Fast Tetrapod Evolution Looks like Slow Tetrapod Creationism

 
I saw a report on yet another study which challenges a naturalistic view of origins, though the government-funded researchers cited in the article didn't put it that way of course. 

Advocates of naturalism: I am going to start this post off with points you may have heard before but if you keep reading you will see I am going to take it somewhere you very, very likely have not considered before, because it is based on results discovered only in the last two or three years. I am asking that you not leap to conclusions based on the first paragraphs and dismiss it as something you've already considered. Try to hear what I am really getting at. It is amazing and frustrating at how hard it has been to get people, regardless of their philosophy, to do this. Everyone scans until they can put what they read into some box they have pat answers for. If you do this here, you are not getting it. Despite my writing this warning, I predict that most naturalists who read this post will still do it. That's how powerful and debilitating mental Pidgeon-holing is.

Consider these quotes:

"The researchers also found that most of the close relatives to tetrapods had exceptionally slow rates of anatomical evolution, suggesting the fish relatives to tetrapods were quite well adapted to their aquatic lifestyle.

"On the other hand, we discovered the evolutionary lineages leading to the first tetrapods broke away from that stable pattern, acquiring several of the major new adaptive traits at incredibly fast rates that were sustained for approximately 30 million years," said Simões."

So far interesting, but only a little out of line with the Punctuated Equilibrium view of evolution which popped up some decades back. That is, there are large periods of stasis which are broken by periods of very rapid change. Most don't dare call these events "macro-evolution" but that's what they are talking about. Notice two things. One is that the rate of change wasn't just fast but "incredibly fast". The fast changes continued for thirty million years, but that doesn't mean that the change from fish to tetrapod took that long. It is just how long the rapid changes went on for. With just a little more looking they may find what they found with the incredibly fast changes in the Cambrian Explosion.

That is, that while the period of rapid change in the Cambrian went on for 30 million years, the initial burst occurred in less than 410,000 years. This is obviously too fast for new basic body plans (phyla) to evolve by any mechanisms that we see operating today. Even if by some rare yet natural chance a hopeful monster could be born with a successful new body plan, it doesn't explain why over a dozen new body plans did so at the same time. How come all the miracles happened in such close succession? 

Under naturalist premises the original idea was that evolution was constantly occurring as creatures were shaped by their environment. Once they learned more they realized that while this does go on, it is limited in extent and forms are stable most of the time. There is a slow background sort of evolution as the earth fiddles within a type. It is only on rare occasions that this stability is punctured (thus the name Punctuated Equilibrium) by rapid change. In an impressive feat of cognitive dissonance, some naturalists will hold this view while at the same time denying there is any difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution, claiming one is just the cumulative effect of the other. 

Under the original idea a new niche opening up is what precipitated the evolution of new forms. This idea has been kept, without noticing how it is incongruous with newer discoveries in the field and Punctuated Equilibrium. Essentially, once in a great while by chance there will be an exceptionally unlikely event. Nature pops up with something very different from what was before it only a short while back. If there is an unexploited niche for it to fill then it prospers greatly. All by chance, no intent or Designer required. It seems like a reasonable idea on the surface. Yet people haven't stopped to realize that the party line on unexploited niches doesn't fit with the party line on P.E. and what we have actually found in the Cambrian. 

Hear this: even if they were right about this process, under P.E. an empty niche does not guarantee that a creature will show up to fill that empty niche. It still requires the exceptionally unlikely event. Under the old view, where change was steady state and continuous, and forms near infinitely malleable without islands of stability, it made sense that empty niches would be inevitably filled. Under P.E. it doesn't make sense and it surely doesn't make sense that the new forms would all arise in a batch as they did during the Cambrian. They'd have us believe that all of the exceptionally unlikely events occurred together, yet it was still chance and not intent which brought them about!

To many creationists, in particular Old Earth ones, P.E. is simply accommodating evolutionary theory to describe what things would look like if supernatural creation were also true. That is, the steady state sort of background evolution is the earth bringing forth living creatures and the establishment of new kinds is God helping nature fulfill His command to nature. My particular view of Genesis chapter one is a Christ-centered one: We live in a universe fit for beings like us- we can't do God's will without God's help and neither can nature. This is why, not only is there a difference in micro-evolution and macro-evolution, but macro-evolution actually happens much faster than all but the smallest variations via micro-evolution. When God gets involved, big changes can happen fast. When nature is left on her own, it takes a long time to make very little progress. It isn't that evolution is untrue, it is just a part of what is being done in creation. 

And then, the pattern seems to be repeating itself with the tetrapods. But something else happened with tetrapods, and it is a repeat of the pattern seen of ocean life in the Ordovician. See these quotes from the article:

The researchers also found that the fast rates of anatomical evolution in the tetrapod lineage were not associated with fast rates of species diversification. In fact, there were very few species around, so few they had a very low probability of being preserved in the fossil record.

