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).

Fishy Tail Tale, Courtesy of Live Science

Image courtesy of Terry Howard, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

When the title of a pro-evolution article starts with the words 'Tale of 2 Tails,' we would expect to be treated to an intriguing, yet speculative Darwinian story.

This is what recently happened at Live Science.

Marine creatures, we are told, do not swim in the same way. Whales evolved from mammals that lived on land. They move their tails up and down. Sharks, in contrast, are fish, so they move their tails from side to side.

This is how Kenneth Lacovara, a professor of paleontology and geology at Rowan University, explains the difference.

He says that this is the way their respective ancestors (Pakicetus for whales and Tiktaalik for fish) moved, and they obviously haven’t had the time to change their habits despite making transitions from land to water (whales) and water to land (fish ancestor) during the assumed tens of millions of years, and then the poor fish had to get wet again.

Tales like these might be entertaining, but they’re definitely not based on facts.

Source:

Geggel, Laura 2017. Tale of 2 Tails: Why Do Sharks and Whales Swim So Differently? Live Science (20 May).

Weird Darwinian Story: Brightly Coloured Fruit Enabled Our Ancestors to See Colours

A recent Darwinian story features a rhesus macaque. Image courtesy of Einar Fredriksen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).




Joel Kontinen

In Darwinian stories, the tail often wags the dog.

As the evolution of humans from ape-like creatures is dogma, Darwinists credit evolution for most if not all similarities we have with apes and monkeys.

The latest story features colour vision in us and in rhesus macaques. It is based on observing these monkeys in the wild.

An article in Science explains:

“A common genetic variation makes some females have three types of cone cells and others have two. Studies with captive macaques has shown that trichromatic females are faster than their dichromatic peers at finding fruit.”

The article moves quickly from fact to fiction: We have colour vision because some macaques evolved this trait.

What these stories never include are our unique traits.

While apes might be good at swinging from trees, they could never run a marathon.

Unlike us, they were never created in God’s image to walk and run upright on two feet.

Unlike apes, we have a chin, and the golden ratio in us speaks of ornate design that cannot be explained away by Darwinian mechanisms.

Source:

Price, Michael. 2017. You can thank your fruit-hunting ancestors for your color vision.. Science (19 February),

A Not-So-Brainy Darwinian Brain Evolution Story

“Surprisingly complex interactions”: Image courtesy of US National Institutes of Health, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

The human brain is a Darwinian enigma. Evolutionists are baffled at its size and effectiveness.

But it has also inspired just-so stories featuring things like our assumed lizard brain.

However, not all researchers have let their imagination carry them away.

In 2008 Harvard biology professor Richard Lewontin admitted that we don’t know anything about brain evolution.

Two years later, Brian J. Ford, a research biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, said that the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we can imagine.

Neuroscientists have tended to be puzzled at how wonderful the human brain is.

They are willing to acknowledge that surprisingly complex interactions occur between “neurotransmitter receptors and other key proteins,” enabling us to process information really fast.

This has inspired engineers to build smarter computers.

Neuroscientists have suggested that the brain may be designed to help us learn. They have described it as a vast community of microscopic computers and a well-organised library, to name a just a few suggestions.

But all this has not sounded the death knell for Darwinian brain stories that tend to be anything but brainy.

A new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports has this to say:

“Humans have evolved a disproportionately large brain as a result of sizing each other up in large cooperative social groups, researchers have proposed.”

The research was based on computer modelling and had nothing to do with examining a brain.

Science Daily states:

“Lead author of the study Professor Roger Whitaker, from Cardiff University's School of Computer Science and Informatics, said: ‘Our results suggest that the evolution of cooperation, which is key to a prosperous society, is intrinsically linked to the idea of social comparison -- constantly sizing each up and making decisions as to whether we want to help them or not.’ ”

Then comes the brain part:

“The research team propose that making relative judgements through helping others has been influential for human survival, and that the complexity of constantly assessing individuals has been a sufficiently difficult task to promote the expansion of the brain over many generations of human reproduction.”

So, forget things like meat eating. Sizing each other up is the new Darwinian explanation for our big brains – until they come up with a new not-so-brainy story that completely demolishes the current one.

But those who have not been numbed by Darwinian tales might well see real evidence of superb design in one of the most complex organs ever created.

Source:

Cardiff University. 2016. Large human brain evolved as a result of 'sizing each other up'. Science Daily (12 August).

