Sunday 19 February 2023

Human exceptionalism on its deathbed?

World’s Oldest Medical Journal Endorses “Nature Rights”

I have been writing for some time about how establishment medicine and bioethics have become profoundly ideological to the point of crossing into the nihilism of anti-humanism. Now, The Lancet, the world’s oldest and one of the field’s most established medical — not environmental — journals has published an advocacy column in favor of granting “rights” to “nature.”

The author backs the concept of granting humans the right to a clean environment: a plausible proposition that at least maintains the concept of rights that belong exclusively to the human realm.

However, according to Hong Kong–based bioethicist and law professor Eric C. Ip, such rights do not go nearly far enough. He wants rights granted to nature, which would thereby reject human exceptionalism. From the piece, “From the Right to a Healthy Planet to the Planetary Right to Health,”

Some interpretations of the right to a healthy planet could still be problematic. The planet’s ecosystems consist of communities of life forms, of which humanity is but one member, that interact with each other and their landscapes.

The Rio Declaration’s reference to the positioning of humans “at the centre of concerns for sustainable development” could no longer be defended. It is impossible to protect the well-being of the planet if humans persist in pursuing endless, albeit narrowly defined, growth with an aura of species superiority.

Jesting? Unfortunately, Not a Chance

In other words, we, flora, fauna, and, indeed, geological features such as rivers and granite outcroppings are equal. Lest you think I jest, at least six rivers and two glaciers have already been granted “rights” as this antihuman movement spreads.

Ip claims that human rights and nature rights are mutually reinforcing:

In their current form, rights of nature are enforceable rights attributed to natural entities of Earth, such as ecosystems; these rights — mainly the rights to exist, flourish, and restoration — underscore the core planetary health insight that humanity is part of, and not apart from, an interconnected planet. Practically speaking, the right to a healthy environment and the planetary right to health converge on the same obligation on the part of humanity to protect the planetary community. There does not seem to be any irreconcilable conflict between these two mutually reinforcing rights. Humans have an intrinsic right to flourish; however, that is impossible if they treat the natural foundations of life with disrespect.

This Is Simply Not True

Nature’s “rights” are typically defined, by environmental organizations, as “the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” That’s akin to both a right to life and noninterference with natural processes and life cycles.

Laws that grant rights to nature do so for the purpose of handcuffing human thriving by inhibiting development, all in the name of saving the planet. They generally allow anyone to bring court action to prevent development activities — meaning that all human endeavors that impact the natural world are at the mercy of the sensibilities of the most radical environmentalist. And that includes essentials such as the generation of electricity with fossil fuels, as well as the mining of minerals such as lithium needed to make renewables functional.

A Radical Agenda

At the very least, granting “rights” to “nature” would grant the natural world and human needs equal consideration before the law. Even if related lawsuits on behalf of nature’s “rights” are lost eventually, the chilling effect of their potential alone would be catastrophic. Imagine trying to obtain liability insurance for a new waterfront hotel or a mining operation when the insurance company knows that the most extreme anti-development activist can take the project to court.

Radical environmental misanthropy is on the march, now co-opting the medical establishment. Its activists are well funded and ideologically committed. The time has come to stop rolling our eyes at the apparent insanity of these proposals and take the threat posed by them seriously. The future of human prosperity and our self-identification as the special species, uniquely possessed with both rights and responsibilities, depend on defeating this radical agenda.

In search of what the science actually says re:.Darwinism.

Rob Staedler and the NABT

Cornelius G Hunter

It's no secret that the origins debate is highly polarized. Many people have their minds made up and too often there is no place for a reasoned evaluation of the science. That’s tragic because that is where things become interesting. I once spoke to a roomful of high school science teachers, explaining that they could accurately teach how the science bears on the theory of evolution—both positively and negatively. The response I got was that this would confuse the students who needed to be given a simple, unambiguous message. One teacher was concerned that anything other than an obvious, “evolution is true,” message would be detrimental to the learning. To be sure there can be a tension between detail and clarity in classroom settings. High school students learn introductory history lessons out of necessity. They simply are not ready for research-level topics. Clarity sometimes comes at the cost of less detail. But there is a difference between simplifying a lesson and biasing a lesson. I was again reminded of all this when I heard about how the National Association of Biology Teachers responded to Dr. Robert Stadler’s new book, The scientific approach to Evolution.

It would be difficult to find someone more qualified than Stadler to analyze how the scientific evidence bears on the theory of evolution. His academic background is in Biomedical Engineering, with degrees from the top universities in the nation (Case Western Reserve University, MIT, and Harvard). And he has twenty years of experience in the field, with more than 100 patents to his name.

Stadler’s interest in evolution skips over the usual culture wars arguments and focuses on the science. Stadler provides an approach that is sorely needed. While there are plenty of texts and popular books that review the scientific evidence for evolution, they invariably fail to provide any kind of accounting of the strength of the evidence. The field outside my window is flat and so is evidence that the Earth is flat. But of course that evidence is weak.

On the other hand, there is plenty of academic work dealing with methods of rigorous, quantitative, theory evaluation, such as Bayesian approaches. But they invariably fail to engage the real-world evidences for evolution, in any kind of comprehensive way.

For all the talk, there is too often a lack of actual practice of analyzing the evidence. Enter Rob Stadler and his thoroughly accessible approach to laying out how the evidence bears on the theory of evolution. Importantly, Stadler explains not just the evidences, but the strengths and weaknesses of those evidences.

Because Stadler’s approach is accessible, it is an excellent classroom resource. Indeed, regardless of what one believes about a scientific theory such as evolution, the learning is greatly enhanced when one is allowed to explore the evidence, think critically about it, form opinions, and defend them in discourse. Rather than rehearse the carefully selected subset of evidences routinely presented in textbooks, the science should be allowed to speak for itself.

Unfortunately those science teachers I spoke to are not the only ones uncomfortable with allowing science such freedoms. Earlier this year Stadler worked with an agency to place an advertisement for his new book with the National Association of Biology Teachers. The contract was signed, funds were paid, and beginning in May the ad was to appear on the NABT website.

But strangely enough, on May 1 the advertisement failed to appear. It was through the ad agency that Stadler learned that the NABT had no intention of running the ad. The agency informed Stadler that the NABT had “concerns” over the content of the book.

And what exactly was the problem? The Scientific Approach to Evolution allows the evidence to speak for itself. According to Stadler’s book, there could be negative evidences, as well as positive evidences.

And that was not acceptable.

The NABT was concerned that “Dr. Sadler’s attempts to address ‘strengths and weaknesses’ in order to establish a climate of controversy in the scientific community regarding evolution where there is none.”

Ironically, the NABT was also concerned that Dr. Sadler underappreciates that “theories are open to revision and refinement as new data becomes available.” That’s ironic because Sadler’s book does precisely that. Sadler appeals to new data to refine and revise our understanding of evolution.

Indeed, if Sadler’s theory-neutral appeal to the scientific evidence makes him guilty of attempting to “establish a climate of controversy” where there is none, then how can theories such as evolution ever be revised?

The fact is, the NABT’s ground rules are a form of theory protectionism. They won’t even run an advertisement for a book that dares question evolution on scientific grounds.

And rather than address the evidence that Sadler brings forth, the NABT contrives nefarious motives. According to the NABT, Sadler is guilty of dishonest pedagogy, and seeking “to establish a climate of controversy.” In the name of scientific integrity the theory must be protected. Darwin’s supporter TH Huxley called for a very different approach. We must, Darwin’s bulldog explained:

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

Huxley insisted that we cast aside our preconceived notions, and follow the evidence to wherever it leads. Otherwise “you shall learn nothing.” Unfortunately Huxley would not recognize today’s classroom. The NABT would do well to heed the warning of Darwin’s most vocal advocate.

