Yet more on the fossil record's on going hostility toward the Darwinian narrative.

Fossil Friday: Fossil Elephant Shrews and the Abrupt Origin of Macroscelidea 

Günter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday we look into the origins of the placental mammal order Macroscelidea, which comprises the very strange but uber-cute elephant shrews or sengis. These small insectivorous mammals are speedy runners endemic to Africa, where they occur in 20 living species (Heritage et al. 2020). With their long mobile snouts they look a bit like the fictitious snouter animals described by the German zoologist Gerolf Steiner in his satirical book Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia (Stümpke 1967), which has a kind of cult status among German-speaking animal lovers. Elephant shrews are sometimes considered to be living fossils (Novacek 1984) and their origin is believed to go back 57.5 million years in the Paleocene with a subsequent divergence of the crown group in the early Oligocene about 33 million years ago (Heritage et al. 2020: fig. 7) and its main diversification in the Miocene correlated with aridification events in Africa (Douady et al. 2003). 

Such a deep division of the main groups of extant Macroscelidea is also indicated by another recent molecular study (Krásová et al. 2021). So much for the theory, but let’s check what the actual fossil record, mostly consisting of jaw fragments and isolated teeth, really says. As noted by Stevens et al. (2021), “unravelling the origin and affinities of macroscelideans (also termed sengis, or elephant shrews) has long presented a palaeontological puzzle.” According to the technical literature the fossil record of the order Macroscelidea and its assumed fossil relatives spans from the Early Eocene to the Pleistocene (Patterson 1965, Butler 1995, Holroyd 2009, Asher & Seifert 2010, Naish 2013), and was always restricted to the African continent (for a possible exception see below). The earliest fossils of Macroscelidea are said to be 45.6 million years old (Hartenberger 1986, Holroyd 2010, Seiffert 2010a). 

Considerable Scientific Debate 

Of course, the question of the earliest fossil record of Macroscelidea hinges crucially on the question of which fossil taxa qualify as Macroscelidea in the first place. Unfortunately, this latter point is a matter of considerable scientific debate with very different suggestions for the composition, subdivision, and classification of Macroscelidea. We here follow the most recent work by Senut & Pickford (2021), but include in our discussion some more questionable fossil taxa considered by Holroyd (2010) and Hooker & Russell (2012) (see the Appendix for a classification of all genera with age ranges of their fossil record). 

The oldest unequivocal Macroscelidea are the fossil taxa Eorhynchocyon rupestris (Rhynchocyonidae), Namasengi mockeae (Macroscelididae: Namasenginae), Promyohyrax namibiensis (Myohyracidae), Afrohypselodontus minus and A. grandis (Afrohypselodontidae), all described by Senut & Pickford (2021) from the tufas of the Eocliff locality in Namibia. They demonstrate the simultaneous abrupt appearance of all four families of elephant shrews in the Middle Eocene (Bartonian/Priabonian, 40.4-37.2 mya), which is not exactly what Darwinism would predict. A somewhat older Middle Eocene record could be a single tooth (specimen SN 10’08 ) of an unnamed species from the Sperrgebiet in Namibia described by Pickford et al. (2008: 470), which is of probable Lutetian age (47.8-41.2 mya) and may belong to an early ancestor of Myohyracidae. 

Previously, the oldest crown group macroscelideans were the rhychocyonids Oligorhynchocyon songwensis from the Late Oligocene (25.2 mya) Nsungwe Formation in Tanzania (Stevens et al. 2021) and Miorhynchocyon meswae from the Early Miocene (22-21 mya) of Kenya (Butler 1984, Holroyd 2010, Heritage et al. 2020). 

The Pliocene 

genus Mylomygale was a rodent-like herbivore (Naish 2013) and is classified in a separate subfamily Mylomygalinae (Camp et al. 1953, Patterson 1965, Holroyd 2010). However, “Corbet & Hanks (1968) pointed out that it shows a considerable resemblance to Macroscelides, and it may be a specialized member of the Macroscelidinae” (Butler 1995). Until recently, Mylomygale was only known from Early Pleistocene cave sediments in South Africa, contemporaneous with the close-by locality of the famous Taung Child. Now, this genus has also been found in Middle Pliocene paleokarst of South Africa (Senut et al. 2022). 

Another group that is very close to modern macroscelideans but rather resembled hyraxes is the extinct family Myohyracidae (Patterson 1965, Van Valen 1967, Butler 1984, 1995, McKenna & Bell 1997, Naish 2013), which initially indeed was misidentified as fossil hyraxes. It is mainly known from the Miocene, but the earliest representatives are Myohyrax and Promyohyrax from the Late Eocene of Namibia (Senut & Pickford 2021). The above mentioned unnamed specimen from the Lutetian of Namibia might be a basal Myohyracidae, since Pickford et al. (2008) found that it has “a morphology that could represent the ancestral morphotype for Myohyrax and Protypotheroides.”

Finally, there is the new macroscelidean family Afrohypselodontidae erected by Senut & Pickford (2021) from the Late Eocene of Namibia, which is unique with its ever-growing rootless cheek teeth. 

Two other extinct taxa that were excluded from unequivocal Macroscelidea by Senut & Pickford (2021) but are quite likely indeed stem macroscelideans are the Metoldobotidae and Herodotiidae. The later could extend the fossil record to 55.8 million years ago, which would perfectly align with the brief Paleogene window of time, when most of the placental orders abruptly appear in the fossil record.

The genus Metoldobotes from the early Oligocene of Fayum in Egypt was often considered the oldest and largest unequivocal Macroscelidae (Patterson 1965, Simons et al. 1991, Asher & Seiffert 2010, Stevens et al. 2021). Strangely, it would also be “one of the most derived macroscelideans” (Simons et al. 1991). Tabuce et al. (2001) suggested that Metoldobotes is the sister group to Myrohyracidae and living elephant shrews, while Seiffert (2007) found strong bootstrap support for a sister group relationship with crown group Macroscelidea. However, in the most recent study this position has been questioned by Senut & Pickford (2021), who considered Metoldobotidae to be only doubtfully related to Macroscelidea, mainly because of its poorly preserved and scanty fossil record. As an interesting side note, Naish (2013) speculated that Metoldobotes may have been the only venomous sengi because of a conspicuous groove in the lower third incisor, but also cautioned that many mammals have such grooves without being venomous. 

The extinct family Herodotiidae is more primitive and older, with some similarities to the Paleogene “condylarthrans” (Butler 1995; see below), but still has often been included as subfamily Herodotiinae in a more widely understood family Macroscelidae (Simons et al. 1991, Butler 1995, Tabuce et al. 2001, 2012, Benoit et al. 2013, Tabuce 2018). The studies by Seiffert (2007) and Asher & Seiffert (2010) “reviewed arguments for and against including herodotiines (Nementchatherium, Chambius and Herodotius) in the Macroscelidea.” According to Seiffert (2007) “the Eocene herodotiines Chambius and Herodotius are generally considered to be primitive macroscelideans” (e.g., Hartenberger 1986, Tabuce et al. 2007, Seiffert 2010b), with a fossil record that extends to the Early or early Middle Eocene Chambi Massif in Tunisia, where Chambius was first discovered.  