Speaking Orangutan Is a Darwinian Illusion

This ape cannot speak.




Joel Kontinen

A captive orangutan has learnt to utter something that sounds a bit like hoo or huu, and this has inspired Darwinists to speculate about the evolution of language.

New Scientist gives us a summary of what occurred:

“An orangutan has shown an ability to emulate human speech for the first time — a feat that gets us closer to understanding how human speech first evolved from the communications of ancestral great apes.”

This account is heavily biased towards Darwinism. The ape did not utter a single human word, but only a few sounds – or perhaps ‘grunts’ is a more befitting description.

Evolutionists were nonetheless impressed, as they tend to be when something like this happens:

“ ‘Rocky’ the ginger ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a ‘conversational context’.”

Then the storytelling attempts to reach the stratosphere:

“ ‘This opens up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans,’ says lead researcher Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, UK.

His team conducted a game in which the ape mimicked the pitch and tone of human sounds and made vowel-like calls.”

The orangutan’s calls are a far cry from language. Parrots and some other birds can do a lot better, yet evolutionists don’t get carried away by their prowess.

When it comes to speech, apes and monkeys just don’t have the necessary organs. No amount of wishful thinking can be of any help.

For Darwinists, the origin and evolution of language is an enigma. Some refer to it as Darwin’s problem (but it’s not his only one). It cannot be solved by storytelling.

However, they have tried a variety of approaches, for instance apes gesticulating with their arms, taming ourselves, gorilla song, ape laughter, and marmoset communication featuring listening.

But none of them are convincing. Apes differ too much from us.

Whereas some would say that the monkeys’ loss of voice control kept them from evolving language, a more plausible view is that only humans are programmed to learn language.

And that sets us apart from all other creatures. Only humans were created in the image of God.

Source:

New Scientist staff and Press Association. 2016. Orangutan learns to mimic human conversation for the first time. (27 July).

Evolutionists Acknowledge They’re Proposing a Just So Story about Apoptosis

Apoptosis is anything but simple. Image courtesy of Pierre Fauquenot and Margaux Belhassen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).



Joel Kontinen


What would evolution be without its just so stories?

It might probably sound a bit more boring. Stories make good headlines, even if their credibility might be questionable.

Recently, the journal Current Biology published a paper entitled Just So Stories about the Evolution of Apoptosis.

Apoptosis means programmed cell death. Without it, cells would keep on living past their due dates, causing cancer and other unpleasant diseases.

The paper’s abstract says:

“Apoptosis is a form of active cell death engaged by developmental cues as well as many different cellular stresses in which the dying cell essentially ‘packages’ itself for removal. The process of apoptotic cell death, as defined at the molecular level, is unique to the Metazoa (animals).”

What it does not say is that like some molecular machines, apoptosis is irreducibly complex.

It could not have evolved through a stepwise Darwinian process. All parts had to be present at the start, or the mechanism would not work.

However, the paper attempts to explain why apoptosis can be seen in many different life forms:

“Yet active cell death exists in non-animal organisms, and in some cases molecules involved in such death show some sequence similarities to those involved in apoptosis, leading to extensive speculation regarding the evolution of apoptosis.”

Their use of the word 'speculation' seems to be an honest definition of what they are trying to do:

“Here, we examine such speculation from the perspective of the functional properties of molecules of the mitochondrial apoptotic cell death pathway. We suggest scenarios for the evolution of one pathway of apoptosis, the mitochondrial pathway, and consider how they might be tested. We conclude with a ‘Just So Story’ of how the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis might have evolved during eukaryotic evolution.”

'Just so story' might also be a befitting description of what they’re trying to do. It is often used in an attempt to keep the Divine Foot outside, as professor Richard Lewontin famously suggested.

Controlled cell death is a very complicated process. In 2002 Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for identifying genes that control apoptosis.

For more details, I would suggest you read Philip Bell’s excellent article on apoptosis in the Journal of Creation.

It shows how such a process could not have evolved.

Sources:

Bell, Philip. 2004. The non-evolution of apoptosis. Journal of Creation 18(1): 86–96.

Green, Douglas R. and Patrick Fitzgerald. 2016. Just So Stories about the Evolution of Apoptosis. Current Biology 26 (13): R620–R627 (11 July).

