Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 435

The worm that was making those tracks 551–539 million years ago may be found

It’s called Yilingia spiciformis:

More than half a billion years ago, a strange, worm-like creature died as it crawled across the muddy sea floor. Both the organism and the trail it left lay undisturbed for so long that they fossilized. Now, they are helping to revise our understanding of when and how animals evolved.

The fossil, which formed some time between 551 million and 539 million years ago, in the Ediacaran period, joins a growing body of evidence that challenges the idea that animal life on Earth burst onto the scene in an event known as the Cambrian explosion, which began about 539 million years ago …

“It’s such a bizarre-looking organism,” says Darroch. The creature, which has been named Yilingia spiciformis and was up to 27 centimetres long, seems to be a biologically complex animal with a distinct front and rear end. “We don’t really have many of those from the Ediacaran,” he says.

Colin Barras, “Ancient worm fossil rolls back origins of animal life” at Nature

Paper. (paywall)

The claim that the worm challenges the Cambrian explosion which followed this Ediacaran period is weird because we knew there were worms in the Ediacaran on account of the tracks (and comb jellies too) but the explosion of multi-faceted life in the Cambrian is a unique event in any case.

(The vid is in French but the pictures tell the story pretty much.)

A friend sends some information from Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt:

The late Precambrian- era sediments around the world have yielded four main types of fossils, all of which are dated between about 570 and 543 million years ago. … The third group includes what are called trace fossils, the possible remains of animal activity such as tracks, burrows, and fecal pellets. Some paleontologists have attributed these trace fossils to ancient worms.

[…]

This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of palaeontologists to reject ancestor-descendant relationships between all but (at most) a few of the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna. Nevertheless, some have suggested that trace fossils may establish a link. In an authoritative 2011 paper in the journal Science, Douglas Erwin and colleagues described the discovery of Ediacaran trace fossils consisting of surface tracks, burrows, fecal pellets, and feeding trails, which, they argue, though small, could only have been made by animals such as worms with a relatively high degree of complexity. On the basis of these findings, Erwin and other paleontologists have argued that these trace fossils suggest the existence of organisms with a head and tail, nervous systems, a muscular body wall allowing creeping or burrowing, and a gut with mouth and anus. Other paleontologists suggest that these characteristics may indicate the presence of a Precambrian mollusk or a worm phylum.

Graham Budd, a British paleontologist who works at Uppsala University in Sweden, and others, have disputed these associations. Budd and geologist colleague Sören Jensen argue that many alleged trace fossils actually show evidence of inorganic origin: “There are numerous reports of older trace fossils, but most can be immediately shown to represent either inorganic sedimentary structures or metaphytes [land plants], or alternatively they have been misdated.” Still others have suggested that surface tracks and trails could have been left by mobile single-celled organisms, including a known form of a giant deep-sea protist that leaves bilaterianlike impressions. As one paper explains, “Some such traces date back to 1.5 billion to 1.8 billion years ago, which outdates even the boldest claims of the time of origin of animal multi-cellularity and forces researchers to contemplate the possibility of an inorganic or bacterial origin.”

Even the most favorable interpretations of these trace fossils suggest that they indicate the presence of no more than two animal body plans (of largely unknown characteristics). Thus, the Ediacaran record falls far short of establishing the existence of the wide variety of transitional intermediates that a Darwinian view of life’s history requires. The Cambrian explosion attests to the first appearance of organisms representing at least twenty phyla and many more subphyla and classes, each manifesting distinctive body plans. In a best case, the Ediacaran forms represent possible ancestors for, at most, four distinct Cambrian body plans, even counting those documented only by trace fossils. This leaves the vast majority of the Cambrian phyla with no apparent ancestors in the Precambrian rocks (i.e., at least nineteen of the twenty- three phyla present in the Cambrian have no representative in Precambrian strata).

Third, even if representatives of four animal phyla were present in the Ediacaran period, it does not follow that these forms were necessarily transitional or intermediate to the Cambrian animals. The Precambrian sponges (phylum Porifera), for example, were quite similar to their Cambrian brethren, thus demonstrating, not a gradual transformation from a simpler precursor or the presence of an ancestor common to many forms, but quite possibly only an earlier first appearance of a known Cambrian form. The same may be true of whatever kind of worm may be attested by Precambrian tracks and burrows.

Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, pp. 81, 85-85 (HarperOne, 2013) (citations omitted).

See also: Earlier than thought: Ancient and well-travelled worm

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Lay Catholics questioning Darwinism?

For some years, it has not been the practice of many Catholics to question Darwinism. Most got sucked years ago into some muddle according to which the great theologian Thomas Aquinas didn’t supposedly think there could be such a thing as observable design in nature because that would make God a “tinkerer.” Some tinker.