However, in Seiffert’s own analysis (Seiffert 2003, 2007) the genera Herodotius and Chambius never clustered with Macroscelidea but with aardvarks in some of the trees, and in others with pseudoungulates, paenungulates, or hyraxes. Senut (2008) concluded that “the Palaeogene Macroscelididae from Northern Africa classified in the Herodotiinae (Simons et al., 1991), might not be ancestral to any of the Miocene to Recent Macroscelididae.” However, this result could be based on undersampling of data as a larger updated data set (Seiffert 2010b: fig. 14) again placed herodotiines with Macroscelidea. Benoit et al. (2013) studied the evolution of the middle and inner ear of elephant shrews and in their cladistic study resolved Chambius as basal-most representative, but they ignored the study of Seiffert (2007). I think the case for a macroscelidean relationship is reasonably well supported, which would extend the fossil record of Macroscelidea to about 55.8 million years ago. 

Uncertain and Doubtful 

All remaining candidates as earlier stem macroscelideans are much more uncertain and doubtful. They mostly belong to a group of enigmatic fossil mammals from the Paleocene and Eocene that was previously classified within the highly polyphyletic ungulate-like order “Condylarthra” in the family Hyopsodontidae, which seems to be a likewise polyphyletic waste basket taxon (Tabuce et al. 2001, 2006, Zack et al. 2005a, Halliday et al. 2015). The study by Halliday et al. (2015: fig. 1) mentioned a close affinity of Hyopsodontidae and Macroscelides as “current consensus,” but found that the “case of the macroscelidean relationships … depends on the assumption that apheliscid ‘condylarths’ fall within Hyopsodontidae,” which they failed to establish in their own analysis. 

Zack et al. (2005b) removed the apheliscine and louisinine genera from Hyopsodontidae and placed them in a separate family, Apheliscidae. This family Apheliscidae comprises several genera and species including Haplaletes andakupensis and Litomylus orthronepius, which could be the oldest stem macroscelideans by far with an estimated stratigraphic range of 66.043-63.3 mya. A relationship of Apheliscidae with Macroscelidea was supported by several studies (Simons et al. 1991, Zack et al. 2005a, Penkrot et al. 2008), which also postulated a possible Holarctic origin of this subgroup of Afrotherian mammals. This would be strange indeed, but also on anatomical grounds such a relationship with Macroscelidea still has to be considered as highly controversial, since Halliday et al. (2015) instead recovered Apheliscidae as a basal member of the Laurasiatheria, thus not even as afrotherian mammals. 

A Big Question Mark 

As just mentioned, Zack et al. (2005b) had transferred Louisininae from Hyoposodontidae to the reinstated family Apheliscidae. Louisinines also include the species Cingulodon magioncaldai and Monshyus praevius from the Hainin Formation in Belgium, which yielded the oldest Cenozoic mammalian fauna of Europe with its estimated age range of 66.043-61.7 mya (Sudre & Russell 1982, De Bast & Smith 2017). Several authors considered a possible relationship of louisinines with Macroscelidea (e.g., Hartenberger 1986, Simons et al. 1991, Tabuce et al. 2001, 2007, Holroyd & Mussell 2005, Zack et al. 2005a; see Benoit et al. 2013). This was indeed strongly suggested by Hooker & Russell (2012), who elevated them to a separate family, Louisinidae, in the stem group of Macroscelidea.  

Tabuce (2018) tentatively and with a big question mark concurred with this result, even though the study had significant flaws that were highlighted by De Bast & Smith (2017) who commented:

Hooker & Russell (2012) followed this hypothesis in the last revision of the family; however, they relied on a cladogram that lacked any extant member of Macroscelidea and in which most basal dichotomies are found only in the majority-rule consensus but not in the strict consensus tree. Here we place the family in Eutheria without further precision because we believe that the characters shared by Louisinidae and Hyopsodontidae with Macroscelidea are convergences due to the development of saltatorial capacities. 

Two other hyopsodontid “condylarths,” i.e. Teilhardimys (= Microhyus) and Paschatherium,were recovered as very basal stem group representatives of Macroscelidea by Zach et al. (2005a) and Tabuce et al. (2006). Zach et al. (2005b) classified these two genera in Louisininae within Apheliscidae. In the cladogram of Tabuce et al. (2007) the North American apheliscines are closer to Macroscelidea, but the European louisinines “Microhyus” and Paschatherium closer to Paenungulata. On the other hand, Cooper et al. (2014) found that “the consistent recovery of the European louisinids Paschatherium and Teilhardimys as stem perissodactyls challenges the view that they are afrotherian macroscelideans.” The seminal work by Halliday et al. (2015) on Paleocene mammal affinities found neither Teilhardimys nor Apheliscidae to be closely related with Macroscelidea and indeed did not even support any of the mammalian supergroups (Xenarthra, Afrotheria, Euarchontoglires, and Laurasiatheria) as monophyletic unless constrained with molecular data. It must be really emphasized again: the very same fossils were in some studies resolved as close relatives of the order Macroscelidea and Paenungulata within the supergroup of Afrotheria, and in other studies recovered as close relatives of the unrelated order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates) in the different supergroup Laurasiatheria.  

Have you ever heard any physicists hotly debating if a certain particle is a fermion or a boson? All such substantial problems were likely the reason that Senut & Pickford (2021) in the most recent work on macroscelidean evolution considered Louisinidae to be doubtfully related to Macroscelidea.

In their mentioned revision of Louisinidae, Hooker & Russell (2012) suggested in their maximum parsimony cladogram (see above for flaws in this analysis) that the genus Adunator and the families Adapisoricidae and Amphilemuridae successively represent the most basal branches of the macroscelidean lineage. Apparently, this was not accepted by any other authors (compare Tabuce et al. 2018), but still made it into the Paleobiology Database and the German Wikipedia. 

In spite of some similarities with hyopsodontid condylarths, these taxa are generally considered to be related to erinaceomorph insectivorans (hedgehogs) of the order Eulipotyphla (Russel 1964, Van Valen 1967, Novacek et al. 1985, Halliday et al. 2015). Senut & Pickford (2021) did not even bother to list them among their “families of doubtful or uncertain macroscelidean affinities.”

Last but not least, we must briefly discuss the leptictidians, an enigmatic group of bipedal mammals from the Paleogene. Asher & Seiffert (2010) placed the genus Leptictis from the Late Eocene and Oligocene of North America as sister group to Macroscelidea in their tree of Afrotherian phylogeny and biostratigraphic distribution. This phylogenetic position of leptictids was also supported in the cladograms of Zack et al. (2005a: fig. 3c), Hooker & Russell (2012), and O’Leary et al. (2013). The genus Leptictis and its relatives are generally recognized as a distinct order Leptictida, which even includes the Late Cretaceous genus Gypsnonictops. 

This would of course be an extremely interesting and very unusual dating for a subgroup of Afrotheria and alleged close relative of living elephant shrews. However, according to other experts (e.g. Wible et al. 2009), including the most recent study (Halliday et al. 2015), the Leptictida instead belong into the paraphyletic stem group of placental mammals, and therefore do not even represent real eutherians. Similarities of leptictids and macroscelideans therefore have to be considered as convergences, as already suggested by Butler (1995). Likewise, Meehan & Martin (2010) noted that “the morphology of leptictidans was highly convergent to that of extant macroscelideans, due to similar ecological specialisations to insectivory, digging, and saltatory locomotion” (Halliday et al. 2015). 

