Sunday 14 January 2024
On the argument from charm.
Tour-Cronin Debate: Does Charisma Carry the Day?
Yesterday I began a discussion of the Harvard roundtable debate on the origin of life between James Tour and Lee Cronin. Before going further, I should disclose a couple of facts: I consider Jim Tour a friend, and I’m certainly partial to his arguments. But I know that Jim is very passionate. He wears his feelings on his sleeve, and with Jim, what you see is what you get. I don’t think Jim would deny any of this — in fact, I like that about him: he’s a very transparent individual. But sometimes his personality type means that if he feels that he’s on the right side of an important issue, some passion is going to come out. In a world paralyzed by apathy, fuzziness, and fog, I find this refreshing. But his approach brings a rhetorical risk: Jim’s opponents know that our apathetic and fuzzy world fears conflict, so sometimes people try to capitalize on Jim’s passion and misrepresent it as aggression in order to appeal to the “peace, peace…can’t we just have peace?” crowd.
This dynamic was on full display during the Tour-Cronin roundtable. Sometimes Jim’s critics might have a point that he could reach more people if he toned things down a little. But there’s also a time when people need to be awakened to the fact that something is seriously wrong. If Tour is right, then the OOL community has been dramatically overstating their successes to the public, misleading them into thinking that answers are close at hand. If Tour is right then this point needs to be stated clearly, even if some of the offenders’ feathers get ruffled.
So was Tour overly aggressive at the roundtable? Having watched and then re-watched the event, I don’t think that was at all the case. Professor Tour kept his cool, never shouted, never raised his voice to inappropriate levels, and, most importantly, was highly focused on the science. Tour was in fact very mild throughout the event and maintained a very cool disposition.
Cronin’s Charisma Doesn’t Equate to Science
As for Lee Cronin, he has a likeable personality and a cool haircut, and this plays well before an audience of academics — especially those who are allergic to controversy and/or want peace with the establishment. I suspect a lot of Harvard folks fit into that category. Cronin was quick to attempt to address some of the seemingly devastating quotes that Tour had cited from him.
For example, Cronin jovially compared his 2011 prediction that we’d create life in the lab “within the next two years” to other misguided prophecies that we should already have self-driving cars, and affably admitted that his prediction might have been “a little bit too quick.” Cronin directly addressed Tour’s quotation of a tweet where Cronin had called OOL research “a scam.” Cronin clarified what he meant: “I don’t think origin of life is a scam. That was a joke.”
Fine. So Cronin admits he overstated how soon we’d recreate the origin of life, and we’re supposed to take his tweet as a joke. We should give people space and grace to clarify their positions and retract statements that they later realized were inaccurate. But don’t miss the hidden assumption in Cronin’s explanation of his inaccurate prediction: most everyone believes that someday we will have self-driving vehicles. So if predicting that we’ll someday “make life in the lab” is like predicting that someday we’ll “build self-driving cars,” then the two predictions falls into the same category of “reasonable things that will likely someday be accomplished.” The hidden assumptions in Cronin’s argument imply that someday we’ll solve the origin of life.
But remember, Tour offered many reasonable and potent scientific challenges, so we have to ask: Did Cronin adequately address them? The answer is important, and it is this: No, he didn’t. Cronin did not even attempt to address Tour’s challenges. Instead, Cronin adopted a dual rhetorical angle — attack Tour and make the OOL sound reasonable.
Cronin seemed intent upon using the roundtable not to provide a scientific explanation for the origin of life, but rather to convince people to believe that one day we’ll solve this problem. Amazingly, Cronin sought to inspire this confidence without ever coming remotely close to explaining the science of how it is going to happen.
It was quite an impressive and bold rhetorical move. Simply put, Cronin didn’t come to explain how the OOL took place; he just came to convince you to believe that someday that problem can be solved. And Cronin’s good-humored personality certainly made the task much easier for him. But if you look past the charisma, it’s clear that Cronin presented virtually no science that suggests the origin of life is actually a solvable problem.
Jim Tour as Foil
Cronin did not come to talk about the chemistry of how life originated. He came to sound reasonable, and even admitted up front that “I’m not coming here to today to say we’ve solved the problem.” Instead, he hoped that as an OOL theorist appearing in the flesh, he might be able to make the natural chemical origin of life sound reasonable. And he gave it a good try, repeatedly reassuring the audience — without any specifics — that we’re “making progress,” even “fantastic progress.”
But when you want to look like the good guy, it helps to make someone else into the bad guy. That way, you look all the more reasonable and believable. Thus, Cronin forced Tour into the role of foil, the pessimistic, angry, aggressive, and unfair critic. As the self-identified scientific optimist, Cronin sought to make himself look like the reasonable party.
There was a problem, however. When he scripted out his opening statement, he was obviously banking on the plan that Tour would raise his voice, shout, get angry, and act in a generally aggressive and distasteful manner. Thus, in a very odd move, Cronin repeatedly referenced Tour’s “shouting,” or “rattling” people’s “eardrums,” saying Tour would “shout at me until … hoarse” or “shout at [people] relentlessly to say ‘everyone’s an idiot.’” But none of that happened — Tour may have been passionate but didn’t shout, didn’t rattle anyone’s eardrums, and he certainly didn’t call anyone an idiot.
Another example: Cronin claimed that Tour called him a “bad chemist.” But this never happened either. Later during the roundtable Cronin claimed Tour was being “overcritical” — like something you might say to your spouse who keeps nagging you about something. I felt this was entirely unfair: Tour is raising reasonable questions and for this he is accused of being too critical? If so, then surely his challenges should be easy to answer. But Cronin had no answers. Instead, Tour focused on the science, and Cronin focused on Tour. Sound familiar?
Déjà Vu: Repeating the Tour-Farina Debate Dynamic
Lee Cronin is far more pleasant than “Professor Dave,” and this roundtable was far mellower and more civil than the Tour-Farina-debate. Yet key aspects of the rhetorical dynamics were virtually identical:
In the May 2023 OOL debate between Tour and Dave Farina, Tour focused on the science, posing a series of scientific challenges to OOL. Farina explicitly refused to answer those challenges and questions, and instead spent a great deal of time talking about Tour personally — with a vicious series of ad hominem attacks.
In this November 2023 OOL roundtable between Tour and Cronin, Tour focused on the science, posing a series of serious scientific challenges to OOL. Then, his opponent Cronin explicitly refused to answer Tour’s reasonable challenges and questions, and instead spent a great deal of time talking about Tour personally — not getting nasty but nonetheless attacking Tour by repeatedly trying to paint him as “shouting,” “angry,” “aggressive,” etc.