Anyway, it was interesting to see that, just recently, a California Catholic paper has started to smell the coffee at last and picked up on George Weigel’s article from First Things:

The empirical evidence suggests that the notions of a purposeful Creator and a purposeful creation cannot be dismissed as mere pre-modern mythology. That may help a few Nones out of the materialist bogs in which they’re stuck.

“Memo to Nones: Darwin can’t explain Cambrian explosion” at California Catholic Daily

The comments reveal a variety of approaches, including one commenter who wants to just blame the Cambrian explosion on Snowball Earth. Right. That’ll solve everything.

Of course, the disgruntled can always blame it all on that Yale prof David Gelernter.

But lay Catholics actually waking up… wow.

See also: At First Things, they are also getting over Darwinism

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Skeptics duped by fake prof

This could happen to anyone, of course:

Between 2016 and 2019 a writer named John Anthony Glynn, whose biography includes a Ph.D. in psychology and professorships of psychology at several universities, had four articles published in Skeptic and eSkeptic (the online edition of print Skeptic). While we edited and fact-checked his articles, we did not verify his biographical claims and we were duped. A number of red flags that emerged over the past few months led to an investigation that revealed Mr. Glynn faked his Ph.D. As the Publisher and Editor of Skeptic I should have been more alert to these red flags and I take full responsibility for the publication of these articles under the pretense of his unearned expertise. I apologize to our readers and promise that from now on we will be more vigilant in our fact-checking. A Ph.D. is not required to publish in Skeptic, but fabricating one is disqualifying. Further research revealed that Mr. Glynn represented himself as a Ph.D. psychologist to several academic institutions (academic fraud), and under those credentials he published over 40 articles in 15 different publication outlets in 2019 alone (journalistic fraud). The extent of this calculated, systematic, and repeated deception warrants publishing our findings, the details of which follow.

Michael Shermer, “The Fabulist and the Publisher” at Skeptic

Of course, it’s more embarrassing for a celeb skeptic.

But look on the bright side. At least they care. In the social sciences, it’s the guy revealing flimflam who gets punished.

But why, exactly, is a PhD so important? The Sokal hoax-ees all have PhDs, probably, and what good did that ever do?

See also: Sokal Hoaxer Punished: Science Has Left The Building

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Three scholars of “biodiversity and biology” suggest ditching the Darwinian descent of man graphic

Possibly the earliest version was T.H. Huxley in 1863.

Because nature isn’t really that tidy, they say. But then they go on to blame everyone but the Darwinists for keeping the idea going:

This misunderstanding is a holdover from before 1859, the year Charles Darwin first published his scientific theory of evolution via natural selection.

Until then, the traditional view of how the world was organized was through a “progression in perfection.” This concept is explicit in the idea of the “great chain of being,” or “scala naturae” in Latin: All beings on earth, animate and inanimate, could be organized according to an increasing scale of perfection from, say, mushrooms at the bottom up through lobsters and rabbits, all the way to human beings at the top.

Quentin Wheeler, Antonio G. Valdecasas, and Cristina Cánovas, “Evolution doesn’t proceed in a straight line – so why draw it that way?” at The Conversation

Amazing rewrite of the history of Darwinism! Nobody but Darwinists was doing this kind of stuff.

But guess they gotta claim something. And get this:

Given centuries of religious belief in a “great chain of being,” the idea of linearity was an easy sell. The iconic version of this concept is, of course, the depiction of a supposed ape-to-human “progression.” Variations of all kinds have been made of this depiction, some with a humorous spirit, but most to ridicule the monkey-to-man theory.

Quentin Wheeler, Antonio G. Valdecasas, and Cristina Cánovas, “Evolution doesn’t proceed in a straight line – so why draw it that way?” at The Conversation

That’s flatly wrong. These descent of man graphics were not an easy sell. They were taken seriously by elite sources and they were hugely controversial elsewhere. Humorous versions riffed off the canonical Darwinian versions to be sure. But that was because, even today, most people are just not Darwinists, sorry guys.

If the biodiversity profs really need to muddy the history as much as this, maybe things are even worse than we knew. Stay tuned.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: Cave art actually went downhill during the fabled ascent of man?

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But how do frog dads know how to look after tadpoles?