An Apparently Simple Question 

As you likely have realized by now, it can get pretty complicated to answer the apparently simple question of what the earliest fossil record of a certain group is, or even to find a consensus about what the group is. Anyway, from the above we can at least conclude that the oldest fossil record of unequivocal Macroscelidea is about 55.8-40 mya and that of the more doubtful alleged stem group about 66-56 mya. While there are some aberrant rodent-like and hyrax-like fossil elephant shrews, we do not find any fossil evidence for a gradual building of the distinct macroscelidean body plan during the Paleogene and Neogene periods (formerly called Tertiary). Likewise their theoretically predicted stem group in the Upper Cretaceous is totally missing in the fossil record, since Leptictida turned out to be stem eutherians. Just as all the other placental mammal orders, elephant shrews appeared abruptly on the scene, unless “hyopsodontids” like Louisinidae should indeed turn out to be stem group macroscelideans, which is still far from certain (see above). But even then, there would remain a large morphological gap between the condylarth-like stem taxa and unequivocal macroscelideans. 

Just like its internal classification, the systematic affinities of the order Macroscelidea used to be a big mess, with very different candidates discussed as putative closest relatives, such as Archonta (treeshrews, colugos, and primates), Glires (rabbits, hares, and rodents), Eulipotyphla (insectivores), Tubulidentata (aardvarks), and Afrosoricida, as well as extinct Condylarthra (Patterson 1965, Simons et al. 1991, Butler 1995, Tabuce et al. 2001, Asher & Seiffert 2010, Naish 2013, Stevens et al. 2021). Rathbun (2005) therefore noted that “few mammals have had a more colourful history of misunderstood ancestry than the elephant-shrews.” Only after the advent of phylogenomics have they been recognized as members of the Afrotheria clade (Nishihara et al. 2005, Seiffert 2003, 2007, Asher & Seiffert 2010). Next Fossil Friday we will look into another member of the Afrotheria, i.e., the order Afrosoricida that includes golden moles, otter shrews, and the iconic tenrecs of Madagascar. Stay tuned for more evidence on abrupt appearances in the mammalian fossil record. 

The ancient wisdom of the ents.

 At nautilus: the ancient wisdom stored in trees 

Uncommon descent 

What’s the oldest known living thing, and how do we know? Why should we even want to know? The explanation is a history of curiosity and care. It’s about our long-term relationships—spiritual and scientific—with long-lived plants, as long as long can be. It’s all about trees.

A tree is a plant that people call a tree—a term of dignity, not botany.

Although people construct the meaning of “trees” and assign age value to the vascular plants they call “ancient trees,” people cannot themselves create life that grows in place for centuries. Exclusively, solar-powered organisms enact that miracle. Among plants, there are ephemerals, annuals, biennials, perennials—and, beyond them all, perdurables, thousand-year woody life-forms. 

INTO ETERNITY: Individual bristlecone pines, such as this one photographed in Utah, can live for close to 5,000 years. By sectioning off dying parts of themselves, they’re able to outlast the rise and fall of human empires. Photo by Anthony Heflin / Shutterstock.

As a rule, gymnosperms (flowerless plants with naked seeds) grow slower and live longer than angiosperms (flowering plants with fruits). Gymnosperms include ginkgo (a genus of one), cycads, and every kind of conifer—including yews, pines, firs, spruces, cedars, redwoods, cypresses, podocarps, and araucarias. All these lineages began hundreds of millions of years before the divergence of angiosperms. In effect, the newer, faster competition forced slow growers to retreat to exposed sites and poor soils, adverse niches conducive to oldness. Five thousand years is the approximate limit for nonclonal living under adversity. In plants, the potential for extreme longevity seems to be an evolutionary holdover from the deep past. Only about 25 plant species can, without human assistance, produce organisms that live beyond one millennium, and they are mainly conifers of primeval lineage. The cypress family contains the most perdurables, followed by the pine family. Many relict conifers hang on in limited, vulnerable habitats. The ice ages didn’t help their cause. In general, neither did humans, with their technologies of fire, domestication, and metalworking. Of some 600 conifer species, roughly one-third are endangered, with many genera reduced to a single species. 

A gymnosperm doesn’t so much live long as die longer—or, live longer through dying. The interior dead wood—the heartwood—performs vital functions, mechanically and structurally. In comparison, the thin living outer layer is open to the elements. If damaged by an extrinsic event such as fire or lightning, this periderm doesn’t heal or scar like animal skin. Instead, new cambium covers the injury, absorbing it as one more historical record alongside its growth rings. Thus, an ancient conifer is neither timeless nor deathless, but timeful and deathful. A few special conifers such as bristlecone pine can live through sequential, sectorial deaths—compartmentalizing their external afflictions, shutting down, section by section, producing fertile cones for an extra millennium with the sustenance of a solitary strip of bark. The final cambium has vitality like the first. Longevity doesn’t suppress fecundity. Unlike animals, plants don’t accumulate proteins that lead to degenerative diseases. 

The strongest correlation with long life (elongated death) is chemical. Longevous conifers produce copious resins—volatile, aromatic hydrocarbons like terpenes—that inhibit fungal rot and insect predation. Chemically, bristlecone is off the charts. Its high-elevation habitat offers additional protection from enemies, competitors, and fire, given that they tolerate dryness and cold. In habitats with chronic stress, conifers grow slower and stockier. Slow woody growth generates more lignin, another organic polymer with defensive properties. Stress-tolerant plants prioritize stability over size. Their stuntedness is equal parts adaptation and tribulation. 

Regrowth is another pathway to oldness, an adaptation that appears in both gymnosperms and angiosperms. Certain single-boughed woody species—notably ginkgo, redwood, yew, olive—can recover from catastrophic damage, even the death of the bole. These trees never lose their ability to resprout and regenerate. At the organismal level, they do not senesce, meaning they don’t lose vitality with age. In theory, such a plant is internally capable of immortality, though some external force inevitably ends its life. With particular species and cultivars, humans can force rejuvenation through grafting, pollarding, or coppicing. Plants that normally die young may live long under horticultural care. 

The price of longevity is immobility. At the organismal level, a plant cannot migrate like an animal. Its localism is total. Trees take what comes until something indomitable comes along. Extrinsic mortality may result from a distinct catastrophe, such as fire or gale, or multiple, cumulative stressors. There are limits beyond which even the most deeply rooted organisms can no longer function. Thresholds of water, salinity, and temperature are absolute thresholds. 

Does a naturally occurring tree of great age have value in itself? Foresters and forest ecologists have long debated this question. A century ago, technicians used words like “overage,” “overmature,” and “decadent” to describe standing timber past its prime. Commercial managers saw tree life as individual and rotational, and considered postmerchantable growth to be a biological waste of time. Their business—international markets for wood products—encouraged uniformity in age and size. By contrast, forest ecologists studied the communities in, on, and under each tree—each a world in itself—and saw forest life as processual. The cycle of life required dead and dying trees. Today, foresters meet ecologists halfway: Old trees provide nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and other “ecosystem services.” 

Perdurables are so much more than service providers. They are gift givers. They invite us to be fully human—truly sapient—by engaging our deepest faculties: to venerate, to analyze, to meditate. They expand our moral and temporal imaginations. 

In mythical form, trees appear in creation stories, present at time’s beginning. In graphical form, they represent seasons, cycles, genealogies, algorithms, and systems of knowledge. An olden bough is a bridge between temporalities we feel and those we can only think. This is why Darwin imagined millions of years of evolutionary history as a wide-spreading Tree of Life. Most profoundly, select living conifers—ancient organisms of ancient ancestry—are incarnations of geohistory. Volcanic eruptions, magnetic field reversals, and solar proton events leave signatures in their wood. Through tree-ring science, we see how woody plants register cyclical time and linear time, Chronos (durations) and Kairos (moments), climate and weather, the cosmogenic and the planetary. As multitemporal beings—short, long, and deep time together, in living form—perdurables allow us to think about the Anthropocene without anthropocentrism. They grant emotional access to timefulness.  