Moreover, the outcome of this “roundtable” is almost identical to that of the Tour-Farina debate:
At the close of the Tour-Farina debate, Tour’s reasonable challenges were left completely unanswered, yet Tour’s character had been unfairly slandered.
At the close Tour-Cronin roundtable, Tour’s reasonable challenges were left completely unanswered, and once again Tour’s character had been unfairly slandered, even if in a friendlier manner.
Lee Cronin is a very personable individual. No doubt about that. But the critic of the origin of life, Jim Tour, had arguments and challenges that his opponent did not address and therefore apparently could not address. Once again, James Tour carried the day. No doubt about that, either.
Saturday 13 January 2024
Friday 12 January 2024
Yet more echoes of the Cambrian explosion?
Fossil Friday: Update on Cambrian Bryozoans
A few weeks ago, I commented (Bechly 2023) on the abrupt origin of Bryozoa either during the Cambrian Explosion or in the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, both of which have been called big bangs of life by mainstream evolutionary biologists. I especially emphasized the back and forth concerning the interpretation of putative bryozoan fossil from the Cambrian period. I mentioned that a new study by Yang et al. (2023a) had recently challenged the bryozoan status of the genus Protomelission from Cambrian limestone in Australia, and instead identified it as a dasyclad green algae.
Now, a new study (Yang et al. 2023b) has been uploaded to the preprint archive bioRxiv. (The lead author only coincidentally shares the same name as that of the lead author of the earlier study.) This new study strongly rejects the determination as dasyclad green algae in favor of an identification as archaeocyath-like sponges, based on the analysis of multiple specimens that show the typical skeletal structures, aquiferous system, and ontogeny. Archaeocyaths, which are “broadly accepted as an extinct class of the phylum Porifera, were the earliest reef-building metazoans in the Phanerozoic” and “reached a biodiversity of over 300 genera and ca. 1500 species before the end of the Cambrian Age 4” (Yang et al. 2023b).
The authors emphasize that “the origin of the bryozoans remains a mystery” but explicitly confirm the reality of the Cambrian Explosion as “the most significant evolutionary event in Earth history in terms of setting up stem- and even crown-groups of almost all major metazoan phyla.” That’s bad news for the science deniers among the hardcore Darwinists and anti-ID activists, who recently have tended more and more simply to deny the Cambrian Explosion as a real event, and instead claim it to be just an artifact of an incomplete fossil record or even a straw man set up by evil creationists. The real experts disagree and fully corroborate the thrust of Stephen Meyer’s point in his book Darwin’s Doubt.
References
Bechly G 2023. Fossil Friday: Cambrian Bryozoa Come and Go. Evolution News November 24, 2023. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/11/fossil-friday-cambrian-bryozoa-come-and-go/
Meyer SC 2013. Darwin’s Doubt. HarperOne, New York (NY), viii+498 pp.
Yang J, Lan T, Zhang X-G & Smith MR 2023a. Protomelission is an early dasyclad alga and not a Cambrian bryozoan. Nature 615(7952), 468–471. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05775-5
Yang A, Luo C, Han J, Zhuravlev AY, Reitner J, Sun H, Zeng H, Zhao F & Hu S 2023b. Not dasycladalean alga, but an Odyssey of the earliest Phanerozoic animal reef-builders. BioRxiv December 8, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.12.07.570709
Thursday 11 January 2024
Psalms Chapter 96 American Standard Version.
1.Oh sing unto JEHOVAH a new song: Sing unto JEHOVAH, all the earth.
2Sing unto JEHOVAH, bless his name; Show forth his salvation from day to day.
3Declare his glory among the nations, His marvellous works among all the peoples.
4For great is JEHOVAH, and greatly to be praised: He is to be feared above all gods.
5For all the gods of the peoples are idols; But JEHOVAH made the heavens.
6Honor and majesty are before him: Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.
7Ascribe unto JEHOVAH, ye kindreds of the peoples, Ascribe unto JEHOVAH glory and strength.
8Ascribe unto JEHOVAH the glory due unto his name: Bring an offering, and come into his courts.
9Oh worship JEHOVAH in holy array: Tremble before him, all the earth.
10Say among the nations, JEHOVAH reigneth: The world also is established that it cannot be moved: He will judge the peoples with equity.
11Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof;
12Let the field exult, and all that is therein; Then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy
13Before JEHOVAH ; for he cometh, For he cometh to judge the earth: He will judge the world with righteousness, And the peoples with his truth.
Reductionism bumping up against its limits?
Biochemist Begins to Sense Limits of Materialism
Irish biochemist William Reville has been the first Officer for the Public Awareness and Understanding of Science at University College, Cork — the sort of post Richard Dawkins had at Oxford. Reville, author of Understanding the Natural World: Science Today (Irish Times Books 1999), informed us last week that “There is every reason to believe that consciousness will eventually yield to scientific analysis just as the general nature of life yielded”.
I was somewhat taken aback. What does he mean by the “general nature of life” yielded to scientific analysis? True, we now know vastly more than we used to about life in all its forms. But, as James Tour’s ongoing debates with fellow scientists attest, no one has any idea how life began.
“Deep Ongoing Mysteries”
It is the same with physics. Just yesterday at IAI.TV, Oxford theoretical physicist Tim Palmer acknowledged that “we are in dire need of some new paradigms in physics, and seemingly unable to arrive at them. We are yet to solve the deep ongoing mysteries of the dark universe and still haven’t convincingly synthesised quantum and gravitational physics.”
The “general nature,” both in physics and in life sciences, is precisely what hasn’t yielded. Thus the current state of affairs in science is hardly a very strong basis for optimism that something ethereal like consciousness is going to “yield” to a physicalist or other naturalist explanation.
Reville hopefully tosses up emergence theory:
Most scientists and philosophers think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Emergent phenomena arise in complex systems, such as the human brain. The “wetness” of water is a simple example of an emergent property. Water is composed of water molecules (H2O). There is nothing about the fundamental properties of hydrogen or oxygen that predicts wetness but when countless H2O molecules congregate together, wetness emerges.
Similarly, the human brain contains 86 billion neurons. Individual neurons are not conscious but the emergent phenomenon hypothesis predicts that the collective properties of these 86 billion neurons and their interactions produce consciousness.
WILLIAM REVILLE, “WILL SCIENCE BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN CONSCIOUSNESS?” IRISH TIMES, JANUARY 4, 2024
But why should 86 billion non-conscious material neurons working together produce consciousness? Dr. Reville can believe in such an origin of consciousness if he wants but calling it science is arbitrary when no mechanism is proposed.
