The Great Leap Forward in Toolmaking When Adamics Appeared

 Thanks to Alexander Young for putting me onto this graphic. There was a great leap forward when what I believe was a distinct population which later became us appeared on the scene. Click on image for larger view.

Was Nature Done With Dinosaurs Before the Asteroid?

 

A new study shows that dinosaurs were in serious decline before the asteroid which is credited with wiping them out hit. Here we see the drop in new species appearing verses the number of existing species going extinct. They were losing diversity even before the strike. 

In my view, creation and evolution have a complex interconnection which is not well explored in today's "debate" over the issue. Naturalism, the belief that nature is all that there is, is the big loser in all this, not creationism or, strictly speaking, evolution. 

For example, I've noticed before that nature acts in patterns which are better explained by the direction of a Purpose and an Intelligence rather than natural processes. This goes well beyond the most known example, the Cambrian Explosion. For example, the pattern of diversification shown in the Ordovician defies the expectations of naturalism as well. Indeed, "Burst after near stasis" seems to be a recurring theme of nature, and "Outlier Events" (compared to what would be expected if change was driven by random processes) are the norm. And contrary to the party line, there is only a weak correlation between these radiation events and mass extinctions. 

But that is on the side of new forms being produced. What about on the other side of the equation? That too doesn't fit the naturalist view of things. It turns out that not only do categories of organisms diversify in "bursts" with no apparent natural impetus, but they also stop bursting seemingly without natural explanation. 

The latest example is the broad and highly successful group "dinosaurs". Non-avian ones to be exact. According to the graphs above, it looks like they essentially "quit evolving" after true birds got here. One can argue that mammals were squeezing them out, that new types of plants arose that they were not so able to digest or what have you, but these bromides merely put off the question. Mammals kept evolving, plants kept evolving, why didn't dinosaurs? 

This is a pattern I've noticed before. It is almost as if once "Nature" is done playing with a type of organism, she moves on and that one mostly stops evolving. The change is then focused on the successor group.  I first observed this with relation to vertebrae in reptiles and mammals. Despite the vast diversity of reptiles, they seemed unable to develop more than one type of vertebrae in all the eons of time they have existed. Mammals meanwhile have five different types. Why can't reptiles evolve different kind of vertebrae when they changed so many other things?  It is as if "nature" was done playing with reptiles and had mostly moved on to something else. This makes no sense with naturalistic premises, but that's what nature looks like. 

I'm not the only one who has noticed this. I reported on a study which examined the same pattern which shows up throughout the 543 million years of animal life on earth. An ancestor form will have very little diversity. Then when the modern form appears, it bursts forth in tremendous diversity and swamps the ancestor form which often vanishes. So, the study concluded, a disproportionate amount of all the diversity which ever existed is found in presently living forms.  

If you think birds are from dinos, that surely describes what happened there. And birds didn't even take the niches held by the dinosaurs that went extinct. They went extinct even though they were mostly not competing with their own possible "successor form". And if the the study I started with is right, they were on their way out before the asteroid. It wasn't a strike that somehow selectively killed non-avian dinos while sparing birds. It was just the final blow to a group that was already failing to adapt- even though they had adapted quite well for over a hundred million years back when "nature" was letting them change with the times. 

Scientists have started asking the question "Is Evolution More Intelligent than we Thought?" The answer to this question is firstly that it is, in a way, a stupid question. "Evolution" can't be intelligent. But God can be intelligent. If what they are trying to say is that nature is behaving in ways that seem to be the product of an intelligence and wondering if therefore there is some kind of intelligence behind nature, then that isn't a stupid question. Rather it is an important question based on profound scientific observations. And the answer to it goes beyond what science can verify (IOW something science, a study of nature alone, must be "stupid" about). Our Creator God is that intelligence behind nature. 

*****

My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right. 