Saturday 18 February 2023

On pondering the work of the original Technologist

Where Biology and Engineering Intersect: CELS 2023 Applications Are Open Now!

Steve Laufman

We recently announced the 2023 Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS), which will be held June 1-3, 2023, at the Tally Retreat Center at Camp Copass, in Denton, TX.

CELS 2023 brings together an interdisciplinary group of biologists, engineers, computer scientists, medical practitioners and researchers, systems modelers, process designers, and others from related disciplines in order to: (1) apply engineering principles to better understand biological systems, (2) craft a design-based theoretical framework that explains and predicts the behaviors of living systems, and (3) develop research programs that demonstrate the engineering principles at work in living systems.

A Collegial Setting

The conference will follow a workshop-like format of discussion-oriented sessions in a collegial setting, with a goal of fostering active participation and establishing concrete results and action items.

Topics include the following:

Intersection of Biology and Engineering — the impacts of engineering thinking in the study of biology

Architecture of Living Systems — design principles and design patterns in living systems

Theory of Biological Design — theoretical foundations for a new design-based framework for living systems

Adaptation — mechanisms and processes used by living systems to adapt to changing circumstances and environments

Coherence — organization of capabilities and processes to achieve and sustain life

Optimization — mechanisms and processes for optimizing resource usage

Interdependency and Causal Circularity — how complex and coherent systems are initialized and jumpstarted

Resilience — failure prevention and anti-fragility in living systems

Process Coordination — mechanisms for orchestrating biological processes

Applications and Models — formal methods for modeling and understanding living systems

Not Merely for Listening

This is not a conference for listening to thought leaders in the intelligent design community (though many will be there), but an opportunity to jump in and become part of the conversation — working together to develop a new theoretical framework for how living systems work, as well as their adaptive capabilities and limits to change over time. We expect many who have long stayed on the sidelines will find themselves uniquely positioned to contribute.

We hope to be able to offer a limited number of scholarships to upper class and graduate students, or to post-docs in early career positions.

Space is limited in order to promote meaningful discussion and concrete results, so if you’d like to join us for this unique opportunity, we encourage you to complete the application process as soon as possible.

For more information, and to apply, go here. We look forward to seeing you at CELS 2023!

Carnivorous plants a trap for Darwinism?

Venus Flytrap Takes a Bite Out of Darwinism

Evolution News

On a classic episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid reads from Marcos Eberlin’s fascinating book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. In this excerpt, the distinguished Brazilian scientist highlights the challenge the Venus flytrap poses for evolutionary theory. Dr. Eberlin describes the problem: The Venus flytrap, like all carnivorous plants, has no use for its insect-trapping function unless it also has an insect-digesting function. And vice versa. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection selects for current function, not potential future function. Unlike a designing intelligence, natural selection can’t look into the future and plan in that way. So for natural selection to have selected these twin systems, they would somehow have had to evolve together. But could they really evolve together? How, when there would be no functional advantage along much of the evolutionary pathway to the sophisticated finished systems? Finally, how did this “evolutionary miracle” also happen in four other carnivorous plant genera, supposed cases of “convergent evolution”? Download the podcast or listen to it here. And see a video of the Venus flytrap in action below, as mentioned in the podcast:

Thursday 16 February 2023

Confessions of an ex-trinitarian?

The world war beneath our feet

On the machine code of life

Wednesday 15 February 2023

Even reductive materialists marvel.

Darwinism: trolled by lunatics?

Ruminants, Moon Watchers Bedevil Darwin

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future host Andrew McDiarmid brings listeners a couple of fascinating recent articles from Evolution News by David Coppedge. The first is “Animals Tune Behavior by Lunar Cycle; but How?” The second article is “Darwin, We Have a Problem: Horse Teeth Are Not Less Evolved.” In the first, some ingenious molecular engineering crops up in widely divergent creatures, giving them some impressive abilities to read lunar cycles. The evolutionists’ go-to explanation is “convergent evolution,” an incantation that fails to explain how something like this could have evolved even once, much less multiple separate times. And in the second, a much-beloved story of ruminant tooth evolution gets a kick in the teeth from a series of uncooperative facts, not least of which are the teeth of a famous non-ruminant, the horse. Download the podcast or listen to it Here

Tuesday 14 February 2023

Why no rise of the machines

Darwinism's quest for a simple beginning remains a dead end.

The fossil record continues to "astonish" Darwinists.

New Scientist: Ichthyosaurs Evolved “Astonishingly Rapidly”

Casey Luskin

In December, Günter Bechly commented on the non-neo-Darwinian origins of ichthyosaurs (large marine reptiles that lived in the Mesozoic), writing:

A new study that described Sclerocormus as the sister genus to Cartorhynchus found “that ichthyosauriforms evolved rapidly within the first one million years of their evolution” (Jiang et al. 2016). This means that the fish-like habitus of ichthyosaurs originated from terrestrial quadrupedal ancestors within a quarter of the lifespan of a single large vertebrate species. Not exactly gradual in my view! Indeed, a friend of mine, who is one of the leading experts on ichthyosaurs and not a theist, privately and confidentially told me that he came to doubt neo-Darwinism as an adequate explanation for this very reason.

A Real Whopper”

Now, an article in New Scientist has confirmed these problems, with a story titled “Largest ever animal may have been Triassic ichthyosaur super-predator.” According to the subhead, “New fossil discoveries show predatory marine reptiles from 200 million years ago may have been bigger than today’s blue whales — and that they evolved astonishingly rapidly.”

Then, in 2021, Sander and his colleagues reported a real whopper. They described a 2-metre-long ichthyosaur skull, plus some other bones, found at a site called Fossil Hill in Nevada. The animal, which they named Cymbospondylus youngorum, was probably 17.5 metres long. It lived 246 million years ago, a mere 6 million years after the Permian-Triassic extinction, and only 2 million years after the proto-ichthyosaurs. The implication was clear: once they had taken to the water, some ichthyosaurs got very big, very fast.

At first glance this appears to be a shockingly fast pulse of evolution. For comparison, the whales seem to have taken tens of millions of years to evolve from land-dwelling animals to ocean giants.

Other sources have affirmed the rapid evolution of ichthyosaurs. A 2021 paper in Science cited “rapid evolution of body size in ichthyosaurs” and “fast increases in disparity measures in early ichthyosaurs” which “reflect rapid lineage diversification and dietary specialization.”

Of course, the claim above about whales taking “tens of millions of years to evolve” is not correct, as fully aquatic whales also are said to have evolved incredibly rapidly from land mammals in perhaps just a few million years, not “tens of millions.” An article at Phys.org also published last year stated:

Dr. Coombs comments “Within eight million years, the ancestors of whales go from being fully terrestrial, such as the four-legged, furry Pakicetus which lived around the edge of the Tethys Sea, to fully aquatic.

"This is super quick in evolutionary terms.”

