Solution to Pop Quiz: Who Believes and Promotes the Fixity of Species Belief?

Like punctuated equilibrium, Ernst Mayr occasionally sprinkled his work with unintended bits of brilliance. In one spurt, he once told Michael Ruse that “People forget that it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief.” Indeed, atheists say they are not religious because, after all, they don’t believe in god, and creationists say atheists are religious because, after all, believing in evolution requires faith. But both are wrong.

When atheist PZ Myers says he doesn’t think god would have created this universe or atheist Richard Dawkins says our eye’s backward photocells would never have been designed, they are expressing non scientific, religious beliefs. There is no scientific experiment that demonstrates Myers’ or Dawkins’ convictions. These atheists are “intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief” in god.

This oft-heard argument that god doesn’t exist because god wouldn’t have created this world is not an argument from atheism. The conclusion is atheism, but the argument is from theism. Ironically, not believing in god usually entails beliefs about god.

Who believes in the fixity of species?

How does this apply to the fixity of species? The fixity of species refers to the religious belief that if god created the species they would be fixed. Populations would not undergo any kind of biological change under the divine plan. This belief that once created, all species remain fixed throughout history is often associated with the eighteenth century Swedish super-scientist Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus. But Linnaeus soften his views and no longer accepted the fixity of species in his later years.

Linnaeus had tremendous influence, but not enough to rid the world of the doctrine of the fixity of species. And so a century later Darwin inherited the view that if god created the species they would be fixed.

This is why those differing bird populations on the Gallapagoes Islands were so significant for Darwin. Surely god would not stoop so low as to create slightly different variants of birds on some remote islands. The great botanist and natural theologian John Ray had made this argument a century earlier and by Darwin’s time the infra dig (beneath god’s dignity) argument was well entrenched.

But on the other hand, if these differing bird populations were different species, then the species were not fixed. And if the species were not fixed, then god must not have created them, because if god did create them, they would be fixed. Therefore those bird species must have evolved.

So while arguing that the species are not fixed, Darwin also argued they would be fixed if god had created them. God didn’t do it, because here’s how god would do it. As Mayr said, it is possible to be intensely religious even when god is removed from the picture.

The tiny differences between the bird species did not suddenly reveal to Darwin how fish could change to amphibians, or how amphibians could change to reptiles, or how reptiles could change to mammals. Rather, the revelation was that the idea of creation was suddenly becoming untenable. The crucible for Darwin was not an abundance of positive evidence for evolution but rather negative evidence against creation.

This has become even more true today. Darwin had no scientific reason to think that variations between bird populations revealed that all life arose spontaneously. And today the evidence even more so rejects such a move. Even evolutionists agree that the massive biological changes their theory requires must have come about by some unknown mechanisms more powerful than the adaptive mechanisms we observe at work in populations.

But such problems are inconsequential, for evolution has been proven. True we don’t know how macro evolution could have occurred, but we know god did not create the species. As Mayr points out, the doctrine of fixity of species was a key barrier to overcome in order if the concept of evolution was to flourish:

Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution. The fixed, essentialistic species was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike.

This is why the species barrier, as fuzzy as it is, has always been so important to evolutionists. They do not believe the species are fixed, but they do believe in the fixity of species.

Today’s evolutionists inherit these religious ideas and replay them over and over. In his Toward a New Philosophy of Biology Mayr writes that “evolutionary change is also simply a fact owing to the changes in the content of gene pools from generation to generation.”

What? Changing gene frequencies make the spontaneous origin of all life a fact? This would be laughable if not understood within its historical context. But such statements do make sense once we understand the historical context of the fixity of species doctrine.

Isaac Asimov claimed that color changes in the peppered moth prove evolution. Steve Jones wrote that the changes observed in HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) contain Darwin’s “entire argument.” According to science writer Jonathan Weiner, the changes in the beaks of birds show us “Darwin’s process in action.”

Likewise Professor Marta Wayne tells us that “Evolution is change in gene frequency” and science writer Emily Willingham defines evolution as “a change in population over time.” Professor Pamela Bjorkman states that a mutating virus is “evolution at work” and that “In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale.”

These statements by evolutionists make no sense from a scientific perspective. Evolutionary thought would be absurd in the absence of its historical context. But it is perfectly logical when we understand the underlying metaphysics. Remember, it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Independent Intron Insertion: More Evidence for Common Mechanism

It is perhaps the most celebrated evolutionary evidence from the genomics era. Like a grammar school teacher who knows cheating occurred when he sees identical typos in essays from different students, evolutionists know common descent occurred when they see identical junk DNA (yes we know the junk DNA often seems to be found to be functional, but that’s a different story) in the genomes of different species. In what philosopher Elliott Sober has called Modus Darwin, evolutionists reason that only evolution can account for these so-called shared errors. But is the premise true? Can only evolution account for such observations? (yes we know the evolutionary reasoning is, as usual, not scientific, but that’s a different story).