Considering Panpsychism
He then considers panpsychism. Panpsychism, unlike eliminative materialism, concedes the existence of immaterial consciousness, provided it is shared with all life forms or the universe in general:
Philosophers who support panpsychism believe there is an open explanatory gap between the physical and the mental. As Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch notes: “If you knew every last physical detail about my brain processes, you still wouldn’t know what it’s like to be me.” And philosopher Yanssel Garcia, University of Nebraska Omaha, declares “physical science is incapable, in principle, of telling us the whole story”.
REVILLE, “EXPLAIN CONSCIOUSNESS?”
All true. But in the real world, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is unique to humans. If electrons or sea cucumbers are in some sense conscious, it’s just not the same kind of thing and raises no similar issues.
Reville senses something may be afoot:
But, the apparent difficulty of the task facing science of elucidating how inanimate matter forms conscious minds must not deter scientists from patiently and systematically pursuing the matter in the traditional manner. Of course, if consciousness eventually turns out to be completely resistant to explanation by science, then we are into, as they say, “a whole new ballgame“. Either way, exciting times lie ahead.
REVILLE, “EXPLAIN CONSCIOUSNESS?”
In Pursuit of “Traditional Methods”
He somehow senses a duty to continue to pursue the “traditional methods” (materialist research) indefinitely. But he is at least willing to consider the possibility that they will continue to fail. And, it is true, as he says, that exciting times lie ahead.
Materialist science has got about as far as it can go and progress will only be made if we are willing to contemplate non-materialist approaches. It won’t be easy; for one thing, progress won’t even necessarily look like the same thing. A better understanding of consciousness, for example, may mean a clearer picture of how it relates to the environment but will not mean showing that it doesn’t really exist or is somehow a physical thing.
Not just intelligent design but ingenious design. II
Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature
Is the universe meaningful or meaningless? Purposeful or pointless? On a new episode of ID the Future, enjoy the second half of an interview with Dr. Jonathan Witt about the evidence of purpose and meaning built into the universe. Dr. Witt is co-author of the book A Meaningful World, which argues that the more we learn about the universe, the more it seems laden with meaning. He unpacks this argument in a discussion with host Dr. Mark Turman.
Here in Part 2, Witt describes four characteristics common in all works of human genius and provides examples, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Euclid’s geometry. He then explains that we find the same hallmarks in the natural world, from the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics and the elegant structure of the DNA helix to the efficiency of protein machines and the intricate interconnected systems that keep organisms alive. It turns out, Witt argues, that the deeply original thinking and high levels of intelligence we so admire in human genius has a long-standing precedent in nature.
Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Wednesday 10 January 2024
Technology is more predictive re:biology than physics? II
Systems Biology Cracks Life’s Engineered Intricacies — A Report from CELS
Most academic biologists would sooner parasail into Mordor than admit intelligent design beats blind evolution. Modern Darwinism is very much the reigning paradigm in historical biology. Curiously, however, the hottest branch of experimental biology nowadays actually adopts as a working heuristic the view that biological systems are optimally engineered. This hot new approach — systems biology — has proven so fruitful that there is a growing demand for engineers to join biological research groups to help those groups think like engineers.
Recently I had the privilege of attending a scientific conference that took this systems biology approach — the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS) in Denton, Texas. What makes this gathering stand out is that the biologists and engineers in attendance don’t adopt the design paradigm as merely a working heuristic. They are convinced that the biological systems under review exhibit clever engineering solutions because they really were cleverly engineered. Every CELS talk I attended spotlighted a different ingenious design in biology, or upended some cherished Darwinian assumption, or both.
Smarter than Knitting Machines
In one lecture, internationally distinguished Brazilian chemist Marcos Eberlin discussed the engineering marvels of proteins, ribosomes, and their underlying amino-acid architecture. Ribosomes contain proteins and RNA. They are waterproof, mechanically resistant, flexible, and elastic, with long-lived, connecting units. They work like knitting machines but are much smarter than knitting machines, Eberlin explained.
Proteins, likewise, are extraordinarily strong, flexible, and elastic — much better than man-made nylons and able to self-fold into the precise four-dimensional structures needed for life. They do so in a myriad of shapes that fulfill a host of challenging tasks. These protein machines, moreover, don’t just work individually; they work together symphonically.
Eberlin said that many of his fellow scientists disbelieve in God but plagiarize him all the time in a research field known as biomimetics. The kicker is that when they manage the copying feat, they usually do so in a way inferior to the original.
A Chicken-and-Egg Problem
Eberlin also pointed out problems with the idea that RNA, proteins, and ribosomes evolved gradually through a mindless process. To get ribosomes and any kind of protein, you need various kinds of amino acids, all left-handed. (No, amino acids don’t have hands. They do, however, have amine groups either on the right-hand or left-hand side.) How did mindless nature sort through the righties and lefties and choose exclusively left-handed amino acids? There is no purely mindless natural process for generating or selecting only left-handed amino acids.
Eberlin warned against slipping into a view of physical laws as having foresight or intentions. The laws of nature were never striving to produce purely left-handed amino acids. Nature’s laws don’t care about nursing life. If anything, the mindless forces of nature want to tear life apart.
To overcome these buffeting forces, Eberlin says, you need molecular biological machines. One is the ribosome. It’s essential for making proteins, but ribosomes are themselves partially made up of proteins. So, which came first in the evolutionary story?
You also need very large RNA molecules to make ribosomes. Some origin-of-life researchers say life began as an RNA World, with DNA and proteins arriving later. Others say, no, proteins came first. Others, that no, ribosomes were first to the party. But really you need all three, Eberlin says. None of them can survive without the others.
It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem, and Eberlin said that overcoming it requires foresight and planning, activities reserved for intelligent agents. Three chemists won a Nobel Prize for mapping the ribosome, and Eberlin said the prize was well deserved. So, what prize, he asked, is due the one who designed the ribosome in the first place?
The Problem of Orphans
In another CELS talk, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson discussed a rising challenge to modern evolutionary theory — the exponential growth in the catalogue of orphan genes.
Orphan genes are functional DNA sequences without known homologues outside a given species or lineage. A commitment to universal common descent led biologists to expect such genes to be rare. After all, if all species evolved from ancestor species in a gradually branching tree of life, starting with the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), with genetic changes accumulating only very gradually through small genetic mutations, then novel genes — seemingly without ancestry — should be quite unusual. But as it turns out, they’re not.
Nelson related an experience from years ago when he was called out in a lecture at Dartmouth. He was speaking on the challenge orphan genes pose for evolutionary theory, and his critic complained that we didn’t have enough of a sample — just 122 bacterial species — to conclude that there was any real problem for evolutionary theory. Surely this signal would dissipate, said the critic, once the genomes of more bacterial types were sequenced.
