https://evolutionnews.org/2024/12/natural-selection-the-god-that-failed/

"Darwinism is not just a science-stopper; it is also, as Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox points out, guilty of itself adopting the god-of-the-gaps fallacy. In this case, the god is natural selection. Whenever materialism cannot come up with any empirically verifiable explanation, it invokes natural selection. Lennox cites Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin:

"Much of present day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends anti-theories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories; they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Darwin conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function as an anti-theory called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action — evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken — evolution! The brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!"

Comment: natural selection is a worthless tautology.

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/07/herding-chromosomes-in-the-mitosis-corral/

"The sequence of amino acids in each protein involved is far too improbable to have originated by chance.

"Several million cells divide every second in our bodies.

"Cells have been dividing since the beginning of life on earth.

"The accuracy of cell division is so extraordinarily high, many animals alive today are recognizable from their counterparts in the fossil record.

"We are truly privileged to behold details of wonders that were concealed from the eyes of people for thousands of years. If Romans and Babylonians and ancient Chinese were impressed by the sight of a baby at birth, how much more should we be awestruck, dumbfounded, indeed reverent at what biochemists are learning today about realities too small for human eyes? Sure, some observations like evil and suffering are hard to understand, yet even these are better situated for explanation in a design context. As my college biology prof used to say, “The amazing thing is not that we get sick. The amazing thing is that we are ever well,” considering how many things must work correctly each moment of every day. Never become complacent about these realities taking place inside us. We are witnessing intelligent design at a level never comprehended throughout all human history." (my bold)

Comment: cells are doing thousands of biochemical molecular processes every second and as the prof noted the vast majority of the time it all works just fine. This cannot happen by chance. It is the answer to objections in theodicy.

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2021/heads-up-cardiovascular-...

"Giraffes, it turns out, have solved a problem that kills millions of people every year: high blood pressure. Their solutions, only partly understood by scientists so far, involve pressurized organs, altered heart rhythms, blood storage — and the biological equivalent of support stockings.

***

"To have a blood pressure of 110/70 at the brain — about normal for a large mammal — giraffes need a blood pressure at the heart of about 220/180. It doesn’t faze the giraffes, but a pressure like that would cause all sorts of problems for people, from heart failure to kidney failure to swollen ankles and legs.

***

"When cardiologist and evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz of Harvard and UCLA examined giraffes’ hearts, she and her student found that their left ventricles did get thicker, but without the stiffening, or fibrosis, that would occur in people. The researchers also found that giraffes have mutations in five genes related to fibrosis. In keeping with that find, other researchers who examined the giraffe genome in 2016 found several giraffe-specific gene variants related to cardiovascular development and maintenance of blood pressure and circulation. And in March 2021, another research group reported giraffe-specific variants in genes involved in fibrosis. (my bold)
***

"And the giraffe has another trick to avoid heart failure: The electrical rhythm of its heart differs from that of other mammals so that the ventricular-filling phase of the heartbeat is extended, Natterson-Horowitz found. (Neither of her studies has been published yet.) This allows the heart to pump more blood with each stroke, allowing a giraffe to run hard despite its thicker heart muscle.

***

"Natterson-Horowitz is now turning her attention to another problem that giraffes seem to have solved: high blood pressure during pregnancy, a condition known as preeclampsia. In people, this can lead to severe complications that include liver damage, kidney failure and detachment of the placenta. Yet giraffes seem to fare just fine. Natterson-Horowitz and her team are hoping to study the placentas of pregnant giraffes to see if they have unique adaptations that allow this.

***

"People who suffer from hypertension are also prone to annoying swelling in their legs and ankles because the high pressure forces water out of blood vessels and into the tissue. But you only have to look at the slender legs of a giraffe to know that they’ve solved that problem, too. “Why don’t we see giraffes with swollen legs?

***

"In people, these are tight, elastic leggings that compress the leg tissues and prevent fluid from accumulating. Giraffes accomplish the same thing with a tight wrapping of dense connective tissue. Aalkjær’s team tested the effect of this by injecting a small amount of saline solution beneath the wrapping into the legs of four giraffes that had been anesthetized for other reasons. Successful injection required much more pressure in the lower leg than a comparable injection in the neck, the team found, indicating that the wrapping helped resist leakage.