In fact sometimes these shared errors cannot be shared after all. Like identical typos in essays from students who have never met, sometimes the identical junk DNA could not have originated from a common ancestor even if one believed in the mythical common descent to begin with. In these cases evolutionists agree that lightning did strike twice, such as in this study which found introns at common DNA insertion sites. As one evolutionist put it:

Remarkably, we have found many cases of parallel intron gains at essentially the same sites in independent genotypes. This strongly argues against the common assumption that when two species share introns at the same site, it is always due to inheritance from a common ancestor.

What if common descent had been the only explanation for such similarities in the genomes of different species? That would have been remarkable given the substantial scientific problems with the idea.

More Evidence of Adaptive Mutations: Adaptation by Directed Modification Rather Than Selection, Lamarck N, Darwin 0

One of the major pillars of evidence claimed for the fact of evolution is the adaptation in populations that we observe. As Ernst Mayr—one of the leading evolutionists in the twentieth century—wrote in his Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, “evolutionary change is also simply a fact owing to the changes in the content of gene pools from generation to generation.” This equating of minor change—even a mere change in gene frequencies within a population—with all of evolution is rampant within evolutionary apologetics. For example in the first 20 seconds of the recent Let’s Talk About Evolution video Professor Marta Wayne tells viewers that “Evolution is change in gene frequency” and science writer Emily Willingham defines evolution as “a change in population over time.” Similarly in this video Professor Pamela Bjorkman states that a mutating virus is “evolution at work” and that “In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale.”

But are allele frequency changes and virus mutations tantamount to evolution?

The answer is “no” for several reasons. First, there is no proof that such small-scale change can add up to the massive changes—including everything from molecular machines to body plans—that evolution requires. Evolutionists are fully aware of this and in their “honest moments” (as Stephen Jay Gould once put it) admit this to each other. As we understand them small-scale mechanisms of change, such as random mutations, simply do not provide the degree or type of change needed by evolution.

Furthermore, in the past century another category of evidence has arisen that highlights the failure of this pillar of evolution: The small-scale change mechanisms themselves are highly complex. In other words, if evolution is true then it created incredibly complex cellular and molecular mechanisms so that, yes, evolution could occur.

One example of this are the so-called adaptive mutations. These mutations are not random with respect to need, as evolutionists have insisted, but rather are often the right one for the need at hand. In other words, when faced with a challenging environment populations respond with changes that meet the new challenges.

Whereas evolution requires random changes that ever so slowly are produced by undirected mutations, science reveals just the opposite: rapid change brought about by non random adaptive mutations which meet the current environmental challenge, as one recent paper from Israel demonstrated. The paper first explained that in neo-Darwinism heritable diversity comes from:

neutral and advantageous mutations that occur rarely, spontaneously at random locations, and independently of any selection processes imposed by the environmental conditions.

But biological designs comprise a vast combinatorial space and so:

it is reasonable to hypothesize that existing and rare genetic variation cannot provide an immediate advantageous solution

Indeed. But there is dearth of knowledge of how adaptation occurs, for:

Little information exists on the dynamics of processes that lead to functional biological novelties and the intermediate states of evolving forms.

Their results provide hints, however, for contra evolutionary theory they found heritable adaptation which “must have been induced in individual cells by this environment.” They conclude:

This study, therefore, details a process that is different from the fundamental common view of adaptation. Here adaptation seems not to rely on random and rare genetic variability that accumulated independently from the selection agent. …

Thus, adaptation in our experiments was a property of individual cells rather than a property of the population and the process that led each cell to the adapted state was induced by the challenging environment. In fact, further findings corroborated this striking result. …

Notably, the decline in the adaptive potential over time argues against the existence of an advantageous subpopulation during phase I and supports the notion that adaptation was achieved by cells only after the transition into the challenging environment. …

These adjustments, as we have shown, can be rapidly gained by individual cells and stably propagated for many generations and, thus, should be considered an adaptation that might have a significant role in evolution of regulatory systems. …

cells acquired adaptive mutations (mutations directed at advantageous positions) at a very high rate after the exposure to glucose. …

adaptive mutations might arise as a response to stressful environments and allow such a widespread adaptation of individuals and the rapid adaptation of the whole population. …

Thus, our experiments prove the existence of a cellular mechanism enabling an inherited cellular adaptation that was induced by an unforeseen challenge in many cells simultaneously. …

The implications of such a mechanism are far reaching in diverse areas of biology; …

In other words, these results indicate a built-in response mechanism. The population of cells rapidly and efficiently adjusts to the environmental challenge and these changes are passed on to later generations.

These types of results contradict evolutionary theory and evolutionists have resisted them all along. I once debated an evolution professor who dismissed such evidence and assured the audience it was all false. This is how science works for evolutionists. Theory first, evidence second.