If it’s okay to question Darwin-only evolution scenarios, here’s a good one:

After poison frog tadpoles hatch from their eggs in the leaf litter, they wriggle onto the backs of their patiently waiting fathers, who piggyback them to water. Scientists studying the candy-colored amphibians, sometimes called poison dart frogs, in the Amazon rain forest recently discovered that frog dads often skip close-by ponds in favor of something more distant—a move that expends precious energy. Sometimes they traveled as far as 400 meters, scientists reported in July in Evolutionary Ecology. “It’s actually quite the journey,” says study author and biologist Andrius Pašukonis of Stanford University…

Despite the energy cost and higher risk of meeting predators, dropping young tadpoles in faraway pools may offer evolutionary benefits such as decreased risk of inbreeding and less competition for resources, Pašukonis says. But it is difficult to say what exactly motivates the frogs themselves to go farther, notes neurobiologist Sabrina Burmeister of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies poison frog cognition but was not involved in the new research. J

Jennifer Leman, “Poison Frog Fathers Ferry Their Tadpoles Great Distances” at Scientific American

But how do the daddy frogs know to do this? It’s not enough to say that it benefits their offspring. What is the exact mechanism by which they learned to carry out this process?

A word processor would have benefited Shakespeare. Why didn’t he have one? Because no one had the information to produce one, right?.

So what is the specific means by which an intellectually underendowed life form like the frog has enough information to do this stuff? This isn’t fight, flight, or freeze. It is a complex program. How does it come to be there?

In this case, the researchers are honest enough not to just start emitting Darwinblather. They admit we don’t really know. That is a good beginning. Because we don’t.

See also: Frogs did not do what evolutionary biologists told them they should

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At Nature: The “bizarre logic” of the multiverse is explored in a review

In a review of cosmologist Sean Carroll’s new book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, we read:

Six decades on, the [many worlds/ multiverse] theory is one of the most bizarre yet fully logical ideas in human history, growing directly out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics without introducing extraneous elements. It has become a staple of popular culture, although the plots of the many films and television series inspired by it invariably flout the theory by relying on contact between the parallel worlds, as in the 2011 movie Another Earth.

In Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll cogently explains the many-worlds theory and its post-Everett evolution, and why our world nevertheless looks the way it does. Largely because of its purely logical character, Carroll calls Everett’s brainchild “the best view of reality we have” …

Nevertheless, non-scientists might have lingering problems with Carroll’s breezy, largely unexamined ideas about “reality”. Like many physicists, he assumes that reality is whatever a scientific theory says it is.

Robert P. Crease, “The bizarre logic of the many-worlds theory” at Nature

Crease writes as if he would very much like to buy in but still thinks that sanity has something to offer. Possibly, many establishment science figures teeter on that brink.

Sabine Hossenfelder offers a different perspective:

Hossenfelder Summarizes Multiverse Theories, Asks: Science Or Fiction?

and

Hossenfelder: The multiverse is a fringe idea

True, it’s a fringe idea. But it’s one very big fringe, trailing out the door and down the street and beyond the furthest galaxy…

Bunk, sure, but lotta bunk.

See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

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The Manhattan Contrarian on David Gelernter abandoning Darwinism

What would an urban sophisticate make of doubts about Darwinism? Once the enforcement trolls have been banished below stairs, hasn’t Darwinism become something people patter at cocktail parties, so that others know that they are bicoastal and just deplore! their privilege? Instead of being genuine deplorables who might doubt?

No, but seriously, Darwinism today has no more to do with science than cocktail olives have to do with nutrition. Anyway, the Contrarian, as the name implies, says

But the problem is that the Darwinian hypothesis is not just that “evolution occurred,” but rather that there is a specific mechanism — known as “natural selection” — by which new species have emerged from old and have proliferated, by which single-celled bacteria have gradually evolved into fish and birds and humans. And unfortunately, the ongoing accumulation of evidence, both from the fossil record and from molecular biology, has not been kind to the hypothesized mechanism of natural selection. …

In other words, if you have come to believe that evolution according to the Darwinian hypothesis is firmly established in science, prepare to have your preconceptions shaken up. Live by the scientific method, die by the scientific method. Of course, just because Darwin’s hypothesized mechanism is falsified does not mean that Meyer’s alternative answer — “intelligent design” — must be accepted. As a non-scientific non-falsifiable hypothesis, “intelligent design” cannot be either proven or disproven. You can believe it or not, as you wish.

Is there another potential falsifiable hypothesis out there as to the mechanism by which all these species may have evolved from the bacteria? Not that I’m aware of. That does not mean that it won’t emerge, but a good century and a half after Darwin, there’s no sign of it.

Francis Menton, “David Gelernter Takes On Darwinism ” at Manhattan Contrarian

If Darwinism is not the answer, it is not the answer even if ID isn’t either. It can’t just stand in for an answer to keep ID off the table.

So far, it stays lively: One of the biggest problems with Darwin’s theory may now be his supporters Their unreflective belligerence advertises all the other problems. Barbara Kay talks about the fallout from David Gelernter’s coming to doubt Darwin.

Maybe the best defence of Darwinism is now ignorance of the problems. They said things like, “I don’t need to read this to know it’s ignorant.” Which is a fine way to expose their own ignorance: They had no idea what they were talking about, and acted proud of it!