That article was covering a 2022 paper in Current Biology, “The tempo of cetacean cranial evolution,” which found that “Cetacean diversity was obtained through three key periods of rapid evolution” where the “Highest evolutionary rates are seen during the initial evolution of stem whales” — the period mentioned above — and “fossils demonstrate rapid transitions into novel morphospace.” The paper continues:

The evolution of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) involves one of the most extreme transitions of any vertebrate lineage. This shift occurred over an evolutionarily short 8–12 million years and is captured by an exceptional fossil record beginning in the early Eocene (~53 Ma) that documents the reorganization of the cetacean body into that of a fully aquatic organism. Some of the most extreme anatomical changes in this transition occurred in the skull, allowing whales to feed, breathe, and navigate in their new aquatic environments

New Niches, Open for Business

In any case, the New Scientist article goes on to propose that the giant ichthyosaurs’ rapid evolution is because niches opened up after the Permian-Triassic extinction that allowed them to evolve rapidly:

But given that the ichthyosaurs were living immediately after a period of profound ecological upheaval, perhaps we shouldn’t be too shocked. “I suspect one of the key reasons for [their rapid evolution into giants] is simply because nobody else was doing that,” says Lomax. It may be that such a rapid shift was possible because the Permian-Triassic mass extinction reduced diversity in the oceans, creating an opportunity for gigantic animals to evolve, which the ichthyosaurs seized.

This concept that adaptive radiations occur after mass extinction when niches are empty and available to be filled is an old idea. A 2022 paper in Frontiers in Earth Science invoked or hinted at adaptive radiation to explain the rapid appearance of diversity in various vertebrate groups after the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction:

Among vertebrates in particular, the nature of their [post-extinction] recovery also seems to mark something unusual. Certain clades such as fishes and tetrapods showed very rapid diversifications in the sea. … Marine predatory vertebrates show spectacular and rapid diversifications in the Early and Middle Triassic, and new discoveries from China have confirmed their early start in the Triassic, but not in the Late Permian. … The recent analysis of a giant ichthyosaur, Cymbospondylus youngorum, from the Anisian-aged Fossil Hill Member of the Favret Formation in Nevada, gives impressive evidence of the rapid diversification of these marine reptiles. This animal is estimated as 17.6 m long and weighing 45 tons, and the authors carry out detailed macroevolutionary analysis which shows enormously rapid achievement of huge diversity and great body size by ichthyosaurs in the Olenekian and Anisian, a prime example of an ‘early burst’ radiation.

But this explanation lacks mechanisms and never explores how biological information can arise so quickly. The raw data remains in direct conflict with Darwinian gradualism — meaning this is a case of evolutionary biology trying to explain away the data that otherwise was not directly expected under their model.

Monday 13 February 2023

The sexual counter revolution?

Rise of the "eternal" Metropolis

On the Nexus of science and religion.

New Open-Access Book from South Africa Explores Intelligent Design and Science-Faith Issues

Casey Luskin

The intelligent design (ID) community continues to forge stronger ties with scientists and scholars around the world. The latest example is a newly published book from Aosis, a South African academic publisher, titled Science and Faith in Dialogue. This peer-reviewed book was released at the very end of 2022, and it is open access and can be downloaded for free Here.

An All-Star Lineup

The lead editor of Science and Faith in Dialogue, Frederik van Niekerk, is Professor on the Nuclear Engineering staff at Northwest University of Potchefstroom in South Africa. In addition to Professor van Niekerk’s chapter, the volume includes contributions from some well-known names from the academic conversation over intelligent design, including (in the order in which they appear in the table of contents):

Stephen C. Meyer: “Qualified agreement: How scientific discoveries support theistic belief”

Hugh Ross: “Cosmological fine-tuning:

Guillermo Gonzalez: “Local fine-tuning and habitable zones”

Fazale R. Rana: “Materialistic and theistic perspectives on the origin of life”

James M. Tour: “Are present proposals on chemical evolutionary mechanisms accurately pointing toward first life?”

Brian Miller: “Engineering principles better explain biological systems than evolutionary theory”

Marcos Eberlin: “The evidence of foresight in nature”

Casey Luskin: “Evolutionary models of palaeoanthropology, genetics, and psychology fail to account for human origins: a review”

Michael N. Keas: “Rumours of war and evidence for peace between science and Christianity”

We’ll be featuring excerpts here in the future, but for now I’d like to highlight some special features of chapters in the book.

“Return of the God Hypothesis”

Steve Meyer’s chapter reprises his “Return of the God Hypothesis” argument and explains why theism is the best explanation on a philosophical level for the evidence from the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and biological complexity.

Guillermo Gonzalez explores many features of our galaxy, solar system, and planet that make it specially suited for life — looking at the Cosmic Habitable Zone, Galactic Habitable Zone, and Cosmic Habitable Age all suggest that “the properties of our particular universe were designed and selected for us.”

Jim Tour explores various obstacles to a chemical origin of life, including the need to carefully guide origin-of-life experiments, and the overwhelming complexity of producing cellular features by blind chemistry. He also reflects on his own research designing synthetic nano-vehicles, concluding that if it’s so hard for skilled chemists to produce molecular machines, can dumb natural processes do the same?

Brian Miller provides an exciting chapter which outlines an emerging new paradigm of doing biology through the lens of engineering. He sees new evolutionary concepts like natural genetic engineering or phenotypic plasticity as mechanisms that are designed to allow organisms to evolve within limits. And evolution can’t be random, as he cites challenges to neo-Darwinism from the fossil record, phylogenetic tree construction, and developmental biology.

“Foresight” in Nature

Marcos Eberlin, a chemist who is a member of the Brazilian National Academy of Sciences, finds evidence of “foresight” and planning required to produce many biological features, like the cell membrane, DNA and the genetic code, and bird navigation. Even water, he argues, shows evidence of foresight so life can exist.

Mike Keas debunks various myths about the historical relationship between faith and science, such as the idea that Christianity produced the “dark ages,” that a big universe is incompatible with theism, or that the church has historically persecuted scientists.

As for my chapter, you’ll just have to wait — we’ll talk about it more soon here at Evolution News!

The ongoing search for the master race.

Fidel Castro: a brief history.

Fidel Castro

political leader of Cuba

Britannica

Fidel Castro, in full Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, (born August 13, 1926, near Birán, Cuba—died November 25, 2016, Cuba), political leader of Cuba (1959–2008) who transformed his country into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Castro became a symbol of communist revolution in Latin America. He held the title of premier until 1976 and then began a long tenure as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers. He handed over provisional power in July 2006 because of health problems and formally relinquished the presidency in February 2008.

Castro was born in southeastern Cuba. His father, Ángel Castro y Argiz, an immigrant from Spain, was a fairly prosperous sugarcane farmer in a locality that had long been dominated by estates of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company. While married to his first wife, Ángel Castro began an affair with one of his servants, Lina Ruz González, whom he later also married. Together they had seven children; Fidel was one of them, and Raúl, who later became his brother’s chief associate in Cuban affairs, was another.

Fidel Castro attended Roman Catholic boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and then the Catholic high school Belén in Havana, where he proved an accomplished athlete. He was named Havana’s outstanding schoolboy sportsman in 1943–44, and he excelled in track and field (in the high jump and middle-distance running), baseball, basketball, and table tennis. In 1945 he entered the School of Law of the University of Havana, where organized violent gangs sought to advance a mixture of romantic goals, political aims, and personal careers. Castro’s main activity at the university was politics, and in 1947 he joined an abortive attempt by Dominican exiles and Cubans to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow Gen. Rafael Trujillo. He then took part in urban riots that broke out in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 1948.

After his graduation in 1950, Castro began to practice law and became a member of the reformist Cuban People’s Party (called Ortodoxos). He became their candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives from a Havana district in the elections scheduled for June 1952. In March of that year, however, the former Cuban president, Gen. Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the government of Pres. Carlos Prío Socarrás and canceled the elections.

