQ women, which bolsters the idea that looking after human babies is indeed cognitively taxing. But although their theory is intriguing, Dr Piantadosi and Dr Kidd admit that none of this adds up to definitive proof.

That, unfortunately, can be the fate of many who study human evolution. Any such feedback loop would be a slow process (at least as reckoned by the humans themselves), most of which would have taken place in the distant past. There are gaps in the theory, too. Even if such a process could drastically boost intelligence, something would need to get it going in the first place. It may be that some other factor—perhaps sexual selection, or the demands of a complex environment, or some mixture of the two—was required to jump-start the process. Dr Piantadosi and Dr Kidd’s idea seems a plausible addition to the list of explanations. But unless human intelligence turns out to be up to the task of building a time machine, it is unlikely that anyone will ever know for sure.