He Tries to Play Natural History Mr. Fix-it

The book “Lamarck's Revenge” by paleontologist Peter Ward is a book that tries to kind of tell us: evolution theory is broken, but there's a fix. Unfortunately, the fix described is no real fix at all, being hardly better than a tiny little band-aid.

On page 43 the author tells us the following:

“ 'Nature makes no leap,' meaning that evolution took place slowly and gradually. This was Darwin's core belief. And yet that is not how the fossil record works. The fossil record shows more 'leaps' than not in species.”

On page 44 the author states the following:

“Charles Darwin, in edition after edition of his great masterpiece, railed against the fossil record. The problem was not his theory but the fossil record itself. Because of this, paleontology became an ever-greater embarrassment to the Keepers of Evolutionary Theory. By the 1940s and '50s this embarrassment only heightened. Yet data are data; it is the interpretation that changed. By the mid-twentieth century, the problem posed by fossils was so acute it could no longer be ignored: The fossil record, even with a century of collecting after Darwin, still did not support Darwinian views of how evolution took place. The greatest twentieth century paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, in midcentury had to admit to a reality of the fossil record: 'It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all new categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly, and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.' "

So apparently the fossil record does not strongly support the claims of Darwin fans that new life forms appear mainly through slow, gradual evolution.  Why have we not been told this important truth more often, and why have our authorities so often tried to insinuate that the opposite was true? An example is that during the Ordovician period, the number of marine animals in one classification category (Family, the category above Genus) tripled, increasing by 300% (according to this scientific paper). But such an "information explosion" is dwarfed by the organization bonanza that occurred during the Cambrian Explosion, in which almost all animal phyla appeared rather suddenly -- what we may call a gigantic complexity windfall. 

Ward proposes a fix for the shortcomings of Darwinism – kind of a moldy old fix. He proposes that we go back and resurrect some of the ideas of the biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who died in 1829. Ward's zeal on this matter is immoderate, for on page 111 he refers to a critic of Darwinism and states, “The Deity he worships should be Lamarck, not God.” Many have accused evolutionary biologists of kind of putting Darwin on some pedestal of adulation, but here we seem to have this type of worshipful attitude directed towards a predecessor of Darwin.

Lamarck's most famous idea was that acquired characteristics can be inherited. He stated, "All that has been acquired, traced, or changed, in the physiology of individuals, during their life, is conserved...and transmitted to new individuals who are related to those who have undergone those changes." For more than a century, biologists told us that the biological theories of Lamarck are bunk. If the ideas of Lamarck are resurrected by biologists, this may show that biologists are very inconsistent thinkers who applaud in one decade what they condemned the previous decade.

Ward's attempt to patch up holes in Darwinism is based on epigenetics, which may offer some hope for a little bit of inheritance of acquired characteristics. In Chapter VII he discusses the huge problem of explaining the Cambrian Explosion, which he tells us is “when the major body plans of animals now on Earth appeared rapidly in the fossil record.” Ward promises us on page 111 that epigenetics can “explain away” the problem of the Cambrian Explosion. But he does nothing to fulfill this promise. On the same page he makes a statement that ends in absurdity:

“The...criticism is that Darwinian mechanisms, most notably natural selection combined with slow, gene-by-gene mutations, can in no way produce at the apparent speed at which the Cambrian explosion was able to produce all the basic animal body plans in tens of millions of years or less. Yet the evidence of even faster evolutionary change is all around us. For example, the ways that weeds when invading a new environment can quickly change their shapes.”

The latter half of this statement is fatuous. The mystery of the Cambrian Explosion was how so many dramatic biological innovations (such as vision, hard shells and locomotion) and how so many new animal body plans were able to appear so quickly. There is no biological innovation at all (and no real evolution) when masses of weeds change their shapes, just as there is no evolution when flocks of birds change their shapes; and weeds aren't even animals. The weeds still have the same DNA  (the same genomes) that they had before they changed their shapes. Humans have never witnessed any type of natural biological innovation a thousandth as impressive as the Cambrian Explosion.

Ward then attempts to convince us that “four different epigenetic mechanisms presumably contributed to the great increase in both the kinds of species and the kinds of morphologies that distinguished them that together produced the Cambrian explosion” (page 113). By using the phrase “presumably contributed” he indicates he has no strong causal argument. To say something “contributed” to some effect is to make no strong causal claim at all. A million things may contribute to some effect without being anything close to being an actual cause of that effect. For example, the mass of my body contributes to the overall gravitational pull that the Earth and its inhabitants exert on the moon, but it is not true that the mass of my body is even one millionth of the reason why the moon keeps orbiting the Earth. And each time you have a little charcoal barbecue outside, you are contributing to global warming, but that does not mean your activity is even a millionth of the cause of global warming. So when a scientist merely says that one thing “contributes” to something else, he is not making a strong causal claim at at all. And when a scientist says that something  “presumably contributed” to some effect, he is making a statement so featherweight and hesitant that it has no real weight.

On page 72-73 Ward has a section entitled “Summarizing Epigenetic Processes,” and that section lists three things:

1. “Methlyation,” that “lengths of DNA can be deactivated.”
2. “Modifications  of gene expression...such as increasing the rate of protein production called for by the code or slowing it down or even turning it on or off.”
3. “Reprogramming,” which he defines as some type of erasing, using the phrase “erase and erase again,” also using the phrase “reprogramming, or erasing.”

