The Second Humans: A Science Fiction Story

The prosecution attorney began his opening statement:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said. “The woman seated at that table, Seraphina Baker, has committed one of the most terrible crimes a person can commit: a particularly bad type of sex crime. We will now present evidence that will show her guilt beyond reasonable doubt.”

It was the year 2145, but they still conducted court cases pretty much as they did during the twentieth century. A few courts had tried using robotic judges and juries, but they had been laughable failures, and the cases in which they were used had to be retried using regular human judges and juries. But robots were usually  used as court bailiffs, and every court now used electronic stenographers to record all the words spoken in the trial.

The first witness called by the prosecution was Seraphina Baker. She could have taken the Fifth Amendment, and refused to testify in the case. But she thought that she could say some things that would help in her defense.

“Ms. Baker, did you begin to consort with one Ethan Baker two years ago?”

“Yes,” said Seraphina. “That's when we started dating.”

“And did you begin to conduct intimate carnal relations with this Ethan Baker?” asked the prosecution attorney.

“What does that mean?” asked Seraphina.

“Did you begin to engage in sexual intercourse with Ethan Baker?” said the prosecution attorney.

“Yes,” said Seraphina. “But that was only after we were married.”

“Your honor,” said the prosecution attorney. “As you well know, marriage is irrelevant to whether the defendant has committed the crime with which she is charged. I move that the defendant's claim about her marriage be struck from the court record.”

“I agree,” said the judge.

“Now, Ms. Baker,” said the prosecution attorney, “before you began to engage in sexual intercourse with Ethan Baker, did you go the appropriate government website, to check whether this was allowable?”

“No,” said Seraphina. “I figured it must be okay since we were married.”

After the prosecution attorney objected, the last part of Seraphina's statement was struck from the court record. The prosecuting attorney was able to get Seraphina to admit that she had made love with her husband, had not used birth control, and that she had given birth to a child.

The trial was a very short one. The defense called two character witnesses to try to show that Seraphina Baker was a very admirable and charitable person. Soon it came time for the prosecution attorney to make his closing argument.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” said the prosecution attorney, “let me briefly review the glorious history of our people. One hundred years ago the genetic engineers bestowed a great blessing upon planet Earth. Using gene-splicing, they created a new race of humans that is now known as the Second Humans. The Second Humans are smarter, stronger, faster, healthier and more beautiful than the lowly race of humans who first lived on this planet, the race we call the First Humans.”

“People such as you and me,” continued the prosecution attorney, “know how great it is to be a Second Human, so much superior to the inferior First Humans. But this blessing comes with a solemn obligation. It is the great responsibility of every Second Human to eventually father or mother at least four children. This is so that the Second Humans can grow in numbers, and fulfill their destiny of completely replacing the race of the First Humans.”

“And there is one simple thing that every Second Human must do when choosing a mating partner,” continued the prosecution attorney. “He or she must go to a particular government web site, to make sure that any prospective mating partner is also a Second Human. Any Second Human who fails to do this, and who mates with a First Human, is a traitor against the sublime ordained destiny of the Second Humans.”

“By her own testimony Seraphina Baker failed to do this simple thing,” said the prosecution attorney. "She has committed the terrible crime she has been accused of: the crime of inferior copulation, the crime of a Second Human mating with a First Human. So you must find her guilty.”

After the defense attorney made his plea, the jury went into the jury room to deliberate. After an hour of debate, they came back with a verdict.

“In the case of Seraphina Baker,” said the judge. “How find you on the charge of inferior copulation?”

“We find her guilty,” said the jury foreman.

Seraphina was sentenced to ten years in prison. Her husband Ethan and her child Kristen tried to continue to live in their community of Second Humans. But the Second Humans would often make nasty remarks about Kristen, calling her a half-breed. So Ethan and Kristen reluctantly moved to a community of First Humans.

Living in that impoverished community was very hard. Eager to make sure that the Second Humans would take over the planet and replace the First Humans, the government was doing everything it could to help that happen. All of the government benefits went only to the Second Humans, and the First Humans were left with no health insurance, no municipal services, fire-trap housing, much higher effective tax rates, and very poor schools. When the First Humans would go downtown in their cities, they would find many store signs and restaurant signs telling them to keep out.