This finding helps to answer an ongoing debate in evolution of whether new major animal groups originated under fast rates of anatomical change and species diversification (the classical hypothesis). Or, if there were high rates of anatomical evolution first, with increased rates of species diversification occurring only several million years later (a new hypothesis).

"What we've been finding in the last couple of years is that you have lots of anatomical changes during the construction of new animal body plans at short periods of geological time, generating high rates of anatomical evolution, like we're seeing with the first tetrapods. But in terms of number of species, they remained constrained and at really low numbers for a really long time, and only after tens of millions of years do they actually diversify and become higher in number of species. There's definitely a decoupling there," said Simões.

It sounds like they are saying that macro-evolution happens fast, but micro-evolution happens slowly in nature. That isn't what they expected under naturalist premises, that's why the idea is  "a new hypothesis". Note I did not put the parenthesis in the quote above, they were from the article.

Now here is the new observation I want to make: if this happened under naturalistic processes there would be no reason for diversification of a new type of creature into a new environment full of new niches to be delayed. It is like the new form of tetrapod was immediately well-adapted to be a generalist in its new niches. Under P.E. it is unlikely enough that nature even produces a new form, but when it does so, it is supposed to be a stroke of luck, not bit-by-bit shaping. So there is no reason for such a new form to be well-adapted to its new environment. Therefore there is no reason why speciation should be delayed. Indeed, there should be more impetus for it than there was in the original stable environment from which it came. Instead we see big changes continuing for millions of years and only many millions of years later species diversification occurring. 

This is nonsensical under naturalistic premises. One extremely rare event (high rate of anatomical 'evolution') is followed by others, but the normal sort of background evolution doesn't even start filling in with a diversity of species until much later. 

Someone suggested to me that the new tetrapods had a new environment so they didn't need to speciate to fill niches within that new environment. This doesn't take into account how things really work. If the first tetrapods fill a niche at the mouth of a river, after the first thousand years those down river are not competing with the population still at the mouth, but the original niche at the mouth of that river is very much filled, and if they try to go down river the adjacent population is already there, so the same evolutionary pressure that supposedly always work to drive speciation should be at work after a matter of centuries if not sooner. The great delay in this sort of background evolution while macro-evolution continues to churn out one miracle after another of creatures perfectly suited for their increasingly inland freshwater environment flies in the face of what we would expect to happen if natural forces are totally responsible for the change. The new form was supremely suited for the role of generalist in the new environment so that there was no pressure for speciation for a very long time. This only makes sense under the old slow environment-shaping evolution or special creation. Sudden appearance of a new form is incongruent with sublime suitability in the new environment, unless there is more than blind chance at work.

If natural explanations were correct then we should see new species branching off each new form very quickly. We don't. It is as if each new form was already well-adapted to its environment. That isn't the footprint of blind nature at work friends. It looks exactly like what things should look like if there was a Designer who knew what He was doing. 


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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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Have They Been Getting Evolution Wrong This Whole Time?

 Apparently so. Oh I don't mean in the vaguest sense of defining it as "change over time". If that is all it means then of course evolution is true. In this world change is inevitable. If all it means is "a change in gene frequencies over time" then again, of course that is correct. It is merely a subset of the first definition. Heck, even if God personally genetically engineered the founding members of every new family of life that ever lived on this earth, both of those definitions would still be true because neither specifies the power behind the change. 

Merriam Webster defines it as "descent with modification from preexisting species." There is no doubt that happens too, but even this definition dodges the real question of whether this process is responsible for all the variation in life in earth's history. For example, domestic dogs are an example of descent with modification from pre-existing species, wolves, but this does not mean that squid and eagles shared a common ancestor by natural descent. To assume otherwise based on the wolf-to-dog evidence alone is a gross example of the scientific error of "unsound extrapolation of data." This is the mistake of assuming that a given amount of known change can tell us about change that we don't really have the data for.  

One might even argue (as I would) that domestic dogs are an example of intelligent design (through selective breeding) as well as an example of Webster's definition of evolution. I would add further that if an Intelligent Designer fashioned every family of life on earth by modifying life forms from pre-existing families then this process would also meet Webster's definition of "evolution". So then one can legitimately "believe in evolution" and still "believe in creationism". One can believe that "evolution happened" without believing that evolution did it all. 

My point in the two-above paragraphs is that it is extremely difficult to extract a definition of "evolution" from naturalists which even acknowledges that a question might exist as to whether this process relies on natural means alone and can be extrapolated so that it can be rightfully considered the sole explanation for all variation in living things. The naturalistic premises are not stated in the definition, nor the absolute totality of the dogma as expressed in practice, but so many naturalists go on to act as if they were stated. 

Too many of them refuse to even see my point on this. They just won't allow themselves to see it. I don't like to start out by questioning motives, but when real engagement is avoided it leads to the question of motives. So by now I view this as a tedious attempt to rig the definitions in order to obscure the rational bases for reconsidering their premises. Is that science or dogma? Is it the business of science to obscure questions or answer them? It is particularly irritating coming from people who present themselves as the arbiters of honest inquiry. 