The claim that adaptive change is a proof text for all of evolution is an incredible misrepresentation of the scientific evidence. It is an equivocation on evolution so over the top it is difficult to believe. Indeed, it is astonishing to see evolutionists such as Mayr, Bjorkman, Wayne and the rest make such statements with a straight face.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Repeated acquisition and loss of complex body form characters: New Evidence for an Old Problem

It is one of the most celebrated proof texts for evolution and at the same time a good example of what is wrong with the life science’s dominant paradigm. The pentadactyl structure—five digits (four fingers and a thumb for humans) at the end of the limb structure—is found throughout the tetrapods. The activities of this massive group of fauna include flying, grasping, climbing and crawling. Such diverse activities, evolutionists reason, should require diverse limbs. There seems to be no reason why all should need a five digit limb. Why not three digits for some, eight for others, 13 for some others, and so forth? And yet they all are endowed with five digits. And, evolutionists explain, this structure neatly fall into a pattern of common descent. Obviously the pentadactyl structure must be an artefact of common descent—a suboptimal design that was handed down from a common ancestor rather than specifically designed for each species. Darwin canonized this proof with one of his most cited passages:

What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?

Curious indeed. This example is today a staple in the apologetics literature. Look in any textbook or popular work demonstrating the fact of evolution, and you are likely to see a graphic showing various pentadactyl structures in the tetrapods. Here is how evolutionist Mark Ridley echoes Darwin’s original interpretation in his Evolution textbook:

Other similarities between species are less easily explained by functional needs. The pentadactyl (five-digit) limb of tetrapods is a classic example. … Tetrapods occupy a wide variety of environments, and use their limbs for many differing functions. There is no clear functional or environmental reason why all of them should need a five-digit, rather than a three- or seven- or 12-digit limb. And yet they all do. … The evolutionary explanation of the pentadactyl limb is simply that all the tetrapods have descended from a common ancestor that had a pentadactyl limb and, during evolution, it has turned out to be easier to evolve variations on the five-digit theme, than to recompose the limb structure. If species have descended from common ancestors, homologies make sense; but if all species originated separately, it is difficult to understand why they should share homologous similarities. Without evolution, there is nothing forcing the tetrapods all to have pentadactyl limbs.

Here is how the Public Broadcasting Service evolution site explains the evidence:

The limbs of tetrapods all have the same pattern of bones. Darwin was one of the first to comment that it seems unlikely that this single skeletal structure could be the best one possible for each of the activities it is required to perform in different animals. … If you want to see concrete evidence of evolution, look no further than your hand or your foot. Five fingers, five toes. There's nothing magical about the number, yet five digits at the end of their limbs is a motif that runs through all the animals with four limbs, called tetrapods. … Pentadactyly (having five digits) is, in fact, an accident of evolutionary history.

And here is how evolutionist Douglas Futuyma put it:

If God had equipped very different organisms for similar ways of life, there is no reason why He should not have provided them with identical structures, but in fact the similarities are always superficial.

But as usual, the evolutionary apologetics are less convincing than evolutionists believe. In this case there are four different problems with this evidence and the evolutionary arguments.

Four problems with the evidence

The first problem is that evolution has no scientific explanation for the origin of the pentadactyl structure. Amazingly, evolutionists cannot account for the evolution of the very structure they claim proves their theory.

The second problem is that evolutionists are having it both ways. When they find a biological pattern, such as the pentadactyl structure, they claim it is a sign of evolution’s contingencies. Evolution, they say, can only work with the limited raw materials and designs that are immediately available. It knows not where it goes, and so you have patterns that, while workable, are less than efficient.

But on the other hand, evolutionists also claim ownership of all of biology’s fantastic designs. In fact, evolutionists claim ownership of all of biology, period. That’s right, evolution is supposed to have created everything in the biological world. Walk through any life science library and in the stacks you will see a seemingly endless supply of archived journals covering the seemingly endless list of subjects that comprise the life sciences. All of this is little more than scratching the surface of the biological world. We have learned so much, and yet have so much more to learn.

And according to evolutionists, it all came from evolution. All the DNA, proteins and organelles. All the millions and millions of different species, including all their fantastic and unique designs. All of biology. Though evolutionists do not know how, they are certain these all were the creation of evolution.

Evolution, apparently, is an incredibly imaginative and powerful design and creation tool. It can do it all. And yet, when evolutionists find a pattern, this they say is due to how clumsy their process is. Evolutionists aren’t fooling anyone, they can weave a story for any occasion.

The third problem is that similarities such as the pentadactyl structure in fact do not fit the expected pattern of common descent. In spite of all the textbook propaganda, the empirical evidence is all over the map. There are all kinds of digit patterns, both extant and in the fossil record. As Stephen Jay Gould once admitted, “The conclusion seems inescapable, and an old ‘certainty’ must be starkly reversed.” And as one recent study concluded:

Our phylogenetic results support independent instances of complete limb loss as well as multiple instances of digit and external ear opening loss and re-acquisition. Even more striking, we find strong statistical support for the re-acquisition of a pentadactyl body form from a digit-reduced ancestor. … The results of our study join a nascent body of literature showing strong statistical support for character loss, followed by evolutionary re-acquisition of complex structures associated with a generalized pentadactyl body form.