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COVID-19 Origins Controversy Applies to Larger Intelligent Design Debate

 I’ve never read a better report than the one from the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” for explaining why the COVID-19 virus is most probably the result of an unintentional release from the Wuhan Weapons Lab’s gain-of-function research. It is a long report, and I won’t go into all the details here, but I do want to explore the consequences of this controversy as it applies to the creationism vs. naturalism debate. Unlike most, I don’t describe the debate in creation-evolution terms for reasons that I explore here. Naturalism is the real opposite of creationism, but I find that naturalists hide behind evolution to obscure just how unreasonable their claims really are. Almost all Christians believe that some amount of evolution occurred, the real question is whether it is reasonable or not to believe that nature alone is responsible for all of the variation in all life forms throughout earth’s history.

It is true that much of the science media and political establishment was trying to push the narrative that the virus was the product of nature alone, and that is part of the reason why the controversy has simmered so long. But the article takes some time to explain just how and why that occurred. There is much I could say about that too, and it goes to the heart of the valid part of the skepticism that many Christians have toward the science/political/media establishment. But that’s in the piece and it is not what I want to focus on today. The other reason the controversy has gone on so long is more interesting to me. It is that it is legitimately difficult to tell whether significant changes in organisms are the result of nature or the intervention of an intelligent designer. In this case a scientist name Shi and her associates.

Here it is over a year later, and we still don’t know. The virus underwent a huge leap in the ability to infect humans, and it seemed to come out of nowhere. How did it originate? The change happened right in front of us. We have studied the virus intensely over this period with considerable resources. That includes the origins question. And the fact is that even though we have collected a lot of very specific evidence and people have strong opinions, we just don’t know.

 I submit to you that science is simply not that good at detecting whether or not a virus, or a life form, has been engineered by an Intelligent Designer or whether it is the product of natural forces alone. The money-quote from the article is this, “For instance, any result of a gain-of-function experiment could be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time. “

There you have it. Proponents of what amounts to the Design Hypothesis for this virus have been pointing out features of the virus that are unlikely to have occurred by natural processes. Advocates for what amounts to the naturalistic explanation counter that viruses naturally do lots of strange things and argue that these findings could be the result of a few unlikely events, by chance, coming together.

This is like much of the ID-Naturalism debate. It is a microcosm of that debate. I am extremely convinced by the evidence in that report, some of which I already knew, that the virus was engineered. The Chinese may even have proof of that in their possession but they are acting as guilty as sin and keeping a lid on a lot of the data. Absent a confession, those who wish to cling to the hypothesis of natural origin will always be able to hide in the improbable because any gain-of-function can be explained as one that evolution would have arrived at in time.

That question of time is a critical one. The strongest evidence against a natural origin in that article comparing the amount of change which occurred and noting the time it took for it to occur- the rapidity of the change violated the norms of viral evolution. In other words, a naturalistic explanation has a rate problem. The same is true in the broader creationism debate. In the Cambrian Explosion dozens of new Phyla show up in what is, compared to the norms of biological evolution, a fantastically short period of time for that amount of change to occur. Those new phyla go on for tens of millions of years spinning off very few species, until all at once, they all start doing so in the Ordovician. There are numerous anomalies like this (though none on such a scale as the Cambrian) throughout earth’s history. Evolution, as defined by "change", mostly happens in relatively short and dramatic bursts between long periods of near-stasis. Naturalists like to use a waive of the hand to say that nature did it all. It just did it in some time periods apparently thousands or even millions of times faster than in others! All those “gain-of-function” events can be explained away simply by applying copious amounts of credulity in inverse proportion to the rate of change.

While such dismissals may satisfy them, it doesn’t change the underlying issue: Their faith that nature alone is sufficient isn’t science. It isn’t verifiable by present scientific capabilities. It would be orders of magnitude harder than figuring out if the Wuhan virus was engineered and absent a confession from the Chinese, we may never know that for certain. Conversely, there is nothing “unscientific” about looking at these periods when change seems to occur with astonishing rapidity relative to the norm and conclude that nature wasn’t in the driver’s seat. 

When science very poor at answering a question, there is no “scientific” or “non-scientific” answer. There are only answers which limit themselves to philosophical naturalism, the belief that there is no supernatural and that therefore all effects must have a natural cause, or those which are open to theistic possibilities. On such questions, that science uses a method of operation that only considers natural causes doesn’t make an answer which relies on naturalism as a philosophical premise any more “scientific” than the opposite conclusion.