The “adaptations” that contribute to trees’ longevity have the hallmarks of design, to enable the organism to weather various threats to its existence. The persistence of these living things is remarkable. The author’s description of some trees reminds me of Tolkien’s description of elves: immortal, but still subject to death by violence. Stewarding Earth’s resources by appreciating the value of these longest-lived keepers of history is commended to us by wisdom. 

Bowing down to the beast?

 Robert Schenk on the religious right's Faustian bargain.

Faith on view 

Brad Reed of Salon writes that Evangelical preacher Robert Schenck criticized Christian conservative support of Republicans in testimony to the House Judicial Committee. He argued that the alliance between the religious right and Republicans came at “a great spiritual cost.”

Reverend Schenck was a prominent activist in the pro-life movement before 2019 and cited the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as part of an unequal exchange between Christians and politicians. Schenck later repudiated his anti-abortion position and has preached in more than 40 countries since 1982, including every state in the US.

Reed continues:

The Rev. Robert Schenck, who was once a prominent anti-abortion activist, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday that he and his fellow conservative Christians made a Faustian bargain with the Republican Party as part of their quest to overturn Roe v. Wade.

During his testimony, Schenck described a meeting he and his fellow evangelicals had with Republican operatives in which they were told that, in order to get what they wanted with Roe, they would have to accept and promote an entire package of right-wing policies that they otherwise might have found objectionable.

In that meeting that I participated in, the conversation went something like this: ‘You guys want Roe v. Wade overturned, we can do that for you, but you take the whole enchilada, you take the whole thing,”‘ he said. “You take everything else that comes with it. Because if you want Roe gone, you have to work with us.”

“From that point on that community that I had served, and still do, made a deal with them devil,” he said. “That deal was, we would support everything on the conservative agenda, whether or not we had conscientious conflict with them. The means were justified by the ends of that.” 

 Ps. Of course the religious left has long had its own Faustian bargain going with the political left and is (if anything) even less self aware re:the spiritual injury they have been doing themselves thereby.

Pi : a brief history.

pi 

mathematics

Alternate titles: π

By the editors of the encyclopedia brittanica 

pi, in mathematics, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The symbol π was devised by British mathematician William Jones in 1706 to represent the ratio and was later popularized by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. Because pi is irrational (not equal to the ratio of any two whole numbers), its digits do not repeat, and an approximation such as 3.14 or 22/7 is often used for everyday calculations. To 39 decimal places, pi is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197 

The Babylonians (c. 2000 BCE) used 3.125 to approximate pi, a value they obtained by calculating the perimeter of a hexagon inscribed within a circle and assuming that the ratio of the hexagon’s perimeter to the circle’s circumference was 24/25. The Rhind papyrus (c. 1650 BCE) indicates that ancient Egyptians used a value of 256/81 or about 3.16045. Archimedes (c. 250 BCE) took a major step forward by devising a method to obtain pi to any desired accuracy, given enough patience. By inscribing and circumscribing regular polygons about a circle to obtain upper and lower bounds, he obtained 223/71 < π < 22/7, or an average value of about 3.1418. Archimedes also proved that the ratio of the area of a circle to the square of its radius is the same constant.

Over the ensuing centuries, Chinese, Indian, and Arab mathematicians extended the number of decimal places known through tedious calculations, rather than improvements on Archimedes’ method. By the end of the 17th century, however, new methods of mathematical analysis in Europe provided improved ways of calculating pi involving infinite series. For example, Isaac Newton used his binomial theorem to calculate 16 decimal places quickly. Early in the 20th century the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan developed exceptionally efficient ways of calculating pi that were later incorporated into computer algorithms. In the early 21st century computers calculated pi to 62,831,853,071,796 decimal places, as well as its two-quadrillionth digit when expressed in binary (0).

Pi occurs in various mathematical problems involving the lengths of arcs or other curves, the areas of ellipses, sectors, and other curved surfaces, and the volumes of many solids. It is also used in various formulas of physics and engineering to describe such periodic phenomena as the motion of pendulums, the vibration of strings, and alternating electric currents. 

 

Our designed solar system v.chance and necessity

 The fine-tuning of the solar system 

Uncommon descent 

The universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and the Earth–Moon double planet system demonstrate clearly some remarkable evidence of highly intelligent design. If we consider them separately, each characteristic appears to be highly improbable due to random chance. When taken all of them together, the probability of random chance becomes as small as to be impossible. An alternative thought, designed by an intelligent creator is a more realistic explanation to many of the civilized people. In either way, we must admit that we are nothing but a product of a miracle—either a miracle of chance or a miracle of design. 3 

Argument from the formation of the sun in a cluster 

1. Scientists determined that the Sun formed in a cluster of stars containing at least one massive star that died in a supernova explosion.

2. The distance to that supernova must have been close enough to enrich the solar nebula adequately, but not so close that it would have destroyed the disk from which the planets formed.

3. Such fine-tuning indicates design of the solar system that could have been done only by The Supreme Engineer, God.

4. God necessarily exists.

http://kgov.com/fine-tuning-of-the-universe

The Finely Tuned Parameters of the Solar System include:

- Our Sun is positioned far from the Milky Way's center in a galactic goldilocks zone of low radiation

- Our Sun placed in an arm of the Milky Way puts it where we can discover a vast swath of the entire universe

- Earth's orbit is nearly circular (eccentricity ~ 0.02) around the Sun providing a stability in a range of vital factors

- Earth's orbit has a low inclination keeping it's temperatures within a range permitting diverse ecosystems

- Earth's axial tilt is within a range that helps to stabilize our planet's climate

- the Moon's mass helps stabilize the Earth's tilt on its axis, which provides for the diversity of alternating seasons

- the Moon's distance from the Earth provides tides to keep life thriving in our oceans, and thus, worldwide

- the Moon's nearly circular orbit (eccentricity ~ 0.05) makes it's influence extraordinarily reliable

- the Moon is 1/400th the size of the Sun, and at 1/400th its distance, enables educational perfect eclipses

- the Earth's distance from the Sun provides for great quantities of life and climate-sustaining liquid water

- the Sun's extraordinary stable output of the energy

- the Sun's mass and size are just right for Earth's biosystem

- the Sun's luminosity and temperature are just right to provide for Earth's extraordinary range of ecosystems

- the color of the Sun's light from is tuned for maximum benefit for our plant life (photosynthesis)

- the Sun's low "metallicity" prevents the destruction of life on Earth

- etc., etc., etc. 

cloud that forms star and planetary system

Correct number and sizes of planets and planetesimals consumed by star

Correct variations in star’s diameter

Correct level of spot production on star’s surface

Correct variability of spot production on star’s surface

Correct mass of outer gas giant planet relative to inner gas giant planet

Correct Kozai oscillation level in planetary system

Correct reduction of Kuiper Belt mass during planetary system’s early history

Correct efficiency of stellar mass loss during final stages of stellar burning

Correct number, mass, and distance from star of gas giant planets in addition to planets of the mass and distance of Jupiter and Saturn

Our solar powered biosphere v. Darwinism

 At Phys.Org: Alpine Lake Bacteria Deploy Two Light-Harvesting Systems 

Uncommon descent  

Christopher Packham writes:

Though humans, along with other vertebrate and invertebrate organisms, don’t photosynthesize, we’re definitely the downstream beneficiaries of the life forms that do. Phototrophic organisms at the bottom of the food chain convert abundant sunlight into the energy that ultimately powers all other life.