In other words, morphological patterns in biology, including the pentadactyl structure, do not fit the common descent model. This has evolutionists doing mental gymnastics as limbs and other designs must come and go as needed to make sense of evolution. They are lost, then reevolved, then lost, then whatever. It is all just storytelling.

Finally, the fourth problem is that the argument for why the pentadactyl structure proves evolution is metaphysical. Darwin’s argument, and those before and since are all about evolutionists non scientific premises about how biology should work and be designed. Surely god would never use such a thing as the pentadactyl structure in so many different species.

This, of course, is nothing more than religious rationalism. This silliness opens science up to all manner of argument. Imagine if there were no patterns such as the pentadactyl structure. If the designs were all different and somehow optimized for their respective applications, then evolutionists would point to that as evidence of natural selection choosing the best design. If God created the species, they would argue, wouldn’t we see some pattern? Instead, all we see is adaptation. Why wouldn’t God leave some sign that they were created instead of making the species appear to have evolved by natural processes? Evolution must be true.

It is, in a word, junk science. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Is Martin Mahner an Anti-Realist?

In his new paper on why science must presuppose metaphysical naturalism (the view that there is no supernatural, but only a materialistic world) Martin Mahner largely ignores questions of completeness and realism. Indeed, completeness goes unmentioned and Mahner’s only mention of the question of realism versus antirealism is in an end note where he dismisses the issue as not too relevant:

… there is an ongoing realism/antirealism debate in philosophy. However, this debate concerns mostly epistemological problems regarding the justification of more detailed realistic claims such as the status of unobservable entities, the truth of scientific theories, etc.

Well perhaps questions of completeness and realism are not what Mahner wants to address in his paper, or perhaps they are just inconvenient. In any case, Mahner is stuck with losing one or the other. As we have discussed before, such as here, here and here, those who mandate method necessarily lose a guarantee of either completeness or realism.

Bacon forfeited completeness and Descartes forfeited realism, but evolutionists will forfeit neither (which is possible only by introducing additional metaphysics which, of course, evolutionists do).

When mandating methodological or metaphysical naturalism, questions of completeness and realism immediately become important. But evolutionists want simply to mandate naturalism without reckoning with the implications. Mahner’s paper, unfortunately, does nothing to remedy this.

East of Durham: The Incredible Story of Human Evolution

Imagine if Galileo had built his telescope from parts that had been around for centuries, or if the Wright Brothers had built their airplane from parts that were just lying around. As silly as that sounds, this is precisely what evolutionists must conclude about how evolution works. Biology abounds with complexities which even evolutionists admit could not have evolved in a straightforward way. Instead, evolutionists must conclude that the various parts and components, that comprise biology’s complex structures, had already evolved for some other purpose. Then, as luck would have it, those parts just happened to fit together to form a fantastic, new, incredible design. And this mythical process, which evolutionists credulously refer to as preadaptation, must have occurred over and over and over throughout evolutionary history. Some guys have all the luck.

In fact this incredible string of serendipity must extend all the way down to the molecular level. This is because different species have similar genes and proteins, and evolutionists must assume that these molecular similarities originated in a common ancestor. In other words, the proteins had to have been already present before the new species evolved.

Consider, for example, the human and chimpanzee. There is great similarity in most of the protein coding genes in humans and chimps, and evolutionists must assume those genes were already present in the supposed chimp-human common ancestor. So how did humans evolve? Evolutionists must conclude that it was not so much the evolution of new proteins (though that too must have occurred but that’s another incredible story) or the modification of existing proteins (though again that also must have uncannily occurred making for yet another incredible story), but the evolution of when and how many of those proteins are expressed. As one Duke University research team concluded:

The finding that neural adaptation has occurred mainly via noncoding changes is particularly important in view of the remarkable cognitive innovations in the human lineage.

Yes, that is remarkable. It would be as though the parts for the telescope or the airplane had been lying around for eons, just waiting to be used to form a new wonderful design.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Pop Quiz: Who Believes and Promotes the Fixity of Species Belief?

Historians will point to the eighteenth century Swedish super-scientist Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus, as a key figure in the history of thought who promoted the religious belief that once created, all species remain fixed throughout history.

That answer gets an F because not only did Linnaeus soften his views and no longer accept the fixity of species in his later years, but the question is not in the past tense. The question is in the present tense. Who believes, not believed, in the fixity of species.

Ah, that’s easy. Creationists, right? Wrong again. Go back and do your homework, or if you must, see the next line where the answer is given backwards:

stsinoitulovE

Yes, it is they who believe in the fixity of species. After all, modern evolutionary thought arose in the highly religious culture of seventeenth and eighteenth century western Europe. It was motivated by, and inherits religious ideas from that day. It is, in fact, stuck fast to its centuries-old metaphysical foundation. Far from the cutting-edge science it purports to be, evolution is little more than today’s ossified remains of long-since discarded religious ideas.

