If Living Things Had an Intelligent Designer, How Would We Know?

 I dread taking the path I am going to have to take in order to make my point about creation. That's because anything regarding the COVID-19 virus has been absurdly tribalized. Once something becomes so, minds become closed not just regarding the subject but anything that touches it. This article may be an example of that. I've tried to make the point I am making here on several online forums and it is positively frightening how minds switch off and simply cannot even get to the point I am trying to make. 

It doesn't matter if I am talking to a YEC who did not finish high school or a Research Scientist with a Doctorate. They and all points between have an unsettling propensity to act like two bands of chimpanzees hurling poo at one another. It is all about what side you are on, not what the facts are. Even if for my purposes it does not matter who is right regarding the question of the origin of COVID-19. They can't seem to get to what I am saying about the fact that there is a controversy because both sides seem to be utterly convinced that all dissent from their position is illegitimate. This even though the World Health Organization hasn't even released their report on the origin of the virus yet, and that report may be meaningless anyway because China is editing it. Intelligence is no defense against tribal thinking short-circuiting reasoning. That said, here goes. 

The former Director of the Centers for Disease Control, a virologist with access to inside information by the name of Robert Redfield, has publicly said that he does not believe that the COVID-19 virus outbreak started at an animal market. Rather, the evidence suggested to him that the virus was the result of gain-of-function experiments from the nearby Wuhan weapons lab and that the release was an accident. Dr. Anthony Fauci was quick to denounce this view, but then he was connected to the outfit which authorized and supported the viral-gain-of-function research to occur at that lab. Even if Redfield has found the truth, it might be a hard truth for Dr. Fauci to accept. Indeed it would be hard for a lot of well-placed individuals to accept, and this may be related to the fierceness with which dissenting views on this issue are suppressed. 

That is not to say that Redfield is right. It is not necessary for him to be right in order to make the point about creation that I wish to make here. It is only necessary to acknowledge that there is a legitimate question on the matter. It is a disgrace that this has become so difficult. We are are in an environment where everything is politicized, conclusions are rushed, and even smart people take their cues from their chosen authority figures and quickly decide that dissent is somehow immoral or ignorant or both. 

If you are mentally independent enough to acknowledge that it is genuinely difficult for experts to determine whether this virus was subjected to engineering or not, then you should be able to appreciate the real point of this article: If they can't tell whether or not a virus from a known area in a known near timeframe was or was not genetically engineered, then how can they tell whether or not the emergence of dozens of phyla in the Cambrian, or the sudden diversification in the Ordovician were engineered? 

Naturalists assume that the evolutionary mechanisms we are familiar with are able to make all of these changes even during the short periods of dramatic change. But that's not driven by scientific proof, but rather the extrapolation of known data to vast lengths. "It must have been nature because nature is all there is" is circular. We know that nature has some power to shape organisms. We don't know, scientifically, whether this world is strictly the result of natural processes or if nature was being guided from beyond to produce a beautiful and complex world that would never have developed on its own. We simply can't know that via science. 

There are several instances of what I would call "anomalies" in the development of life on this planet. I've documented a few on this blog and won't go into them here, but I seriously doubt most of the kind of intervention I am talking about could even be detected with our current science. The dust-up about the virus only confirms that to me. The truth is, we don't have a thousand different biospheres to observe. We have one. We don't know if a thousand others, or a billion others would naturally turn out to be as integrated and complicated as ours or if what we enjoy here is not the result of nature alone, but Divine input. In an article about "Creation-Evolution Wars" I mused that many actions could fit the definitions of both creationism and evolution. Naturalism is the odd man out there.

Genesis chapter one says that God told the seas and earth to bring forth living creatures, but then subsequently says that He made or created them. This points to a creation which cannot do God's will without God's help. This is exactly the kind of creation one would expect were Christianity correct, because it also teaches that we cannot do His will without His help, and that our obedience is far from perfect. 

Just as we can't figure out for sure if the changes that made the Wuhan virus so deadly in such a short period of time were from nature or design, we can't answer the much much harder question of whether the biosphere as a whole is the result of nature or design, or some combination of both. Partisans on both sides will holler that we can, and view dissent as disease, but this is not the path of the noble mind. 

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Misbehaving Missing Muons

This isn't related to early Genesis, except as evidence that there is a lot about this universe that science still doesn't understand.