So, what has occurred in the intervening years? A Polish research team has now surveyed the genomes of more than 60,000 bacterial species and close to 200 million bacterial proteins. In the process they have uncovered 8.5 million orphan proteins. The signal, far from fading, is now loud enough to rattle teeth. Nelson noted that it isn’t just bacteria either. Whenever the DNA of a previously unsequenced plant or animal form is sequenced, many new orphan genes are uncovered.
The pattern clashes with what universal common descent anticipates but meshes well with an intelligent design paradigm. If a feature is closely shared with another species, then we might expect the designer to repurpose a module already in use. If the feature is unique to the species or lineage, then we could expect the designer to write new DNA code for the new feature, much as a software engineer would proceed, with the result being more orphan code. And that is the pattern that is emerging.
The Point of the Pentadactyl
Another CELS speaker was engineering superstar Stuart Burgess, Professor of Engineering Design at Bristol University in England. Burgess is the editor of two bioengineering journals, and a lead designer for the British Olympic Cycling Team. His work there helped the British track cyclists win the top medal haul in both the Rio and Tokyo Olympics. Burgess also has had two research fellowships at Cambridge University and was the lead designer for the European Space Agency’s Metop satellites.
In his CELS talk, Burgess made the case that an understanding of engineering principles well explains the repeated appearance of the pentadactyl (five digit) limb design throughout the animal kingdom.
Evolutionists have long argued that this pattern is due to evolutionary common descent — that is, that a series of mutations constructed the five-digit design in a common ancestral lineage and that the blueprint was passed down to various descendants on the branching limb of animal life, leaving everything from human hands to whale flippers sporting the pentadactyl design. But even a fully paid-up evolutionist such as Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould conceded that this tidy story breaks down. In his book Eight Little Piggies, he noted various exceptions to the pentadactyl rule before he gamely tried to fit the much messier picture into a Darwinian frame.
Burgess offered what he sees as a more elegant solution. Namely, an engineering analysis shows that five digits (as opposed to, say, one or three or seventeen) provides an optimal tradeoff between strength and flexibility/dexterity. A single digit would be strongest, and a dozen digits more flexible or dexterous. But if you want an optimal combination of these two virtues, and you graph them with strength decreasing with each additional digit, and flexibility/dexterity increasing with each digit, you find that the two virtues cross at the five-digit point. Five digits thus represent what engineers describe as a constrained optimization of competing attributes.
The five-digit design appears so often in the animal world, in other words, because the designer was a good engineer and selected it as the best trade-off between competing virtues. Take the five-digit whale flipper. The flipper must be strong but also flexible enough to twist in various subtle ways in the service of making the creature a master swimmer. An engineering analysis found that five digits best achieves that compromise, Burgess said.
Whale Bones of Contention
At this point in the talk Burgess anticipated an objection: Yes, but whales have vestigial pelvic bones, left over from their land-dwelling ancestors, pelvic bones largely useless to the whales. Surely that screams blind evolution, not design. Burgess noted that this oft-recycled argument for evolution is badly outdated, since research has long revealed important functions for these bones.
The point was conceded in a 2014 paper in the journal Evolution. “Due to their highly reduced state, cetacean pelvic bones are sometimes thought of as ‘useless vestiges’ of their land-dwelling ancestry,” but, the authors continued, these whale bones in fact serve “important roles in male reproductive function.”1 In support of the claim, the article cited more than a dozen corroborating scientific papers stretching from 1881 to 2009.
As one would expect from an article in the journal Evolution, the authors scrambled to provide an alternative evolutionary explanation for the pelvic bones, but the cherished evolutionary story of “vestigial” pelvic bones joins the growing pile of discredited icons of evolution detailed by biologist Jonathan Wells, first in Icons of Evolution and then further in Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution.
In the case of the pelvic bones of the whale, the Darwinian framework led many scientists astray, whereas the view that these bones are the product of rational and skillful engineering pointed in the right direction.
This pattern of discovery harkens back to the scientific revolution itself. The founders of modern science were theists, tutored in the Judeo-Christian understanding of reality. Their early breakthroughs were fueled by seeing the book of nature as the work of a master author, a great craftsman whose deep designs called for careful study to illuminate their hidden intricacies. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that in recovering this approach to the living world, today’s systems biologists find themselves in the midst of a fresh revolution of discovery.
How the stones bore witness to the bible's account re:Belshazzar.
How does archaeology confirm the role of Belshazzar of Babylon?
FOR many years, Bible critics claimed that King Belshazzar, who is mentioned in the book of Daniel, never existed. (Dan. 5:1) They held that view because archaeologists could find no evidence that he had actually lived. However, that changed in 1854. Why?
In that year, a British consul named J. G. Taylor explored some ruins in the ancient city of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq. There, located in a large tower, the explorer found several clay cylinders. The cylinders, each about four inches (10 cm) long, are engraved with cuneiform writing. The writing on one of the cylinders includes a prayer for the long life of Babylonian King Nabonidus and his oldest son, Belshazzar. Even critics had to agree: This finding proves that Belshazzar did exist.
However, the Bible states not only that Belshazzar existed but also that he was a king. Again, critics were skeptical. For example, the 19th-century English scientist William Talbot wrote that some state that “Bel-sar-ussur [Belshazzar] was co-regent with Nabonidus his father. But of this there is not the slightest evidence.”
That controversy was settled, however, when the writings on other clay cylinders revealed that Belshazzar’s father, King Nabonidus, was away from the capital city for years at a time. What happened during his absence? “When Nabonidus went into exile,” states the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “he entrusted Belshazzar with the throne and the major part of his army.” So Belshazzar served, in effect, as a coruler in Babylon during that time. Thus, archaeologist and language scholar Alan Millard stated that it was appropriate for “the Book of Daniel to call Belshazzar ‘king.’”
Of course, for God’s servants, the principal evidence that the book of Daniel is trustworthy and inspired by God is found within the Bible itself.—2 Tim. 3:16.
In pursuit of JEHOVAH'S Favor.
Leviticus Ch.8:16NIV"Moses also took all the fat around the internal organs, the long lobe of the liver, and both kidneys and their fat, and burned it on the altar."
1Samuel Ch.2:15-17ASV"Yea, before they burnt the fat, the priest's servant came, and said to the man that sacrificed, Give flesh to roast for the priest; for he will not have boiled flesh of thee, but raw. 16And if the man said unto him, They will surely burn the fat first, and then take as much as thy soul desireth; then he would say, Nay, but thou shalt give it me now: and if not, I will take it by force. 17And the sin of the young men was very great before JEHOVAH; for the men despised the offering of JEHOVAH.
18But Samuel ministered before JEHOVAH, being a child, girded with a linen ephod."