For example, as one of the major pillars of evidence for their theory evolutionists cite the adaptation of organisms that we observe in the laboratory and in the field. It is, according to evolutionists, a powerful proof text for evolution. There is a constant stream of evolutionists insisting that such evidence proves evolution to be a fact.

It is as if they are forever stuck in the nineteenth century, replaying Darwin’s marvel at how differing bird populations “undermine the stability of species.” Like Sisyphus forever pushing the rock up the hill, they are forever pushing the absurd idea that resistance to pesticides and antibiotics in plants and microbes, respectively, make evolution the only possibility because as Darwin believed, if God created the species they would be fixed.

As Ernst Mayr pointed out, the doctrine of fixity of species was a key barrier to overcome if the concept of evolution was to flourish:

Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution. The fixed, essentialistic species was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike.

And indeed evolutionary thinking eventually did rush in, on the power of metaphysical arguments such as this one. But these powerful religious motivations don’t just go away. Indeed, they provide the justification and motivation in the face of daunting scientific contradictions. And so to this day, evolutionists continually repeat their mantras from centuries past. Here is a typical example of how, today, the religion has become so ingrained in evolutionary thought. Below the video is the text beginning at the 9 second mark.

[0.09] What we study is how viruses and bacteria and other microbes get inside your body to infect them. And what I wanted to talk to you about today was how evolution is involved in that process, and basically why we think evolution is very important to understand.

So, when you get infected by a virus or a bacterium, there is basically a war going on inside your body, where the virus wants to multiply, or the bacteria wants to multiply, and your immune system wants to keep it back down. Now what happens is that, we as humans have evolved over millennia to actually have specific cells and those cells have particular receptors that will get rid of the virus or kill it or sequester it or some way make it so that it can’t infect you and make you sick.

Now the virus then, is evolving inside our bodies to get around that immune system. And if you look at the genes inside viruses, sometimes they steal long stretches of genes from their host, and other times they have mimics of genes in their host. So basically, viruses have this tremendous chance to evolve inside of people, that is their host, so they can get around an immune system.

So a successful virus would be something like influenza virus, that changes every year. So what it does is it mutates. It makes a lot of different forms of itself. Most of these are completely useless—that is they are defective viruses. But out of the millions and millions of viruses that it makes, one or a few of those will be better, and those will go on and multiply and infect other people.

That is evolution at work.

So basically, the viruses make millions of copies of themselves, most of them are worse. They’re making random mutations, random changes. They don’t know beforehand what’s good or what’s bad. The best ones will win out, and those will go on and infect.

In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale. So that they made some changes in their immune system, to keep up with particular viruses and other changes that were actually worse. And the changes that were beneficial gradually win out.

So in a nutshell, that’s an example of evolution, at play, in your body, that goes on all the time.

And so I think we need to understand this, because bacteria in particular are able to mutate to get around antibiotics. It’s another example of evolution. We need to understand this, so that we can develop drugs that will actually get around bacteria’s incredible ability to evolve quickly, to get around the drugs we use today. Thank you.

For many this just proves that evolutionists are liars. Or that they are fools.

But when evolutionists such as Professor Bjorkman make these arguments, they are not consciously lying. Here Professor Bjorkman is smart, knowledgeable and honestly speaking her mind.

So how to explain evolutionists, such as Bjorkman, when they present their evolutionary absurdities with all the earnestness of a five-year-old talking about Santa Claus? It isn’t from ignorance or from deceit.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Research Sheds Light on How the Brain Responds to Stimulus and Learns

It’s no surprise that the brain is profoundly complex. We discussed here, here and here that the brain contains hundreds of billions of nerve cells which are connected via hundreds of trillions of synapses. That a single synapse is like a microprocessor (although far more complex of course), with both memory-storage and information-processing functions and thousands of molecular switches. That a single human brain has more switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections in the world. That evolutionists now admit that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. That evolutionists insist it is a fact that the brain evolved, and yet fail miserably to explain how such an incredible event occurred, or even how we could know it to be a fact. It just is, because, ultimately, it boils down to metaphysical claims about what must be true, scientific evidence be damned.

But all of this is, as usual, only one small sliver the evolution’s absurdities. For if the brain itself is complex, consider what it does. For instance, the brain is a fantastic learning machine. As a baby explores its environment it learns, and in this process a massive array of molecular switches and controls are adjusted within the brain.

One research study, for instance, found 12,000 segments of DNA (which as usual evolutionists had thought were mere oddities) that are transcribed in response to environmental stimuli. This is the first step in the brain’s process of responding, adjusting and learning. These DNA segments, known as enhancers, influence gene expression which in turn influences how the brain’s neurons function and communicate with each other.

Presumably learning processes such as this lead to knowledge. But does knowledge lead to wisdom?

Global Warming Quandary Resolved

In light of last week's release of more emails revealing ulterior motives of climate researchers, we felt a reprint of our reporting of an overlooked breakthrough resolution to the entire quandary was in order. --Ed.