I noticed that the "Standard Model" of particle physics has been mildly challenged by a finding that detected electrons over their heavier version muons in certain quark collisions. In the standard model, these collisions should produce equal amounts of each. Instead, 1,000 times more electrons were detected.

I have thought about particles seeking the "lowest energy point" in their interactions with each other as an explanation for say, the unification of gravity and electromagnetism. I don't have the background to really look into it, but it seems that this finding would be expected in such a case, even if it was not expected by the standard model. The hadrons are created not in an actual instant, but as a process that occurs over a tiny but not instantaneous length of time. During that process, the would-be electron or muon should orient itself so as to wind up an electron rather than a muon.

A coin toss should get a random number of heads and tails, but if one side of the coin is much more massive than the other the most stable way for it to land would be with the heavy (say heads) side down, resulting in most toss's resulting in "tails". In theory each side has a 50-50 chance of occurring, but in the process of the toss the coin orients itself to its more stable state.

Y-Chromosome Haplogroups Have Differing Mutation Rates

 An amazing study came out last fall claiming that different Y-Chromosomes have wildly different mutation rates. Y-haplopgroups are passed down from father to son. Y-haplpgroup B for example, the one found mostly in Baka, Mbuti (formerly Pygmies) and some Khosian, has a mutation rate 1.5 times greater than Y-haplogroups R and E, found in Europeans and most Africans. The longer the "branch", or time it branched off according to past calculations, the greater the mutation rate.

I'd like someone in the field to delve into this deeply, but this finding would appear to tighten the window of Y-haplogroup branching. That is, the ones that seem older may owe a part or even most, of their apparent age difference to the fact that they have higher mutation rates. The ones that seem younger may be a bit older than they seem because "age" is determined by the mutations they have accumulated. That is unless, as I suspect, the mutation rate assumed in the past were those of Europeans or African Haplogroup E. Both of those were slow to mutate according to this study. So maybe scientists have been using a low mutation rate to do these calculations. If that is the case then the older branches would move closer in time and the younger branches remain where they are. The study recommended using each Y-haplogroup's rate to measure branching dates. 

They did not test any of the "A" haplogroups such as A00, A0, or A1. They tested "B", thought to have branched off 100,000 years ago from the "A1b2" haplogroups. If one goes back and recalculates based on the idea that those mutations they were using to calculate time really happened 1.5 times faster than we thought, then you in effect take 1/3 of that time away. This would put the splitting of the "B" branch at roughly 67 kya. Surprisingly recent and close to the time for "E". That's just a napkin-figure of course.

Since I am going there, let's talk about "Y-haplogroup Adam". That is, the "common ancestor" of all of these groups. I have explained elsewhere that under the Christ-centered model the Adam in the bible came later, and that humanity started as a "host" or group, not a single couple. So then these very ancient dates for "Y-haplogroup Adam" are calculations of when an event that never happened might have occurred. They are meaningless if humanity started as a population with a set amount of diversity at the start rather than all came from a single pair. So in effect the diversity does not require an explanation, but I do wonder if the following occurred with the A groups:

Initial calculations of the origin date of A0 were only about 60,000 years ago but that figure was upped to 142,000 years ago (with a wide margin of error) in later studies. That haplogroup wasn't tested in this study, but the pattern of longer branching correlating with a higher mutation rate would indicate that the date should be recalibrated toward the more recent figure. We can't know how much toward it until we get more data, but if B mutates at roughly 1.5 times the rate of R1 and E then we might expect A0 to have an even higher value. If, for example, the mutation rate was twice as high (2.0), then if the more recent studies were otherwise properly done they would imply a branching date of 142.000/2 = 71,000 years ago. There are a lot of "ifs" there, but that is how we figure out what questions need to asked and what things need to be tested for.

All of the A Y-haplogroups, A00, A0, A1a, and A1b, are very distantly related, perhaps no closer to one another than they are to haplogroup BT from which the rest (and bulk) of mankind sprang. They are all defined by missing the mutation (M91) which defines BT and the stream which represents the bulk of humanity. But it seems odd to me that in this accounting, mutations are always added but never lost. We know that back-mutations happen in nature on a regular basis. Why couldn't each of these A haplogroups represent an instance when the defining mutation M91 was lost? This would only require a back mutation in that particular gene four times in all of human history. 