There is nothing constructive or creative in such epigenetic processes. They are simply little tweaks of existing proteins or genes, or cases of turning off or erasing parts of existing functionality. So epigenetics is useless in helping to explain how some vast burst of biological information and functional innovation (such as the Cambrian Explosion) could occur.

Trying to make it sound as if the idea that epigenetics had something to do with the Cambrian Explosion, Ward actually gives away that such an idea has not at all gained acceptance, for he states this on page 118: “From there the floodgates relating to epigenetics and the Cambrian explosion opened, yet none of this has made it into the textbooks thus far.” Of course, because there's no substance to the idea that epigenetics can explain even a hundredth of the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian Explosion involved the relatively sudden appearance of almost all animal phyla, but Ward has failed to explain how epigenetics can explain the origin of even one of those phyla (or even a single appendage or organ or protein that appeared during the Cambrian Explosion).  If the inheritance of acquired characteristics were true, it would do nothing to explain the appearance of novel biological innovations, never seen before, because the inheritance of acquired characteristics is the repetition of something some organisms already had, not the appearance of new traits, capabilities, or biological innovations. 

So we have in Ward's book the strange situation of a book that mentions some big bleeding wounds in Darwinism, but then merely offers the tiniest band-aid as a fix, along with baseless boasts that sound like, “This fixes everything.”

A book like this seems like a complexity concealment.  Everywhere living things show mountainous levels of organization, information and complexity, but you would never know that from reading Ward's book.  He doesn't tell you that cells are so complex they are often compared to factories or cities. He doesn't tell you that in our bodies are more than 20,000 different types of protein molecules, each a different very complex arrangement of matter, each with the information complexity of a 50-line computer program, such proteins requiring a genome with an information complexity of 1000 books. He doesn't mention protein folding, one of the principal reasons why there is no credible explanation for the origin of proteins (the fact that functional proteins require folding, a very hard-to-achieve trick which can occur in less than .00000000000000000000000001 of the possible arrangements of the amino acids that make up a protein).  In the index of the book we find no entries for "complexity," "organization," "order," or "information." Judging from its index, the book has only a passing reference to proteins, something that tells you nothing about them or how complex they are.  The book doesn't even have an index entry for "cells," merely having an entry for "cellular differentiation." All that Ward tells you about the stratospheric level of order, organization and information in living things is when Ward tells you on page 97 that "there is no really simple life," and that life is "composed of a great number of atoms arranged in intricate ways," a statement so vague and nebulous that it will go in one of the reader's ears and out the other. 

In his interesting recent book Cosmological Koans, which has some nice flourishes of literary style, the physicist Anthony Aquirre tells us about just how complex biological life is. He states the following on page 338:

"On the physical level, biological creatures are so much more complex in a functional way than current artifacts of our technology that there's almost no comparison. The most elaborate and sophisticated human-designed machines, while quite impressive, are utter child's play compared with the workings of a cell: a cell contains on the order of 100 trillion atoms, and probably billions of quite complex molecules working with amazing precision. The most complex engineered machines -- modern jet aircraft, for example -- have several million parts. Thus, perhaps all the jetliners in the world (without people in them, of course) could compete in functional complexity with a lowly bacterium."

Some arrangements are too complex to have appeared by chance

There's a Better “Octopuses from Space” Theory Than Those 33 Scientists Suggested

When 33 scientists released their interesting paper “Cause of Cambridge Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?” the paper received fairly little attention. That's too bad, because it was an interesting paper fearlessly challenging biological orthodoxy. But now the paper has attracted new attention. Inspired by a speculation in the paper by the 33 scientists, someone released a news story with a headline saying octopuses may have come from space. The excitement may have got started with this outrageous headline from the British tabloid Express:

The tabloid's  dubious headline

This, of course, was not actually “science news,” but merely a report about a very speculative idea presented in the paper about the Cambrian Explosion written by the 33 scientists. Let's take a look at the wider theory advanced by these scientists, and some reasons why it comes up short.

The theory is that various biological innovations in Earth's past occurred after comets dumped biological material on our planet. One of the great unsolved mysteries of biology is why there was such a massive amount of biological innovation occurring about 540 million years ago in the event called the Cambrian Explosion. During this relatively short period of time, most of the animal phyla now existing originated. For reasons discussed here, such an event has always been hard to reconcile with Darwinian ideas of slow, gradual evolution.

The 33 scientists suggest a strange possibility: that life originated in comets, and that during the Cambrian Explosion our planet may have passed through a cloud of comets. If life had existed on many of these comets, this may have provided our planet with a surge of new biological information. The authors state the following:

It takes little imagination to consider that the pre-Cambrian mass extinction event(s) was correlated with the impact of a giant life-bearing comet (or comets), and the subsequent seeding of Earth with new cosmic-derived cellular organisms and viral genes (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1979, 1981). There may indeed have been a complex comet debris stream implying multiple impacts over the estimated 25 million years at the start of the Cambrian explosion.

The authors also suggest that cometary impacts had something to do with the origin of the octopus. The authors point out that “the genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo sapiens.” The authors state this:

The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus (e.g. Nautilus pompilius) to the common Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) to Squid (Loligo vulgaris) to the common Octopus … are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant “future” in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large. Such an extraterrestrial origin as an explanation of emergence of course runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm.