New research out this week has resolved a long-standing, and important, quandary about the causes of global warming. While several models point to anthropogenic CO2 and other greenhouse gases as the leading cause of global warming, the warming trends do not quite match the history of anthropogenic CO2. In fact, shrinking glaciers and other undeniable evidences of warming trace back to about the mid seventeenth century. But this predates the significant rise in anthropogenic CO2 that came in later centuries. Now environmental researchers have solved the puzzle. While CO2 is undoubtedly an important factor in certain warming events, by far the most significant cause is the hot air emitted by evolutionists. In other words, anthropogenic theory rather than anthropogenic industry is the root cause of global warming.

What is particularly convincing about the new research is how precisely the earth's temperature correlates with major discharges of evolutionary hot air. As the figure illustrates, temperature spikes over the past three and a half centuries align perfectly with the history of thought. The correlation is simply too uncannny to doubt. Only the "flat-earth" warming deniers will find a way to explain this away.



In fact just today Canadian researchers recorded a significant warming event, which they were able to localize to a region over central Canada and the northern midwest of the USA. The timing (and location) correlate perfectly with a blog published by evolutionist PZ Myers entitled "The Ubiquity of Exaptation" where Myers pollutes science with a particularly acute hot gaseous emission. In fact one of the researchers, using a new experimental localization algorithm, believes he has traced the emission to a city block where, as it turns out, Myers resides. The researcher believes Myers wrote the blog from his home office.

In that blog Myers made several asanine statements about the evolution myth. In particular Myers emitted seemingly hilarious, but in fact environmentally dangerous, statements about the evolution of the nervous system. These included:

We use variations in these voltages to send electrical signals down the length of our nerves, but they initially evolved as a mechanism to cope with maintaining our salt balance.

I concluded this section by trying to reassure everyone that their brain is something more than just a collection of paramecia swimming about. Although the general properties of the membrane are the same, evolution has also refined and expanded the capabilities of the neuronal membrane: there are many different kinds of ion channels, which we can see by their homology to one another are also products of evolution, and each one is specialized in unique ways to add flexibility to the behavioral repertoire of the cell. The origins of the electrical properties are a byproduct of salt homeostasis, but once that little bit of function is available, selection can amplify and hone the response of the system to get some remarkably sophisticated results.

Once again, the cell simply reuses machinery that evolved for other purposes to carry out these functions.

The Trichoplax genome has been sequenced, and found to contain a surprising number of the proteins used in synaptic signaling…but it doesn't have a brain or any kind of nervous system, and none of its four cell types are neurons. What a mindless slug like Trichoplax uses these proteins for is secretion: it makes digestive enzymes, not neurotransmitters, and sprays them out onto the substrate to dissolve its food. Again, in more derived organisms with nervous systems, they have simply coopted this machinery to use in signaling between neurons.

We also contain a great many possible signals: long- and short-range cues, signals that attract or repel, and also signals that can change gene expression inside the neuron and change its behavior in even more complicated ways. It's still at its core an elaboration of behaviors found in protists and even bacteria; we are looking at amazingly powerful emergent behaviors that arise from simple mechanisms.

You can see how extreme was this incident of evolutionary story telling. But what we once thought were merely hilarious and asanine mythological narratives are now clearly very, very dangerous environmental toxins. The bad news is that evolutionary theory far exceeds anthropogenic CO2 as the leading cause of global warming. The good news is that we now understand the cause.

New Finding: Perhaps Food Comes With Its Own Instructions

New research from the PRC is lending credence to those nutty health-food advocates who have suspected all along that food is more than your daily intake of carbon-carbon bonds and vitamins and minerals, that oats are better than Cheerios, and that the food chain is far more complex than evolution would have it.

Background

Because evolution was supposed to use mutations in the DNA’s genes, evolutionists focused heavily on the genes. Wasn’t the remaining 98% of the genome pretty much junk anyway? But much to the evolutionist’s surprise DNA is far more complex. As one writer put it:

Few predicted, for example, that sequencing the genome would undermine the primacy of genes by unveiling whole new classes of elements. … Biology's new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called 'junk' DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling.

As one evolutionist admitted:

We fooled ourselves into thinking the genome was going to be a transparent blueprint, but it's not.

And another echoed this sentiment:

The more we know, the more we realize there is to know.

An important function of non-coding DNA is regulation. The coding DNA contains the information to construct proteins and the non-coding DNA helps to regulate that construction. For instance, short snippets of transcribed DNA called microRNA (miRNA), about twenty nucleotides long, can halt the protein construction process. These recently discovered regulators are one example of the immense complexity of biology at the molecular level. But there’s more.

New research suggests new role for microRNA

PRC researchers have now shown that our genes are not only regulated by our microRNA, they are also regulated by the microRNA in the food we eat. In other words, food not only contains carbohydrates, proteins, fat, minerals, vitamins and so forth, it also contains information—in the form of these regulatory snippets of miRNA—which regulate our gene production.