After legal means failed to dislodge Batista’s new dictatorship, Castro began to organize a rebel force for the task in 1953. On July 26, 1953, he led about 160 men in a suicidal attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba in hopes of sparking a popular uprising. Most of the men were killed, and Castro himself was arrested. After a trial in which he conducted an impassioned defense, he was sentenced by the government to 15 years’ imprisonment. He and his brother Raúl were released in a political amnesty in 1955, and they went to Mexico to continue their campaign against the Batista regime. There Fidel Castro organized Cuban exiles into a revolutionary group called the 26th of July Movement.

On December 2, 1956, Castro and an armed expedition of 81 men landed on the eastern coast of Cuba from the yacht Granma. All of them were killed or captured except Fidel and Raúl Castro, Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara, and nine others, who retreated into the Sierra Maestra to wage guerrilla warfare against the Batista forces. With the help of growing numbers of revolutionary volunteers throughout the island, Fidel Castro’s forces won a string of victories over the Batista government’s demoralized and poorly led armed forces. Castro’s propaganda efforts proved particularly effective, and as internal political support waned and military defeats multiplied, Batista fled the country on January 1, 1959. Castro’s force of 800 guerrillas had defeated the Cuban government’s 30,000-man professional army.

As the undisputed revolutionary leader, Castro became commander in chief of the armed forces in Cuba’s new provisional government, which had Manuel Urrutia, a moderate liberal, as its president. In February 1959 Castro became premier and thus head of the government. By the time Urrutia was forced to resign in July 1959, Castro had taken effective political power into his own hands.

Castro had come to power with the support of most Cuban city dwellers on the basis of his promises to restore the 1940 constitution, create an honest administration, reinstate full civil and political liberties, and undertake moderate reforms. But once established as Cuba’s leader he began to pursue more radical policies: Cuba’s private commerce and industry were nationalized; sweeping land reforms were instituted; and American businesses and agricultural estates were expropriated. The United States was alienated by these policies and offended by Castro’s fiery new anti-American rhetoric. His trade agreement with the Soviet Union in February 1960 further deepened American distrust. In 1960 most economic ties between Cuba and the United States were severed, and the United States broke diplomatic relations with the island country in January 1961. In April of that year the U.S. government secretly equipped thousands of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro’s government; their landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, however, was crushed by Castro’s armed forces.

Cuba also began acquiring weapons from the Soviet Union, which soon became the country’s chief supporter and trade partner. In 1962 the Soviet Union secretly stationed ballistic missiles in Cuba that could deliver nuclear warheads to American cities, and in the ensuing confrontation with the United States, the world came close to a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its nuclear weapons from Cuba in exchange for a pledge that the United States would withdraw the nuclear-armed missiles it had stationed in Turkey and no longer seek to overthrow Castro’s regime.

Fidel Castro

In the meantime Castro created a one-party government to exercise dictatorial control over all aspects of Cuba’s political, economic, and cultural life. All political dissent and opposition were ruthlessly suppressed. Many members of the Cuban upper and middle classes felt betrayed by these measures and chose to immigrate to the United States. At the same time, Castro vastly expanded the country’s social services, extending them to all classes of society on an equal basis. Educational and health services were made available to Cubans free of charge, and every citizen was guaranteed employment. The Cuban economy, however, failed to achieve significant growth or to reduce its dependence on the country’s chief export, cane sugar. Economic decision-making power was concentrated in a centralized bureaucracy headed by Castro, who proved to be an inept economic manager. With inefficient industries and a stagnant agriculture, Cuba became increasingly dependent on favourable Soviet trade policies to maintain its modest standard of living in the face of the United States’ continuing trade embargo.

Castro remained premier until 1976, when a new constitution created a National Assembly and Castro became president of that body’s State Council. He retained the posts of commander in chief of the armed forces and secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba—the only legal political party—and he continued to exercise unquestioned and total control over the government. Castro’s brother Raúl, minister of the armed forces, ranked second to him in all government and party posts.

Fidel Castro’s early attempts to foment Marxist revolutions elsewhere in Latin America foundered, but Cuban troops played an important role in various conflicts in other less-developed countries, especially in Africa. It was long held that Cuban forces were acting as surrogates for the Soviet Union in these Cold War conflicts. However, scholarship that emerged in the early 21st century made clear that Cuba had acted at its own behest in Africa as Castro sought to spread the Cuban Revolution internationally and to bolster his standing among nonaligned countries and in the less-developed world. From 1975 to 1989, Cuban expeditionary forces fought in the Angolan civil war on the side of the communistic Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. In 1978 Cuban troops assisted Ethiopia in repelling an invasion by Somalia. By the 1980s Castro had emerged as one of the leaders of nonaligned countries, despite his ties to the Soviet Union. He continued to signify his willingness to renew diplomatic relations with the United States, provided that it end its trade embargo against Cuba. In 1980 Castro released a flood of immigrants to the United States when he opened the port of Mariel for five months. The 125,000 immigrants, including some criminals, strained the capacity of U.S. immigration and resettlement facilities.

In the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev began to undertake democratic reforms and eastern European countries were allowed to slip out of the Soviet orbit, Castro retained a hard-line stance, espousing the discipline of communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took him by surprise and meant the end of generous Soviet subsidies to Cuba. Castro countered the resulting economic decline and shortages of consumer goods by allowing some economic liberalization and free-market activities while retaining tight controls over the country’s political life.

In late 1993 Castro’s daughter sought asylum in the United States, where she openly criticized her father’s rule. The following year, economic and social unrest led to antigovernment demonstrations, the size of which had not been seen in Cuba in some 35 years. Shortly thereafter Castro lifted restrictions on those wanting to leave the country, and thousands headed for the United States in the largest exodus since the 1980 Mariel “freedom flotilla.” In 1998 Castro allowed Pope John Paul II to visit Cuba for the first time.

In 2003 the National Assembly confirmed Castro as president for another five-year term. During that year the Cuban government arrested dozens of independent journalists and activists in a renewed government crackdown on dissidents, and some 75 activists were convicted for conspiring with the United States to subvert the revolution. The following year Castro strengthened his alliance with Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez by helping him bring to fruition the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas [ALBA]; Alternativa later changed to Alianza [“Alliance”]), a socialist initiative to promote regional commerce, through which Cuba provided health care professionals to Venezuela in exchange for discounted oil.

On July 31, 2006, Fidel Castro passed power on a provisional basis to his brother Raúl in order to recover from surgery for a serious intestinal illness. It was the first time since the 1959 revolution that he ceded control. In February 2008, just days before the National Assembly was to vote for the country’s leader, Fidel Castro (who had not appeared in public for 19 months) officially declared that he would not accept another term as president. His announcement that he was stepping down was made through a letter that was addressed to the country and posted on the Web site of the official Communist Party newspaper, Granma. In part it read, “I do not bid you farewell. My only wish is to fight as a soldier of ideas.”

In the succeeding months, official photos were released of Fidel Castro in private meetings, and in July 2010 he made a public visit to the National Centre for Scientific Research in Havana. In September, on the eve of the release of the first volume of his memoirs, The Strategic Victory, he remarked to a reporter from the United States that “the Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” Many took his comment as an admission of the failure of communism. However, Fidel Castro was quick to qualify his remarks in a speech that followed a few days later. Most analysts saw his remarks as offering support for Raúl’s introduction of economic reforms that included a massive layoff of government employees as well as increased toleration of private enterprise. In 2011 Fidel stepped down as secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba and was succeeded by Raúl.