Leviticus Ch.7:25ASV"For whosoever eateth the fat of the beast, of which men offer an offering made by fire unto JEHOVAH, even the soul that eateth it shall be cut off from his people. "
The sacrices and freewill offerings made at JEHOVAH'S sanctuary under the law covenant were foreshadows of the even better sacrifices Christ's High Priesthood facilitates. Yet a careful study of these illuminates key principles as to what JEHOVAH'S Standards are re:acceptable offerings.
The Fat mentioned in these passages was considered the most valuable part of the meat. Note that JEHOVAH insisted that the most valuable part of the sacrifice be offered first and that not even the priests were to convert any of it to personal use on pain of death.
Roman's Ch.12:1NKJV"I beseech[a] you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your [b]reasonable service."
So mere ritual will not do ,the Lord JEHOVAH is entitled to the most desirable/valuable part of our inner life. If we are not leading with an offering of our inner self to JEHOVAH exclusively our overall offering will be displeasing to JEHOVAH. Certainly it would be idolatrous to make material/hedonistic pursuits the centre of our affections and concerns. None of this is because JEHOVAH is a joyless fuddy duddy who begrudges his servants ever having any fun. Rather having created us for a particular purpose he understands that there can be no deep and abiding Joy found outside of that purpose. But joy is an elusive quarry. The trick is to turn Joy in to our pursuer rather than our quarry . JEHOVAH Alone can help us with that. He is worthy of our best,after all we got it from him.
Tuesday 9 January 2024
Not merely intelligent but ingenious design II.
Nature Reveals Not Just Design but Genius
Almost 50 years ago, physicist Steven Weinberg wrote that “[t]he more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” But is our universe really just a meaningless accident? Or can we detect true genius by studying its workings? On a new episode of ID the Future, we are pleased to share the first half of an interview with Dr. Jonathan Witt on the Denison Forum podcast about a cosmos charged with meaning and purpose. In their book A Meaningful World, Dr. Witt and co-author Benjamin Wiker develop a philosophical argument that the more we learn about the universe, the more it seems laden with meaning. Dr. Witt discusses this argument with host Mark Turman.
In Part 1, Witt shares his personal journey of faith and notes why he became skeptical of Darwinism. He discusses why he and Wiker wrote their book, describing the volume as an antidote to the materialist thinking that has dominated academic and scientific circles for the last 150 years. Witt explains that after studying the hallmarks of genius in humans, they looked for the same characteristics in nature, finding bountiful examples of the same challenges, surprises, mystery, and elegance one expects from a work of genius.
Download the podcast or listen to it here
On the price of convergent serendipity.
Convergent Evolution: An Argument That Comes at a Price
Can the laws of nature explain the biological information in human beings and other creatures? In his recent book The Compatibility of Evolution and Design, theologian Rope Kojonen argues that they can. My colleagues and I reviewed the book in the journal Religions and have been critiquing it here.
I turn now to convergent evolution, which is Kojonen’s strongest positive argument for the laws of form, or what he calls the “library of forms.” This argument is significant because these laws of form play a crucial role in Kojonen’s positive case for design. In his view, the laws of form arise from designed laws of nature and, in turn, they vitally shape the “fine-tuned” preconditions that help make evolution possible. So, Kojonen’s convergence argument is a crucial part of his case for design. It also plays a key role in his account of how design supplements evolutionary processes in just the right way.
To understand why this is problematic, it helps to know more about convergence. Kojonen says that convergence means “the independent evolution of the same biological outcome in two or more different lineages, beginning from different starting points” (Kojonen 2021, p. 125). He notes, for example, that “dolphins and sharks have similar streamlined bodies and dorsal fins, even though dolphins are mammals and sharks are fish.” He also says that “paddle-shaped limbs for swimming have evolved independently seven times, and a structure as complex as the eye has evolved independently 49 times…” (p. 125). The word “convergent” is used to describe these examples because, in general, multiple lines of evidence — usually from genetics, paleontology, biochemistry, systematics, and similar fields — indicate that it is hard to make a coherent phylogenetic account of how they came to be from a given common ancestor. Under the idea of common ancestry, these facts are considered odd. Thus, evolutionists say that they are the result of convergent evolution.
A Stacked Deck
Kojonen sees this convergence as evidence that laws of form “play a significant role” in helping evolutionary processes cluster around similar solutions (p. 125). He comes to the conclusion that convergence shows “functional constraints have a big effect on the evolution of life like that on Earth” (p. 127). The general idea, expressed as a rhetorical question, seems to be: If the same solutions came up independently over and over again, doesn’t that suggest that the deck was probably stacked to help evolution succeed?
The first problem is that convergence needs not only to evolve certain complex proteins, traits, and systems but also to evolve these things on their own more than once. If proteins are rare and isolated (as our review establishes) and the chances of even a single short protein evolving once in the whole history of the earth are too low, then, all other things being equal, the chances of similar proteins evolving more than once are even lower. This is amplified when scaled up to protein complexes, cell types, tissues, and organs, again demonstrating why the strength of the scientific evidence is crucial. If unguided evolution was not the cause of convergence, Kojonen’s argument that convergence supports the reconciliation of evolution and design would also fall apart.
A Dilemma
Second, and more importantly, Kojonen’s model is stuck in a paradox. This problem is a version of “Sober’s Paradox,” which is a term used by philosopher of biology Paul Nelson (Nelson 2022). Kojonen’s ideas about common ancestry and his ideas about convergence are at odds with each other. His attempt to agree with both sides breaks up the model internally.
Accept Convergence, Lose Common Ancestry
For instance, if convergence of forms is the result of being constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, then Kojonen’s co-option response to Behe’s argument about irreducible complexity loses some of its power. This is because co-option only makes sense if there are similar protein parts in other systems that could be changed into the specialized parts needed for the bacterial flagellum. Kojonen says this about the flagellum: “The fact that similar parts exist in other systems, for example, does show that evolution is possible” (p. 118). But with “convergent evolution,” parts or systems that are even more complicated than the flagellum of a bacterium can develop without any similarity or common ancestry. If that’s true, what real power does co-option have?
Let’s also think about how true evolutionary convergence hurts Kojonen’s case that proteins evolved over time. As the story goes, mutation and natural selection can transform one functional protein into another. But if convergence is happening, wouldn’t it be easier for evolution to just make a new protein? Otherwise, if it is just as likely that evolution can lead to big changes as it is to lead to small ones, why talk about gradual changes moving one functional protein to another? Again, the argument has lost its power.
As we’ve seen, Kojonen’s belief in evolutionary convergence hurts the case for common ancestry in standard evolutionary theory. Evolutionary biologists usually think that similar structures can best be explained by having a common ancestor with a similar structure, i.e., it is far more likely that a complex trait evolved once instead of twice. If complex features are just as likely to appear on their own, then it is very hard to prove that two organisms share a common ancestor (Luskin 2017).