Later the authors state the following, using “bolides” as a synonym for comets:

One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth - most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized Octopus eggs. Thus the possibility that cryopreserved Squid and/or Octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted (below) as that would be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the Octopus' sudden emergence on Earth ca. 270 million years ago. Indeed this principle applies to the sudden appearance in the fossil record of pretty well all major life forms, covered in the prescient concept of “punctuated equilibrium” by Eldridge and Gould advanced in the early 1970s ...Therefore, similar living features like this “as if the genes were derived from some type of pre-existence" (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981) apply to many other biological ensembles when closely examined.

It is certainly an interesting idea that various “information explosions” or “complexity explosions” we see in the history of life might be explained by biological material coming from comets. And the 33 authors are quite right in hinting that such cases are inadequately explained by Darwin's theory of evolution, which offers only the explanation of random mutations and natural selection, one that is weak and unconvincing for reasons discussed here. An event such as the Cambrian Explosion in which we see the rather sudden appearance of most of the existing animal phlya (with so many new body plans appearing suddenly) is something that seems to be impossible to explain while you are confined by the straight-jacket of Darwinian orthodoxy. However, there are two  very big problems in the type of theory suggested by the 33 authors.

The main problem has to do with the genetic code. The genetic code is the very specific system of representations used by all earthly life. It is not at all true that this genetic code follows inevitably from some laws of chemistry. The genetic code used by earthly organisms is only one of thousands of possible genetic codes that life might have been based on.

The genetic code

So let us imagine that life appeared independently on different comets in our solar system. The life on each such comet would have its own genetic code. If life were to develop on a comet, and that comet were to crash to our planet, such life would be using a genetic code entirely different from that of the earthly life that existed before. If there had been multiple collisions of life-bearing comets on Earth, what we would expect is a variety of organisms using different genetic codes. It might, for example, be that 50 percent of life used one genetic code, and 20 percent of life used some other genetic code, and 30 percent of life used some third genetic code. Or there might be ten different genetic codes used by earthly life. But that's not what we see. All life on Earth seems to use the same genetic code.

A writer named Gert Kortof states the problem in reviewing a book by Fred Hoyle:

Why is it a problem that the genetic code of the extraterrestrials and terrestrials should be the same? Is the code not necessarily derived from the laws of chemistry? No, it isn't! The genetic code is not a universal cosmic code. The problem with any theory that claims extraterrestrial genetic input, is that life on Earth is a closed genetic system. I strongly disagree with Hoyle's claim that "terrestrial biology is not a closed system". (p. 3) Why? All Life on earth happens to have the same genetic code. That would be no problem, if it would be the only possible genetic code available to life. Our genetic code is one of billions and billions of possible codes. The current one looks like a 'frozen accident'. The probability that the genetic code of extraterrestrial DNA is the same as the genetic code on earth, equals the chance that a Boeing-747 arises from a junk yard!

Therefore it is very hard to believe that various comets on which life independently developed have seeded our planet with new life forms. If that had happened, it would not be true that all life uses the same genetic code. The issue of the genetic code is ignored by the paper by the 33 scientists.

A second problem is that comet collisions would be extremely destructive to earthly life. A comet impact would not be as destructive as an asteroid impact. But a larger comet might have so much kinetic energy that it might cause a mass extinction if it collided with our planet. A scientist says here that a collision with a kilometer-sized comet would probably mean the end of civilization. The chance of life on a comet surviving such an impact does not seem very great. It seems that a comet collision would be likely to destroy far more species than it added to our planet because of an addition of life from the comet.

Does this mean that the idea of extraterrestrial inputs to earthly biology should be discarded and dismissed? Not at all. There is a variation of this idea that gets around the genetic code problem and the collision problem. We can simply hypothesize that rather than being accidental, random inputs from comets, the extraterrestrial inputs were deliberate inputs from intelligent extraterrestrial visitors.

Instead of life-bearing comets arriving at various times in the past, we can imagine life-bearing spaceships arriving here at various times in earth's history. Imagine if the beings populating an extraterrestrial expedition to our planet were to try to speed up the evolution of life on Earth. If such astronauts were to design new organisms to introduce on our planet, they would presumably create designs using the genetic code already used on our planet, rather than using some genetic code coming from their own planet (just as someone visiting Japan from England trying to spread ideas to the Japanese would create books written in Japanese rather than English). And of course, under such a spaceship theory the astronauts would not be smashing their spaceships into our planet, so you avoid the collision destruction problem. So by imagining a purposeful, directed introduction of new life forms into the Earthly biosphere, we have a “life from space” theory that avoids the two big problems of the theory of the 33 scientists.

But such a smarter theory might have been avoided by the 33 scientists on the grounds that it would be hard for a paper advancing such a theory to get published, given the current state of biological academia where there exists ideological restrictions that sometimes seem as great as those in a medieval monastery. For it is a great taboo in colleges and universities for anyone to be talking about purpose, design, and deliberate intent when trying to explain the origin of Earth's living things.