The two metabolic systems for harvesting light energy are fundamentally different. The most familiar is the chlorophyll-based photosynthesis by which plant life uses light to power the conversion of carbon dioxide and water into sugars and starches; the other system consists of proton-pumping rhodopsins.

Microbial rhodopsins, retinal-binding proteins, provide ion transport driven by light (and incidentally, sensory functions). It’s a family that includes light-driven proton pumps, ion pumps, ion channels and light sensors. Microbial rhodopsins are found in archaea, bacteria and eukaryota and are widespread in oceans and freshwater lakes. Generally speaking, species tend to pick one or the other metabolic system, the PC/Mac dichotomy of phototrophic organisms. However, a multi-institutional team of molecular biologists now reports finding an alpine lake bacterium that uses both bacteriochlorophyll-based photosynthetic complexes and proton-pumping rhodopsins. Their study is published in PNAS.

Based on flash photolysis measurements, the authors report that both systems are photochemically active in Sphingomonas glacialis AAP5, found in the alpine lake Gossenköllesee, located in the Tyrolean Alps. Specifically, in low-light conditions between 4 and 22 degrees Celsius, the bacterium expresses bacteriochlorophyll, and in light conditions at temperatures below 16 degrees Celsius, expresses xanthorhodopsin, a proton pump.

S. glacialis uses harvested light to synthesize ATP and to stimulate growth. The authors write, “This indicates that the use of two systems for light harvesting may represent an evolutionary adaptation to the specific environmental conditions found in alpine lakes and other analogous ecosystems,” namely a response to large seasonal changes of temperature and light.

As the authors note, bacteriochlorophyll-based systems are large, complex and pigment-driven, requiring complex molecular machinery for synthesis, assembly and regulation. But once assembled, they comprise a “set-it-and-forget-it” system that functions even under low-light conditions. Rhodopsins, on the other hand, are far simpler and less expensive to express; their disadvantage is that they are only assembled and function in the presence of higher irradiance levels.

Loaded with all the genetic hardware for both chlorophototrophy and retinalphototrophy, these photoheterotrophic little guys have a reduced need for aerobic respiration and can therefore use available carbon for growth, a scarce commodity in the alpine lake environment they call home. 

“As the authors note, bacteriochlorophyll-based systems are large, complex and pigment-driven, requiring complex molecular machinery for synthesis, assembly and regulation.” A statement such as this, acknowledging complex, functional systems of molecular machines necessary for photosynthesis, is scientifically incompatible with the suggestion that “light harvesting may represent an evolutionary adaptation.”

Unguided natural processes degrade complex, functional systems over time. The spacetime history of the universe is woefully insufficient to randomly produce such complex, functional molecules. Yet again, researchers have claimed godlike powers for nature. Deifying nature has no place in modern science, since we know that nature itself is subject to laws that regulate its workings. The light-harvesting capabilities of bacteria represent the work of intelligent design, consistent with the role of God as Creator. 

Design deniers:stumped by the book of life again?

Yet Another Example Of How Materialism Blinds Its Proponents

Uncommondescent 

Over at the Reasons.org post (see here), UB and JVL are having an exchange that illustrates perfectly how materialism blinds its proponents.

UB summarizes:

In 1948 did John Von Neumann take a page from Alan Turing’s 1933 Machine and give a series of lectures predicting that a quiescent symbol system and a set of independent constraints would be required for autonomous open-ended self replication? Yes. In 1953 did Francis Crick, along with Watson, discover the sequence structure of that symbol system, calling it a code? Yes. And in 1955 did he further predict that an unknown set of protein constraints would be found working in the system, establishing the necessary code relationships? Yes. In 1956-1958 did Mahlon Hoagland and Paul Zamecnik experimentally confirm Crick’s (and Von Neumann’s) predictions. Yes. In 1961, did Marshal Nirenberg have to demonstrate the first symbolic relationship in the gene system in order to know it? Yes. In 1969 did Howard Pattee set off on a five decade analysis of the gene system, confirming it as symbolic control of a dynamic process? Yes. Do the encoded descriptions of the constraints have to be physically coherent with all the other descriptions (i.e. self-referent) in order to successfully function? Yes. Is the gene system and written human language the only two systems known to science that operate in this way? Yes. Is the appearance of an encoded symbol system considered in science to be a universal correlate of intelligence? Yes.

All of UB’s claims are true beyond the slightest doubt. Is JVL convinced? Of course not. He writes: 

I’d say you made an error in how you choose to interpret the works of semiotic researchers as supporting ID when they, themselves, do not see their work in that way. 

JVL’s point is that if UB is correct about the logical inferences of the researchers’ work, how could that conclusion have escaped the researchers themselves? It does not seem to have occurred to JVL that both things could be true at the same time. In other words, UB could very well be correct about the logical conclusion compelled by the researchers’ observations, even though the researchers themselves did not come to that conclusion. How is that possible? Simple. The researchers, like JVL, were blinded by their a priori metaphysical commitments. They literally could not see where their own work was leading.

Examples of researchers who could not see where their own work was heading abound in history. Does anyone think that Copernicus reached his heliocentric conclusions based on original research alone? Of course he didn’t. Men had been observing the planets and the stars for hundreds of years before Copernicus, and he had a library full of their work. All of these prior researchers concluded that their observations supported a geocentric cosmology. Copernicus’ genius was not in making new observations. His genius was in interpreting observations that had been made over the course of hundreds of years through a new paradigm (a paradigm inspired, by the way, by Copernicus’ conviction that God’s design had to be more elegant than the existing system described). 

Now, let’s imagine if JVL were responding to Copernicus in 1543:Copernicus: Ptolemy established the geocentric paradigm when he published the Almagest in 150 AD.  I do not dispute Ptolemy’s observations. I agree with them. Nor do I dispute the observations of all subsequent astronomers who have taken the geocentric view for granted for nearly 1,400 years. Again, I agree with those observations. But I have concluded that even though those observations were correct, the researchers did not reach the correct conclusion from those observations. The earth orbits the sun.

JVL: The researchers on whose observations you are relying did not reach the same conclusion that you do. Therefore, you must be wrong.

Sound farfetched? Not so fast. There were lots of JVLs back in the 16th century who said that very thing. Copernicus was correct. But that didn’t stop people like JVL from pushing back at him on the basis of authority. Indeed, the people who pushed back at Copernicus had an even better argument than JVL does today. After all, Copernicus was trying to upset a paradigm that had been taken for granted for well over a millennium. The authority weighing against him was overwhelming. But he was right and the prior authorities were wrong.That is why science proceeds by challenging authority, not, as JVL would have it, by meekly submitting to it.

So yes, it is true as JVL says. The researchers UB cites did not understand the significance of their own observations, just as the researchers who preceded Copernicus (many of whom were brilliant men) did not understand the significance of their own observations.

JVL thinks he has a knockdown counter to UB: “The researchers you cite did not reach the same conclusion that you do.” He is wrong about that.

Marcel-Paul Schützenberger: a brief history.

 Marcel-Paul Schützenberger 

Wikipedia 

 Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger (24 October 1920 – 29 July 1996) was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine. He worked in the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory.[1] In addition to his formal results in mathematics, he was "deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of [neo-]Darwinism",[2] a stance which has resulted in some mixed reactions from his peers and from critics of his stance on evolution. Several notable theorems and objects in mathematics as well as computer science bear his name (for example Schutzenberger group or the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy). Paul Schützenberger was his great-grandfather. 

