Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 106
February 15, 2022
Researchers: Horizontal gene transfer from invertebrates to snakes helps solve Australian snake mystery
The most venomous australian snakes came by sea rather than by land, according to a research group led by the University of Adelaide:
In a paper published in Genes, the researchers analysed the genomes of two Australian elapids (front fanged snakes), a tiger and a brown snake, and compared them to marine and semi-marine elapid sea snakes and Asian elapids.
They inferred that the ancestor of all Australian elapids had accumulated self-replicating and self-mobilising genes (jumping genes) that were not present in their land relatives but came from another source altogether.
Corresponding author Professor David Adelson from the University of Adelaide’s School of Biological Sciences says, “While we know all marine and semi-marine sea snakes descended from a common Australian land-based ancestor, the origin of Australian elapids has been debated for some time.
“Some believe their ancestors travelled by land, whereas others hold the more contentious view that a marine or semi-marine ancestor swam here.
“In our research we found a number of genes that were present in the ancestor of all Australian elapids but could not be traced to a snake ancestor; instead they could be traced to similar transposable gene sequences found in marine life, including fish, sea squirts, sea urchins, bivalves, and turtles.
“This indicates the marine environment transferred the new genetic material into the snakes and offers new support to the argument that the first Australian elapids swam to our shores. They must have previously acquired the new genetic material during an ancestral period when they were adapted to marine life.”
University of Adelaide, “Mystery origin of iconic Aussie snakes unlocked” at ScienceDaily (February 10, 2022)
Slow roll this one: “could not be traced to a snake ancestor; instead they could be traced to similar transposable gene sequences found in marine life, including fish, sea squirts, sea urchins, bivalves, and turtles”
The researchers identified 14 distinct transfer events of the new genetic material from other marine organisms, with eight genes uniquely present in the marine and semi-marine sea snake genomes. In the case of the semi-marine snake genome, the acquired genes accounted for as much as 8-12% of the total genome sequence.
“This meant that we could unambiguously determine the major genetic differences between land and marine/semi-marine snakes were a consequence of migration into a marine environment,” said Professor Adelson.
“This is the first time that jumping genes have been used to confirm the evolutionary history of any animal species, and this research definitively proved that the common ancestor of all Australian elapids adapted to a marine environment.
University of Adelaide, “Mystery origin of iconic Aussie snakes unlocked” at ScienceDaily (February 10, 2022)
Just think of all the Darwinism that would have been thrown at this transition decades ago. If the account holds up, it’s another instance of a less neat but more accurate picture of the history of life.
The paper is open access.
You may also wish to read: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more
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Sabine Hossenfelder on epic fights in science
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder says the reputation of scientists for objectivity is overrated:
Snippets:
Newton and Leibniz then got into a bitter dispute over who was first [to invent calculus]. Leibniz wrote to the British Royal Society to ask for a committee to investigate the matter. But at that time the society’s president was… Isaac Newton. And Newton simply drafted the report himself. He wrote “we reckon Mr Newton the first inventor” and then presented it to the members of the committee to sign, which they did…
Electric lights came in use around the end of the 19th Century. At first, they all worked with Thomas Edison’s direct current system, DC for short. But his old employee Nicola Tesla had developed a competing system, the alternate current system, or AC for short. Tesla had actually offered it to Edison when he was working for him, but Edison didn’t want it… He paid Brown to build an electric chair with AC generators that they bought from Westinghouse and Tesla, and then had Brown lobby for using it to electrocute people so the general public would associate AC with death.
Together the two men discovered 136 species of dinosaurs (Cope 56 and Marsh 80) but they died financially ruined with their scientific reputation destroyed [over their feuds].
Sabine Hossenfelder, “Epic fights in science” at BackRe(Action) (February 12, 2022)
Much more at the link.