The Second Humans would often torment the First Humans with this taunt:

First Humans are the worst humans!

First Humans are the worst humans!

Sometimes a Second Human child would ask a First Human child a hard historical or scientific question such as “What caused the Boer Wars?” or “Explain the difference between a quark and a quasar.” If the First Human was slow in answering, the Second Human child would unleash a taunt such as:

Boys can't reckon

Unless they are Second.

A First Human girl might get a taunt like this from a Second Human:

Girls are accursed

Whenever they're First.

Years later Kristen asked her father a question.

“If the Second Humans are a superior race,” wondered Kristen, “then why are so many of them cruel and heartless?”

“Maybe it's because the genetic engineers didn't find any way to make people more moral by messing with their DNA,” said Ethan sadly.

Myth of the Mind-Reading Machine

In the British tabloid the Sun there's a prime example of a bunk and bogus reporting of a scientific study. The headline says, “Mind-reading machine can now translate your thoughts to text immediately by interpreting brain activity.” The text of the article is carefully worded to make you think that such a mind-reading machine was invented.

We are told this machine was “detailed in the Journal of Neural Engineering” and that the study leader was David Moses. There's no link to the study, but when I searched for such a study, I found it. The paper in the Journal of Neural Engineering co-authored by David Moses is entitled, “Real-time classification of auditory sentences using evoked cortical activity in humans.”

The abstract describes the study as follows:

Here, we introduce a real-time neural speech recognition (rtNSR) software package, which was used to classify spoken input from high-resolution electrocorticography signals in real-time. We tested the system with two human subjects implanted with electrode arrays over the lateral brain surface. Subjects listened to multiple repetitions of ten sentences, and rtNSR classified what was heard in real-time from neural activity patterns using direct sentence-level and HMM-based phoneme-level classification schemes. Main results. We observed single-trial sentence classification accuracies of 90% or higher for each subject with less than 7 minutes of training data.

This isn't mind-reading at all. It's auditory perception classification, and to only a very limited extent. Two people listened to the same ten sentences being spoken over and over again, while their heads were hooked up to equipment that monitored electrical signals from their brain. Some software used these readings to make guesses about which of these ten sentences were later spoken to the people. This type of guessing is not any type of thought reading. Something that you are hearing is not something that you are thinking. When you hear something, that's a perception, not a thought.

The Sun news story has a phony-baloney infographic telling us that in this experiment “thoughts appear on screen as words,” but no such thing actually occurred. The story has been repeated, with similar inaccuracies, by other sources such as the Daily Mail.

What we have here is a stunt of no obvious usefulness. It's hard to foresee how anything useful might come out of being able to predict which sentence a person is listening to by reading traces of auditory perception in his mind. The study raises ethical concerns. Did Moses and his team implant electrodes in two people's brains (presumably something that might risk brain damage) to achieve this unimportant result? 

A similar bunk story appeared in 2016, with the headline “Scientists Have Invented a Mind-Reading Machine That Visualizes Your Thoughts.” The actual activity was based on analyzing brain activity during visual perceptions, and did not involve any actual reading of thoughts (although it may have exploited perceptual after-images, as discussed below).

A 60 Minutes segment on an alleged "mind-reading machine" is preserved on a youtube.com video entitled “Mind Reading Machine on CBS Reads Your Thoughts.” But it isn't a reading of thoughts. The video shows people hooked up to a brain scanner. The people are shown viewing pictures of one of ten different objects, The machine then predicts from patterns in their visual cortex which of the ten things they were looking at. This is perception prediction, not a reading of thoughts.

In some of these experiments, the experimenters may be exploiting a kind of brief after-effect where traces of something you just saw linger for a few seconds in the visual cortex. Imagine if I hook someone up to a brain scanner, and show them a picture of a wrench for five seconds, and then ask them to close their eyes for five seconds and think of what he just saw. It is entirely possible that the parts of the visual cortex activated by such a perception will show traces that linger for a few seconds. We seem to see this in after-image optical illusions. An example of one is below. If you look at this image for 30 seconds, and then close your eyes, you should be able to still see one of the bars for a few seconds, as a kind of ghostly bar in your mind's eye. You can find many other examples of after-image optical illusions by doing a Google image search for "afterimage." 