"Giraffes also have thick-walled arteries near their knees that might act as flow restrictors, Aalkjær and others have found. This could lower the blood pressure in the lower legs, much as a kink in a garden hose causes water pressure to drop beyond the kink. It remains unclear, however, whether giraffes open and close the arteries to regulate lower-leg pressure as needed. “It would be fun to imagine that when the giraffe is standing still out there, it’s closing off that sphincter just beneath the knee,” says Aalkjær. “But we don’t know.”

"Aalkjær has one more question about these remarkable animals. When a giraffe raises its head after bending down for a drink, blood pressure to the brain should drop precipitately — a more severe version of the dizziness that many people experience when they stand up suddenly. Why don’t giraffes faint?

"At least part of the answer seems to be that giraffes can buffer these sudden changes in blood pressure. In anesthetized giraffes whose heads could be raised and lowered with ropes and pulleys, Aalkjær has found that blood pools in the big veins of the neck when the head is down. This stores more than a liter of blood, temporarily reducing the amount of blood returning to the heart. With less blood available, the heart generates less pressure with each beat while the head’s down. As the head is raised again, the stored blood rushes suddenly back to the heart, which responds with a vigorous, high-pressure stroke that helps pump blood up to the brain.

"It’s not yet clear whether this is what happens in awake, freely moving animals, though Aalkjær’s team has recently recorded blood pressure and flow from sensors implanted in free-moving giraffes and he hopes to have an answer soon."

Comment: presented once before. It is an example of extreme adaptability requiring many new mutations to solve complex alterations. I've bolded that concern's answer above. I would suggest these protective mechanisms are designed

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/06/luskin-why-intelligent-design-is-the-truly-scientific...

"ID uses the scientific method, is testable, and is perfectly happy when it yields a natural explanation for any given phenomenon. It’s also open to explanations that recognize the activity of a designing mind, when evidence supports that conclusion. The ID scientist who is a religious believer believes whatever he does for reasons of his own — not because he “used” ID to support his view. I would add, that’s why ID proponents are as interestingly diverse as they are, which is one reason ID (compared with apologetics) has the credibility it does.

"In the hands of the atheist scientist, on the other hand, a codicil is added to MN [methodological naturalism] that arbitrarily excludes seeing intelligent activity behind phenomena in biology and cosmology. That codicil, a matter of personal or philosophical preference, binds and blinds the scientist in a way that is NOT scientific. ID, as Luskin explains, is thus the superior, more open, and truly scientific tool."

Comment: belief in a God is up to the individual.

https://evolutionnews.org/2014/10/has_ken_miller/

"Recall that the definition of irreducible complexity notes that removal of a part "causes the system to effectively cease functioning."

***

"In recent years it has been shown that the bacterial flagellum is an even more sophisticated system than had been thought. Not only does it act as a rotary propulsion device, it also contains within itself an elegant mechanism to transport the proteins that make up the outer portion of the machine, from the inside of the cell to the outside... However, taking away the parts of the flagellum certainly destroys the ability of the system to act as a rotary propulsion machine, as I have argued. Thus, contra Miller, the flagellum is indeed irreducibly complex. What’s more, the function of transporting proteins has as little directly to do with the function of rotary propulsion as a toothpick has to do with a mousetrap. So discovering the supportive function of transporting proteins tells us precisely nothing about how Darwinian processes might have put together a rotary propulsion machine."

Comment: Behe refers to the flagellum as a system unit to perform a function. Its attachment to a bacterium is assumed, but not required to discuss specified function. In the mousetrap. once again, Behe discusses a single system function without any other requirements.

https://www.the-scientist.com/university/artificial-organs-innovating-to-replace-donors...

"Conventionally, renal assistance devices (RADs) are extracorporeal artificial systems that rely on a combination of a conventional hemofilter and a bioreactor. They mimic glomerular filtration and drive essential metabolic, endocrinologic, and immunologic kidney functions. Researchers creating artificial organ devices are preclinically investigating methods to miniaturize and implant RADs. In addition to RADs, scientists develop renal scaffolds for bioartificial kidneys from pig kidneys, discarded human kidneys, or polymers such as collagen, hyaluronic acid, alginate, agarose, chitosan, fibrin, and gelatin.