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Scientists Left Floundering for Explanation of Flat Fish Evolution

Kory Evans of Rice University has to be one of the most honest evolutionary scientists on the planet. After an exhaustive study of the genomes of flounders and sole- flat fish that asymmetrically have two eyes on the same side of their body as adults, he was asked if there was some kind of advantage to this condition. "I'm not gonna lie," Evans said. "I don't really know if there's an advantage. I think they did it because they could."

Old-school scientists would have concocted some evolutionary just-so story to explain why having one eye migrate across to the other side of the head and losing a lot of mobility in a flattening process was driven by survival-of-the-fittest necessity. Presumably Evans is of the new school which has tired of spinning such tales and looking for such unicorns. The "Theory of Evolution" is itself evolving and the new take is something called "Neutral Theory". That is to say, changes are not initially driven by adaptations to the environment. The big ones happen "just because they can" and the adaptive ones are much smaller in scope. Sounds a bit like the old "Hopeful Monster" idea, but let's not go there. 

What he has lost in exchange for being free of the burden of having to generate continuous silly explanations is to basically adopt a framework that needs no "why". "Because it could" is explanation enough in neutral theory. But then if you ask "how could that happen" you simply get a list of the complicated interrelated changes that had to occur in tandem to keep a functioning organism. They happened in tandem because they were linked. 

Well, OK, but why is that the case in this group and them alone? Other flatfish didn't flatten that way, as the article points out. And this group radiated radically within a three-million year span and then essentially stopped. That pales in comparison to the vast amount of change in a short time-frame from the densest part of the Cambrian, but it is still a lot of change in a very short time period compared to the sort of background change that seems the "norm". Even a nominally curious mind moves to the question of what powered this unusual process. Too bad. That was what the "selective adaptation" version of evolutionary theory was for, and they don't do that so much now. The Neutral Theory guys don't get drawn into such obligations. You don't need to know "why". "Because it could" is the new Neutral Theory answer.

Creationism/Intelligent Design has an answer to these questions, even if the answer is not testable scientifically. The Creator put new information into His creation, His hand, His mind, made links that nature could never make in the amount of time required to make it work and work well. 

Perhaps someday Neutral Theory Evolutionists will see that there is nothing conceptually in what they are saying that rules out Creationism or Intelligent Design as an explanation for the evolutionary (yes these changes could be BOTH creation and evolution) changes that they see. Maybe those ideas can't be formally tested in their field, but when they are down to saying "because it could" as an explanation for phenomena, then that doesn't matter so much. Evolution and creationism are not stepping on each other anymore under Neutral Theory because NT doesn't ascribe to nature all power to shape life through the environment and survival of the fittest. Nature is "neutral" in that process, as the name implies. Once they say in effect that in the natural realm there is no "why", then the door is open for theology to provide the "why" without stepping on the toes of science. 

Now I wrote "maybe someday NT evolutionists" will see that there is no conceptual conflict with creationism at that point, but that cuts both ways. Creationists should also grow to the place where they see that this sort of "evolution" is also not a threat to their philosophy of nature. 

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"Archaic Humans" Don't Have Gene Expression Like Actual Humans

 The article was titled "A new perspective on the genomes of archaic humans". 

The content of the article re-enforced a point I have made here over and over- archaic 
"humans" are not like humans. They were not like us. Naturalists have insisted on calling every member of the Genus Homo "human". We should start calling members of our species "Adamics" to counter their co-option of a word that originally meant only our species. 

There is DNA that makes proteins and there is DNA that regulates the DNA that makes proteins. Studies focusing only on the protein-making DNA may find lots of similarities, but this is like saying that a Chevy Chevette and a Chevy Corvette used the same bolts! How many of those bolts are used in what place and attaching what things matters a lot, even if the bolts are identical. In this case the study found hundreds of differences in regulatory DNA between Adamics,  vs. Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Excuse me, they found thousands, but hundreds where they could tell there was a functional difference. Those differences were clustered around brain and vocal tract regions. Things that very much make us who we are. 