Those of you in the science community who may be tempted to feel offended by this, if there is substance to what I say then being offended doesn't do anything to solve the problem. I think many people outside the science community see things as I do even if they can't articulate why they find engaging with you so frustrating. You may be tempted to write off their reaction as a result of ignorance and hard-headedness on their part. Don't do that. You will never get better doing that. Even if your unwillingness or inability to consider the argument from truly neutral premises is even 1% of the problem, that's the 1% that it is your responsibility to do something about. Add to it that enhancing your ability to see things from other premises can only make you better at science and life. 

An honest definition of evolution as used by most in science today would be something like "The theory that natural processes alone produced changes in genes over time, and this combined with natural selection formed new varieties of organisms so that all living things are related to all other living things via natural descent". Webster gets closest to this with their alternative definition of evolution "the scientific theory explaining the appearance of new species and varieties through the action of various biological mechanisms (such as natural selection, genetic mutation or drift, and hybridization)". 

This definition is more forthright than those commonly used because it comes closest to specifying natural means and gives examples of those means. To use a science phrase, "it is more testable" than the definitions that naturalists often try to foist on me when I attempt to engage them on the issues I have described above. Even this definition from Webster doesn't address the totality aspect of the theory which naturalists attempt to impose. That is to say, the belief that this represents the only means by which new forms have appeared and it is powerful enough to have produced all of the change we have found in the time it is proposed to have done so.

I apologize for having taken so long to get to the evidence which prompted the title to this article. I am a mere messenger and in order to make the message clear I had to spend a great deal of time dispensing with the fog generated by those whose interests are not met by such clarification. But the bottom line to me is that even if every living thing on earth descended from other living things via natural descent with no assist from an Intelligent Designer (aside from us humans as described with dogs and wolves above) considerable evidence suggests that they still don't have the mechanisms by which this occurred correct. 

That's right, despite all the supremely confident assurances that they are right and implications that you are a dolt for failing to "trust the science" on these questions, some recent research has turned up some surprising mechanisms for change in organisms that have nothing to do with the traditional factors. 

This recent study shows how asexual organisms can adapt to their environment even in the absence of genetic information. It comes on the heels of earlier studies like one I wrote about here showing that fly behavior is altered without changes to the genome but rather through epigenetic changes that are not heritable the way genetic changes are. 

Another study I wrote about suggests that Lamarck was right even though his ideas have been rejected for over 100 years. Jean Baptiste Lamarck was the first to outline a coherent theory of evolution, though not the one accepted today. He didn't know about genes. He thought there was some material force in the universe, like electromagnetism, which drove life to increasing complexity. He called this a "complexifying force". But his second major thesis is the one he was most known for: that animals can prompt biological changes in themselves by the use or disuse of a function. There was, he proposed. an additional "adaptive force." In his mind this change would then be hereditary.

Well, it turns out squid edit their own RNA. Their DNA can say one thing, but the messenger RNA can be altered, outside the cell nucleus, to make different proteins. I don't think there is any evidence such changes would be heritable, but it does speak to Lamarck's second thesis within the life of an animal. As far as his first thesis goes, what if the "complexifying force" isn't a force at all? Whatever its called, his ideas were rejected long ago, but these studies all suggest some neo-Lamarckism is in order.

I haven't even seen any serious attempt to examine if these findings challenge the existing ideas about evolution, but it seems almost intuitively obvious that they do. Right off hand, I wonder how the cumbersome process described in traditional evolutionary theory can even get off the ground? If living things can adapt to their environment without waiting for chance to produce a gene that works better in that environment, then traditional evolutionary mechanisms seem an inferior redundancy. That one squid with a mutation which helps him survive better in a given environment is outcompeted by myriads of his kind who functionally adapt in a similar way based on epigenetic changes that respond directly to the environment and not chance. How then do even beneficial mutations become established in such cases? There is built-in variability in living things which occurs completely outside the process described in the textbooks. 

Look, maybe there will be a sensible way they can fold these findings into what they already know and improve the odds that nature did it all. Maybe they will just sweep these questions under the ever-more-lumpy rug. I don't know. I just know that the smug air of certainty that they have got most of this figured out is unjustified based on findings from their own community. And that their failure to engage in a reasonable manner is going to have consequences. The confidence-gap that people have in the voice of the scientific community is beginning to waiver, despite a ramp-up effort by the establishment media to herd everyone into line. And that gap is going to grow because its based on real underlying and unaddressed issues in the community. 

This is where I could go off on another long riff about what it means as a Christian who is a scientist to put your vocation under the Lordship of Christ. But I won't do that. There are others better positioned than me to do that, and they ought to be the ones to do it. But surely humility, a desire to serve, and considering others before yourself along with honesty are big factors in that endeavor. 

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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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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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