Contributions medicine and biology 

Schützenberger's first doctorate, in medicine, was awarded in 1948 from the Faculté de Médecine de Paris.[4] His doctoral thesis, on the statistical study of biological sex at birth, was distinguished by the Baron Larrey Prize from the French Academy of Medicine.[5]

Biologist Jaques Besson, a co-author with Schützenberger on a biological topic,[6] while noting that Schützenberger is perhaps most remembered for work in pure mathematical fields, credits him[5] for likely being responsible for the introduction of statistical sequential analysis in French hospital practice.[7] 

Contributions to computer science and linguistics 

Schützenberger's second doctorate was awarded in 1953 from Université Paris III[dubious – discuss].[8] This work, developed from earlier results[9][10] is counted amongst the early influential French academic work in information theory.[11] His later impact in both linguistics and combinatorics is reflected by two theorems in formal linguistics (the Chomsky–Schützenberger enumeration theorem[12] and the Chomsky–Schützenberger representation theorem), and one in combinatorics (the Schützenberger theorem). With Alain Lascoux, Schützenberger is credited with the foundation of the notion of the plactic monoid,[13][14] reflected in the name of the combinatorial structure called by some the Lascoux–Schützenberger tree.[15][16]

In automata theory, Schützenberger is credited with first defining (what later became known as) weighted automata, the first studied model of automata which compute a quantitative output.[17]

The mathematician Dominique Perrin credited Schützenberger with "deeply [influencing] the theory of semigroups" and "deep results on rational functions and transducers", amongst other contributions to mathematics.[1]

Office honors and recognition 

Professorships and other teaching[1]

Professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Poitiers (1957–1963)

Lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University (1961–1962)

Director of Research at the CNRS (1963–1964)

Professor at the University of Paris (1964–1970)

Professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Paris VII (1970-until his death in 1996)

National honors

In 1988, after having been a Correspondant since 1979, Schützenberger was made a full Membre of French Academy of Sciences.

Posthumous recognitions

After his death, two journals in theoretical mathematics dedicated issues to Schützenberger's memory. He was commemorated in this manner by Theoretical Computer Science in 1998[18] and again by the International Journal of Algebra and Computation in 1999.[19]

The mathematician David Berlinski provided this dedication in his 2000 book The Advent of The Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World: À la mémoire de mon ami . . M. P. Schützenberger, 1921-1996. 

Works 

For the complete list of his papers, see: Papers

De la diversité de certains cancers. Pierre Florent Denoix, Paris (1954)/About the diversity of some cancers

Théorie géométrique des polynômes eulériens, with Dominique Foata, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Springer (1970)/Geometric theory of Euler polynomials

Triangle de pensées, with Alain Connes and André Lichnerowicz, Paris, O. Jacob ; Saint-Gély du Fesc : Espace 34 (2000)/Triangle of thoughts

Les failles du darwinisme, La Recherche, n°283 (January 1996)/The miracles of darwinism

Œuvres complètes, edited by Jean Berstel, Alain Lascoux and Dominique Perrin, Institut Gaspard-Monge, Université Paris-Est (2009)/Complete Works

The Complete Works of Marcel-Paul Schützenberger: Complete Works

David Berlinski further explains why theist and no theist alike can dare to deny deny Darwin.

 The Book of Life  

  THE DISCOVERY of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1952 revealed that a living creature is an organization of matter orchestrated by a genetic text. Within the bacterial cell, for example, the book of life is written in a distinctive language. The book is read aloud, its message specifying the construction of the cell’s constituents, and then the book is copied, passed faithfully into the future.

This striking metaphor introduces a troubling instability, a kind of tremor, into biological thought. With the discovery of the genetic code, every living creature comes to divide itself into alien realms: the alphabetic and the organismic. The realms are conceptually distinct, responding to entirely different imperatives and constraints. An alphabet, on the one hand, belongs to the class of finite combinatorial objects, things that are discrete and that fit together in highly circumscribed ways. An organism, on the other hand, traces a continuous figure in space and in time. How, then, are these realms coordinated?

I ask the question because in similar systems, coordination is crucial. When I use the English language, the rules of grammar act as a constraint on the changes that I might make to the letters or sounds I employ. This is something we take for granted, an ordinary miracle in which I pass from one sentence to the next, almost as if crossing an abyss by means of a series of well-placed stepping stones. 

In living creatures, things evidently proceed otherwise. There is no obvious coordination between alphabet and organism; the two objects are governed by different conceptual regimes, and that apparently is the end of it. Under the pressures of competition, the orchid Orphrys apifera undergoes a statistically adapted drift, some incidental feature in its design becoming over time ever more refined, until, consumed with longing, a misguided bee amorously mounts the orchid’s very petals, convinced that he has seen shimmering there a female’s fragile genitalia. As this is taking place, the marvelous mimetic design maturing slowly, the orchid’s underlying alphabetic system undergoes a series of random perturbations, letters in its genetic alphabet winking off or winking on in a way utterly independent of the grand convergent progression toward perfection taking place out there where the action is.

We do not understand, we cannot re-create, a system of this sort. However it may operate in life, randomness in language is the enemy of order, a way of annihilating meaning And not only in language, but in any language-like system–computer programs, for example. The alien influence of randomness in such systems was first noted by the distinguished French mathematician M.P. Schutzenberger, who also marked the significance of this circumstance for evolutionary theory. “If we try to simulate such a situation,” he wrote, “by making changes randomly . . . on computer programs, we find that we have no chance . . . even to see what the modified program would compute; it just jams.(3) 

Planets of Possibility 

THIS IS not yet an argument, only an expression of intellectual unease; but the unease tends to build as analogies are amplified. The general issue is one of size and space, and the way in which something small may be found amidst something very big.

Linguists in the 1950’s, most notably Noam Chomsky and George Miller, asked dramatically how many grammatical English sentences could be constructed with 100 letters. Approximately 10 to the 25th power, they answered. This is a very large number. But a sentence is one thing; a sequence, another. A sentence obeys the laws of English grammar; a sequence is lawless and comprises any concatenation of those 100 letters. If there are roughly (1025) sentences at hand, the number of sequences 100 letters in length is, by way of contrast, 26 to the 100th power. This is an inconceivably greater number. The space of possibilities has blown up, the explosive process being one of combinatorial inflation.

Now, the vast majority of sequences drawn on a finite alphabet fail to make a statement: they consist of letters arranged to no point or purpose. It is the contrast between sentences and sequences that carries the full, critical weight of memory and intuition. Organized as a writhing ball, the sequences resemble a planet-sized object, one as large as pale Pluto. Landing almost anywhere on that planet, linguists see nothing but nonsense. Meaning resides with the grammatical sequences, but they, those sentences, occupy an area no larger than a dime.

How on earth could the sentences be discovered by chance amid such an infernal and hyperborean immensity of gibberish? They cannot be discovered by chance, and, of course, chance plays no role in their discovery. The linguist or the native English-speaker moves around the place or planet with a perfectly secure sense of where he should go, and what he is apt to see.

The eerie and unexpected presence of an alphabet in every living creature might suggest the possibility of a similar argument in biology. It is DNA of course, that acts as life’s primordial text, the code itself organized in nucleic triplets, like messages in Morse code. Each triplet is matched to a particular chemical object, an amino acid. There are twenty such acids in all. They correspond to letters in an alphabet. As the code is read somewhere in life’s hidden housing, the linear order of the nucleic acids induces a corresponding linear order in the amino acids. The biological finger writes, and what the cell reads is an ordered presentation of such amino acids-a protein.