Mudskippers Defy Darwinian Dogma of Transition from Water to Land

Mudskippers will dry out if they’ll adopt a terrestrial lifestyle. Image courtesy of H. Krisp, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

New research proposes that sea animals might have “evolved the ability to live on land many times,” as a report posted on Science Daily puts it.

This challenges “the perception that this extreme lifestyle shift was likely to have been a rare occurrence in ancient times. New research shows 33 different families of fish have at least one species that demonstrates some terrestrial activity and, in many cases, these behaviors are likely to have evolved independently in the different families.”

This Darwinian optimism might be uncalled for, however:

Convergent evolution has for ages been the standard Darwinian method for explaining away features shared by unrelated species, such as echolocation in bats and dolphins.

However, the transition from land to sea – another Darwinian dogma associated with the jump from sea to land – is likewise fraught with difficulties. Mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski calculates that a cow-like creature living on dry land would have needed at least 50, 000 morphological changes for such a move. From skin to the breathing apparatus, almost everything has to be changed if the cow wants to stay alive in its new watery environment. Like transforming a car into a submarine, it needs an enormous amount of changes.

Moreover, Tiktaalik, once assumed to be the earliest terrestrial creature, has lost its iconic status, as land animals predate it by several million years according to the evolutionary timescale.

Now, evolutionary ecologist Dr Terry Ord, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of New South Wales and a co-author of a new paper published in the journal Evolution, acknowledges that the real threat for sea animals trying to settle on land is drying out:

"The real difficulty in developing a fully-fledged terrestrial lifestyle may be in preventing drying out. This has direct consequences for them breathing on land because they still require their gills, which need to stay moist to function properly."

Mudskippers can jump onto land but if they won’t return to the sea, they will eventually dry out. They are not designed to be terrestrial creatures.

Darwinian stories tend to be entertaining but often a bit fishy.

Source:

University of New South Wales. 2016. Fish out of water are more common than thought. Science Daily. (22 June).

Darwinian Logic: Monkeys’ Loss of Voice Control Kept Them From Evolving Language

No speech? Image courtesy of David M. Jensen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).





Joel Kontinen

Darwinian just so stories tend to be entertaining. One ingredient that they do not lack is imagination. Here’s a recent example, featuring monkeys and researchers who associate old monkeys’ calls with language evolution:

“Monkeys lose the ability to consciously control their calls as they age, which may have limited the evolution of language in non-human primates.”

May, might and could are popular Darwinian words that we often see in science texts. A plausible translation is that they don’t have a clue as to how a trait came into being but they assume that it must have come about via an evolutionary pathway.

When it comes to speech, apes and monkeys just don’t have the necessary organs. No amount of wishful thinking can be of any help.

For Darwinists, the origin and evolution of language is an enigma. Some refer to it as Darwin’s problem (but it’s not his only one). It cannot be solved by storytelling.

However, they have tried a variety of approaches, for instance apes gesticulating with their arms, taming ourselves, gorilla song, and marmoset communication featuring listening.

But none of them are convincing. Apes differ too much from us.

Evolutionists have grossly exaggerated the language skills of
Kanzi, the famous bonobo. Contrary to what we were told, it failed to understand basic grammar and could certainly not speak.

There is a much more logical explanation for the origin of the language groups we humans and no animals have: the Tower of Babel account in Genesis 11.

It seems that humans are programmed to learn language.

Source:

Age robs monkeys of vocal control. Nature 534, 155 (9 June 2016).

Fatty Darwinian Story: "Fat Tissue Evolved to Protect Us From Ourselves"

Fat hasn’t helped all apes evolve into humans.





Joel Kontinen

Evolution would be boring without a never-ending stream of new just so stories that often contradict each other, but they do keep on making headlines across the popular media.

Several Darwinian tales focus on eating, mostly meat.

Some others have to do with our body parts, such as our hands or brains.

A fresh story features our ability to use fat. As usual, the journal Nature sees a Darwinian connection to it. The subheading of its editorial – Humans’ exceptional ability to burn through calories fuels our evolution – already suggests what is to come.

Humans burn more energy than chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas or orangutans. As Nature puts it, we have

“evolved to use more energy. We are the original consumer society: our increased demand for physiological energy is driven by our more efficient way of walking, the energy-dense foods such as meat and tubers we have found, and the methods of cooking we have invented and adopted.”

A fundamental problem with Darwinian stories is that the data do not necessarily support the conclusions that seem to have been added afterwards, just to keep the evolution community happy.

