Convergent Evolution Does Not Rescue a Darwinian Dilemma

Look like my distant cousin? Image courtesy of KENPEI, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

The Darwinian community has an enormous problem that Science Daily recently tried to downplay.

When Australian fish “separated by 30– 50 million years of evolution" look like they were siblings, this is said to fulfil a Darwinian prediction.

The report was based on a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and it “identified significant convergence in body form between Australian freshwater terapontid grunters and several distantly related marine fish families.”

Science Daily goes on to exclaim: “Convergent evolution is one of the fundamental predictions of evolutionary theory.”

It is no such thing. In contrast, it falsifies Darwin’s tree of life. Only close relatives should look alike.

But very often genetically distant species look alike, regardless of how long ago they parted ways (in the Darwinian scenario, that is).

Evolutionists resort to convergent evolution as an excuse for why Darwinian predictions fail so often.

Source:

James Cook University. 2017. Distant fish relatives share looks. Science Daily (15 June).

No Credible Darwinian Explanation for the Origin of Consciousness

It’s hard to get consciousness from rocks, but evolutionists have to try.



Joel Kontinen

Consciousness is a ghostly thing in a naturalistic world.

A new paper nonetheless attempts to explain its purpose in a purely Darwinian way.

However, it can only offer some speculations as to why humans are conscious creatures. New Scientist mentions a few advantages of consciousness:

“It may have evolved to help us learn and adapt to changing circumstances far more rapidly and effectively.”

The magazine quotes philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger at the University of Mainz in Germany, who suggests: “The capacity for rapid, effective learning would almost certainly be something that evolution would have selected and maintained.”

Not a single word about the origin of consciousness. Obviously, natural selection cannot select a trait that does not exist.

It thus seems that in this research, the beef is missing.

New Scientist has previously admitted that evolution does not explain consciousness. Now it seems that its reporters have forgotten what they have said.

Source:

Ananthaswamy, Anil. 2017. Consciousness helps us learn quickly in a changing world. New Scientist (27 June).

Weird Ediacaran Animals Defy Darwinian Expectations

Image courtesy of Ryan Somma, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA).





Joel Kontinen


The Darwinian version of Earth’s history has plenty of twists and turns. First, nothing happened for billions of years (except some cyanobactria that haven’t changed since and are anything but simple).

Then our planet almost froze to death, but luckily, roughly “635 million” to “541 million years” ago, bizarre creatures emerged that have no place in Darwin’s tree of life.

A recent article in The Conversation and re-published in Live Science admits:

“Despite nearly 70 years of careful study, paleontologists have yet to identify key features among them that would allow us to understand how these organisms are related to modern animals. The forms evident among Ediacaran organisms are, for the most part, truly unique – and we are no closer to understanding their place in evolutionary history.”

The most obvious explanation is that they have none. Like some modern animals, such as the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteater, they lack ancestors – and thus defy Darwinian expectations.

Parvancorina, a tiny(1-2 centimetres long) sea creature obviously moved in water. Image courtesy of Matteo De Stefano/MUSE-Science Museum, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA).

Some Ediacaran creatures were rather complex. Moreover, some of them might still be living in our time.

Source:

Darroch, Simon and Imran Rahman. 2017. The Lives of Weird 500-Million-Year-Old Creatures Revealed. Live Science (25 June).

Humans May Have an Inbuilt GPS, Research Suggests

Image courtesy of Nachoman-au, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

New research published in the journal Nature Communications suggests that we may have an inbuilt GPS system that enables us to find our way.

Dutch researchers Jeroen Bos, Martin Vinck, Cyriel Pennartz and colleagues have “identified a new type of neuron which might play a vital role in humans' ability to navigate their environments.”

An article in Science Daily gives us the gist of what they found out:

“The ability to make fine grained assessments of location is seated in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure located in the temporal lobe. Research shows that the precise mechanism for navigation includes hippocampal place cells, which increase or decrease in electrical activity depending on one's location. However, when making their daily commute, people don't need very detailed representations of which houses they pass in which order. Instead, they can make due with more course information.”