Like the nucleic acids, proteins are alphabetic objects, composed of discrete constituents. On average, proteins are roughly 250 amino acid residues in length, so a given protein may be imagined as a long biochemical word, one of many. 

The aspects of an analogy are now in place. What is needed is a relevant contrast, something comparable to sentences and sequences in language. Of course nothing completely comparable is at hand: there are no sentences in molecular biology. Nonetheless, there is this fact, helpfully recounted by Richard Dawkins: “The actual animals that have ever lived on earth are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could exist.” It follows that over the course of four billion years, life has expressed itself by means of a particular stock of proteins, a certain set of life-like words.

A COMBINATORIAL COUNT is now possible. The MIT physicist Murray Eden, to whom I owe this argument, estimates the number of the viable proteins at 10 to the 50th power. Within this set is the raw material of everything that has ever lived: the flowering plants and the alien insects and the seagoing turtles and the sad shambling dinosaurs, the great evolutionary successes and the great evolutionary failures as well. These creatures are, quite literally, composed of the proteins that over the course of time have performed some useful function, with “usefulness” now standing for the sense of sentencehood in linguistics. 

As in the case of language, what has once lived occupies some corner in the space of a larger array of possibilities, the actual residing in the shadow of the possible. The space of all possible proteins of a fixed length (250 residues, recall) is computed by multiplying 20 by itself 250 times (20 to the 250th power). It is idle to carry out the calculation. The numbers larger by far than seconds in the history of the world since the Big Bang or grains of sand on the shores of every sounding sea. Another planet now looms in the night sky, Pluto-sized or bigger, a conceptual companion to the planet containing every sequence composed by endlessly arranging the 26 English letters into sequences 100 letters in length. This planetary doppelganger is the planet of all possible proteins of fixed length, the planet, in a certain sense, of every conceivable form of carbon-based life.

And there the two planets lie, spinning on their soundless axes. The contrast between sentences and sequences on Pluto reappears on Pluto’s double as the contrast between useful protein forms and all the rest; and it reappears in terms of the same dramatic difference in numbers, the enormous (20 to the 250th power) overawing the merely big (10 to the 50th power), the contrast between the two being quite literally between an immense and swollen planet and a dime’s worth of area. That dime-sized corner, which on Pluto contains the English sentences, on Pluto’s double contains the living creatures; and there the biologist may be seen tramping, the warm puddle of wet life achingly distinct amid the planet’s snow and stray proteins. It is here that living creatures, whatever their ultimate fate, breathed and moaned and carried on, life evidently having discovered the small quiet corner of the space of possibilities in which things work.

It would seem that evolution, Murray Eden writes in artfully ambiguous language, “was directed toward the incredibly small proportion of useful protein forms. . . ,” the word “directed” conveying, at least to me, the sobering image of a stage-managed search, with evolution bypassing the awful immensity of all that frozen space because in some sense evolution knew where it was going.

And yet, from the perspective of Darwinian theory, it is chance that plays the crucial–that plays the only role in generating the proteins. Wandering the surface of a planet, evolution wanders blindly, having forgotten where it has been, unsure of where it is going. 

The Artificer of Design 

RANDOM MUTATIONS are the great creative demiurge of evolution, throwing up possibilities and bathing life in the bright light of chance. Each living creature is not only what it is but what it might be. What, then, acts to make the possible palpable?

The theory of evolution is a materialistic theory. Various deities need not apply. Any form of mind is out. Yet a force is needed, something adequate to the manifest complexity of the biological world, and something that in the largest arena of all might substitute for the acts of design, anticipation, and memory that are obvious features of such day-to-day activities as fashioning a sentence or a sonnet.

This need is met in evolutionary theory by natural selection, the filter but not the source of change. “It may be said,” Darwin wrote, 

that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good: silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, as the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Natural selection emerges from these reflections as a strange force-like concept. It is strange because it is unconnected to any notion of force in physics, and it is force-like because natural selection does something, it has an effect and so functions as a kind of cause.(4) 

Creatures, habits, organ systems, body plans, organs, and tissues are shaped by natural selection. Population geneticists write of selection forces, selection pressures, and coefficients of natural selection; biologists say that natural selection sculpts, shapes, coordinates, transforms, directs, controls, changes, and transfigures living creatures.

It is natural selection, Richard Dawkins believes, that is the artificer of design, a cunning force that mocks human ingenuity even as it mimics it:

Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventually to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers.

In affirming what Darwin showed, these words suggest that Darwin demonstrated the power of natural selection in some formal sense, settling the issue once and for all. But that is simply not true. When Darwin wrote, the mechanism of evolution that he proposed had only life itself to commend it. But to refer to the power of natural selection by appealing to the course of evolution is a little like confirming a story in the New York Times by reading it twice. The theory of evolution is, after all, a general theory of change; if natural selection can sift the debris of chance to fashion an elephant’s trunk, should it not be able to work elsewhere–amid computer programs and algorithms, words and sentences? Skeptics require a demonstration of natural selection’s cunning, one that does not involve the very phenomenon it is meant to explain. 

No sooner said than done. An extensive literature is now devoted to what is optimistically called artificial life. These are schemes in which a variety of programs generate amusing computer objects and by a process said to be similar to evolution show that they are capable of growth and decay and even a phosphorescent simulacrum of death. An algorithm called “Face Prints,” for example, has been designed to enable crime victims to identify their attackers. The algorithm runs through hundreds of facial combinations (long hair, short hair, big nose, wide chin, moles, warts, wens, wrinkles) until the indignant victim spots the resemblance between the long-haired, big-nosed, wide-chinned portrait of the perpetrator and the perpetrator himself.

It is the presence of the human victim in this scenario that should give pause. What is he doing there, complaining loudly amid those otherwise blind forces? A mechanism that requires a discerning human agent cannot be Darwinian. The Darwinian mechanism neither anticipates nor remembers. It gives no directions and makes no choices. What is unacceptable in evolutionary theory, what is strictly forbidden, is the appearance of a force with the power to survey time, a force that conserves a point or a property because it will be useful. Such a force is no longer Darwinian. How would a blind force know such a thing? And by what means could future usefulness be transmitted to the present?

If life is, as evolutionary biologists so often say, a matter merely of blind thrusting and throbbing, any definition of natural selection must plainly meet what I have elsewhere called a rule against deferred success.(5)

It is a rule that cannot be violated with impunity; if evolutionary theory is to retain its intellectual integrity, it cannot be violated at all.

But the rule is widely violated, the violations so frequent as to amount to a formal fallacy. 

Advent of the Head Monkey 

IT IS Richard Dawkins’s grand intention in The Blind Watchmaker to demonstrate, as one reviewer enthusiastically remarked, “how natural selection allows biologists to dispense with such notions as purpose and design.” This he does by exhibiting a process in which the random exploration of certain possibilities, a blind stab here, another there, is followed by the filtering effects of natural selection, some of those stabs saved, others discarded. But could a process so conceived–a Darwinian process–discover a simple English sentence: a target, say, chosen from Shakespeare? The question is by no means academic. If natural selection cannot discern a simple English sentence, what chance is there that it might have discovered the mammalian eye or the system by which glucose is regulated by the liver? A thought experiment in The Blind Watchmaker now follows. Randomness in the experiment is conveyed by the metaphor of the monkeys, perennial favorites in the theory of probability. There they sit, simian hands curved over the keyboards of a thousand typewriters, their long agile fingers striking keys at random. It is an image of some poignancy, those otherwise intelligent apes banging away at a machine they cannot fathom; and what makes the poignancy pointed is the fact that the system of rewards by which the apes have been induced to strike the typewriter’s keys is from the first rigged against them. 