Accept Common Ancestry, Lose Convergence
What about the other side of the dilemma? If Kojonen accepts common ancestry, then what follows for his case for convergence and, by extension, his case for the “laws of form”? It seems like two results follow. First, he can no longer explain a lot of biological phenomena. This is because he says that convergence is “ubiquitous.”
Second, in Kojonen’s model, convergence is part of his case for the laws of form. And these laws play a crucial role in the “fine-tuned” preconditions that help make evolution possible. Given that these preconditions arise from designed laws of nature, they play a vital part of Kojonen’s overall account of design. But if Kojonen accepts common ancestry (and its standard justification), then he loses a crucial element of his particular account of design. This greatly harms the heart of his model, which is to defend a certain view of design and its compatibility with evolutionary theory.
So Kojonen’s model has internal inconsistencies. He is basically stuck between a rock and a hard place. Kojonen’s understanding of (and justification for) “design” conflicts with both his own reasoning (about co-option and protein evolution) and the justification of common ancestry, which is a mainstay of evolution. So while Kojonen’s study of the laws of form is one of the most interesting ways he looks at design, this argument comes at a very high price.
References
Branscomb, Elbert, and Michael J. Russell. 2018. “Frankenstein or a Submarine Alkaline Vent: Who Is Responsible for Abiogenesis?: Part 1: What Is Life-That It Might Create Itself?” BioEssays: News and Reviews in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology 40 (7): e1700179.
Djamgoz, Mustafa B. A., and Michael Levin. 2022. “Bioelectricity: An Update.” Bioelectricity 4 (3): 135–135.
Dobson, Christopher M. 2004. “Chemical Space and Biology.” Nature 432 (7019): 824–28.
Ellis, George. 2023. “Quantum Physics and Biology: The Local Wavefunction Approach.” arXiv [quant-Ph]. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06516v10
Monday 8 January 2024
The first humans are just as human as present day humans?
Childhood in the Ice Age — What Was It Like?
In Aeon late last winter, University of Victoria archaeologist April Nowell offered insights into the lives of children in the Paleolithic era, roughly 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. The surprising thing is how much we actually know about that.
Nowell, author of Growing Up in the Ice Age (Oxbow Books 2021) points out, in addition to Caves of Lascaux-level archeological finds that make world news, a wealth of additional information, put together, tells us more than we might have expected about Stone Age life.
For example, footprints embedded in soft earth or mud in and near a cave tell us that a family, burning bundles of pine sticks to light their way, crawled through a cave called Grotta della BÃ ̀sura 14,000 years ago. The footprints belonged to two adults, an 8-to-11-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 3-year-old.
Having reached a point now known as the “Sala dei Misteri,” they left signatures of their time there: “While the adults make charcoal handprints on the ceiling, the youngsters dig clay from the floor and smear it on a stalagmite, tracing their fingers in the soft sediment. Each tracing corresponds to the age and height of the child who made it: the tiniest markings, made with a toddler’s fingers, are found closest to the ground.”
Then They Left
Their pine torches left charcoal traces on the walls. What were they doing? We will never know for sure but it seems like a ritual of some sort.
We know other things about the lives of children back then as well. One is that they had to learn the art of making stone tools (knapping). Examining the masses of struck-off fragments, archeologists can tell which ones were produced by novices who had not yet perfected the art.
But, says Nowell, we have evidence of children at play too:
Other studies of footprints, this time from 13,000-year-old sites in Italy and France, document children and teens running around playing tag, making ‘perfect’ footprints the way kids do today at the beach, and throwing clay balls at each other and at stalagmites — some of the pellets missed their targets and remain on the cave floor. Skills were honed through play in other ways: at Palaeolithic sites in Russia, researchers found 29 clay objects that, by analysing traces of fingerprints, were determined to be made by children between the ages of six and 10, and adolescents between 10 and 15. Ethnographically, we know that children often begin to learn ceramics by first playing with clay, making toy animals and serving bowls.
APRIL NOWELL, “CHILDREN OF THE ICE AGE,” AEON, 13 FEBRUARY 2023
And Sadder Evidence as Well
One young child from 10,000 years ago was buried in clothing with hundreds of beads lovingly sewn in.
When telling us of our ancestors, researchers often hold out the hope that the information they painstakingly accumulate will shed light on human development. From the fragments gathered so far, it seems we have no evidence for a history of the human mind, only the history of human technology.
Sunday 7 January 2024
On separating real from apparent design in nature
Stephen Meyer: Evidence of Mind in the Natural World
Can we scientifically detect the activity of a mind behind the universe? On a new episode of ID the Future, philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer answers this question and more in the concluding hour of a new two-hour interview on various topics related to his work and books. The interview was recorded in the fall of 2023 by Praxis Circle, a worldview-building organization that promotes open dialogue around life’s biggest questions. The word praxis harkens back to Latin and Greek as a word for practice, action, or doing. So praxis refers to the process of interaction between our worldview — our conception of reality, our view of the world — and our practice of living and acting in it. It’s an interesting mental space to begin a dialogue.
A word on the format of the interview. The interview host is Doug Monroe, and you’ll hear him at various intervals. However, the discussion was recorded specifically to be broken up into 39 short videos, so most of the time you won’t hear the question being asked — just Dr. Meyer’s response. The questions he answers are often connected and follow a logical progression exploring Dr. Meyer’s books and arguments. Plus, Dr. Meyer usually begins his answer by paraphrasing the question, so you’ll have a good idea what he’s talking about as he begins each new answer.
In case it’s helpful, here’s an outline of the topics covered by Dr. Meyer in this second hour of the interview:
How Christianity Sparked the Scientific Revolution
How Human Fallibility Led to Development of a Scientific Method
Scientific Materialism and Philosophical Skepticism
Where Intelligent Design Stands in the Scientific Community Today
The Argument of Signature in the Cell
The Universe’s Origin and Quantum Physics
Every Philosophical System Posits a Prime Reality
Cosmological Data that Points to God?
Our Fine-tuned Universe
Fine-tuning vs. the Multiverse
Applying Occam’s Razor
The Low Creative Power of Darwinian Mutations
The Problem with Theories of Everything
Theistic Evolution: an Oxymoron
Do Miracles Violate the Laws of Nature?
A Good Theology of Nature
Society’s Ultimate Problem
Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Saturday 6 January 2024
How science enables an intellectually satisfying theism.