"Similarly, artificial livers may be a solution to organ donor shortages for treating end-stage liver failure and an alternative to extracorporeal artificial supports.8 For example, researchers made artificial “liver-buds” from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in vitro and transplanted them to successfully rescue an animal model of liver failure.

"Scientists and clinicians can use 3D printing for cardiac surgical planning and creating custom-fit implants. Researchers have also created devices for cardiac tissue maturation that enhance implant viability, such as cardiac-specific extracellular matrices made of animal-derived bioink or decellularized cardiac tissue. Additionally, in proof-of-concept studies, researchers have manufactured cardiac structures such as branched coronary arteries and embryonic hearts with hydrogels. Using computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, they printed hydrated materials such as alginate, collagen, and fibrin to build mechanically robust and complex 3D anatomical cardiac architectures."

Comment: the research to invent implantable artificial organs follows the concept of plug and play. Both kidney and liver need a supply of blood to work to full capacity and an emptying system for the discharge. A heart just needs a blood volume to work with. The artificial organs will be just as IC as the natural ones. Why must you try to reinterpret what is presented to fit your preconceived desires? IC demands ID. The primary premise of ID.

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/11/dembski-won-the-argument-with-his-critics-new-edition...

"The fundamental goal of any approach to design detection is identifying patterns, events, or artifacts that (1) are extremely unlikely to have occurred through chance and natural processes and (2) show signs that they were deliberate acts of a mind. The challenge is rigorously meeting both criteria.

***

"In every context, the first criterion entails identifying, at least qualitatively, the probability for the occurrence of some event or outcome solely due to chance and natural processes. For instance, the probability of any number between 1 and 6 appearing on a well-constructed six-sided die is 1 in 6. The outcome is purely the result of chance. In contrast, the probability of rolling a 6 on a loaded die could be close to 100 percent. The outcome is a direct result of gravity.

***

"The second criterion entails a mind assigning significance or value to some outcomes independently of any law-like process. As a thought experiment, imagine Bill Gates deciding on a whim to give one billion dollars to five specific people scattered throughout the world. In addition, the day after the money was dispersed, you were one of six people invited to a dinner party. If you discovered that four of the five recipients of Gate’s generosity were also invited, you would know that the invitees were not chosen randomly. You would also know that the invitations were not primarily based on any factors independent of the invitees’ newfound wealth, such as their height or weight or nationality. The guests were deliberately chosen for some premeditated purpose, such as raising money for a charity or a political campaign.

"The key elements for this conclusion are (1) the number of combinations of six people chosen out of the entire human population being extremely high and (2) and the number of combinations of six people possessing such wealth being much lower. The disparity between the probability of choosing randomly a specific set of six people and the probability of randomly choosing a set out of all sets of six people with at least that much wealth is what points to design.

"The argument for design in biology follows the same logic. The number of configurations of atoms resulting from chance and natural laws is unimaginably large. By comparison, the number of configurations is vastly smaller that correspond to life or anything to which a mind would attribute the same significance as life, or nearly so, such as a computer with an advanced AI or an automated space shuttle capable of colonizing mars.

"Stated differently, the probability of a configuration of atoms corresponding to life occurring through chance and natural processes is unimaginably small. By comparison, the probability is vastly larger of choosing life out of a pool of entities that are as significant, or nearly as significant, as life.

"The design debate centers on one of the two criteria. Design proponents have described the exceedingly low probability of some biological system or structure emerging, such as a random sequence of amino acids folding into a functional protein. They also point out the significance of biological components, such as folded proteins, in the context of life.

"Some critics challenge the first criterion by arguing either that biological structures are not as rare as design proponents believe, or that natural processes such as self-organization and natural selection dramatically improve the odds of their forming. Others challenge the second criterion by arguing that a specific structure might be extremely unlikely to occur by chance and natural processes, but biological structures are not as special as design proponents believe. Critics assert that life could have used many other structures to accomplish the same tasks, so the probability of finding anything that serves a particular purpose is tractable.