We can imagine how an experimenter might exploit such an effect. He might hook a subject up to a brain scanner, and ask the subject to stare at an image for 30 seconds, and then close his eyes and think about the image just seen. The brain scanner might then scan the person's brain for a few seconds, and be able to predict which of 7 images the person saw, based on what was seen in the brain when the subject's eyes were closed. The experimenter might then encourage people to think such a thing was mind-reading. But this is not thought-reading. The scanner is just picking up a perceptual after-image. This is probably what is going on in the 60 Minutes video.

If an experiment like the phony description in the Sun story had actually occurred, it would be a monumental breakthrough of the greatest interest to every philosopher of mind. It would tell us that thoughts are actually generated by brains, an idea which has never been proven. There are good reasons for doubting such an idea. Among these are the fact that we have no understanding at all of how a brain could generate a thought or an abstract idea. As discussed here, attempts to search for a neuroscience explanation for how a brain could generate a thought results in a spectrum of incoherence that doesn't add up to anything.  Thoughts are mental things, so how could they possibly be generated by merely physical things like brains?  That would be rather like blood pouring out of a stone. 

Other very dubious stories in the press include one that memory can be enhanced by electrical stimulation. One headline says, “Electric pulses to the brain can improve memory as much as 15 per cent, finds study.” Such a result is unimpressive. An experimenter could show a 15 percent increase in memory retention when people held a rabbit's foot in their hands. The experimenter need merely try 20 or 30 tests, and then submit for publication whichever one produced the best performance, taking advantage of random variations.

There is no such thing as a pure memory test, since every memory test is a test of perception, concentration, and memory. It is easy to imagine how some meaningless brain stimulus might cause someone to do a little better in a memory test. Suppose you do an experiment in which you first have a subject try to memorize things under normal conditions, and then have the subject try to memorize things while some fancy brain gizmo is attached to his head. Let's imagine the brain gizmo doesn't actually do anything except give the reader a little buzzing effect. It's entirely possible that this will produce a 10 percent or 15 percent performance improvement that is purely the result of a kind of power of suggestion and expectation. The subject may kind of have the feeling that when he's wearing the brain gizmo, this is when he is expected to perform really well; so he may simply concentrate a little harder while wearing the brain gizmo. A minor difference in concentration could easily account for a 15 percent difference in performance.

It is also possible that such a minor difference in performance is simply a result of a kind of placebo effect. The power of the placebo effect is well documented. If a doctor in a white coat gives a man some sugar pill, and tells him this is a powerful cure for his ailment, the patient will very often report that the pill was effective. We don't understand why this happens again and again, and it may be a mysterious type of mind over matter. It is easily possible that such a placebo effect can also come into play in a memory test. Hook someone up to some fancy brain gizmo and test his memory, and he may perform a little better. The result may have nothing to do with the gizmo, but may be simply the person performing a little better because he believed something had been done to make him perform better, with the result being a kind of placebo effect. 

One recent experiment (dubiously billed as a test of a "memory prosthesis") involved 22 patients with brain electrodes who 100 times chose a particular visual image from a group of images. The brain electrodes recorded electrical activity in the hippocampus during this training. Then some of these signals were played back in a later test in which patients had to pick the original image from a set of 3.  This reportedly producing a 40% increase in "memory recall" involving that particular image.  But it is known that the hippocampus has a role in visual perception, as this long scientific paper tells us. So what could have been going on here is that some of the visual perception mechanism of the brain was captured and replayed.  Such a result can be explained without any assumption that anything is going on involving memory.  We could have a bit of "perception playback" rather than enhanced memory recall. 

I can imagine a type of experiment which to the best of my knowledge has never succeeded. A person would be hooked up to a brain scanner, and would then try to concentrate very hard on one of 7 things which he had not recently seen, such as an apple, a banana, a blue ring, and so forth. Software connected to the scanner would then try and guess which of the things the person was thinking about. If the prediction was successful, would this prove that the brain is generating such ideas? Not at all. It would merely suggest that the visual cortex used by the brain in vision can be leveraged when someone is trying hard to visualize something. A mind's eye image of something is not necessarily the idea of a thing. You may first have the idea of Marilyn Monroe in a bikini, and then concentrate hard to kind of visualize that, fleshing out some details (such as imagining a particular bikini color).  If we use a little of the visual cortex when making a vivid visualization in our minds, that does not prove the preceding idea came from our brains. 