Stephen Meyer: Scientific Arguments for a Theistic Worldview
Are there strong scientific arguments for theism? Is there such a thing as objective morality? How is a worldview built? On a new episode of ID the Future, philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer answers these questions and more in the first hour of a new two-hour interview on various topics related to his work and books. The interview was recorded in the fall of 2023 by Praxis Circle, a worldview-building organization that promotes open dialogue around life’s biggest questions. The word praxis harkens back to Latin and Greek as a word for practice, action, or doing. So praxis refers to the process of interaction between our worldview — our conception of reality, our view of the world — and our practice of living and acting in it. It’s an interesting mental space to begin a dialogue.
A word on the format of the interview. The interview host is Doug Monroe, and you’ll hear him at various intervals. However, the discussion was recorded specifically to be broken up into 39 short videos, so most of the time you won’t hear the question being asked — just Dr. Meyer’s response. The questions he answers are often connected and follow a logical progression exploring Dr. Meyer’s books and arguments. Plus, Dr. Meyer usually begins his answer by paraphrasing the question, so you’ll have a good idea what he’s talking about as he begins each new answer.
In case it’s helpful, here’s an outline of the topics covered by Dr. Meyer in this first hour of the interview:
Founding of Discovery Institute
Definition of worldview
Dr. Meyer’s own worldview journey
Epistemology and the Judeo-Christian idea of intelligibility
Mind-body problem of consciousness
The need for objective, rational arguments for theism
Importance of philosophy
Materialism, relativism, and objective morality
The fact/value divide
Newton and Leibniz debate: gravity and God
The nature of information
This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. Download the podcast or listen to ithere
Friday 5 January 2024
Birds aren't little dinosaurs?
Fossil Friday: New Evidence Against Dinosaur Ancestry of Birds
This Fossil Friday we revisit the ancestry of birds, with the featured skeleton of the Late Cretaceous bird Hesperornis gracilis, exhibited at the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. Hesperornis was a flightless and toothed marine bird, somewhat similar to modern penguins, and lived contemporaneous with some of the raptor dinosaurs that are well known from the Jurassic Park movies.
Few hypotheses in evolutionary biology have become as popular among lay people as the postulated ancestry of birds from bipedal dinosaurs. Indeed, many a school kid will tell you proudly that birds simply are surviving dinosaurs. The theropod ancestry of birds has become an evolutionary dogma that is almost universally accepted and taught as the consensus view. However, there are a few dissenters, among whom the paleornithologist Alan Feduccia from the University of North Carolina certainly is the most prominent. He famously coined the term “temporal paradox” for the fact that the fossil record of the assumed theropod stem group of birds tends to be younger than the oldest actual birds. Last week I discussed new evidence that makes this temporal paradox much worse (Bechly 2023).
Beyond the Fossil Record
However, Feduccia’s critique of the dinosaur-bird hypothesis is not based just on problems with the fossil record, but also on conflicting evidence from comparative anatomy. Now, he presents new evidence that still more sharply contradicts the consensus view. One of the arguments for a dinosaur-bird relationship has been the presence of a so-called “open” acetabulum, which “is a concave pelvic surface formed by the ilium, ischium, and pubis, which accommodates the head of the femur in tetrapods.” Feduccia (2024) studied the acetabulum in early basal birds and found that their acetabulum tends to be partially closed and an antitrochanter (process of the ischium or iliac) is absent. This casts strongly into doubt one of the key characters for a dinosaur-bird relationship and suggests that this hypothesis must be re-evaluated. The fact that microraptorids and troodontids “also exhibit partial closure of the acetabulum and lack an antitrochanter is a further incongruity in that these taxa should exhibit “typical” theropod pelvic girdle modifications for terrestrial cursoriality.” This could support the view of several experts (e.g., Martin 2004, and various studies cited by Feduccia), that these maniraptoran taxa represent secondarily flightless birds rather than theropod dinosaurs.
Feduccia concluded his new study with this remarkable statement:
The hypothesis that birds are maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs, despite the certitude with which it is proclaimed, continues to suffer from unaddressed difficulties … Until problems like those discussed here — and many others that continue to be dismissed either by appeal to “consensus” or through overconfidence in the results of phylogenetic analysis of morphological data — have satisfactorily been resolved, skepticism toward the current consensus and continued investigation of alternative hypotheses are needful for the promotion of critical discourse in vertebrate phylogenetics and evolutionary biology.
Birds and dinosaurs may not represent arbitrary chunks of an evolutionary grade after all, but may instead represent distinct natural kinds. At the very least, the evidence seems to be much more ambiguous, weaker, and less convincing than most evolutionary biologists love to pretend.
The inability of chance and necessity to navigate the fitness landscape.
Trapdoors in the Fitness Landscape: Scientists Revive Worries About an Evolutionary Metaphor
Sewall Wright concocted one of those metaphors in science that lingers long past its “best by” date. In 1932, he coined the term “the fitness landscape.” He envisioned a mythical land of peaks and valleys, with the peaks indicating higher fitness, and valleys populated by evolving organisms starting out on their journeys toward progressively higher fitness levels. Impelled by the struggle for existence, organisms would climb higher till reaching a peak. One difficulty with this picture appeared soon after the metaphor gained popularity: to get to a higher peak, an organism would have to climb down, lowering its fitness on the way to a neighboring peak. Some workarounds 7were concocted, but the evocative metaphor lent itself to 3-D graphs and formulas of positive selection, giving evolutionary biologists hopes of empirical rigor as they measured their research organism’s progress up the landscape.
Stability of the Landscape
Unwarranted assumptions are the bugaboo of clever models like this. One is the stability of the landscape. Does the hypothetical landscape undulate over time, such that a peak at one epoch becomes a valley in another? After all, the dynamic environment is oblivious to the needs of organisms. How quickly does a given habitat change? How can evolutionists be sure that fitness for a savannah does not become a detriment if the population finds itself in a habitat undergoing desertification? For reasons like this, Mustonen and Lässig in 2009 dubbed it a fitness “seascape” instead of a landscape.
Another of Wright’s assumptions was that the fitness landscape follows Gaussian curves consisting of smooth lines without discontinuities. Even if some of those Gaussian curves rose steeply like a cliff, Darwin defenders like Richard Dawkins could get their organisms up to the summit of Mount Improbable by envisioning a gradual staircase from another direction, allowing natural selection to maintain Darwin’s narrative of the accumulation of small, incremental steps.