"The second edition of The Design Inference lays out the theoretical framework and practical methodology for addressing all these objections. In addition, advances in biology over the past few decades allow the methodology to be rigorously applied. Such analyses demonstrate evidence for design that is now so clear and rigorous that, for intellectually honest and sincere seekers of the truth, denying it is no longer feasible."

Comment: this thought process seeing the complexity of design in living forms is Goff's missing gulf of knowledge as he tries to explore teleology of the universe. A nebulous universal mind appearing naturally is a weak substitute against postulating a supernatural mind of greater power of design as the designs in biochemistry show.

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/10/words-for-wednesday-disentangling-id-from-creationism/

"Intelligent design (“ID”) is the theory, based on the scientific method and empirical evidence, that the best explanation for the “apparent design” in the universe, which is acknowledged by most scientists, is actual design by an intelligent agent.

"Creationism is the belief, typically based on religious scripture and tradition, that the universe has been designed and created by a divine agent.

"Intelligent design proponents and creationists come in many flavors. Creationists certainly believe that the creator is intelligent. They might also believe that the creation account in the book of Genesis should be interpreted as six 24-hour days, and that the earth is just several thousand years old. But some creationists interpret the Genesis account differently, and believe that the earth and universe are very old. Others start with different religious traditions altogether. Many creationists look for scientific data that supports their religious tradition.

"Intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, do not necessarily subscribe to any particular view of who or what the designing intelligence is. In other words, creationism starts with the identity of the designer and works downward to the creation, while intelligent design theory starts with empirical evidence and does not, from this scientific evidence, ascribe an identity to the designing mind.

"Do creationists believe that the universe was designed by an intelligent agent? Yes!

"Do intelligent design theorists believe that the intelligent agent was the creator described in the Hebrew Bible? Some do. Others don’t. (my bold)

"One reason the distinction is important is that many materialists (those who believe that everything about the universe is explicable in purely material terms, apart from a mind) ridicule creationism and lump ID in with it as if the two are equivalent. Whatever you believe, it’s important to recognize that creationism and ID are not the same thing. Creationism starts with the belief in a designer and interprets data accordingly, while ID starts with scientific evidence and infers the best possible explanation for that evidence."

Comment: My view is to avoid any use of the Bible, except to recognize modern Hebrew interpretation of Genesis which tells us the Earth is ancient and made over eons of time. I take the further step of recognizing God as the designer as one of the 'some do' folks..

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/03/evolutions-tall-tale-the-giraffe-neck/

"There should be a good reason for the extraordinary length, because it causes hardship. A giraffe’s heart needs to pump blood 2 metres up to the head, which requires a high blood pressure and management to avoid fainting or stroke. “It’s beautifully adapted to this, but it’s a big cost,” says Rob Simmons, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who was not involved in the study.

"One prevailing theory is that giraffes evolved longer necks to reach higher trees for food. “This is widely believed; it’s really entrenched,” says Simmons…. [But] research has shown that giraffes tend to eat from lower levels, and tall giraffes aren’t more likely to survive drought, when food competition is highest. Another idea is that giraffes evolved longer necks for sexual competition, with male giraffes engaging in violent neck-swinging fights and longer necks attracting mates…. [But] males don’t have longer necks than females.

***

"No continuous series of fossil links leads to the Giraffa or Okapia. “The giraffe and the okapi of the Congo rain forest are considered as sister groups, the origins of which are still not known”. Similarly Starck (1995, p. 999) remarks: “The ancestry of Giraffidae is disputed.” Wesson agrees with these statements about giraffe fossils, as follows: “The evolving giraffe line left no middling branches on the way, and there is nothing, living or fossil, between the moderate neck of the okapi and the greatly elongated giraffe. The several varieties of giraffe are all about the same height.”

***

"Lönnig describes several things that must be either engineered or reengineered to arrive at a functional giraffe from a short-necked ancestor. First, giraffes, like cows and many other grazing animals, are ruminants, meaning they regurgitate a half-digested cud and chew on it before swallowing the food a second time, helping them digest tough fibrous grass and leaves. But to pull off this trick, a giraffe, with its neck as tall as a man, needs “a special muscular esophagus,” Lönnig explains. So that’s one reengineering challenge.