In March 2016 Fidel, who seldom had been seen in public in recent years, made a high-profile appearance in print when he responded to U.S. Pres. Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba with a 1,600-word letter in Granma. In the letter, titled “Brother Obama,” he recapped the aggressive U.S. policy toward Cuba during the Cold War and castigated Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to visit the island in nearly 80 years, for not acknowledging the accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution, including its efforts to eradicate racism. Addressing the warming Cuba-U.S. relations, Castro wrote, “Nobody should be under the illusion that the people of this dignified and selfless country will renounce the glory, the rights, or the spiritual wealth they have gained with the development of education, science and culture.” In April a frail soon-to-be-90-year-old Castro told the Communist Party Congress that he would be dying soon, and he implored party members to work to fulfill his communist vision for Cuba.

The God shared by irrational "theist " and "rational" atheists?

Sabine Hossenfelder Promotes Determinism

Cornelius G Hunter

We’ve Learned Nothing Since Laplace

Yesterday theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder became the latest in a long line of smart people to make the absurd claim of determinism (see Blog or Video), and that therefore there is no such thing as free will. This silliness traces at least as far back as Laplace and is based on the idea that any system evolves from time point 1 to time point 2 according to the laws of nature. As Hossenfelder puts it:

These laws have the common property that if you have an initial condition at one moment in time, for example the exact details of the particles in your brain and all your brain’s inputs, then you can calculate what happens at any other moment in time from those initial conditions. This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.

The first problem with Hossenfelder’s sophism is that it is non empirical. We experience free will continually in our personal experience. Hossenfelder’s claim amounts to a denial of untold mountains of evidence. Hossenfelder’s predictable solution is anti-realism. The problem, according to determinists such as Hossenfelder, is that our experience is uniformly false. We may think we have free will, but that is nothing more than an illusion.

But why is that true? Hossenfelder makes the Humean appeal to the laws of nature. They show how systems evolve deterministically, so therefore the data from our personal experience must be false. Hossenfelder fails to see the unjustified leap she has made. She has declared the laws of nature to be authoritative without justification.

Hossenfelder has identified a conflict: our experience says one thing, and the laws of nature say the opposite. Something must give, and Hossenfelder unilaterally and without justification concludes that the laws of nature win out. The fallacy is reminiscent of Hume’s argument against miracles that John Earman demolished twenty years ago.

As if sensing a problem Hossenfelder attempts to justify her leap. She explains that “These deterministic laws of nature apply to you and your brain because you are made of particles,” and that “we know that brains are made of particles.” Furthermore, “the laws of nature that we know describe humans on the fundamental level.” But rather than saving the theory, Hossenfelder is merely digging deeper into the fallacy, as she simply begs the question. These are all non-empirical truth claims that are beholden to the assumption of determinism. She simply asserts these claims, but why should we believe any of them are true?

Yet Hossenfelder is supremely confident in her finding. Drop this free will nonsense, she warns, or “you will never understand how the universe really works.” This is the classic intellectual necessity argument, so common in the evolution literature. In this case it is determinism that is required for scientific progress and truth.

This brings us to the second problem with Hossenfelder’s determinism, which is her many truth claims. As she explains above, “the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang.” But if that is true then Hossenfelder cannot know anything. Everything she has typed out was, well, pre-determined by some initial conditions and some blind natural laws.

Why should Hossenfelder think for a moment that anything that occurs to her has any correspondence to truth? Above she made the classic intellectual necessity argument but, in fact, it is precisely the opposite. Her determinism undercuts her many truth claims, and knowledge in general.

There would be no reason to think anything we ever generate has any particular truth value. For instance, I could decide to type 2+2=5. In fact, there I did it. But of course, Hossenfelder would say that sentence was all preordained. She also would say it is not true. So certainly preordained sentences are not necessarily true. In fact, for Hossenfelder our notions, thoughts, commitments, and conclusions are merely a consequence of the arrangement of particles in our heads. Why should we think they would be true, if there even is such a thing?

Hossenfelder’s conclusion, that “the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out” is fitting. For it is the ultimate in meaningless, trivialization of the profound. She is mired in the absurd. Hossenfelder is the best and the brightest—a cutting edge theoretical physicist. The wisest that the world has to offer and look where she has landed. As Paul informed the Corinthians in the introduction of his first letter to them, God made foolish the wisdom of this world.

Sunday 12 February 2023

Who will guard the guards?

Saturday 11 February 2023

Is the first cause argument still a thing?

Friday 10 February 2023

Coleman Hughes on race and guilt etc.

File under "well said." XC

"This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes; but do not let us shut our eyes to it."

Joseph Schumpeter.

Joseph Schumpeter: a brief history.

Joseph Schumpeter

Joseph Schumpeter, also called Joseph A. Schumpeter, in full Joseph Alois Schumpeter, (born February 8, 1883, Triesch, Moravia [now Třešť, Czech Republic]—died January 8, 1950, Taconic, Connecticut, U.S.), Moravian-born American economist and sociologist known for his theories of capitalist development and business cycles.

Schumpeter was educated in Vienna and taught at the universities of Czernowitz, Graz, and Bonn before joining the faculty of Harvard University (1932–50). In 1919 he served briefly as minister of finance in the Austrian government. His influence in the field of economic theory was powerful. In his widely read Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), he argued that capitalism would eventually perish of its own success, giving way to some form of public control or socialism. His History of Economic Analysis (1954; reprinted 1966) is an exhaustive study of the development of analytic methods in economics. His other books include Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (1911; The Theory of Economic Development) and Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, 2 vol. (1939; rev. ed. 1964).

Born: February 8, 1883 Moravia

Died: January 8, 1950 (aged 66) Connecticut

Notable Works: “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” “History of Economic Analysis”

Subjects Of Study: business cycle capitalism

Fossil Friday: The Abrupt Origins of Lagomorphs and Rodents

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features the skull of the fossil rabbit Palaeolagus haydeni from the Oligocene of Nebraska, as we look today into the origins of two orders of placental mammals: the Lagomorpha and Rodentia, which together form the clade Glires within the supergroup (cohort) of Euarchontoglires. Lagomorpha includes the 110 living species of rabbits, hares, and pikas, while rodents with 40 percent (2.600 species) of all living mammal species represent the most diverse mammalian order (Kay & Hoekstra 2008). Rodents, for example, include squirrels, beavers, hamsters, mice, and rats, as well as guinea pigs, gundis, and porcupines.

In my article last week I listed numerous studies that supported Euarchontoglires, of which the vast majority also supported the monophyly of Glires (e.g., Meng & Wyss 2005, Springer et al. 2007b, and most recently Gupta & Suggett 2022), while there were only few dissenters (e.g., Arnason et al. 2002). The molecular studies by Li et al. (1990), Graur et al. (1996), and Misawa & Janke (2003) suggested that Lagomorpha is more closely related to primates than to rodents, but these views were unanimously rejected by later studies (see Honeycutt & Adkins 1993, Douzery & Huchon 2004, Kjer & Honeycutt 2007, and Zhou et al. 2015). This is hardly surprising as rodents and lagomorphs were already classified in a common order Glires by Carl von Linné in the first edition of his famous Systema Naturae (Linnaei 1735), which basically represents the very beginning of the scientific classification of animals and predates any kind of evolutionary thinking. It was Gidley (1912) who separated these two mammalian groups in the distinct orders Lagomorpha and Rodentia and did not consider them as closely related. This view was endorsed in a famous article titled “What, if Anything, Is a Rabbit?” by Wood (1957), and it was also endorsed by Van Valen (1964) and McKenna (1975). Even though for a while “the monophyly of Glires has been one of the most controversial issues in higherlevel mammalian systematics” (Meng et al. 2003), subsequent works increasingly supported the Glires concept (e.g., Simpson 1945), so that Douzery & Huchon (2004) responded to Wood’s classical question with an article titled “Rabbits, if Anything, Are Likely Glires.” Cox & Hautier (2015) therefore concluded in the foreword to their monograph on the evolution of rodents that “at present, the Glires concept is stronger than ever.”