In this case, the conclusion ('humans are evolved apes') does not follow from the data ('humans burn more energy than apes'). It is a worldview-based interpretation, and a rather clumsy one at that.

Contrary to what evolutionists claim, we are very different from chimpanzees and other apes. Even Nature is willing to acknowledge that the Y chromosomes of the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and humans are ”horrendously different from each other.”

Many other details, such as the golden ratio in us, suggest that we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made, just like the Bible tells us.

Source:

Fat lot of good. Nature 533, 8 (5 May 2016).

Darwinian Dilemma: Champion Monkey Swam (or Sailed) 160 Kilometres

The earliest North American monkey probably resembled a capuchin. Image courtesy of David M. Jensen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).





Joel Kontinen

Fossils often present more puzzles for evolutionists than they solve. Thus, when they found the remains of monkeys in South America, they had to speculate that the Platyrrhini, as the new world monkeys are called, crossed the ocean on rafts from Africa.

With the discovery of seven teeth of a monkey known as Panamacebus in Panama, they have to postulate that the owner of these teeth must have swum across a stretch of ocean that was 160 kilometres (100 miles) wide, as they believe there was no land bridge between North and South America at the time.

Quite a swimmer. Or perhaps a champion sailor.

Stories like these might make evolution interesting, but the only ones they would convince are those who rule out more credible scenarios, including the global flood and its aftermath.

The remains are assumed to be “21 million years” old - another story that lacks hard evidence.


Source:

Barras, Colin. 2016. 21-million-year-old fossil is North America’s first monkey. New Scientist (20 April).

The Evolutionary Secrets of Beards Disclosed – Or Perhaps Not

Genghis Khan. Image source: Dschingis Khan und seine Erben (exhibition catalogue), München 2005, p. 304, public domain.





Joel Kontinen

A recent article in The Conversation attempts to disclose the evolutionary secrets of beards. Why do some men sport them? And why do some women find them attractive?

The quest for finding a Darwinian answer for a variety of phenomena is not new. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) famously put it, “Evolution is the light that illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow” and Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay in 1973 entitled Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.

So does this also include beards?

The Conversation article obviously starts with the basic assumption that it does:

“What is the point of a beard, evolutionarily speaking? Children, women, and a whole bunch of men manage just fine without one. But take a walk down some streets these days and you’ll be confronted with all sizes and shapes of groomed (and less groomed) facial hair – from designer stubble to waxed moustaches and hipster beards.

When we see men paying attention to their appearance, it’s easy to assume that they’re just angling for partners. But our research on beards and voices shows that beards probably evolved at least partly to help men boost their standing among other men.”

Author Tamsin Saxton throws in some Darwinese, such as “evolution through sexual selection,” for good measure.

Evolutionists need this concept, as natural selection cannot explain the beauty we see in the animal kingdom and elsewhere.

However, sexual selection has become a controversial concept.

In 1870 Charles Darwin tried to show in his book The Descent of Man that peahens were enthralled by the peacock’s long tail. However, research shows that this isn’t true.

But a lack of facts has never kept evolutionists from speculating. In 2012, for instance, New Scientist had an article entitled: Why Haven’t Bald Men Gone Extinct?

Given the absence of evidence, evolutionists tend to use just so stories.

Source:

Saxton, Tamsin. 2016. Hirsutes you sir: but that beard might mean more to men than women. The Conversation (14 April).

New Darwinian Moth Tale Without Head or Tail

Yponomeuta cagnagella. Image courtesy of Sarefo, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).





Joel Kontinen

While Darwinists tend to think that evolution is real, one thing that has definitely not evolved is their less than meticulous use of the word 'evolution'.

They use it so carelessly in a wide variety of meanings that one might suppose they do it on purpose to muddy the waters.

A recent example features a study on the behaviour of ermine moths (Yponomeuta cagnagella) published in the journal Biology Letters.

An article in Science puts an evolutionary spin on the results:

“Moths from high light pollution areas were significantly less attracted to the light than those from the darker zones … Overall, moths from the light-polluted populations had a 30% reduction in the flight-to-light behavior, indicating that this species is evolving, as predicted, to stay away from artificial lights.”

So, what the article does is to equate a change in behaviour with evolution. The moths have not changed physically; they are still moths of the very same species than before.

Darwinian evolution (i.e. in its molecules to man definition) would probably head towards a speedy extinction, if its adherents were a bit more cautious – and honest – in their use of terms.