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A Muslim design advocate responds to efforts to “Islamize” Darwinism
Such efforts are currently underway, via theistic evolution, and Muzaffar Iqbal, at the Center for Islamic Sciences, offers some thoughts:
After one hundred and seventy years of sound and fury surrounding “Darwin’s dangerous idea”,[1] one would expect everything has been said by all sides and there is no further need to write on the subject. Yet, what Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once said seems to hold true: “Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.”[2] “Such people”, for Samuel Johnson, were the skeptics of his time, but in our protean world, “such people” are people of faith who are keeping the Darwin industry afloat…
The recent converts to evolution have more tools at their disposal, but no matter how sophisticated the verbal acrobatics become, “when boiled down to its scientific content…theistic evolution is no different from atheistic evolution, treating only undirected natural processes in the origin and development of life.”[8] Furthermore, such an attempt creates the same theological problems for Muslim evolutionists as it did for the Christians, because “if God purposefully created life through Darwinian means, then God’s purpose was to make it seem as though life was created without purpose. Within theistic evolution, God is a master of stealth who constantly eludes our best efforts to detect him empirically.”[9] …
Certain commonality among living beings is no argument for evolution, such commonality is necessary because all existing entities share a common living space (planet earth). But this commonality cannot be reduced to a common soup from which life evolved randomly. This cannot be done without eliminating the Creator Who fashioned, apportioned, and created all that exists and Who continues to sustain all that exists.
Theistic evolution is an oxymoron; all versions of Darwinian evolution are evolution by other names and they do not admit God. On the other hand, belief in a Creator does not admit an ad hoc universal common ancestor and random natural selection and hence “never the twain shall meet.”
Muzaffar Iqbal, “New Muslim Evolutionists” at Center for Islamic Sciences (February 9, 2022)
The thing about theistic evolution is that it only solves problems if you really want to be a naturalist atheist but don’t want to leave a religious comfort zone. Design in nature is self-evident and requires some getting over or talking around.
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At Mind Matters News: We trust nonsense from lab coats more than from gurus
This shocking study is relevant to how we decide what to believe from science sources about COVID-19:
An international team of researchers staged a revealing experiment on who we believe when they are talking nonsense. The test of 10,195 participants from 24 countries asked questions about the credibility of the statements and about their personal degree of religiosity.
How could the researchers be sure that the statements were nonsense? They were produced by the New Age Bullshit Generator, an algorithm that generates impressive sounding elements of sentences that make rough grammatical sense even if they make no other sense.
The results suggest that people generally find statements more credible if they come from a scientist when compared to a spiritual guru, with 76 percent of participants rating the ‘scientist’s’ balderdash at or above the midpoint of the credibility scale, compared with 55 percent for the ‘guru’.
Additionally, individuals who scored high for religiosity still showed a preference for the statement from the scientist compared to the spiritual guru; however, it was relatively weaker than the general sample. Religious individuals also gave higher credibility judgments to gurus compared to the general sample but were still lower than the scientist.
CONOR FEEHLY, “THE EINSTEIN EFFECT: PEOPLE TRUST NONSENSE MORE IF THEY THINK A SCIENTIST SAID IT” AT SCIENCEALERT (FEBRUARY 13, 2022) THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS.
The corona crisis has recently brought the subject of the credibility of science to the fore. Does keeping 1.5 meters apart really work? Are vaccinations safe? Does wearing a face mask help? In many cases, the answers to such questions ultimately boil down to who we trust most and consider the most credible authority. Should we take the word of an anti-vaxxer or listen to the national health authorities to guide our beliefs and behavior regarding the virus? “In our research, we looked at the influence that the source of the information has on its credibility, apart from the content of the information itself. We did that with a simple experiment using nonsense claims. They were not about corona, but our findings are also very relevant to the debates around corona,” says UvA psychologist Suzanne Hoogeveen, who led the study.
UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM, “STUDY: SCIENTISTS CARRY GREATER CREDIBILITY THAN SPIRITUAL GURUS” AT PHYS.ORG (FEBRUARY 8, 2022)
If science is seen as “a powerful indicator of the reliability of information,” even when the information is nonsense, then it will certainly be easier for some to market nonsense as science than has been supposed.
Denyse O’Leary, “We trust nonsense from lab coats more than from gurus” at Mind Matters News (February 15, 2022)
Takehome: It’s hard to understand why the researchers take comfort from finding that, worldwide, people will believe absolute nonsense if it comes from scientists.
You may also wish to read: Royal Society: Don’t censor misinformation; it makes things worse. While others demand crackdowns on “fake news,” the Society reminds us that the history of science is one of error correction. It’s a fact that much COVID news later thought to need correction was in fact purveyed by official sources, not blogs or Facebook or Twitter accounts.