"Lönnig gives so many more that there isn’t room for them all here. His book debunking giraffe evolution, The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, is dense and thorough. But he helpfully quotes Gordon Rattray Taylor, who concisely summarized several of the reengineering challenges in his book The Great Evolution Mystery:

"Nineteenth-century observers assumed that the giraffe had only to develop a longer neck and legs to be able to reach the leaves which other animals could not. But in fact such growth created severe problems. The giraffe had to pump blood up about eight feet to its head. The solution it reached was to have a heart which beats faster than average and a high blood pressure. When the giraffe puts his head down to drink, he suffers a rush of blood to the head, so a special pressure-reducing mechanism, the rete mirabile, had to be provided to deal with this. However, much more intractable are the problems of breathing through an eight-foot tube. If a man tried to do so, he would die — not from lack of oxygen so much as poisoning by his own carbon dioxide. For the tube would fill with his expired, deoxygenated breath, and he would keep reinhaling it. Furthermore, one study group found that the blood in a giraffe’s legs would be under such pressure that it would force its way out of the capillaries. How was this being prevented? It turned out that the intercellular spaces are filled with fluid, also under pressure — which in turn necessitates the giraffe having a strong, impermeable skin. To all these changes one could add the need for new postural reflexes and for new strategies of escape from predators. It is evident that the giraffe’s long neck necessitated not just one mutation but many — and these perfectly coordinated.

"In short, the giraffe represents not a mere collection of individual traits but a package of interrelated adaptations. It is put together according to an overall design that integrates all parts into a single pattern. Where did such an adaptational package come from? According to Darwinian theory, the giraffe evolved to its present form by the accumulation of individual, random changes preserved by natural selection. But it is difficult to explain how a random process could offer to natural selection an integrated package of adaptations, even over time. Random mutations might adequately explain change in a relatively isolated trait, such as color. But major changes, like the macroevolution of the giraffe from some other animal, would require an extensive suite of coordinated adaptations."

"In the giraffe’s case, a bit of reasoning goes a long way. Blind evolution doesn’t look ahead and coordinate a group of changes for some future advantage. It’s blind and must proceed by one small useful step at a time. No evolutionist, for instance, believes that a small number of mega-mutations turned a land mammal into a whale."

Comment: We've been here before. The giraffe has no fossil ancestors, so we have a giraffe gap!!! The last paragraph is an ID comment. Most of the quotes are taken directly from a Nature article. From a devoted propaganda source for Darwinism!!! Wow!!!

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/integrated-complexity-instantiated-to-ac...

"Complexity, in special when implemented to achieve a specific purpose, has always only been observed to be the product of a mind. The more complex, the more evidence of design. In ID, complexity is more defined, when we talk about specified, and irreducible complexity. We see it in every living cell, combined. DNA hosts specified complexity, or in words, that can be better comprehended, instructional assembly information. EVERY protein, which is the product of the information stored in DNA, is irreducibly complex. In order to perform its basic function, it must have a minimal size. Unless it has it, no deal, no function. On top of that, proteins are synthesized by the ribosome, depending on the specified complexity of the information stored in DNA. So on top of irreducible complexity, there is an interdependence of specified, and irreducible complexity combined.

"Specified complexity of information stored in DNA, dictates and directs the making of irreducible complex proteins, which all are made to perform a specific function in the cell. On top of that irreducible complexity, there are higher and higher layers of specified, and irreducible complexity. Signaling is essential in every cell, even in single cells, and protists, and was necessary for the first life form to emerge, no matter, what it was. Signals are carriers of information, that are also specified and complex. There has to be always a variegated number of signaling networks in operation, or no life. And there has to be a minimal number of proteins, for life to exist, or no deal. So, proteins are individually irreducible complex, and the cell and its proteome are irreducibly complex because a minimal number of proteins is required for life to exist.

"Living cells are prime examples of irreducible and specified complexity, instantiated to perform a specific function. In order for there to be life, a minimal number of parts has to be there, fully implemented, and operational. All at once.