Now it lies in the emergency ward, kept artificially alive through fact-free storytelling and speculation. (You can read about some examples here, here, here and here.)

Source:

Morell, Virginia. 2016. Your porchlight is causing moths to evolve. Science (12 April).

Latest Darwinian Story: Meat Eating Made Our Faces Thinner

Eating meat has not turned a bonobo’s face any thinner. Image courtesy of Mike R., Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

The latest Darwinian story features raw meat and our faces, making a connection between them in the lives of our assumed ancestors.

The research itself, published in the journal Nature, does not sound very groundbreaking. Its title merely states: Impact of meat and Lower Palaeolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans. However, when reporting on the results, the BBC manages to come up with a juicier version, viz. Meat eating accelerated face evolution.

The facts:

We have narrower faces and smaller teeth than the big apes.

The assumptions:

1) Our ancestors had a more ape-like face and bigger teeth.
2) They evolved from ape-like creatures via Darwinian mechanisms.

The problems:

1) The assumptions cannot be tested.
2) Even in the inflated timeline that evolutionists use, there is not enough time for the changes that are needed to make our ancestors fully human.
3) Evolution can’t produce the genetic information that would be needed in such a transformation.

The result:

An implausible Darwinian just so story, involving major changes over millions of years.

An article in Science once suggested that this kind of speculation might be paleofantasy. In 2008, Richard Lewontin, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, acknowledged that we don’t know anything about brain evolution.

Often, Darwinian storytelling trumps facts.

It might be the only way to try to keep an endangered theory from becoming completely extinct.

Sources:

BBC. 2016. Meat eating accelerated face evolution (9 March).

Zink, Katherine D and Daniel E. Lieberman. 2016. Impact of meat and Lower Palaeolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans. Nature 531 (7595), 500–503.

“Evolution May Be Smarter Than We Thought” – Really?

Owls certainly look designed.




Joel Kontinen

It is no secret that evolution does not work, at least in the sense it is usually understood. This has prompted some ardent Darwinists to re-define how they understand evolution.

Unwilling to admit the obvious, i.e., if something looks like it was designed, it probably was designed, they desperately want to cling on to a naturalistic answer to the problem.

It has become increasingly difficult to deny that design in nature is real. To evolutionists, the very concept seems be something akin to a nightmare.

Some time ago, computer scientist Richard Watson, who is an associate professor at the University of Southampton, UK, attempted to solve the dilemma by suggesting that evolution is evolvable.

This idea has been around for at least two decades or so.

Writing in The Conversation, his title already lets the Darwinian cat out of the bag to catch the nasty design mice: Intelligent design without a creator? Why evolution may be smarter than we thought.

He makes it clear that he will not accept any explanations that acknowledge the existence of authentic design.

He basically says that while evolution might initially be dumb and blind, it is not at all that stupid. He believes that it can learn. His thesis features the regulatory connections between genes and neural networks:

“The evolution of regulatory connections between genes, which govern how genes are expressed in our cells, has the same learning capabilities as neural networks. In other words, gene networks evolve like neural networks learn. While connections in neural networks change in the direction that maximises rewards, natural selection changes genetic connections in the direction that increases fitness. The ability to learn is not itself something that needs to be designed – it is an inevitable product of random variation and selection when acting on connections.”

A major drawback with this approach (from the naturalistic /materialistic perspective, that is) is that it assumes that at its inception, the genome is already complicated. It does not address the dilemma of how Darwinian processes could ever come up with such an intelligent system.

Ignoring this obvious shortcoming, Mr. Watson nevertheless pursues his Darwinian pipe dream:

“The exciting implication of this is that evolution can evolve to get better at evolving in exactly the same way that a neural network can learn to be a better problem solver with experience. The intelligent bit is not explicit ‘thinking ahead’ (or anything else un-Darwinian); it is the evolution of connections that allow it to solve new problems without looking ahead.”

In their desire to exclude the supernatural, some other Darwinians have also gone to great lengths to concoct “unsubstantiated just-so stories”, as they “cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door,” as Harvard professor Richard Lewinton famously put it.

Source:

Watson, Richard A. 2016. Intelligent design without a creator? Why evolution may be smarter than we thought. The Conversation (28 January).