But WHY are they abandoning Darwinism? And note, these are NOT the raging Woke who would pull down Darwin’s statue because he is dead, white, and male. These are thoughtful people. They can see that he might be reasonable but wrong.

Meanwhile, other engaged brains have been getting restless too:

At First Things, They Are Also Getting Over Darwinism

Another Think Tank Now Openly Questions Darwinism So Power Line is interviewing J. Scott Turner, author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. He’s not an “ID guy” but that doesn’t matter. His book’s title tells you what you need to know. He understands that something is wrong. And his insights into insects’ hive mind are a piece in the puzzle.

Hoover Institution interview with David Berlinski

Mathematicians challenge Darwinian Evolution

The College Fix LISTENS TO David Gelernter on Darwin! It’s almost as though people are “getting it” that Darwinism now functions as an intolerant secular religion. Evolution rolls on oblivious but here and there heads are getting cracked, so to speak, over the differences between what really happens and what Darwinians insist must happen.

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Does survival of the fittest not apply to frogs?

Does survival of the fittest not apply to frogs?

Well, it probably does over time but the story turns out to be more complex than that. In one study, the brighter colored poison frogs were not necessarily outcompeting the blander colored ones for survival. Also, from ScienceDaily:

“The biggest surprise came from the fact that the frogs [with] higher amount of toxins in their skin are not necessarily the ones that birds find most distasteful. This finding challenges previous assumptions that most toxic equals most unpalatable,” says Rojas. Paper.(open access) – Lawrence, Rojas, Fouquet, Mappes, Blanchette, Saporito, Bosque, Courtois and Noonan. Weak warning signals can persist in the absence of gene flow. PNAS, 2019 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1901872116 More.

Maybe we are looking for a certainty that isn’t there. How much toxin a frog has may not be calibrated by nature “daily, hourly, adding up.”

See also: Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented?

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What difference does Neanderthal ancestry make?

Researchers aren’t sure:

With the issue of Neanderthal/modern human mating settled, scientists could focus on a new goal, says Akey, now at Princeton University. Namely, what was the consequence of this interbreeding? “Was it just this curious feature of human history that didn’t have an impact, or did it alter the trajectory of human evolution?”

In the past five years, a flurry of research has sought to answer that question. Genomic analyses have associated Neanderthal variants with differences in the expression levels of diverse genes and of phenotypes ranging from skin and hair color to immune function and neuropsychiatric disease. But researchers cannot yet say how these archaic sequences affect people today, much less the humans who acquired them some 50,000–55,000 years ago.

“So far I have not seen any convincing functional studies where you take the Neanderthal variant and the human variant and do controlled experiments” to identify the physiological consequence, says Grayson Camp, a genomicist at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB) in Switzerland. “No one has actually shown yet in culture that a human and Neanderthal allele have a different physiological function. That will be exciting when someone does.”

Jef Akst, “Neanderthal DNA in Modern Human Genomes Is Not Silent” at The Scientist

But the fact that they are even studying something like this helps us understand why it is no longer a career disaster to doubt textbook Darwinism.

It’s been nearly a quarter century since some of us read David Berlinski’s Commentary essay, The Deniable Darwin. Back then, the Neanderthal was the subhuman our kind had killed off. Survival of the fittest and so forth. There were lots of explanations around how stupid Neanderthals supposedly were. Maybe the explanations don’t age so well now.

See also: Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents

and

A deep and abiding need for Neanderthals to be stupid. Why?

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Paper: Sperm cells take up genetic material from outside themselves

Crossing the so-called Weismann barrier:

The active uptake of exogenous nucleic acids by spermatozoa of virtually all animal species is a well-established phenomenon whose significance has long been underappreciated. A growing body of published data demonstrates that extracellular vesicles released from mammalian somatic tissues pass an RNA-based flow of information to epididymal spermatozoa, thereby crossing the Weismann barrier. That information is delivered to oocytes at fertilization and affects the fate of the developing progeny. We propose that this essential process of epigenetic transmission depends upon the documented ability of epididymal spermatozoa to bind and internalize foreign nucleic acids in their nuclei. In other words, spermatozoa are not passive vectors of exogenous molecules but rather active participants in essential somatic communication across generations. (open access)

Ilaria Sciamanna, Annalucia Serafino, James A. Shapiro, and Corrado Spadafora, “The active role of spermatozoa in transgenerational inheritance” at Proceedings of the Royal Society B

If the Weismann barrier is broken, that’s barbarians at the gates of textbook Darwinism, no? It turns out, all sorts of sources can contribute to inheritance.

See also: Epigenetic Learning Appears Confirmed In Nematodes; Weismann Barrier Broken

and

Epigenetic change: Lamarck, wake up, you’re wanted in the conference room!

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