The tabloid Daily Mail has a story about a "mind-reading headset" that has "90 percent accuracy." It has nothing to do with the brain, however. It turns out that if you try hard to speak a word in your mind, so you "can hear it loudly" in your mind's ear,  you usually inadvertently use a little muscle to do that. You can prove this by trying to "silently shout" the word "banana" in your mind while holding your neck -- you should feel a little muscle movement. So the "mind-reading headset" is merely working off such a thing. And the "90% accuracy" is only for a few words that it's been trained on.  This tells us nothing about whether your thoughts originate from your brain or something non-neural like a soul.  

You will no doubt continue to see quite a few "mind-reading machine" stories in the news, even though no one will actually create such machines. The rule on the web these days is "clicks=cash." The more you click on a link to sensational-sounding science stories, the more advertising revenue the web site makes from ads on the site.  With such a situation, there is a great incentive for careless exaggeration of science and technology developments. 

New Galaxy Discovery Triggers Professorial Logic Flub

The theory of dark matter has struck out at the plate again. Scientists reported that they have observed a galaxy named NGC1052-DF2 that seems to have no dark matter near it. This contradicts the dogmatic claim of dark matter theorists that there is a halo of dark matter surrounding every galaxy.

This is the second blow this year against the dark matter theory. It was only last month that we had headlines such as “New Observations of Galaxies Challenge the Standard Cosmological Model.” It was found that 14 out of 17 satellite galaxies orbit the galaxy Centaurus A in a flat plane-like orbit, not randomly scattered in a sphere surrounding that galaxy, as predicted by dark matter theorists. The same type of situation had previously been found in regard to our own Milky Way galaxy and the large nearby galaxy Andromeda. In all three of these cases, satellite galaxies are positioned in roughly a disk-like shape, rather than scattered in a sphere-like shape as predicted by dark matter theory. 

 Centaurus A (credit: NASA)

The headlines were based on a scientific paper that estimates that the chance of finding a plane-like arrangement of satellite galaxies is only 1 in 200, and which says that the chance of finding three galaxies with such an arrangement is “extremely unlikely” under dark matter assumptions.

The latest discovery concerning NGC1052-DF2 has prompted some nonsensical headlines. Forbes.com has a story entitled, “Bizarre Ghost Galaxy Has Hardly Any Dark Matter - Proving That Dark Matter Exists.” It quotes a Yale professor Pieter van Dokkum as saying the following:

We thought that every galaxy had dark matter and that dark matter is how a galaxy begins. This invisible, mysterious substance is the most dominant aspect of any galaxy, so finding a galaxy without it is unexpected. It challenges the standard ideas of how we think galaxies work, and it shows that dark matter is real. It has its own separate existence apart from other components of galaxies.

How's that professor? Finding a galaxy that you don't think has any dark matter shows that dark matter is real? That's defective reasoning, like someone arguing that the fact that he didn't see any unicorns today just proves that unicorns must exist.

We get another look into the logic of van Dokkum in an article on Quanta.org, with the misleading headline, “A Victory for Dark Matter in a Galaxy Without Any.” In that article van Dokkum reasons that other theories would also have a hard time explaining this NGC1052-DF2 galaxy. But an adherent of the dark matter theory is not a reliable source on what competing theories do or do not explain or predict. Scientists in general who become fanboys of some particular theory tend to know very little about competing theories, and often have distorted or jaundiced views about competing theories. Also, it makes no sense to argue that your theory is right because something was observed that conflicts with both your theory and a rival theory. In such a case, the most likely thing is that neither of the theories is correct.

It is, of course, a complete fallacy to be assuming that one of the theories about some natural topic must be true. We may have Theory A, Theory B and Theory C to explain Topic X, but there is no reason to assume that one of these theories must be true. The correct explanation might be Theory D or Theory E or Theory F, none of which humans have ever considered.