In this accounting, A00 would represent one event where M91 was lost, A0 another event in which M91 was lost, and this split would have yet another defining mutation which A00 lacks. So again, A0 did not really spring from A00. Nor did A1. Rather, they each represent independent events where the defining mutation of the real basal haplogroup for mankind, something like BT, was lost in a tiny sliver of the population due to mutations. In this scenario the A00 split from BT was not even necessarily prior to the A0 split from BT. It simply occurred in a part of the population which lacked the defining mutation for A0.

Under this scenario then, these various clades of  Y-haplogroup A don't represent relics that have been largely displaced by spin-offs of BT. Rather, they are also spin-offs of BT who happened to have lost M-91, the defining mutation of BT. It isn't that all of mankind started like them and the spin-offs from BT pushed them to the edge of extinction, rather they were just a few of the many groups which sprang from a humanity that started somewhere around, and something much like, BT. Pure BT hasn't been found anywhere yet, but that's probably just because "mutations happen". Mankind didn't stay still for long. 

On rare occasions we will find an "out-of-place" Y-haplogroup A. We chalk it up to say, unknown male African ancestry for someone in England. In most cases this is probably correct. But what if some of these are modern example of what I am talking about? I call for a study to look at out-of-place haplogroups and try to find one with the fingerprints of a 'recent' M91 deletion (for example one that contained many of the markers of downstream haplogroups but was just missing M91). I think we already have a good example of one something like that, we just didn't catch it "in the act". There is the case of A1b1b2b (A-M13), which though it seems very downstream on A branching, also has signs of a very deep divergence. 

There is simply a lot we still don't know about this subject. I urge everyone in the field to hold to their conclusions loosely, and keep asking questions. 

*****

PS- my best guess on an explanation for the study? If we are shooting in the dark here, what about the idea that the original population which became us was the product of some dramatic re-arrangements (a special creation, but you naturalists can think of it as a random act of nature if you wish)? The aftermath of this would be for a microevolutionary "settling effect" to occur. So then, what we see in these mutations that tend to stick (like the defining ones of Y haps for example) is that they might have a stabilizing effect on the Y chromosome. After all, once "nature" hits on a winning formula, too much re-arrangement is not good!

So for example, the route that led to Y-hap. E in Africa and R and all the other Eurasian Y haplogroups wound up increasing stability as they were acquired. The A haplogroups, along with B, probably still acquired increased stability over the original haplogroup(s) (which may be part of why we don't see BT "pure" anymore) but their chromosomes stumbled onto a less-efficient route of stabilization. This means they still have higher mutation rates. This would explain the data in the study showing that mutation rate is correlated to branch length.

I mean, as long as we are guessing....

*****

Hey my book isn't much about this, but rather theology and apologetics, but I will never write a more important book.....

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Mulligan Sought on Evolutionary Origin of Vertebrates

Some of my best friends are vertebrates. Also, some of my favorite foods. It is a pretty important group. After years of research, they thought they had a good idea about the evolutionary origin of this key group. Until now- the new truth is "Long-Accepted Theory of Vertebrate Origin Upended By Fossilized Fish Larva".

They thought the larva of lampreys were a pretty good stand-in for the common ancestor of all of us creatures with back-bones. Then they found ancient fossil lamprey larva. It turns out, modern lamprey larva don't look like ancient ones. The ancient ones look like little adult lampreys. The modern larvae might be said to have simplified rather than an original simple creature that looked like the modern larvae becoming a more complicated modern adult through an evolutionary increase in complexity.

It is still "evolution" in the sense that lampreys seemed to have changed their larval form. But that's not really what people mean when they speak of "evolution" as an explanation of how life got more complex. Still, if it is being spun as an advance in understanding how vertebrates evolved then I think that is incorrect. Rather, it sheds light on how they DID NOT evolve via a particular path and does nothing to show how they might have. The origin becomes more mysterious than we thought because the best candidate turned out to be a blind alley.

Early Genesis as a text claims the earth does have some creative power, in the sense that God commanded the land and seas to bring forth living creatures. But the text subsequently records that God intervened in nature somehow to help creation fulfill His commands. So this universe can't always do God's will without God's help. That makes it a fit place for beings like us to live in- we can't either! That is surely a prominent theme in classical Christianity. 

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The Theory of Evolution is Inadequate to Explain Biology, Requires "Extensions" Says Oxford Prof

 Read all about it.