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At the University of Geneva: “Cellular tornadoes sculpt our organs”
We learn, “A team from the UNIGE has demonstrated that cells self-organise to generate forces that model the shapes of our tissues:”

How are the different shapes of our organs and tissues generated? To answer this question, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, forced muscle cells to spontaneously reproduce simple shapes in vitro. By confining them on adhesion discs, the biochemists and physicists observed that the cells rapidly self-organise by aligning themselves in the same direction. A circular motion is created around a vortex – called a topological defect – which, by orienting the cells, allows them to join forces, deforming the cell monolayer into a protrusion, a structure commonly observed in embryo development. This cylindrical protrusion is maintained by the collective rotational forces of the cells, creating a tornado-like effect. The formation of these cellular tornadoes would therefore constitute a simple mechanism of spontaneous morphogenesis, dictated by the unique properties of multicellular assemblies. These results can be read in the journal Nature Materials.
University of Geneva (UNIGE), “Cellular tornadoes sculpt our organs” at [publication] (February 10, 2022)
So when was the last time we heard about a tornado that wrought anything but destruction? They can call it “self-organisation” if they want but then self-organization is just another term for “design in nature.”
The paper requires a fee or subscription.
You may also wish to read: The remarkable process of cell division. A classic in design in nature.
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February 13, 2022
Common ancestry: If the Khan Academy must front Darwinism, why use such unconvincing arguments?
Casey Luskin talks about the circular arguments for common ancestry:
I’m currently reviewing a Khan Academy video on “Evidence for Evolution” that pushes outdated science including, as we saw yesterday, Haeckel’s phony embryo drawings. The popular and influential Khan Academy shows that what biologist Jonathan Wells called the “icons of evolution” — long refuted lines of evidence — are alive and well and being served up to students, teachers, and other on the Internet. The video promotes another fallacious icon: homology in vertebrate limbs.
Circular Arguments for Common Ancestry
In fact, that is the very first line of evidence for common ancestry cited by the video. It defines homology as “things which have similar structures, similar position, similar ancestry, but not necessarily the exact same function.” Note that cases of homology are defined as features that have “similar ancestry.” The video says that the “bone structures” in the limbs of humans, dogs, birds, and whales are “eerily similar” and offers the punchline that “this is a very strong hint that maybe humans, dogs, birds, and whales share a common ancestor more recently in the past than say other animals or organisms whose structures aren’t as homologous.”
But there’s a problem with this argument. If you define homology as resulting from common ancestry, you can’t then turn around and use that as an argument for common ancestry. That’s circular reasoning.
Casey Luskin, “Khan Academy Video, “Evidence for Evolution,” Gives Circular Arguments for Common Ancestry” at Evolution News and Science Today (February 8, 2022)
One obvious problem with resorting to circular reasoning is that there are many examples of convergent evolution where unrelated life forms end up with very similar adaptations.
Because of widespread convergent evolution, claims about common ancestry can’t be based on similarity of form alone — any more than we can assume that two people who look quite similar (body doubles) must be closely related. Life is more complex than that.
You may also wish to read: The Khan Academy markets 1980s Darwinism From back when all official “evolution” claims were expected to be reverently accepted by everyone. Luskin: “But in the famed series, the horse fossils don’t evolve in a straight line, nor are they found in the same place, nor do they show a continuous direction of change.”
and
Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?
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The fate of truth in the age of sponsored science?
With diverting illustrations, “the bad cat” tells us “why so many scientific studies refute their own conclusions”:
in the age of government sponsored science driven by grants, sinecure, and sponsorship, scientists face a difficult set of choices.
they must, if they wish to continue receiving the largess of the gold-givers toe the party line of state or commercially sponsored science. he who has paid the piper demands to call the tune and producing work that does not suit “the narrative” is career suicide. your funding will dry up. so may your position, your prospects for advancement, and even your tenure. you will not be asked to join committees, interviewed for articles, citied, or supported. you may be outright attacked. i discuss this in more depth HERE.
but scientists also face another constraint: they need to be accurate. they need to run good experiments, collect good data, and relay it faithfully. if they do not, they will get called out and revealed as incompetents or frauds. this too will end one’s career as it means that not only are you doing no useful work (apart from to propogandists) but will reveal that you have sold out integrity for lucre and that is the end of peers taking you seriously. you play for team lysenko now.
the need to thread this needle and appease and please both demands has led to an odd practice:
many times, the claims made in the abstract or in the conclusions are not supported by the actual data.
el gato malo, “telling the truth in the age of sponsored science” at Substack (February 13, 2022)
The cat, guilty of “bad cattitude,” appears not to know where the shift key is on his keyboard. But we will ignore that for the present. Interesting illustrations of the cat’s point follow.