This taboo makes no sense at all. It is the taboo that when discussing the origin of incredibly fine-tuned biological organisms that look just like products of design and purpose, we must never suggest any explanation that involves some purposeful cause. It is the taboo that when discussing biological functionality more impressive than any electronic functionality man has produced, we must always pretend that all these biological innovations were mere accidents. And so our 33 scientists have given us a theory with two giant holes, huge problems that could have been avoided by simply imagining purposeful extraterrestrial visitations rather than purposeless extraterrestrial comet collisions. 

The Organization Explosions They Can't Explain

Last night on the National Geographic channel there was a science documentary discussing the origin of life. It was the typical misleading treatment of this topic I expect to see on a TV show or a mainstream source. There was the usual vastly overconfident talk suggesting scientists may be on the brink of solving the problem of life's origin, an entirely unfounded claim we have been hearing for 70 years. We also heard a scientist in front of a hot spring or hydrothermal vent saying, “This is where chemistry turns into biology.” No, it isn't. There could only be a case of chemistry turning into biology if chemicals were to turn into a living thing, something that hasn't happened on our planet for at least three billion years, in either nature or a laboratory. Chemistry does not turn into biology in hot springs or hydrothermal vents.  As a recent scientific paper notes, "Independent abiogenesis on the cosmologically diminutive scale of oceans, lakes or hydrothermal vents remains a hypothesis with no empirical support."

The origin of life is a case of an organization explosion. The origin of even the simplest life seems to require a fantastically improbable burst of organization. Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a functional protein molecule to appear, and many such protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: cells, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality. Scientists have no plausible explanation for this organization explosion, nor do they have a decent explanation for another organization explosion: the Cambrian Explosion.

When we examine the fossil record, we don't see fossils appearing in larger and larger sizes, at an even rate of progression between 3 billion years ago and 100 million years ago. Instead, we see very little fossil evidence of life prior to the Cambrian era about 520 million years ago. But during the Cambrian era there is a sudden surge of fossils in the fossil record. This sudden blossoming of life during the Cambrian era is known as the Cambrian Explosion.

The major groupings of life are called phyla. There are about 35 animal phyla, and almost all of these phyla appeared during the Cambrian era. There is not a single animal phylum that has arisen since about the time of the Cambrian era, which lasted from about 540 million years ago to 485 million years ago. As one research paper states, “The youngest animal phylum is about 500 million-year-old.” This highly technical document states that Bryozoans are the youngest phylum of animal. The document states:

Bryozoans, or moss animals, make their first appearance in the fossil record about 490 million years ago. All other phyla had appeared by about 510 million years.

This creates quite a problem for Darwinian theory, as it is not what such a theory predicts. According to Darwinian ideas, what we should have seen is more and more phyla appearing as time progressed, as more and more branches appeared in a tree of life, like the tree of life that appeared as an illustration in The Origin of Species. In fact, Darwin said in The Origin of Species that the Cambrian Explosion “may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”

We don't know how many animal phyla originated in the Cambrian Explosion, and estimates vary between 30 and 100. The graph below assumes an intermediate estimate of 50. A graph like this is startling, because it shows the origin of animal phyla in a single blip.

There have been various attempts to explain how the Cambrian Explosion could have occurred. One such attempt is the book In the Blink of an Eye by biologist Andrew Parker. The author's theory is summarized on the dusk jacket of the book:

Parker's astounding explanation is that it was the development of vision in primitive animals that caused the explosion. Precambrian creatures were unable to see, making it difficult to find friend or foe. With the evolution of the eye, the size, shape, color, and behavior of animals was suddenly revealed. Once the lights were “turned on,” there was enormous pressure to evolve hard external parts as defenses and grasping limbs to grab prey. The animal kingdom exploded into life, and the country of the blind became a teeming mass of hunters and hunted, all scrambling for their place on the evolutionary tree.

The book calls this theory the “light switch” theory. What is this “pressure” referred to in this quote? It is what Parker calls “selection pressure.” The concept of selection pressure is reasonably used when talking about microevolution, changes in a population that result simply from a state where some particular trait already present in the population is either favored or disfavored by the environment.

Here is an example. Imagine a population of 500 dogs is introduced in the wild to a very cold island in upper Canada. Some of the dogs may have short fur, and others may have thick fur like the Samoyed breed. In such a situation, you could say there is selection pressure that might cause the dogs with thick fur to become more common in the population over the next few generations (because the short-haired dogs might tend to freeze to death). This is an example of microevolution, which does not involve any new complex biological innovations. All of the examples in the wikipedia.org article on “evolutionary pressure” (the same as selection pressure) are mere examples of microevolution.

But Parker has hijacked the term “selection pressure,” which is reasonable when talking about microevolution, and he is using it to try to explain sudden cases of biological innovation, what is called macroevolution. This is illegitimate. In no sense can we explain dramatic macroscopic innovations by using the phrase “selection pressure.”

Let us consider the Darwinian account of how evolution occurs. We are told that new biological innovations are caused by lucky random mutations and natural selection. The idea is that over the eons there very rarely occur fortunate random mutations. We are told that natural selection causes favorable random mutations to accumulate, and that this results in useful new adaptions.

Such a Darwinian process will be at the mercy of how often these rare lucky mutations occur. Such a rate will not be sped up when there is a need for some particular innovation. If a biological innovation requires many parts before it can be useful – which is certainly the case for a vision system, hard shells, and grasping limbs – then there will be no natural selection at all until the innovation has reached a functional threshold, which requires quite a few parts arranged in a way that achieves a functional coherence.