UPDATE: Science Daily was even more explicit in its article: "This would suggest some kind of rapid evolution of those organs or some kind of a path that is specific to modern humans," said Gokhman"

That's kind of what we have been suggesting all along! Divine intervention can look like "rapid evolution" from afar. 

Earlier I had speculated about "What it means to be human" and pointed out the differences in a particular kind of speech/reasoning that is unique to us Adamics. Every word still applies and is worth a read, but if anything it appears that I gave the non-Adamic hominids too much credit. Due to the fantastic work of Dr. William Amos of Cambridge I wonder if these "others" ever successfully interbred with our ancestors, or if they did that is was a mistake which nature quickly erased. 

A narrative is being pushed in the name of science that the science itself does not support. These other hominids were not "so much like us". Our ancestors appear to be a distinct population. One which, if they insist on blurring distinctions and calling many species "human" (note that real science typically does the opposite and uses language to make finer and finer distinctions), I will be glad to respond to by calling our kind something akin to what scripture calls us; Adamics

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Yes, NT Greek had Punctuation that Made Sense

 There have been a lot of false claims put out by "learned scholars" regarding New Testament Greek. The Aland's for example, claimed that the original manuscripts didn't use punctuation, that it was added by later scribes. Others have claimed that while there were punctuation marks used, the differences in them in various documents make them meaningless. The scholars have a lot to repent of. 

At the time the New Testament was written, Greek had punctuation marks. Now when most of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, was originally penned there may not have been punctuation marks, but that doesn't matter much- we can compare it to the Hebrew in the Masoretic text if need be. The question is whether punctuation marks were in used in the mid to late first century A.D. when the New Testament was penned. And the answer is yes, see this document for more details. 

At the time that the New Testament was penned, there was a point mark that could be placed after a word. If it were placed high, it was like our period, if in the middle, like a coma, and at the bottom, the like a semi-colon. That system of punctuation changed over time so that biblical manuscripts from different eras had different rules of punctuation. This in itself isn't a "conflict" in the text. If an older document had the end-sentence mark as a high-point and a later one had it as a low-mark (as is our period today) this isn't a true "difference" in the text. The text is expressing the same thought and the means by which that thought was expressed changed over time.

I don't want to imply that it is as neat and simple as all that though. Doubtless different manuscripts will have conflicting testimony on punctuation just as they sometimes do on the words in the text. But the answer isn't to dismiss it all as a later imposition, it is to do the hard work of scholarship just as has been done with the language of the text. If there is a specific question about the correctness in punctuation it can be sorted out in a similar manner. 

There is the question of which text of the New Testament is the best, and that question must be sorted on top of the question of punctuation within the text. There are two and a half major candidates for the textual basis of the New Testament. The main dispute is between translations based on the Alexandrian Text, which includes most of our modern translations, and those based on some version of the Byzantine-Text, often called the "Majority Text" because the family of documents from Greece and Asia Minor are most numerous and circulated in the region where the New Testament was originally written. The Eastern Orthodox use this text. The "Textus Receptus" used for the King James Bible comes from a subset of documents from the Majority Text family, with some minor differences introduced mostly due to Latin influence as well as subtle variations where adequate documents from the Majority Text were not available to Erasmus. 

So they can start with with the punctuation in whichever of these is their favorite and then the discussion can begin regarding whether there is a significant conflict among the documents in that linage regarding what the punctuation should be. The Textus Receptus is drawn from such a small pool of documents that there won't be many cases of that, but it could be compared to the Majority Text and documents from the Majority Text with each other. My guess is that there will be very few such discrepancies once one takes into account the evolution of the punctuation marks which transpired during the period these manuscripts were produced.  

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Hebrewish Script From 15th Century BC Found in Israel

 Some critics like to point out that there was scant evidence for "Hebrew" writing during the earlier proposed date for the Exodus (around 1446 B.C.) This has always been ridiculous because proto-Syriac was known to be around and it was very similar. Now pot sherds have been found in Israel from the 15th century B.C. with writing on them. They can even make out three Hebrew letters used to form the word "slave". 

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