There is much to learn, but this could be a hint of a much more complex, cross-species web of information in the biological world. Here’s how one writer summarized the findings:

The finding is obviously very thought-provoking; for instance, it would indicate that in addition to eating "materials" (in the form of carbohydrates, proteins, etc), you are also eating "information" (as different miRNAs from distinct food sources could well bear different consequences on the regulation of host physiology once taken by the host due to potential regulation of different target genes as determined by the "information" contained within the miRNA sequence), thus providing a whole new dimension to "You are what you eat." Furthermore, the potential significances of this finding would be:

1. has significantly expanded the functions of miRNAs;

2. is an extremely intriguing and novel idea that has far-ranging implications for human health and metabolism;

3. shed new light on our understanding of cross-domain (such as animal-plant) interactions, or perhaps even the 'co-evolution', and to open new ways of thinking about regulation of miRNAs, and about the potential roles of exogenous miRNAs such as those from food, plants and insects in prey-predator interactions;

4. provides evidence that plant miRNAs may be the seventh "nutrient" in the food (the six others are: H2O, protein, FFA, carbohydrate, vitamins and real elements);

5. provides a novel mechanism of development of metabolic disorder.

6. provides evidence that plant miRNAs may represent essential functional molecules in Chinese traditional herb medicine,

It is curious that evolution, which evolutionists insist is a fact, is so often surprised by the evidence.

David Coppedge is Guilty (Again)

Must we sift through the entire sordid affair of David Coppedge yet again? Although we have repeatedly and conclusively proved Coppedge’s guilt (which everyone already knew anyway), some dim-witted judge has now decided that the case has the merit to move forward. Recall that we provided iron-clad proof (and yes, our sources are very reliable) that while in college Mr. Coppedge, then in his Sophomore year, once argued late into the night with his roommate and one other student (from down the hall) about various political issues. Furthermore we proved that Mr. Coppedge was seen entering a bookstore on campus. Our source, who was naturally curious, ascertained that Coppedge browsed several controversial books in the Philosophy section of that bookstore.

Since that time we have learned more, much more. For instance, we now have records indicating that Coppedge has been checking out books from his local public library. One of them was about science.

We had hoped to have an out-of-court settlement that could keep this from getting ugly. We approached a certain individual—a go-between—with our damning evidence. His response, predictably, was that our evidence was too spotty. He missed, most likely on purpose, the entire point. And that point is that our evidence, regardless of how “spotty,” reveals an unmistakable pattern.

And that’s what this is about. Patterns and behaviors. And ulterior motives. Coppedge has demonstrated a clear and obvious pattern, year in and year out, of thinking. Not only that, but he questions things. Of course he was fired and blackballed—that’s what we do with people who think.

We once again stand in full support of the actions of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory which acted in great wisdom in this matter.

Evolutionists Aren’t the Only Ones: More Climate Emails

Scientists, as Del Ratzsch has pointed out, are people. And qua people, they sometimes have non scientific biases. These biases and motivations are crucial for they guide and restrict the science. Some answers are acceptable and other answers are not acceptable. It is that simple. There are those who are blackballed, and there are those who do the blackballing. It all depends on whether one is interested in truth or in dogma. You know who you are.

And what are these biases and motivations? It’s really quite simple. All you need to do is listen as this week’s new round of emails from climate-change scientists demonstrates yet again.

Once again we see deception, manipulation, misrepresentation and the like, but this time it is from climate researchers. Evolutionists are not the only ones who use and abuse science as a vehicle to advance and enforce their non scientific views.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Eric Alm: It’s A Plausible Idea

plau•si•ble  /’plôzəbəl/
1. (of an argument or statement) Seeming reasonable or probable.
2. (of a person) Skilled at producing persuasive arguments, esp. ones intended to deceive.

When one thinks of MIT one thinks of engineering and hard sciences. No nonsense academia that doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But now MIT Professor Eric Alm tells us that the spontaneous generation of a super progenitor is “plausible.” That’s an interesting choice of words because, in fact, that is precisely what evolution is not and it is difficult to imagine how Alm could have arrived at such a strange conclusion.

As we have discussed before, whereas Darwin absurdly hoped that cells could develop in a warm little pond somewhere, science had other things to say. Not only is the spontaneous generation of cellular life not plausible, so is the subsequent evolution of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).

Contra evolution, what science has been indicating for decades is that any such evolutionary LUCA would have had to have been a super progenitor. If evolution is true, then this ancient progenitor of all life must have been extremely complex. As one evolutionist admitted:

We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was.

That wins the understatement of the year award. Here is how one article describes the origin of the LUCA:

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants (see timeline). It's hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

Unfortunately science will always be vulnerable to such pseudo science. This is because science deals not only with what we do understand, but with what we do not understand as well. Science is constantly exploring and adding to our knowledge, but such explorations take it beyond the realm of the known, and into the realm of the unknown. This will always make it vulnerable to the charlatan.