"Graham Cairns-Smith:
We are all descended from some ancient organisms or group of organisms within which much of the machinery now found in all forms of life on Earth was already essentially fixed and, as part of that, hooked on today’s so-called ‘molecules of life’. This machinery is enormously sophisticated, depending for its operation on many collaborating parts. The multiple collaboration provides an explanation for why the present system is so frozen now and has been for so long. So we are left wondering how the whole DNA/RNA/protein control system, on which evolution now so utterly depends, could itself have evolved. We can see that at the time of the common ancestor, this system must already have been fixed in its essentials, probably through a critical interdependence of subsystems. (Roughly speaking in a domain in which everything has come to depend on everything else nothing can be easily changed, and our central biochemistry is very much like that.

"Albert-László Barabási:
Various types of interaction webs, or networks, (including protein-protein interaction, metabolic, signaling and transcription-regulatory networks) emerge from the sum of these interactions. None of these networks are independent, instead, they form a ‘network of networks that is responsible for the behavior of the cell. the architectural features of molecular interaction networks within a cell are shared to a large degree by other complex systems, such as the Internet, computer chips, and society.

"Wilhelm Huck chemist , professor at Radboud University Nijmegen
A working cell is more than the sum of its parts. “A functioning cell must be entirely correct at once, in all its complexity."

Comment: nature cannot be "bright" enough to produce life by chance. A powerful argument with no mention of God.

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/at-quora-is-it-possible-to-prove-beyond-...

"Here’s the question you should ask yourself: Is symbolic code something that blind, intelligence-free physical processes could create and use? Or is mind alone up to the task?

"The legendary John Von Neumann did important work on self-replicating systems. A towering giant in the history of mathematics and pioneer in computer science, he was interested in describing machine-like systems that could build faithful copies of themselves.

"Von Neumann soon recognized that it would require both hardware and software. Such a system had to work from a symbolic representation of itself. That is, it must have a kind of encoded picture of itself in some kind of memory.

"Crucially, this abstract picture had to include a precise description of the very mechanisms needed to read and execute the code. Makes sense, right? To copy itself it has to have a blueprint to follow. And this blueprint has to include instructions for building the systems needed to decode and implement the code.

"Here’s the remarkable thing: Life is a Von Neumann Replicator. Von Neumann was unwittingly describing the DNA based genetic system at the heart of life. And yet, he was doing so years before we knew about these systems.

"The implications of this are profound. Think about how remarkable this is. It’s like having the blueprints and operating system for a computer stored on a drive in digital code that can only be read by the device itself. It’s the ultimate chicken and egg scenario.

"How might something like this have come about? For a system to contain a symbolic representation of itself the actualization of precise mapping between two realms, the physical realm and an abstract symbolic realm.

"In view here is a kind of translation, mechanisms that can move between encoded descriptions and material things being described. This requires a system of established correlations between stuff out here and information instantiated in a domain of symbols.

"Here’s the crucial question: Is this something that can be achieved by chance, physical laws, or intelligence-free material processes? The answer is decidedly NO. What’s physical cannot work out the non-physical. Only a mind can create a true code. Only a mind can conceive of and manage abstract, symbolic realities. A symbolic system has to be invented. It cannot come about in any other way.

"If you think something like this – mutually interdependent physical hardware and encoded software – can arise through unguided, foresight-less material forces acting over time, think again. If I were to ask you to think of something, anything that absolutely requires intelligence to bring about, you’d be hard pressed to think of a better example. It’s not just that no one understands how it could be done, it’s that we have every reason to believe that it is impossible in principle. No intelligence-free material processes could ever give you something like this.

***

"The conclusion is clear: The unmistakable signature of mind is literally in every cell of every living thing on earth.

"Note that John von Neumann mathematically showed that the information content of the simplest self-replicating machine is about 1500 bits of information. This is a vast amount of information, since information bits are counted on a logarithmic scale, and it cannot be explained by any natural process, since it far exceeds the information content of the physical (non-living) universe. Therefore, since self-replicating organisms obviously exist on Earth, their origin must come from the only known source of this level of information – an intelligent mind of capability far beyond our mental ability – consistent with the biblical view of God."