Using the term “selection pressure” to try to explain such an innovation of macroevolution is nonsensical. There would be no natural selection at all until the innovation had become largely functional. And when there's no natural selection going on, there can be no selection pressure. It is absurd to use the word “pressure” to try to explain the natural origin of useful parts and their arrangement into functionally coherent systems. It would be just as absurd to say that if you are freezing in the woods, there will be a “habitation pressure” that will cause falling trees to form into a log cabin for your convenience.

For example, suppose there's a species that does not have wings, and is often preyed on by some predator. It is absurd to say that there is then a selection pressure pushing such an organism to turn into a flying organism that can escape the predator. Until the organism were to develop functional wings, there would no natural selection going on favoring wings. And when there's no natural selection favoring something, there cannot be selection pressure.

Parker's magic-wand phantasmagorical thinking about “selection pressure” is shown on page 6 of his book, where he says, without providing an example, “The introduction of a new food source may lead to the evolution of new mouthparts and limbs for movement.” So if you're an animal that doesn't have a mouth or legs, and some other mobile animal starts to appear in your area, one that might be nice for you to eat, then evolution conveniently provides your species with a mouth and legs, like some Fairy Godmother providing Cinderella with just what she needed for the Prince's ball? That's hilarious.

In reality, Darwinian evolution will always be at the mercy of random mutations that will not cooperate based on needs, and which will always be fantastically unlikely to provide a species with new innovations that it might find useful. This is because virtually all random mutations are neutral or harmful, and it is fantastically unlikely that random mutations would conveniently occur in a way allowing parts to fit together, so that functional coherence was achieved. The need for some biological innovation would cause no change at all in the rate at which favorable random mutations would occur. Such favorable random mutations would be just as fantastically unlikely to occur when a species needed something as when the species didn't need anything. Similarly, there is no relation between your financial needs and the likelihood of you winning a million dollars by playing roulette at Las Vegas.

Below are some of the innovations appearing suddenly in the Cambrian explosion:

1. vision, appearing in species such as trilobytes;
2. various phyla that did not have protective shells;
3. body parts allowing moving about and attacking other organisms;
4. protective shells

You don't explain the first three of these under any “the lights turned on, so animals needed to protect themselves” idea, as it doesn't explain the first three things. Nor does it work to explain the appearance of protective shells by evoking Darwinian natural selection. Let us imagine the gradual evolution of a protective shell around the internal organs of some species like a primitive trilobyte. The first stages in such a protective shell would offer no benefit, because the organism's body would still be a mostly unprotected area that a predator could attack, like some shark munching on a swimmer who only had his wrists protected by steel bands. So there would be no natural selection benefit for the early stages of such an innovation. This is the same “non-functional intermediates” problem, which in Darwin's time was called the problem of incipient stages.

The problem of explaining the Cambrian Explosion is the problem of explaining the abrupt appearance of a wide variety of sudden biological innovations, including vision, which there is no fossil record of before the Cambrian Explosion. Parker cheats on such a task by offering an explanation that starts out with vision appearing, and then tries to use that to explain the other innovations. That's a cheat because his “light switch” theory doesn't explain the hardest part of the Cambrian Explosion, explaining the origin of vision. 

The problem of the origin of vision is constantly minimized by evolutionary biologists, who try to reduce it to only being the problem of an eye developing. But there are 4 parts in even the most elementary vision system:

1. an eye
2. an optic nerve
3. extremely fine-tuned light-capturing proteins, fantastically unlikely to appear by random mutations
4. very complex brain changes needed to interpret visual input

So here we have a classic case of the problem that intermediates or incipient stages would be nonfunctional. For example, it would do a species no good if it had only a primitive eye but not the proteins needed to capture light, or only those proteins but not the primitive eye.

Parker's explanation for vision's origin is as featherweight as a photon. His explanation is basically: because there was a little more sunlight, vision appeared. On page 291 to 292 Parker states:

The first eye must have evolved in response to an increase in sunlight...And indeed the geologists have revealed an increase in sunlight levels precisely at the very end of the Precambrian.

He provides no reference for this claim, which is not true in any substantive sense. There is no geological way to tell how much sunlight there was 530 million years ago, and scientists in general assume that the sun does not suddenly change its output. The scientific paper here has a graph that shows an estimate of solar radiation during the past billion years. We see no sudden increase at the time of the Cambrian Explosion about 530 million years ago.

The basic idea behind Parker's “light switch” theory in his In the Blink of an Eye book is a kind of “Fairy Godmother” concept of evolution. It's the idea that when species need something, evolution rather quickly provides them with wonderful new innovations, “in the blink of an eye,” like the Fairy Godmother providing Cinderella with the wonderful innovations she needed to go to the Prince's ball (or like the female character in I Dream of Jeannie blinking something into existence to benefit her astronaut master). Such a chimerical description is very much at odds with standard claims that evolution is driven by mere random mutations and natural selection. The rate at which incredibly unlikely favorable random mutations occur will have no relation at all to the needs of some species, and it should always be fantastically improbable that random mutations should occur in an organized way that conveniently matched the needs of some species. 