We also get a misleading headline from Nature.com, which has a story entitled, “Beguiling dark matter signal persists 20 years on.” That sounds like dark matter has been detected. But the text of the article tells a different story. We hear that “many physicists still express skepticism” about this signal, and some reasons for thinking it's not dark matter. So in that case, why does the story's headline refer to a “dark matter signal” ?

Nowadays there is a situation where any astronomer who sees something baffling he can't explain may tend to call it “a possible sign of dark matter.” But there have been no reliable observations directly showing dark matter exists, and expensive projects trying to detect it directly have failed. Nor do we have any theoretical understanding of dark matter on the particle physics level. The theory at the center of particle physics is called the Standard Model of Physics. Dark matter has no place in such a theory.

So why do astronomers go about claiming that this or that galaxy has dark matter near it? They make such claims whenever they see galaxies behaving in surprising ways they can't explain through ordinary gravity produced by regular matter.

What led to the belief in dark matter was the discrepancy shown in the visual below. Astronomers thought that the rotation velocity of stars (the speed at which they rotate around the center of the galaxy) should decrease the more the stars are located from the center of a galaxy (which would be the behavior shown by the blue line below). But instead stars rotated with the speed shown in the red line. 

Such a discrepancy was certainly not anything that directly suggested that dark matter existed. It was merely a case of nature behaving in a surprising way. Scientists tried to explain this discrepancy by advancing a very contrived, ad-hoc, and speculative assumption: that each galaxy was surrounded by a kind of envelope or halo of invisible dark matter. Such a theory involves two assumptions: the assumption of the existence of such invisible matter, and also a very specific assumption about the arrangement and placement of such matter. The astronomer making such an assumption is like some theologian confidently telling you not merely that angels exist, but that they live on top of clouds where we can't see them (which would involve not just an assumption about an unseen, but a very specific assumption about the position of such an unseen).

The “overwhelming evidence for dark matter” cited by astronomers is no such thing. It's just evidence that stars rotate with speeds that have a surprising uniformity that we don't understand. When an astronomer says that galaxy X has dark matter, he essentially is just saying that the stars revolve around the center of a galaxy with the pattern shown in the graph above. That isn't really something that tells us dark matter exists, but merely a hint that it might exist. A science paper found (as discussed here) that the rotation speed of galaxies is well-correlated with the amount of visible matter, something that makes no sense under the theory of dark matter. 

Showing their love for being obscure in unnecessary ways, scientists use “^CDM” to signify the cold dark matter theory, in which the first character is the Greek letter lambda. Such a phrase can be expressed as Lambda Cold Dark Matter. But that Lambda word tells you nothing. The theory should be called the Specially Placed Invisible Matter theory or SPIM. That would remind us that the theory relies not merely on postulating invisible matter, but on special assumptions about the way such matter is placed. 

To help shed light on whether a claim is warranted, it is sometimes a good idea to put scientific reasoning in kind of a syllogistic nutshell. The Big Bang theory holds up pretty well to such a thing. We can use reasoning like this:

Premise 1: Astronomers know from red shifts that all the galaxies are expanding away from each other.

Premise 2: The universe has a type of background radiation that we would expect it to have if the universe was once in a very dense state.

Conclusion: The universe must have started expanding from a state of incredible density.

That conclusion holds up reasonably well. But let's try the same thing with dark matter.

Premise 1: The stars in a galaxy rotate around the center of the galaxy at a much more uniform speed than we would expect if just visible matter is involved, given our current understanding of gravity.

Conclusion: Therefore, such a galaxy must be surrounded by an invisible halo of dark matter, some substance never directly observed, with this halo arranged in a very particular way.

This conclusion does not at all follow from the premise. It is merely a speculation, one of many possible ways in which the rotation discrepancy might be explained, including new laws of nature. 
 

Scientists who talk in a matter-of-fact way about dark matter are merely another example of something we see all too commonly: scientists acting as if they know things that they do not actually know.  The problem is that scientists fall in love with their speculative theories, forgetting they are conjectural, and a scientist may "live-breath-and-eat" his favorite theory like some novelist totally wrapped up in his novel or like some ardent suitor obsessed with his loved one.

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."