Cave-Living Baboons and Lemurs Inspire Tall Evolutionary Tales

Some lemurs sleep in caves. Image courtesy of Alex Dunkel, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists tend to get exited when they see – or hear about – animals doing things that only humans usually do. The latest story features chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) and ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) that at least occasionally live in caves.

Bats, and some blind animals, such as crabs, arachnids and salamanders, live in caves, so this should not be such a big deal.

But perhaps it’s size that matters? When big mammals like baboons and lemurs take a nap in a cave, there seems to be no end to the excitement.

"Just like us?" New Scientist asks and begins to speculate on the origin of a South African cave where a massive amount of old bones were found.

Strange things do happen. Sometimes it's a cat that adopts ducklings instead of eating them, but that not evolution, either.

Source:

Sokol, Josh. 2016. These baboons and lemurs have left the trees to live in caves. New Scientist (14 January).

New Darwinian Story Fails to Explain Language Evolution

A new Darwinian attempt at explaining the origin of language features marmosets. Image courtesy of Carmem A. Busko, Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

For Darwinists committed to explaining everything with natural /materialistic processes, the origin of an immaterial skill, such as language, is an enigma.

Hypotheses attempting to account for how speaking originated have without exception turned out to be failures. Since the days of Darwin, the very idea has been a “horrid doubt.”

Many researchers have admitted that they don’t have a clue as to how language could have evolved. It remains a mystery. Some have even suggested that humans may be programmed to learn language.

However, from time to time, Darwinian stories raise their heads. A recent example features marmoset communication. A brief ScienceShot article says:

“Even though the marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) don’t have language, they do exchange calls. And the discovery that a young marmoset (as in the photo above) learns to wait for another marmoset to finish its call before uttering its own sound may help us better understand the origins of human language, say scientists online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. No primate, other than humans, is a vocal learner, with the ability to hear a sound and imitate it—a talent considered essential to speech. But the marmoset researchers say that primates still exchange calls in a manner reminiscent of having a conversation because they wait for another to finish calling before vocalizing—and that this ability is often overlooked in discussions about the evolution of language.”

Could this shed light on how the first humans learned to communicate through the spoken word? No. Language is an immaterial phenomenon. It cannot be explained by storytelling that relies solely on material processes.


Source:

Morell, Virginia. 2015. Marmoset 'conversations' may give clues to evolution of human language. ScienceShot (21 April).

Mudskippers: The Superfast Evolution of a Darwinian Just So Story

Mudskippers are featured in a fresh evolution story. Image courtesy of H. Krisp, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Evolution stories tend to evolve. At times, the evolution is extra fast, as in the recent case of mudskippers, as reported in Nature.

The latest version states:

“Mudskipper fish (Periophthalmus barbarus) use water bubbles as a 'tongue' to feed on land. The finding hints at how other animals might have evolved tongues as they made the transition from aquatic to terrestrial life.

Krijn Michel at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and his colleagues used high-speed video and X-ray imaging to study the feeding behaviour of various animals. They found that when the mudskipper eats on land, a bubble of water held in its mouth protrudes out and touches food before its jaws close.”

Last week, a Nature news article also explained the feeding habits of mudskippers and suggested:

“Amphibious fish that feed on land use water held in their mouths to help them grab and manipulate their prey. The unusual feeding behaviour of mudskippers (Periophthalmus barbarus) could shed light on the evolution of sea-dwelling animals into terrestrial ones.”

Thus, in just one short week, “could shed light on the evolution” becomes “might have evolved tongues.”

While mudskippers eat on land, their feeding behaviour does not lend support to the Darwinian frog-to-prince hypothesis.

It might be advisable to remember what Mark Twain said:

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”


Sources:

Cressey, Daniel. 2015. Fish uses 'water tongue' to grab prey on land. Nature news (18 March).

Fish slurps up prey with watery 'tongue'. Nature 519, 392 (26 March 2015).

New Darwinian Story: Sponges and Bacteria Made Complex Marine Life Possible

Stove-pipe Sponge (Aplysina archeri). Image courtesy of Nick Hobgood, Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen


Mark Twain wrote: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

It might be good to keep this in mind when looking at a proposed solution for boosting oxygen levels in the seas and hence, according to Darwinian thinking, making the deep waters teem with life “hundreds of millions of years” ago and eventually making the Cambrian Explosion possible.

According to New Scientist,

“Last year, came the suggestion that sponges transformed Earth's deep oceans 750 million years ago, turning them into an oxygen-rich haven for life. Now it seems tiny bacteria living inside the sponges also played a part in the drama.”