Comment: this is pure ID. The complexity of intelligent life is beyond the ability of evolution by natural selection. Note the use of the concept of underling information. Where the information came from is the key point. Not from a material world.

https://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2022.2/BIO-C.2022.2

"HALLMARKS OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN IN ICEFISH
The customized icefish heart, vasculature, and blood form a system with mutually dependent parts. These cannot be exchanged with those from red-blooded fish. A non-customized
heart would have the incorrect ratio of mitochondria to contractile elements in diomyocytes. As a result, ATP insufficiency would develop. If the icefish vasculature were replaced with one from a red-blooded fish, the increased vascular resistance would cause the heart to fail. If an icefish’s blood were replaced with red blood, the icefish would die because of hyperviscosity.The cardiovascular systems of other teleosts do not show the same degree of customization. If the heart of one teleost were replaced with one from another teleost of similar size and lifestyle, the teleost would probably survive long enough to reproduce. In general, it is probably fair to say that replacing the circulatory system and blood of one teleost with that of another would be tolerated. The hemoglobinless phenotype requires simultaneous, coordinated acquisition of multiple unique features. This is difficult
to explain with Darwinian evolution, which postulates that species develop by small, incremental changes over long periods. It is unlikely that the changes required by the hemoglobinless phenotype can be accomplished with only one or two mutations. A small number of random but bold, lucky strokes is the most change that can be accomplished by Darwinian evolution within a short period of time. This is simply not enough to develop the hemoglobinless phenotype. It is likely that the creation of a large heart with abundant mitochondria requires one developmental program, of a carbonic anhydrase–containing orpuscle another program, of large-diameter capillaries a third program, and gill epithelial cells that express carbonic anhydrase yet another program. Thus, an origin of icefish via
Darwinian processes from red-blooded notothenioids, or from the phylogenetic notothenioid sister lineage, Percophis brasiliensis [57], is unlikely.

SUMMARY

"The cardiovascular system of fish of the family Channichthyidae appears to have been designed to utilize hemoglobinless blood to solve the problem of increased viscosity at low temperatures. A design for any cardiovascular system must specify each component, including blood viscosity and vascular geometry, in order to maximize laminar flow and minimize vascular resistance. It also must include a mechanism to maintain blood viscosity within specifications. The appropriate value of blood viscosity allows vascular resistance to match cardiac power. This value can be estimated by Reynolds and Dean numbers. Because blood viscosity is an important determinant of blood flow, it should be considered part of the milieu intérieur. Multiple customized components are necessary to utilize hemoglobinless blood. Actualizing the design for the icefish cardiovascular system requires each customized component to be in place simultaneously. This is more innovation than can be accomplished by random mutation as postulated in Darwinian evolution."

Comment: a perfect example of Irreducible Complexity, with so many novelties required to be put together at the same time to create this species.

https://salvomag.com/post/more-trouble-for-darwinism-2

"In “Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Darwinists” at Evolution News & Science Today, Bechly brings our attention to an excellent online resource and shows how it creates new problems for the Darwinian paradigm. TimeTree is a data base of more than 97,000 living species that provides information on the tree-of-life and evolutionary timescales. Created by evolutionists, it can be used to show how long two closely related species took to diverge from each other in the fossil record, according to the best current molecular clock data. Using that data, Bechly highlights a generous sample of closely related species (from a Darwinian perspective at least), and their estimated divergence time in millions of years.

"To fully grasp Bechly’s insightful point, it’s best to first discuss what is called the “waiting time problem.” Even a small change in an organism’s body plan requires many co-ordinated mutations. Population geneticists have performed calculations to work out how long it would take for a series of necessary mutations to occur simultaneously in order to produce those changes in body plan. Back in 2008, a team of scientists from Cornell University, working on Drosophila (the fruit fly), showed that a few million years was required to get just two coordinated mutations. They calculated that, when translated to human biology, with their much smaller populations and longer generation times, the waiting time for two coordinated mutations worked out to more than 200 million years!

"Since major changes in body plans require far more than two coordinated mutations, it seems incredibly unlikely that such coordinated, multi-gene changes could occur to produce the necessary changes over the course of billions of years, let alone millions. Thus, the waiting time problem stretches scientific credulity to the very limits.

"The problem for the Darwinists is that the fossil record attests to many biological “big bang” events in which new lifeforms have appeared abruptly – within a few million years of each other or less, often without any credible antecedents, in utter defiance of the main results of the waiting time calculations.