Another lame explanation of the Cambrian Explosion involves saying that there was an increase in oxygen that allowed it. But you don't explain a fantastically improbable thing by merely mentioning that a prerequisite for it recently appeared. That's as fallacious as Bob's reasoning in the exchange below, which takes place in Joe's backyard.

Joe: How do you like my house of cards?

Bob: You must have made that by just throwing a deck of cards into the air.

Joe: You're crazy! That would never work. 

Bob: But I have an explanation for how it happened: it's that today is a nice calm day. You never could have made that house of cards yesterday by throwing the deck of cards into the air, because yesterday it was too windy for that to work. 

Bob has here committed the fallacy of trying to explain a fantastically improbable event by merely mentioning that a prerequisite for it occurred.

There's one other explanation I've read for the Cambrian Explosion. It's that we observe it because the Cambrian Explosion suddenly started making fossils that are big enough and hard enough for us to observe 500 million years later. That explanation is as lame as the young man's reasoning in the exchange below.

Old man: I've never seen anything very strange,  except that 50 years ago I suddenly saw 40 huge monsters appear in a field. 

Young man: The explanation is obvious. You saw them that day because they were so big. If they were just tiny monsters, you wouldn't have noticed them.

This type of explanation explains nothing. 

There is also the rather laughable explanation suggested by one  researcher, in an article entitled, "Cancer tumors could help unravel the Cambrian explosion."  Talk about grasping at straws. Cancer is a disorganized cell growth, and such a thing does nothing to explain the incredible organization burst that occurs when a new phylum originates. In the article the author claims to have advanced a "new theory," but the scattered observations in the article never amount to a coherent hypothesis. 

A more substantive idea is advanced in this paper, which tries to suggest that earthly evolution has been supercharged by comet bombardments carrying genetic material from beyond our planet. I'm rather skeptical that such an idea could help much with the Cambrian Explosion problem, but perhaps it could help plug other holes in the standard story of earthly life's evolution. The authors state the following, making an interesting comparison between prevailing Darwinian theory and the discarded theory of Ptolemaic epicycles:

In a final reckoning it would have to be admitted that ultimately all of evolution has been controlled and continues to be controlled by space-borne organisms, microbes and viruses. It is important that we not allow Science to be stifled by a reign of dogmatic authority that strives to restrict its progress along narrow conservative lines. The current situation is strikingly reminiscent of the Middle Ages in Europe – Ptolemaic epicycles that delayed the acceptance of a Sun-centred planetary system for over a century.

A question raised by their idea is: if you're going to imagine extraterrestrial life contributing to earthly evolution, then why not just try to explain the Cambrian Explosion by imagining a spaceship that came here and dropped off organisms specifically designed to live here, as I speculated in this post?

Postscript: One of the authors of a scientific study confirms that the appearance of the first animals (which the author dates to 541 million years ago) involved an information explosion. The author states this:

We discovered the first animal had an exceptional number of novel genes, four times more than other ancestors. This means the evolution of animals was driven by a burst of new genes not seen in the evolution of their unicellular ancestors.

The scientific paper gives specific numbers of new genes that appeared when specific groups of animals originated. For example, it lists 1580 novel genes needed for Bilateria to originate, 1201 novel genes needed for Planulozoa to originate, and 1189 novel genes needed for Metazoa to originate. 

Interestingly, the New York Times covers this story with a headline "The Very First Animal Appeared Amid an Explosion of DNA," which sounds like my phrase "information explosion." Meanwhile panspermia.org refers to these novel genes by saying,"What we find remarkable is that neither the genes that apparently predate animals, nor the novel ones noticed now... have any discernable darwinian provenance," meaning they are unexplained under Darwinian theory. 

A 2019 study published in the journal Nature states, "Our results are consistent with the first animal cell being able to transition between multiple states in a manner similar to modern transdifferentiating and stem cells." The suggestion is that "the first animal cell" had a complexity and capability similar to today's cells, which makes the Cambrian Explosion even harder to explain under current ideas.  This sounds like even more of an "organization explosion." 

Replication Crisis Is Only Part of the Scientific Academia Dysfunction

It is widely recognized among scientists that there is a problem called the “replication crisis.” This is the problem that a large fraction of research studies cannot be replicated. The problem was highlighted in a widely cited 2005 paper by John Ioannidis entitled, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” A scientist named C. Glenn Begley and his colleagues tried to reproduce 53 published studies called “ground-breaking.” He asked the scientists who wrote the papers to help, by providing the exact materials to publish the results. Begley and his colleagues were only able to reproduce 6 of the 53 experiments. In 2011 Bayer reported similar results. They tried to reproduce 67 medical studies, and were only able to reproduce them 25 percent of the time.

The replication crisis is real, but it is only part of the malfunction in scientific academia. There are other very serious problems. Here are some of them:

• There is a great deal of overconfidence and hubris among many scientists, who often claim to know things they do not at all know.
• Speaking in triumphal tones, many scientists claim that they, their colleagues, or their predecessors have accomplished things that were not actually accomplished.
• Many scientists inaccurately describe as “science” or "fact" truth claims or speculations that have not been proven by experiments or observations, claims that are merely philosophical ideas or simply dogmas, stories or speculations that became popular among scientists.

In the past and future posts of this blog, you will find discussions of many examples of such things. But for now, let's look at some recent examples.