A Cretaceous Origin?

Many molecular clock studies proposed a Cretaceous origin of Glires and its two main branches (e.g., Li et al. 1990, Kumar & Hedges 1998, Springer et al. 2003, Janečka et al. 2007, Kay & Hoekstra 2008, Meredith et al. 2011, Suárez et al. 2011, Foley et al. 2016). Archibald et al. (2001) also argued for a Cretaceous origin of Glires based on fossil data, but these were later all refuted as not representing eutherian mammals at all (Wible et al. 2005, 2007, Halliday et al. 2015, Velazco et al. 2022). Other studies rather supported an early Paleogene origin of Glires and its divergence into the lagomorph and rodent lineages (Huchon et al. 2002, Douzery et al. 2003, Meng et al. 2003, Meng 2004, Asher et al. 2005, AMNH 2006, Horner et al. 2007, Wu et al. 2012, O’Leary et al. 2013, Phillips & Fruciano 2018, Upham et al. 2019: fig. 4), to make the theory better fit with the actual fossil record. Meng et al. (2003) revealingly remarked:

Apparently, the molecular clock hypothesis tends to push rodent divergences at various levels of the group deeper into history than what the fossil record indicates. The discrepancy is enormous.

Well, such enormous discrepancies between theoretical predictions and empirical data should give reason to pause and to question the adequacy of the theory.

So let’s have a look at the actual fossil record of Glires. Here is an up-to-date classification of all relevant higher taxa of gliriform mammals with their stratigraphic ranges and earliest fossil representatives (extinct groups are marked with +; age ranges are derived from PaleoDB):

Rodentiamorpha sensu Wyss & Meng 1996)

+Sinomylus zhaii (58.7-55.8 mya)

+Eurymyloidea (= “Mixodontia” partim) (61.7-48.6 mya)

+Eurymylidae (61.7-48.6 mya)

+Heomys orientalis (61.7-58.7 mya)

+Eomylus (55.8-48.6 mya)

+Decipomyidae (55.8-48.6 mya)

+Rhombomylidae (58.7-55.8 mya)

Rodentiaformes (sensu Wyss & Meng 1996)

+Alagomyidae (55.8-48.6 mya)

Rodentia

+Ischyromyidae (58.7-30.8 mya)

+Acritoparamys atavus (56.8-55.8 mya)

+Asiaparamys shevyrevae (58.7-55.8 mya)

+Paramys adamus (56.8-55.8 mya)

+Franimys (55.8-50.3 mya)

PaleoDB also lists these invalid families among Glires:

+Aspalacidae (48.6-40.4 mya) (belongs to the living rodent family Muridae according to McKenna & Bell 1997)

Ierboidae (2.588-0 mya) (an obsolete name for a group of living rodents)

Lagostomyidae (a synonym for the living rodent family Chinchillidae)

Ochtodontidae (an incorrect spelling of the living rodent family Octodontidae)

Concerning these datings it must be mentioned that there is some uncertainty concerning the geological layers in China that yielded some of the oldest fossils like Heomys and Mimotona (Li 1977). Benton et al. (2015) commented as follows:

The Wanghudun Formation, Qianshan Basin, China is of debated age. First, it was interpreted as belonging to the Paleocene Shanghuan Asian Land Mammal Age (Dashzeveg and Russell, 1988; Li and Ting, 1993[sic]). However, Missiaen (2011) suggests that the Wanghudun Formation may be closer to the Nongshanian ALMA. We use this younger estimate for age of the Wanghudun Formation for two reasons: it is the more current interpretation, and it is younger, and so more conservative. The marine correlate of the Nongshanian ALMA is the Thanetian, with a minimum bound of 56 Ma ± 0.0 Myr = 56 Ma (Gradstein et al., 2012).

Wang et al. (2016) provided a synopsis of the Paleocene stratigraphy of the region. They agreed that the Wanghudun Formation correlates with the Nongshanian ALMA, which they date to a Middle Paleocene age correlative to a middle Tiffanian Ti1-4a NALMA (North American Land Mammal Age). According to Secord (2008) the Ti1-T4a interval dates to 61.57-58.85 mya, which agrees with the 61 mya estimate for Mimotona by López-Torres et al. (2020).

Glires

The most obvious synapomorphic characteristic of Glires is a pair of enlarged ever-growing incisors (Martin 1999, Fostowicz-Frelik 2017). The first Glires appeared in the Early Paleocene of East Asia, close to the K/Pg boundary, shortly followed by the appearance of mimotonids and eurymyloids as first representatives of the lagomorph and rodent lineages respectively (Li & Ting 1985, 1993, Novacek 1986, Wyss & Meng 1996, Van Valen 2002, Meng & Wyss 2005, Janis et al. 2008, Lacher et al. 2016, Fostowicz-Frelik 2020, 2022).

Previously, mimotonids, and eurymyloids where often together classified in a group called Mixodontia (Dashzeveg & Russell 1988, Averianov 1994, Lopatin 2003, Lopez-Martinez 2008), but this group was mostly abandoned as non-monophyletic when cladistic classification became mainstream consensus, or it was redefined to only include the rodent-related eurymylids (Li & Yan 1979, Dashzeveg et al. 1998) as was originally proposed by Sych (1971) when he named Mixodontia.

Numerous earlier studies placed the African elephant shrews (Macroscelidea) with rodents and/or lagomorphs as well as the fossil anagalids in a clade called Anagalida (McKenna 1975, Szalay 1977, Novacek 1986, 1992, Novacek & Wyss 1986, McKenna & Bell 1997, Meng & Wyss 2001, and Rose 2006). This was challenged by the results of modern molecular systematics and phylogenomics in the late 1990s, when the order Macroscelidea was transferred to a different supergroup called Afrotheria, which became the general consensus among the experts.

Nevertheless, the family Anagalidae, which comprises rabbit-like burrowing mammals known from Paleogene deposits of China and Mongolia (López-Torres & Fostowicz-Frelik 2018), are still considered as stem group representatives of Glires (Van Valen 2002, Meng et al. 2003, Meng 2004, Rose 2006, Janis et al. 2008; but see Fostowicz-Frelik 2017 and López-Torres & Fostowicz-Frelik 2018). Originally, Anagalidae was described and classified by Simpson (1931) among insectivores as relative of treeshrews and elephant shrews, which was still endorsed by Van Valen (1967). According to Nessov et al. (1998) the Anagalida also include Wania chowi from the earliest Paleocene of Anhui in China (Wang 1995), which dates right after the Chicxulub impact that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and thus could represent the oldest fossil record of gliriforms. Unfortunately, this attribution was never supported by a proper phylogenetic study and dates to a time when Anagalida was used in an obsolete way for a non-monophyletic group. Therefore, Wang et al. (1998, 2016) considered the ordinal affinity of Wania as indeterminate, so that we cannot use this taxon as a safe fossil dating for the age of Glires.