A commenter writes, “Papers that start with the line “vaccines are likely the greatest health care intervention in modern history” or similar paean very often end up providing a counterexample to that dogma in the Results section. The whole papers must be read, with a calculator handy.”
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Smallest propeller on Earth powers fastest life form?
Not a life form we might have expected either.
As usual, design in nature was there ahead of us. Specifically, in the Archaea, discovered by Carl Woese (1928–2012):
Some archaea propel themselves to incredible speeds by rotating a spiral-shaped filament called an archaellum. Using a powerful cryo-electron microscope, the new study examined this closer than ever before.
The research team – which included the University of Regensburg – focussed on Methanocaldococcus villosus, a species found near underwater volcanoes off Iceland, where water temperatures can reach about 80°C.
“M. villosus swims at a speed of about 500 body lengths per second,” said Dr. Lavinia Gambelli, of Exeter’s Living Systems Institute (LSI).
“Considering that the tiny cell is only about one micrometer in size, this means half a millimeter in one second.
“At first glance, this does not seem much. But in comparison, a cheetah achieves only 20 body lengths per second – so if an M. villosus cell had the size of a cheetah, it would swim at approximately 3,000 kilometers per hour.
“The incredible speed that M. villosus can achieve makes it one of the fastest organisms on the planet.”
University of Exeter, “Biologists Investigate Smallest Propeller on Earth – Used by One of the Fastest Organisms on the Planet” at SciTech Daily (February 12, 2022)
You may also wish to read: Carl Woese, Discoverer Of A Whole Domain Of Life, Regretted Not Overthrowing Darwin
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Palmer Study Course On Intelligent Design: Human Exceptionalism 6, Part 1
In this session, we explore the best known “Just-So” story of all, “Ape-to-Man”. Part 1 begins with the “Ape to Man” narrative, then reviews existing hominid fossils. We look at the circular reasoning Darwinists use to claim that the existence of ancient primate fossils proves humans are descended from apes. In Part 2, we consider the alleged genetic similarity between chimps and humans. Then we look at what makes humans unique in the created order.
Includes: Darwin claimed that bipedality would have been the first indication of apes evolving into humans. But after searching for evidence of increasing bipedality, the best scientists can do is claim that hominids were facultatively (optionally) bipedal. All apes today are facultatively bipedal. Is that a convincing argument that humans and apes are closely related? What other fossil evidence shows us the distinct difference between apes and humans?
Note from UD: Human exceptionalism has — as a factual state of affairs — produced some of the most nonsensical claims by way of supposed refutation that have ever been made about anything. Try this one, for example:
Chimps who can’t crack nuts prove they are more like humans? Huh? The lengths to which some researchers will go to attempt to discredit human exceptionalism are an assault on reason and common sense. The fact that no chimpanzee figured out on its own how to crack a nut using a stone does NOT make them more like humans, rather less.
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February 12, 2022
Jonathan Wells rates homology as one of the top scientific problems with evolution theory

In this second item in the series, Jonathan Wells discusses the similarity “in the bones in the human hand and the wing of a bat” (technically homology), which Darwin considered evidence for common descent. But, Wells notes,
Yet animals and plants possess many features that are similar in structure and position but are clearly not derived from a common ancestor with those features. The camera eye of a vertebrate and the camera eye of a squid or octopus are remarkably similar, but no one thinks they were inherited from a common ancestor that possessed a camera eye. The spines of South American echidnas and North American porcupines are remarkably similar, yet echidnas give birth by laying eggs, while porcupines give birth to live babies after nurturing them in a womb, like human beings. This fundamental difference means that echidnas and porcupines had very different origins, and they did not inherit their spines from a spiny common ancestor. The folds of skin between the forelimbs and hind limbs of Australian flying phalangers and North American flying squirrels are very similar. Yet the former give birth to fetuses that crawl into a pouch to complete development, like kangaroos, while the latter nurture their fetuses in a womb, like human beings. Again, they had very different origins.
Jonathan Wells, “Top Scientific Problems with Evolution: Homology” at Evolution News and Science Today (February 11, 2022)
So, Wells explains, “similarity of structure and position is evidence for common ancestry, except when it isn’t.”
It’s not clear, at that point, what problems the claim of common ancestry is supposed to address. If it’s true, it’s true but if we can’t use similarity of form as a reliable guide, how do we know it is true?
The whole series to date is here.
Note: The article is excerpted from Jonathan Wells’s chapter in The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021)
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