They made rats navigate their way in a maze and looked at what parts of the brain they mainly used.

Jeroen Bos, the lead author of the paper, thinks they found a new type of neuron, which they dubbed the ‘neighbourhood cell.’

“This neuron seems to enable the brain to specifically differentiate between distinct segments (‘neighbourhoods’) of the environment,” he says.

Our big brain is a Darwinian enigma that keeps on giving surprises to neuroscientists.

Its amazingly complex interactions cannot be explained away by Darwinian just so stories.

Source:

Universiteit van Amsterdam (UVA). 2017. New 'GPS' neuron discovered. Science Daily. (29 May).

Did A Tasmanian Devil Have a Dino for Dinner?

Sarcophilus harrisii. Image courtesy of Mike Lehmann, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).





Joel Kontinen

The fossil record can be a nightmare for Darwinian evolution, as animals often appear fully formed in the wrong places, don’t evolve for aeons and any assumed intermediate forms (aka missing links) tend to be more or less suspicious.

Usually more, as in the case of Ida (Darwinius masillae).

Evolutionists used to believe that dino-era mammals were tiny, until a fossil discovery suggested that at least some of them actually ate dinosaurs.

These dino-eaters looked a lot like Tasmanian devils, although researchers were quick to give them a different name.

Repenomamus giganticus Image courtesy of Nobu Tamura, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).


Source:

Hu, Yaoming et al. 2005. Large Mesozoic mammals fed on young dinosaurs. Nature 433, 149-152.

Dating the Gihon Spring Tower in Jerusalem Shows the Bible Got It Right

Image courtesy of David Roberts, Public Domain.



Joel Kontinen

The Gihon Spring was the main source of the water for the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem and is mentioned in the Bible.

Some archaeologists assumed that a stone tower built to guard the water system hailed from circa 1700 BC.

However, Elisabetta Boaretto and colleagues recently carbon dated the remains of charcoal, seeds and bones found in the sediments and found out that precious studies had overlooked half a metre of sediment, representing hundreds of years.

This means that the tower was erected a lot later, between 900 BC and 800 BC, during the time of King David’s descendants, just like the Old Testament tells us.

The previous date was based on pottery and other artefacts.

Just like we would expect, archaeology has confirmed that the Bible describes ancient history and culture accurately.

It recounts real events, real people and even real catastrophes, such as earthquakes.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2017. Ancient Jerusalem Tower Is (Much) Younger Than Thought. Live Science (16 June).

Carboxysomes: Tiny Machines in Cyanobacteria Defy Darwin, Inspire Product Development

Image courtesy of Raul Gonzalez, Seth Axen, and Cheryl Kerfeld, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).






Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists would agree that cyanobacteria are one of the oldest organisms alive today. These tiny bacteria have hardly changed in “3 billion years” or so.

A news item published by the University of Liverpool, UK. states:

“Cyanobacteria are a phylum of bacteria that produce oxygen and energy during photosynthesis, similar to green plants. They are among the most abundant organisms in oceans and fresh water. Unique internal ‘machines’ in cyanobacteria, called carboxysomes, allow the organisms to convert carbon dioxide to sugar and provide impacts on global biomass production and our environment.”

They are anything but simple.

Carboxysomes are so elegant and efficient that researchers would like to draw inspiration from how they work:

“The self-assembly and modularity features of carboxysomes make them interesting systems for nanoscientists, synthetic biologists and bioengineers, who hope to find ways to design new nanomaterials and nano-bioreactors.”

Darwinian mechanisms cannot produce tiny machines that are far more effective than anything human researchers have come up with.

Source:

University of Liverpool. 2017. Nanotechnology reveals hidden depths of bacterial ‘machines’. (8 June).