But what if the Gaussian assumption is wrong? What if, instead, the structure of the landscape is like a block of Swiss cheese, flat and riddled with holes that a blind watchmaker cannot foresee? The probability of a “holey” fitness landscape becomes credible when considering dependent traits. These “quantitative traits” are made up of components that must cooperate to work. Without all of them emerging simultaneously, no organism can ascend to higher levels. With dependent traits in operation, such as in the case of powered flight, a mutation or defect in one can send the organism to immediate extinction — as if, as in the old board game, a trapdoor opened underneath
This Is Not a New Worry
Sergey Gavrilets thought of this back in 1997 and raised it again in 2004. Now, worries about a “holey landscape” have been given new emphasis in a paper in PNAS — “Drift on holey landscapes as a dominant evolutionary process.” The four authors, from universities in North Dakota, California, and Paris, complain that this worry has been largely neglected.
Our understanding of selection has been strongly shaped by Sewall Wright’s conceptualization of an evolutionary landscape, with populations moving from areas of low fitness to areas of higher fitness. While the one- and two-trait landscapes Wright originally described have been criticized as unrealistic, including by Wright himself, the general metaphor has nonetheless guided much of evolutionary thought
What if the metaphor has “guided much of evolutionary thought” astray? Then, the “understanding of selection” has been shaped awry.
An important conclusion from this research is that evolutionary dynamics on simple landscapes often fail to properly predict evolution on higher dimensional landscapes. Empirical research into quantitative traits has been slow to incorporate this need for a higher-dimensional perspective.
Perhaps most conceptually unfamiliar and unintuitive to researchers focused on quantitative traits are holey landscapes (Fig. 1C; ref. 16). Holey landscapes are high-dimensional evolutionary landscapes that consist of trait combinations that are either of average fitness or that are inviable. This results in flat landscapes with holes at inviable or low fitness phenotypes (Fig. 1C)
Quantitative traits comprise “many aspects of physiology, behavior, and morphology,” they say, illustrating them with things like “most behaviors, physiological processes, and life-history traits.”
To investigate whether such traits tend to be distributed on a Gaussian landscape or a holey landscape, they looked at genetic variations in sixty species, including animals and plants. They found the results to be consistent with “high-dimensional, holey landscapes” instead of simplistic single-peak depictions or “badlands” landscapes consisting of rolling hills and gentle valleys. This suggested to them that
the leading conceptualizations and modeling of the evolution of trait integration fail to capture how phenotypes are shaped and that traits are integrated in a manner contrary to predictions of dominant evolutionary theory.Our results demonstrate that our understanding of how evolution has shaped phenotypes remains incompleteand these results provide a starting point for reassessing the relevance of existing evolutionary models.
Scrap and Start Over?
One way to reassess the relevance of an existing model is to scrap it and start over. The authors are not ready to try that, but they do point to serious shortcomings of conventional models: for instance, missing the holes.
Even more importantly, it is unknown what the topography of landscapes is for natural populations. While portions of selection surfaces and landscapes can be directly estimated, these estimates may differ from the full landscape due to several factors. These include the omission of fitness-affecting traits, incomplete estimation of fitness, and insufficient power to estimate non-linear selection coefficients.
In effect, modelers using Wright’s metaphor are building imaginary landscapes in thin air instead of working with real plants and animals on the real earth that must eat and survive. Simplistic Darwinian models of selection presuppose that beneficial mutations add up. This is not necessarily the case. A benefit to one gene can be a detriment to another — an example of negative pleiotropy. For realism, the whole animal must be considered, lest negative correlations open up a trapdoor that ends that organism’s progress, sending it down into one of those “inviable” outcomes. The authors call for better answers to the “crucial questions we have raised.”
Why would a holey landscape be flat? The authors explain what the model predicts for quantitative traits:
This topography stems from the multivariate nature of phenotypes: while there may be continuous fitness differences in two dimensions, fitness gradients will create holes in the landscape and peaks will average out when additional traits are considered. Unfortunately, predictions about quantitative trait evolution on holey landscapes are not clear and have rarely been pursued (e.g., ref. 18).
This means that traits are not isolated in one or two dimensions, but are interdependent on other traits in additional dimensions. This multi-dimensional consideration of traits on a flat landscape suggests that organisms are already at their optima; the fitness peaks have averaged out. The only way left is down, falling through a hole like a trapdoor if a trait changes that other traits depend on.
Irreducible Complexity and Devolution
The picture fits Michael Behe’s concepts of irreducible complexity and devolution. No part of a mousetrap should be considered in isolation. It may have a great spring, but if the other parts are weak or absent, the trap will not catch mice. Neo-Darwinism’s focus on positive selection of individual genes or traits, therefore, misses the holistic multi-dimensional view of organisms as functional wholes, to borrow Douglas Axe’s phrase. To function, a multi-dimensional trait must reach a threshold of coherence among its parts. These can be considered a list of design requirements.
Can neo-Darwinism recover from the neglected view of holey landscapes? The authors do not offer any hope, other than to wish that better landscape models may be forthcoming. Even with that concession, they remain pessimistic.
Our implementation of Wright’s metaphor represents only one of many possible evolutionary models. It is possible that unmodeled alternative landscapes may produce populations for which variation is distributed in a manner similar to holey landscapes and empirical estimates…. Importantly, and as mentioned previously, much of the exploration of evolution of quantitative traits has focused on simple landscapes like we have implemented here. Thus, it also is an open question what different models of selection “look” like when implemented for higher-dimensional phenotypes. For example, rugged landscapes of high dimensionality may give rise to holey landscapes as peaks average out and valleys are inviable…. Nonetheless, the close correspondence between empirical data and populations simulated as evolving on holey landscapes suggest that our understanding of quantitative trait evolution remains incomplete.
Regardless of any other possible devices to rescue the picture of progress up fitness peaks, they assert that “our finding that observed patterns of quantitative genetic variation across taxonomic groups are not consistent with traditional evolutionary models stands.”
This disconnect between observed patterns of multivariate variation and expectations under conventional models of selection suggests that Wright’s metaphor of landscapes — and the subsequent implementation of this metaphor as Gaussian surfaces — may have contributed to an incomplete understanding of how selection has shaped phenotypes. A potential contributor to this problem has been the lack of clear alternative explanationsbesides a simple null hypothesis of drift with no selection. Moving forward, clear development of additional alternative models of the action of selection and evolution in multivariate space is needed. This will allow the comparison of simulated populations to empirical data as we have done here.
Ultimately, our findings suggest that evolutionary biologists need to better consider the effects of high dimensionality as simple standard evolutionary models are not consistent with available data for quantitative data
Design Trumps Darwinism
Science is supposed to be about observable, quantitative data, isn’t it? If observations do not fit Wright’s convenient metaphor, the metaphor must be revised or discarded. Intelligent design is consistent with flat optima and built-in mechanisms to detect and avoid holes (e.g., DNA error correction, immune systems, blood clotting). Once again, design with its emphasis on engineering specifications trumps Darwinism in the real world.
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