The probability that a monkey will strike a given letter is one in 26. The typewriter has 26 keys: the monkey, one working finger. But a letter is not a word. Should Dawkins demand that the monkey get two English letters right, the odds against success rise with terrible inexorability from one in 26 to one in 676. The Shakespearean target chosen by Dawkins–“Methinks it is like a weasel”–is a six-word sentence containing 28 English letters (including the spaces). It occupies an isolated point in a space of 10,000 million, million, million, million, million, million possibilities. This is a very large number; combinatorial inflation is at work. And these are very long odds. And a six-word sentence consisting of 28 English letters is a very short, very simple English sentence.

Such are the fatal facts. The problem confronting the monkeys is, of course, a double one: they must, to be sure, find the right letters, but they cannot lose the right letters once they have found them. A random search in a space of this size is an exercise in irrelevance. This is something the monkeys appear to know. What more, then, is expected; what more required? Cumulative selection, Dawkins argues–the answer offered as well by Stephen Jay Gould, Manfred Eigen, and Daniel Dennett. The experiment now proceeds in stages. The monkeys type randomly. After a time, they are allowed to survey what they have typed in order to choose the result “which however slightly most resembles the target phrase.” It is a computer that in Dawkins’s experiment performs the crucial assessments, but I prefer to imagine its role assigned to a scrutinizing monkey-the Head Monkey of the experiment. The process under way is one in which stray successes are spotted and then saved. This process is iterated and iterated again. Variations close to the target are conserved because they are close to the target, the Head Monkey equably surveying the scene until, with the appearance of a miracle in progress, randomly derived sentences do begin to converge on the target sentence itself.

The contrast between schemes and scenarios is striking. Acting on their own, the monkeys are adrift in fathomless possibilities, any accidental success-a pair of English-like letters-lost at once, those successes seeming like faint untraceable lights flickering over a wine-dark sea. The advent of the Head Monkey changes things entirely. Successes are conserved and then conserved again. The light that formerly flickered uncertainly now stays lit, a beacon burning steadily, a point of illumination. By the light of that light, other lights are lit, until the isolated successes converge, bringing order out of nothingness. 

The entire exercise is, however, an achievement in self-deception. A target phrase? Iterations that most resemble the target? A Head Monkey that measures the distance between failure and success? If things are sightless, how is the target represented, and how is the distance between randomly generated phrases and the targets assessed? And by whom? And the Head Monkey? What of him? The mechanism of deliberate design, purged by Darwinian theory on the level of the organism, has reappeared in the description of natural selection itself, a vivid example of what Freud meant by the return of the repressed.

This is a point that Dawkins accepts without quite acknowledging, rather like a man adroitly separating his doctor’s diagnosis from his own disease.(6) Nature presents life with no targets. Life shambles forward, surging here, shuffling there, the small advantages accumulating on their own until something novel appears on the broad evolutionary screen-an arch or an eye, an intricate pattern of behavior, the complexity characteristic of life. May we, then, see this process at work, by seeing it simulated? “Unfortunately,” Dawkins writes, “I think it may be beyond my powers as a programmer to set up such a counterfeit world.”(7) 

This is the authentic voice of contemporary Darwinian theory. What may be illustrated by the theory does not involve a Darwinian mechanism; what involves a Darwinian mechanism cannot be illustrated by the theory.     

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XXIII

 In conclusion: 

Cornelius G Hunter 

Ever since Darwin evolutionists have been certain of their theory. They hold that evolution is a fact beyond all reasonable doubt. Evolutionists arrive at this conclusion from a wide range of powerful arguments based on contrastive reasoning where evolutionary theory is compared to alternative hypotheses derived from the concept of independent creation. (Hunter 2014) Evolutionists have found these alternative hypotheses to be false, leaving evolutionary ideas as the only remaining possibility. This process of elimination, which traces back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is based on comparing scientific evidence with expectations derived from independent creation. Therefore the motivation, justification and truth claims for evolutionary theory entail metaphysical beliefs about independent creation.

 

This raises the question of how evolution fares without the metaphysics. That is, how does evolution compare with the scientific evidence? Evolutionary theory holds that the biological world (and more generally the cosmos as well), arose from the interplay of chance and natural law. In other words, evolution holds that the species arose spontaneously. From a strictly scientific perspective, this is a high claim. It is perhaps not surprising that, setting the contrasting reasoning aside and focusing exclusively on the science, evolution’s fundamental predictions fail badly. The above sections reviewed several fundamental predictions of evolutionary theory, once held with great conviction, that have all been found to be false, much to the surprise of practitioners. 

Philosophers have debated the role and importance of predictions in the historical sciences, and how they are related to explanatory capacity. (Cleland 2011; Cleland 2013; Turner) The predictions described above do have strong implications for evolution’s capacity to explain phenomena. For most of these predictions, the falsification has been followed by one or more proposed theory modifications to accommodate the new data. These modifications are often vague and they cause the theory to lose its parsimony. Perhaps most importantly they refute evolution’s common cause argument and remove its so-called “smoking gun.” The evolutionist’s claim has been that in biology we find a wide range of observations that seem unlikely or bewildering, but that in a stroke evolution parsimoniously explains and makes sense of them. Evolution brings a consilience to the data.

 

The above predictions illustrate that there is no such consilience. Evolution’s predictions, and associated explanations, do not make sense of the observations. Consider, for example, the pentadactyl structure prediction discussed above. In Darwin’s day the five-digit pentadactyl structure was observed in a wide variety of species. Why should the same type of structure be used for such a wide variety of tasks? Evolution’s common descent provided a single, simple explanation. The pentadactyl structure arose from a single common ancestor. The associated prediction is that the pentadactyl structure should continue to appear in species according to a common descent pattern. The failure of the pentadactyl structure to form this pattern does not merely represent a false prediction. This common cause argument had been celebrated for more than a century as a compelling proof text. It appears consistently in the literature and is one of evolution’s “smoking guns.” The falsification of this prediction means the loss of this compelling argument. And it means the introduction of non parsimonious explanations, calling for the pentadactyl structure to repeatedly evolve and disappear in various lineages, as the data require. 

Yet contrastive reasoning, evolutionists argue, prove that evolution is a fact. This illustrates the tremendous importance of the role of contrastive reasoning. If all we had was the science there would be no basis for believing the species have spontaneously arisen, much less that such an idea is a fact. But evolution is not a typical scientific theory. In spite of the consistent failure of fundamental scientific predictions, there remains no doubt amongst evolutionists that evolution is a fact. Its high standing is underwritten by extremely powerful contrastive proofs which render its scientific puzzles less crucial. Those puzzles are interpreted as research questions, not challenges to the fact of evolution. That fact, for evolutionists, has already been established by the philosophy and theology that support evolution’s contrastive reasoning. From a strictly scientific perspective, evolution is not a good theory. 

References 

Cleland, Carol. 2011. “Prediction and Explanation in Historical Natural Science.” Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 62:551–582.

 

Cleland, Carol. 2013. “Common cause explanation and the search for a smoking gun.” Geological Society of America Special Papers 502:1-9.

 

Hunter, C. 2014. “Darwin’s Principle: The Use of Contrastive Reasoning in the Confirmation of Evolution.” J International Society History of Philosophy of Science 4:106-149.

Turner, Derek. 2013. “Historical geology: Methodology and metaphysics.” Geological Society of America Special Papers 502:11-18.