One example is a recent headline from the web site of the publication New Scientist. The headline is: “Kepler finds 219 new exoplanets and 10 are rocky and Earth-like.” But the story doesn't actually discuss the discovery of Earth-like planets; it merely discusses the discovery of Earth-sized planets. The discovery of an Earth-like planet would be the discovery of a planet with life. No such thing has taken place.

Another recent example was a FermiLab press release claiming that a new “dark matter map” had been created. But (as discussed here) the map in question was not actually a dark matter map, but a map of mass (something that might be any combination of dark matter and ordinary matter). The technique used to create the map was gravitational lensing, an effect produced by any type of matter, whether dark matter or regular matter. Claiming to have created a map of dark matter based on gravitational lensing is like using an infrared sensor to make a map of human body heat signatures in New York City, and then claiming that you have created a map of Chinese people in New York City. Of course, such a technique cannot distinguish between Chinese and non-Chinese people. By announcing a “dark matter map,” FermiLab was guilty of creating a completely false impression that dark matter had been directly observed.

Another recent example of scientists claiming to have accomplished things they have not accomplished is to be found in this press release from the Australian National University, which was headlined, “ANU-led study solves mystery of how first animals appeared on Earth.” The press release was picked up by science-reporting sites such as ScienceDaily.com, which had an article with the title, “Mystery of how first animals appeared on Earth solved.”

A person hearing such a claim may think immediately of the mystery of what is called the Cambrian Explosion. When we examine the fossil record, we don't see fossils appearing in larger and larger sizes, at an even rate of progression between 3 billion years ago and 100 million years ago. Instead, we see very little fossil evidence of life prior to the Cambrian era about 540 million years ago. But during the Cambrian era there is a sudden surge of fossils in the fossil record. This sudden blossoming of life during the Cambrian era is known as the Cambrian Explosion.

The largest classification category used for living things is the phylum. Astonishingly, every major phylum of animal dates from the time of the Cambrian era about 540 million years ago, or shortly before. Referring to the Cambrian Era ending about 485 million years ago, a scientific web site says, “By the end of the period, every major animal phylum was firmly established, and life after the Cambrian was radically different from what had gone before.”  

This situation is a severe problem for orthodox Darwinism. From Darwinist assumptions, we would expect that the animal phyla would have gradually appeared over the past billion years, with the number of phyla slowly increasing as time passed. But the fossil record shows no such thing. Instead there was a kind of a biological “Big Bang” in which all the major animal phyla appeared rather suddenly. Explaining this problem has been a long-standing problem.

What explanation do these Australian National University scientists offer? Below are some excerpts from the press release:

"We crushed these rocks to powder and extracted molecules of ancient organisms from them," said Dr Brocks from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences. "These molecules tell us that it really became interesting 650 million years ago. It was a revolution of ecosystems, it was the rise of algae." Dr Brocks said the rise of algae triggered one of the most profound ecological revolutions in Earth's history, without which humans and other animals would not exist....

Dr Brocks said the extremely high levels of nutrients in the ocean, and cooling of global temperatures to more hospitable levels, created the perfect conditions for the rapid spread of algae. It was the transition from oceans being dominated by bacteria to a world inhabited by more complex life, he said. "These large and nutritious organisms at the base of the food web provided the burst of energy required for the evolution of complex ecosystems, where increasingly large and complex animals, including humans, could thrive on Earth," Dr Brocks said.

So this is Dr. Brocks' explanation: there suddenly appeared all of the major animal phyla on planet Earth, the first large animals, because there was some algae available for eating. This is, of course, not an actual explanation. It's like trying to explain 40 different types of monsters rising up out of the ground in your backyard by saying that you were having a barbecue, and monsters like barbecued food.

Philosophers distinguish between two types of conditions: necessary conditions and sufficient conditions. A necessary condition for something is a condition that is necessary for that thing to occur or appear, but which does not guarantee that such a thing will occur or appear. A sufficient condition for a thing is a condition which, if satisfied, guarantees that such a thing will occur. You do not explain a thing by merely mentioning a necessary condition of that thing. For example, you would not explain the not-observed appearance of a snowman in your back yard, by pointing out that it's very cold, and snowmen only appear when it is very cold.

The existence of algae in the ocean might be a necessary condition for the existence of large complex animals, because that algae might be at the bottom of a food chain used by the animals. But the existence of algae in no sense explains the appearance of large complex animals that the Earth has never seen before. The existence of algae is at best a necessary condition for the Cambrian Explosion, and is not a sufficient condition. 

The Australian National University press release is therefore guilty of a preposterous misstatement by announcing that this is research that has solved the mystery of how the first animals appeared. It is no sense correct that Dr. Brocks and his colleagues have solved the mystery of how the first animals appeared on Earth, nor have they contributed even 1 per cent towards solving such a mystery. Most people already presumed long ago that algae existed before the first animals, and the previous existence of algae does not explain the existence of such animals, which are many times more complex than algae. The mystery of the Cambrian Explosion remains unsolved. A Cambridge University professor, responding to Brock's claims, says he has gotten things backwards, and that the explosion of algae did not drive the rise of animals.

The example we see in this case is not very uncommon. It is sadly true that when reading today's science magazines, one has to be very careful to separate the gold from the dross, the fact from the tribal folklore. Scientists have many great accomplishments to be proud of, so why do many of them seem to be claiming to know things they don't, or claiming that they or their predecessors accomplished things they didn't? It's like some person with $200 million in the bank telling people he's a billionaire. 