There are two other groups of Paleogene small insectivorous mammals that may belong to the stem group of Glires: One is the enigmatic order Apatotheria, which only includes the family Apatemyidae from the Paleocene-Oligocene of North America and Eurasia. Of this family we not only know the usual teeth and skull fragments but even completely preserved skeletons of Heterohyus from the famous Eocene Messel locality in Germany (Koenigswald 1987). They are characterized by a highly specialized dentition with a single hypertrophied lower incisor, which has been interpreted by Koenigswald (1987) as a adaptation similar to the niche of woodpeckers or the Malagasy Aye-aye lemur. Apatotherians disappeared with a mass extinction event at the Eocene-Oligocene transition (contra Kemp 2005) that is known under the French term “Grande Coupure” and was caused by an abrupt global cooling. In spite of the availability of complete skeletons there has been little agreement on apatemyid relationship (Gingerich & Rose 1982) and they have been mostly associated with primates or with insectivores, but also with rodents and even the extinct carnivore order Cimolesta (Rose 2006). However, the main modern study (Silcox et al. 2010) on the relationship of this group instead found reasonable support for a basal position in Euarchontoglires and weak support for a sister-group relationship with Glires. On the other hand, the cladistic study by Halliday et al. (2015) placed apatemyids as sister group to bats, thus in a different supergroup (Laurasiatheria).

The second group of possible stem Glires is another enigmatic family called Arctostylopidae from the Late Paleocene and Early Eocene of East Asia and North America, which is mainly known from their teeth. According to Halliday et al. (2015) “the relationships of Arctostylopidae are extremely poorly understood (Zack, 2004), but this group has been thought to be related to Glires, Notoungulata, or Artiodactyla”. Cifelli et al. (1989) considered them as possible relatives of lagomorphs. Rose (2006) still endorsed the notungulate affinity, but Missiaen et al. (2006, 2012) showed that similarities with South American notungulates arose independently and instead found synapomorphies with gliriforms. They suggested that arctostylopids may be most closely related to the poorly known early Paleocene family Astigalidae, which was sometimes attributed to Anagalida. Halliday likewise found some support for a relationship with Glires.

Finally, we have to briefly discuss an extinct family called Zalambdalestidae (94.3-61.7 mya), which lived in the Late Cretaceous and Early Paleocene of Asia and had a locomotion similar to modern lagomorphs but teeth like insectivores. They have been associated with Glires, Anagalida, or at least Euarchontoglires by several studies (e.g., Van Valen 1964, Szalay & McKenna 1971, McKenna 1975, 1994, Szalay 1977, Novacek & Wyss 1986, McKenna & Bell 1997, Dashzeveg et al. 1998, Archibald et al. 2001, Meng & Wyss 2001, Fostowicz-Frelik & Kielan-Jaworowska 2002, Averianov & Archibald 2005, Kemp 2005, Janis et al. 2008, Fostowicz-Frelik 2016, 2017, López-Torres & Fostowicz-Frelik 2018). However, Meng (2004)found neither evidence for a relationship of zalambdalestids and Glires, nor for any close relatives of Glires in the Cretaceous. Rose (2006) tentatively still classified Zalambdalestidae in Anagalida with Glires, but mentioned that the phylogenetic position is uncertain and that they could rather be basal eutherians. More recent studies indeed placed Zalambdalestidaeoutside of crown group Eutheria (Wible et al. 2005, 2007, Halliday 2015, Halliday et al. 2015, Velazco et al. 2022), thus not even as genuine placental mammals. The main evidence for such a basal position is the presence of an epipubic bone, which is retained in monotremes and marsupials but reduced in all living placental mammals. Even Van Valen (2002) now doubted his earlier belief that zalambdalestids and Glires are related.

Lagomorphs

The total group that includes crown group Lagomorpha and their stem group like Mimotonidae (Li & Ting 1985, 1993, Averianov 1994, Wyss & Meng 1996, Van Valen 2002, Rose 2006, Dawson 2008) has been named Duplicidentata after the retained possession of two pairs of upper incisor teeth. Lagomorphs originated in the Paleocene of East Asia and later diversified in Asia and North America (Lopez-Martinez 2008, Ge et al. 2013, Lacher et al. 2016). The fossil record of lagomorphs includes 78 genera and 234 species from the Paleocene to the Pleistocene (Lopez-Martinez 2008). The most up-to-date phylogenetic tree and classification of fossil lagomorphs has been provided by Lopatin & Averianov (2020). The oldest fossil record of stem lagomorphs is the insectivorous genus Mimotona from the Paleocene of China (Li 1977, Dashzeveg & Russell 1988), which belongs to the extinct clade Mimotonidae. Actually, Mimotona could represent the oldest known crown group placental mammal known at all (Halliday 2015). Second most ancient record is another mimotonid genus Gomphos from the Early to Middle Eocene of China and Mongolia (Meng et al. 2004, 2005, 2009, Asher et al. 2005) with an estimated age of about 55 million years (AMNH 2006). Several studies (Meng & Wyss 2001, Meng 2004, Rose et al. 2008, Lopatin & Averianov 2020) did not recover Gomphos in a clade with other Mimotonidae but placed it in an even more basal position as sister group to all other lagomorphs.

Dawsonolagus antiquus from the Early Eocene of Inner Mongolia in China has been suggested as transitional form between mimotonids and lagomorphs because of its mosaic combination of characters of both groups (Li et al. 2007). Therefore, Lopatin & Averianov (2020) suggested Eulagomorpha as name for clade that includes Dawsonolagus and crown group Lagomorpha. A possibly even somewhat more ancient eulagomorph is Arnebolagus leporinus from the Early Eocene (Bumbanian, 55.8-48.6 mya) Bumban Member of Naran Bulak Formation in Mongolia (Lopatin & Averianov 2008, 2020). Of similar age is the earliest Strenulagidae Aktashmys montealbus from the terminal Early Eocene of Kyrgyzstan (Averianov & Lopatin 2005, Lopatin & Averianov 2006).

The oldest fossil record of crown group Lagomorpha seems to be distinctive, small ankle bones from Early Eocene (ca. 53 mya) deposits of Gujarat in India (Rose et al. 2008). The fact that crown group and stem group lagomorphs appear together at about the same place and time is one of the many inconvenient facts of the fossil record that do not square well with a Darwinian narrative.

Rodents

The total group that includes crown group rodents and their stem group representatives such as Eurymyloidea has been named Simplicidentata after the possession of only a single pair of upper incisor teeth. Rodents first appeared in the Late Paleocene of East Asia but quickly spread to Europe and North America (Wilson 1951, Dawson & Beard 1996, Dawson 2003). The most basal stem group rodent seems to be Sinomylus, which has a single pair of incisors but uniquely retained the second upper premolar (McKenna & Meng 2001, Rose 2006). However, some cladistic studies recovered Sinomylus as a sister group to Lagomorpha+Rodentia (Rose et al. 2008, Asher et al. 2005, 2019), while Lopatin (2003) suggested that Sinomylus belongs to Eurymyloidea and is closer related to Lagomorpha. Incongruence, anybody?