Fan Zhang of the University of Maryland in Baltimore thinks that sponges and bacteria might have “evolved a hyper-efficient system for extracting phosphorus”.

New Scientist explains the reasoning behind this speculation:

“Phosphorus is an essential but rare nutrient for ocean life. Like all marine organisms, sponges need it to survive but can't extract it from the water – but the bacteria can help them out. Meanwhile, bacteria need the sponges to pump vast amounts of seawater over them so they can extract more phosphorus.”

However, much more than water is needed for life. And much more than oxygen is needed for complex life.

Without a massive infusion of genetic information the oceans would be absolutely dead. We can read the best and most logical explanation for complex life in the seas in Genesis 1:20: “Then God said, ‘Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures’ “ (NASB).


Source:

Brahic, Catherine. 2015. Were early seas transformed by sponge microbiome? New Scientist (23 February).

New Darwinian Story: Darwin’s Finches’ Gene May Explain the Shape of Human Faces

Image courtesy of John Gould, via Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

It’s not difficult to understand why Darwinian stories are so fascinating. While they are often more or less fact free and mutually contradictory, there’s no shortage of them.

A new story features Darwin’s finches. For many decades they have served as icons of evolution. The most obvious reason for their inclusion in this club is a dire scarcity of animals that have changed – at least to some extent. However, the changes have been temporary.

Recently, researchers sequenced the genomes of 120 individual finches. According to a report in Science, they found out that Medium ground finches (Geospiza fortis) had “different versions of [the gene] ALX1 depending on their beak's exact shape.”

In humans, mutations in the gene ALX1 “have been linked to frontonasal dysplasia, a birth defect that can range in severity from distinctly wide features or a cleft palate to more serious skull and brain malformations.”

Next, the storytelling takes off: “The researchers hypothesize that smaller variations in ALX1 could be responsible for the diversity of face shapes among people.”

This is not the first time evolutionists have seen human facial features in animals. Two years ago, when researchers discovered Entelognathus primordialis, a fish fossil assumed to be over 400 million years old, they believed they saw hints of a human face in it.

Few evolutionists ever see the circular reasoning in all of this. The only “proof” for this is that since according to Darwinian ideology, we evolved from fish, we should have traits that fish have.

In other words, ideology determines the outcome.

Source:

Williams, Sarah C. P. 2015. Genomes of Darwin’s finches may explain the shape of human faces. Science (11 February).

New Darwinian Story: How the Zebrafish Got Its Stripes

A female zebrafish. Image courtesy of Azul, Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

British author Rudyard Kipling popularised the idea of the just so story. 1909 his collection Just So Stories for Little Children included tales like How the Leopard Got His Spots and How the Camel Got His Hump.

The paucity of fossils has prompted evolutionist to speculate on the arrival of countless features in the animal kingdom. A common denominator in these stories is that it would be difficult if not impossible to provide any real evidence for them.

They might be loosely built on discoveries, but often speculation takes over when facts end.

The title of a recent report by on researchers at the Max Planck Institute already suggests the genre of the story: How the zebrafish gets its stripes.

Scientists led by Nobel laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard discovered that it takes three major pigment cell types (black cells, reflective silvery cells, and yellow cells) to give zebrafish their characteristic colour and pattern:

“While it was known that all three cell types have to interact to form proper stripes, the embryonic origin of the pigment cells that develop the stripes of the adult fish has remained a mystery up to now. Scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen have now discovered how these cells arise and behave to form the ‘zebra’ pattern.”

So far, they conducted good operational science. However, then the report deteriorated into speculations:

“Their work may help to understand the development and evolution of the great diversity of striking patterns in the animal world.”

From zebra fish they first go on to extrapolate to other fish and then to other animals that likewise have spectacular patterns on their feathers or skin.

“The authors speculate that variations on these cell behaviours could be at play in generating the great diversity of colour patterns in fish. ‘These findings inform our way of thinking about colour pattern formation in other fish, but also in animals which are not accessible to direct observation during development such as peacocks, tigers and zebras’, says Nüsslein-Volhard – wondering how her cats got their stripes.”

Compared to the real issue of the origin of zebrafish, tigers and zebras, this kind of speculation is rather trite.

Source:

How the zebrafish gets its stripes. Max Planck Gesellschaft. August 28, 2014.