 Science mags are grab-bags mixing the sound and the shaky 

Postscript: A 2015 study found a huge surge in the use of pretentious words in biomedical scientific papers, suggesting that hype is becoming ever-more-common.  The study noted this:

The absolute frequency of positive words increased from 2.0% (1974-80) to 17.5% (2014), a relative increase of 880% over four decades. All 25 individual positive words contributed to the increase, particularly the words “robust,” “novel,” “innovative,” and “unprecedented,” which increased in relative frequency up to 15,000%.

This is only in scientific papers themselves; there's a whole other layer of hype going on in university press releases and the press coverage of scientific activities.  Call it the "hype crisis."   

Was the Cambrian Explosion Caused by Extraterrestrials?

In his book Darwin's Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer calls our attention to an unexplained anomaly in paleontology. When we examine the fossil record, we don't see fossils appearing in larger and larger sizes, at an even rate of progression between 3 billion years ago and 100 million years ago. Instead, we see relatively little fossil evidence of life prior to the Cambrian era about 500 million years ago. But during the Cambrian era there is a sudden surge of fossils in the fossil record. This sudden blossoming of life during the Cambrian era is known as the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion is illustrated in the diagram below, from a paper suggesting a prosaic explanation for it. The "known fossil range" lines go back no further than the Cambrian era.

Meyer (who has a PhD from the University of Cambridge) argues that this Cambrian explosion is the result of intelligent design at work in the evolution of life. But there is an alternative to assuming a supernatural hand at work in such a thing. Maybe the Cambrian explosion was caused by extraterrestrials.

We can imagine a hypothetical conversation that could have occurred millions of years ago, aboard an alien spaceship that entered into orbit around our planet.

Xynus: So give me the facts. What is the status of life on this planet?

Zeesin: Our underwater robot probes have confirmed that this planet is an evolutionary dud. There's hardly anything here in the way of life. What a waste of time coming here to this crummy little rock! I told you we should have checked out Alpha Centauri instead.

Xynus: But maybe we can turn this “dud” into a success. What if we were to accelerate the evolution of life on this planet? Maybe we can turn a dull planet into something where intelligence might eventually evolve.

Zeesin: What do you have in mind? Finding some of those dismal organisms in this planet's oceans, and then gene-splicing them to soup up their evolution? That would be a pretty hard chore. You know I don't like to get my four feet wet.

Xynus: No, I have something very different in mind. We can create some species ourselves using our nanotechnology biology lab. We need merely specify some requirements, and the computer will take care of designing the appropriate DNA. We can print out the organisms cell layer by cell layer using our molecular materializer. Then we just dump the newly designed organisms into the oceans of this planet.

Zeesin: Okay, I guess there's nothing much else to do around here.

There are three ages in time when the idea of extraterrestrial intervention might be helpful. The first is the point when the most primitive life developed. Modern science has not yet explained a plausible scenario by which that occurred, partially because of the difficulty of explaining both the origin of a self-replicating molecule and the difficulty of explaining the origin of the genetic code. The second age in time is the Cambrian explosion mentioned here. The third age in time is the time when we saw the emergence of human intelligence. We might call this the “consciousness explosion,” when man seemed to gain in a relatively short span of time (geologically speaking) a variety of subtle mental characteristics such as aesthetic abilities, spirituality, math abilities, language abilities, musical abilities, introspection, and moral reasoning. Accounting for this consciousness explosion is perhaps more difficult than accounting for the Cambrian explosion, given that most of these things are not easy to explain through natural selection, as they are mostly not traits that increase an organism's likelihood of surviving until reproduction.

But there is a barrier to anyone suggesting that some design – either extraterrestrial or supernatural – may have played some role in the origin of life or earthly life or human life. Some scientists have declared that any mention of design in discussing such matters is “not part of science” or “unscientific.” This thought taboo is indefensible. A few examples show very clearly that there is no truth to the idea that “scientists don't consider the possibility of design” when trying to consider causes.

For example, imagine a strange radio signal is received from deep space. If the signal is sufficiently suspicious, a scientist will indeed consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and that the signal may be a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Or imagine that some suspicious looking structure (on an asteroid, moon, or planet) is photographed by a space probe. A scientist will indeed consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and that the structure may have been designed by some extraterrestrial expedition that arrived in our solar system. Or suppose a scientist finds some artificial-looking object buried in a geological bed. A scientist will indeed consider the hypothesis that design was involved, and that the structure may have been designed by some human or some extraterrestrial visitor. Any scientist could advance any of these ideas in a scientific paper without fear of being excluded because he had considered some possibility of design.

The notion, therefore, that considering (or arguing for) a possibility of design in discussing the origins of life on earth is unscientific (or not admissible in a science publication) makes no sense. Such claims need to be translated. When a scientist claims that a hypothesis is “not part of science,” what he typically means is that such a hypothesis “is forbidden or should be forbidden to scientists.” When he claims that a particular hypothesis is unscientific, what he typically means is that such a hypothesis is a taboo that violates the tribal norms of the scientific community. Such claims tell us about sociological and cultural restrictions and prohibitions within the scientific community, but usually don't give us any cogent principle as to how our thought should be limited.