The extinct Eurymylidae from the Early Paleocene to Middle Eocene of East Asia include the most basal and oldest stem group representatives of rodents (Li & Ting 1985, 1993, Wyss & Meng 1996, Van Valen 2002, Rose 2006, Rose et al. 2008). Some genera that are usually classified within Eurymylidae (McKenna & Bell 1997), and even in the subfamily Eurymylinae, have been suggested by some experts to be distinct enough to be better classified in the separate families Decipomyidae (Dashzeveg et al. 1998) and Rhombomylidae (Ting et al. 2002, Huang et al. 2004). Of course, as always in phylogenetics there is considerable conflict in the results and some studies recovered eurymylids as stem lagomorphs rather than stem rodents even though with only weak support (e.g., Lopatin 2003, Marivaux et al. 2004, Asher et al. 2005). A total outlier is the cladistic study by Dashzeveg et al. (1998), who got Decipomyidae as sister group of Lagomorpha, Mimotonidae and Rhombomylidae as successive sister groups of Rodentia (incl. Alagomyidae), and the remaining eurymylids and Gomphos as stem Glires. There is also conflict in the views about the composition of Eurymylidae: Meng et al. (1994) and Wyss & Meng (1996) considered the genus Heomys as closer related to Alagomyidae+Rodentia then to Eurymylidae, while Asher et al. (2005) considered Heomys as member of a monophyletic Eurymylidae but that as closer related to Lagomorpha. Last but not least, Meng et al. (2003), Asher et al. (2019), and López-Torres et al. (2020) also found Heomys in monophyletic Eurymylidae, but the latter as closer related to Rodentia, in agreement with the majority of other experts. Should we have any confidence in this result, – you are not supposed to ask such heretical questions.

The extinct Alagomyidae have been found in Late Paleocene and Early Eocene deposits of North America and Asia (McKenna & Bell 1997, Meng et al. 2007). They were often classified in Rodentia, because they share the typical single pair of incisors with rodents (Halliday et al. 2015). However, they seem to be advanced stem group representatives as sister group of Rodentia (Rodentiaformes) rather than crown group representatives (Meng et al. 1994, Meng & Wyss 1994, 2001, Dawson & Beard 1996, Van Valen 2002, Dawson 2003, Meng 2004, Rose 2006, Janis et al. 2008, Fostowicz-Frelik 2020). Tribosphenomys from the Late Paleocene of China and Mongolia is particularly rodent-like (Meng et al. 1994, Meng & Wyss 2001). Nevertheless, Meng et al. (2003) and López-Torres et al. (2020) has Tribosphenomysas more basal than Paramys in the stem group of rodents, unlike most other studies. Finally, at least one study (Marivaux et al. 2004) did not support the monophyly of Alagomyidae, but had Alagomys more closely related to rodents than Tribosphenomys. Disagreement and incongruence everywhere you look!

The earliest fossil record of crown group rodents could be the family Ischyromyidae (= Paramyidae) from Late Paleocene to Early Oligocene deposits of North America and Eurasia (Matthew 1910, Jepsen 1937, Anderson 2008). They may be closer related to the squirrel group of rodents (Simpson 1945, Van Valen 2002, Janis et al. 2008, Kay & Hoekstra 2008, Asher et al. 2019), even though other workers rather considered them as stem rodents (e.g., Fostowicz-Frelik 2020). The earliest fossils of ischyromyids are species like Asiaparamys shevyrevae from the Latest Paleocene of Kazakhstan (Nessov 1987, Averianov & Martin 2001) as well as Acritoparamys atavus, Paramys adamus, and Franimys sp. from the Latest Paleocene of north-western USA (Wood 1962, Carroll 1988, Dawson & Beard 1996, Anderson 2008, Beard & Dawson 2009). Genera like Paramys (Matthew 1910, Jepsen 1937, Wood 1962) and Ischyromys were arboreal mouse-like animals, while other ischyromyid genera like Manitsha were terrestrial and 1.5 times larger than a beaver.

More or less contemporaneous with stem rodents there is also the first record of crown group rodents from the Ctenodactyloidea such as the genus Tamquammys from the earliest Eocene (ca. 56 mya) Erlian Basin of Nei Mongol in China (Fostowicz-Frelik et al. 2018).The ctenodactyloids are a primitive group of living rodents that includes gundis and the Laotian rock rat, a living fossil (Biello 2006).

The Issue of Incongruence

There is a final curious fact about rodents that must be mentioned because it perfectly illustrates the important issue of incongruence between morphological and molecular/genetic data that is unexpected under Darwinism: early molecular data were interpreted as evidence that rodents are not monophyletic (Graur et al. 1991, 1992, Li et al. 1992; also see D’Erchia et al. 1996), which was extremely surprising as no morphologist ever doubted the monophyly of rodents. Molecular biologist Dan Graur, who is well known to ID proponents as “The Vigilante Who Wants to Retain the Myth of Junk DNA,” mentioned his weird idea that guinea pigs are not rodents at a public lecture at my university in Tübingen, Germany, when I was still a student. I vividly remember how we systematic biologists, educated in the great German tradition of classic comparative morphology, had nothing but ridicule and scorn for such nonsensical results of early molecular phylogenetics. It was not just that those guys suggested that rodents are diphyletic, but ideas about the diphyly of well-established groups became a kind of popular fad for molecular biologists: for example, they also suggested that well-defined groups such as bats and whales are diphyletic, and more recently that the insectivorous Eulipotyphla are diphyletic (Kjer & Honeycutt 2007) which we will discuss next in this article series.

It goes without saying that none of these ideas stood the test of time (Hasegawa et al. 1992, Novacek 1992, Honeycutt & Adkins 1993, Luckett & Hartenberger 1993, Sullivan & Swofford 1997, Janis et al. 2008, Zhou et al. 2015). Other apparently crazy ideas suggested by molecular systematics, such as the non-monophyly of taxa like Articulata (annelids and arthropods) and Tracheata (myriapods and insects), indeed became the new orthodoxy, even though there is still some courageous resistance from the “indomitable village” of classical morphologists (e.g., Scholtz 2002, Wägele & Kück 2014). The same holds for the reverse case, where the traditional view, based on anatomical and fossil evidence, that pinnipeds are diphyletic (walruses and sea lions derived from a bear-like ancestor, and true seals derived from mustelids), was overturned by molecular studies (Koretsky et al. 2016, Hafed et al. 2020). Even though there obviously is rampant conflict between molecular and anatomical data, and between molecular clock datings and the actual fossil record, which even led scientists to question the “adequacy of morphology for reconstructing the early history of placental mammals” (Springer et al. 2007a), few scientists are courageous enough to conclude from such conflicting evidence that we may have to question the Darwinian framework of evolutionary biology. To be clear: this does not mean that common descent is refuted. Rather it means that the evidence strongly suggests that a blind and random process is no causally adequate and sufficient explanation for the diversity and complexity of life.

Anyway, we can conclude from the above discussion of the fossil record of Glires that the earliest stem Glires as well as stem lagomorphs and stem rodents already appeared about 61 million years ago in Early Paleocene of East Asia. Based on Benton et al. (2015) the Fossil Calibration Database took a bit more conservative approach and dates the minimum age of Glires to 56 million years, based on the phylogenetic assignment (Meng et al. 2003, Asher et al. 2005) and younger Thanetian dating (see above) of the genera Mimotona and Heomys.

Since we have now completed our review of the supergroups (cohorts) Xenarthra, Afrotheria, and Euarchontoglires, we will move on to the final of the supergroups of placental mammals, which has been named Laurasiatheria. We will start with insectivores (Eulipotyphla) as its most basal order, but this will be in March, because due to deadlines for the rest of this month Fossil Friday will only feature photos of some nice fossil dragonflies.

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