And so it with sadness that we report that such academic chicanery has infected the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The evolution of the LUCA is, of course, not plausible. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and scientists are well aware of this.

We need not get philosophical about the concept of plausibility. We all know what it means. A hypothesis is plausible if it is reasonable or probable. A LUCA may have evolved, or a LUCA may not have evolved. But such an event is certainly not plausible according to our current scientific knowledge. We can argue about what happened long ago, but the state of our knowledge and its implications for the evolutionary narrative are quite clear. Which brings us to the second definition of “plausible” that unfortunately is also relevent to evolution.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Mark Pallen is Half Right (And All Wrong)

Evolutionist Mark Pallen asks “Is it possible to be a rationalist (a believer in the laws of logic) but not believe in evolution?” Pallen’s answers is “no,” which seems almost correct. Evolution arose from religious rationalism and today dominates rationalist thought. Can you find a rationalist who does not believe in evolution?

Unfortunately the Professor’s thinking is all downhill from there. In fact the parenthetical—where Pallen equates rationalists with believers in the laws of logic—is a dead give away of problems to come. It is true that rationalism draws heavily on logic, but this is hardly a distinctive of rationalism.

While it is good to see evolutionists acknowledge the inherent rationalism within their thinking, they also need to understand what this really means. Pallen later ridicules philosophers in what is all too common in the literature. Evolutionists present their sophomoric reasonings and then take a swipe at those from whom they should be seeking counsel.

Rationalism, empiricism and the Kalman filter

Rationalism is a style of reasoning that emphasizes axioms and preconceptions whereas empiricism focuses on observations. A good analogy is the Kalman filter which combines both a preconceived formula and measured data. Imagine a radar that tracks an aircraft flying overhead. The radar observations are used along with equations of how aircraft fly in the Kalman filter.

And the filter has a knob that controls its behavior. You can tell the filter to follow the data closely and ignore the equations of flight. This is like extreme empiricism. On the other hand you can tell the filter to follow the equations of flight closely and ignore the data. This setting—affectionately known as the “Oblivious Filter”—is like extreme rationalism.

Most scientists operate somewhere in between in the Happy Medium zone where theory and evidence are combined using common sense. Evolutionary thought, on the other hand, is in the Oblivious Filter zone. It doesn’t matter how many predictions are contradicted, evolution must be a fact. Evidence does not affect the fact of evolution.

The mother of all false dichotomies

And so Professor Pallen, like all evolutionists, believes there is only one way to deny the fact of evolution. The only escape is through Berkeley’s eighteenth century trap door that leads into the matrix. All of reality is just inside our heads, or maybe inside some computer somewhere in another reality.

Pallen walks his patient readers through such bizarre notions as though they are the only alternatives to evolution. In the mother of all false dichotomies, either evolution is true or everything must be a dream.

But this is standard evolutionary reasoning. A professor once explained to me that it’s either evolution or else there must be a grand cosmic conspiracy of deception. So this is the evolutionist’s absurd dichotomy: either the world just happened to arise all by itself or the world is a fiction.

Evolution is the result of religious rationalism and it is truly astonishing to see where it leads. Religion drives science and it matters.

Let’s Talk About Evolution: How Religious Insanity Has Corrupted Science

Think the evolutionary non scientific bluster is limited to a few outspoken blowhards? For those not familiar with the world of evolution and its deep infection of the life sciences, here is an educational video that appears to be the evolutionist’s version of whack-a-mole.

If there was any question of what this video is about it is answered within the first fifteen seconds with multiple pop-ups of evolution’s staple equivocation:

Evolution is a change in population over time [0.12]

Emily Willingham, Ph.D.

Science writer

Evolution is change in gene frequency [0.14]

Marta Wayne

Professor of Biology, University of Florida

This equivocation comes in many forms, such as the ruse that observed changes constitute evolution:

Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is actually an observable phenomenon that is supported by a significant body of evidence. [0.54]

Jeanne Garbarino

Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism

The Rockefeller University

Then there is the evolution-is-true lie. Do lies count as fallacies? In any case, maybe evolution is true, maybe it isn’t, but what we do know with absolute certainty is that we don’t know. I can’t tell you what the truth is about whether or how evolution occurred. But I can tell you the truth about the current state of our knowledge. Evolutionists say evolution is a fact, but the fact is evolution is not a fact. But evolutionists are certain, and therein lies the problem:

It’s the true story of where we came from [4:40]

Sheril Kirshenbaum

Research Associate

Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy

University of Texas-Austin

And of course no compendium of evolutionary’s fallacies would be complete without Theodosius Dobzhansky’s classic summary of evolution’s metaphysics:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. [4.20]

Jenny Ruth Morber, Ph.D.

Former nanoscience researcher, current freelance science writer

Well we could go on and on, but what’s the point? The evolution lie, with its many distortions, misrepresentations and fallacies has thoroughly corrupted the life sciences. Religion drives science, and it matters.