"What Dr. Bechly pointed out in his article is that when one compares closely related species from the TImeTree website and looks at their time of divergence based on the best available molecular clocks, very long periods of time appear to be required for even small, almost indistinguishable morphological changes. For example, the fossil record shows that a complete re-engineering of the mammalian body plan from fully terrestrial wolf-like creatures to fully aquatic whale-like animals took place in only four million years, yet according to molecular clock calculations, species like the House Sparrow and Tree Sparrow took 10.2 million years to diverge!...This is good evidence for long periods of stasis and suggests that the comparatively rapid emergence of whales from wholly terrestrial creatures is far more likely to have happened by design that by accident.

"So, can you see the overall problem? Bechly clearly does!

"In his own words:

"Here is my explanation. Darwinism is wrong, and this applies not only to the neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection but to any unguided evolutionary processes including those suggested by proponents of the so-called Extended Synthesis. …

"There is no evolutionary reason why the creative power of this process should have been active over all of Earth history but then ceased to function within the past 10 million years. Intelligent design proponents can easily explain this pattern: there was creative intelligent intervention in the history of life, but this creative activity deliberately ceased with the arrival of humans as the final telos. Any further explanation would have to transgress the methodological limits of the design inference, but Judeo-Christian theists will certainly recognize an eerie correspondence with the Biblical message, which says that God rested from his creative activity after the creation of humans (Genesis 2:2-3).

"What an amazing conclusion! The biblical record says God ceased from creating new lifeforms as soon as humankind appeared on the scene."

Comment: I've always said evolution stopped when sapiens arrived, and I did that without knowing the Biblical passage. This material shows God's way of evolution is God's way, totally different from Darwinists and their prized natural selection as an inventor and convergence as a wonderful natural process working quickly.

https://salvomag.com/post/converging-on-a-creator

"Despite great advances in our understanding of nature, the living world is still rich in mystery. One such enigma is the case of convergent evolution, the notion that life appears to have hit on the same or similar solutions at the genetic and organismic level, many times in its long history and across totally unrelated animal phyla.

***

"Biologists have identified a great many examples of convergence in nature but have yet to explain why this occurs within the framework of the evolutionary paradigm. The best they can do is suggest that when organisms live in similar environments, their evolution is constrained in such a way that they develop anatomical similarities that help them survive better.

***

"But the phenomenon of convergence presents fundamental problems for evolutionary biologists who continue to argue that life is historically contingent (contingent meaning it happened by chance and could just as easily have happened differently). This idea was strongly favored by the late Harvard palaeontologist, Stephen J. Gould, who likened the entire history of life on Earth to a kind of cassette tape being played in real time, such as a musical composition.

***

"But since Gould proposed these ideas in his popular 1989 work Wonderful Life, biologists have unearthed an enormous number of cases where completely unrelated species hit on the same solutions time and time again. This casts severe doubt on the contention that the history of life on Earth is really historically contingent.

"The problem of convergent evolution has recently been compounded by some astonishing research findings from a team of scientists who conducted studies on two unrelated species; the hippopotamus and the whale. Both species are thought to have diverged from a common ancestor some 53 million years ago, but they share a number of anatomical features including hairless bodies, underwater parturition, lack of sebaceous glands, and the ability to detect both the intensity and directionality of sound waves under water.

***

"What they found shocked them. The same 10 genes were inactivated in both hippos and whales! But here’s the kicker; those 10 genes were silenced in whales some 16 million years before the same genes were inactivated in hippos! In other words, those same 10 skin genes were silenced independently in both lineages.

"Responding to these extraordinary findings, lead author of the study Mark Springer said, “None of the inactivating mutations that would have suggested a common aquatic ancestry are shared between these two lineages.”

***

"The silencing of these genes in whales and hippos must have occurred in a highly coordinated manner. For this reason, it’s simply amazing to think that the coordinated loss of the same 10 genes occurred independently in both whales and hippos over such a short period of geological time. To my mind, this is yet another failed prediction of the evolutionary paradigm.

***

"Another issue these research findings unveil is the waiting time problem highlighted by scientists within the Intelligent Design movement. As a team of theorists from Cornell University pointed out some years ago, just two coordinated mutations in such long-lived creatures as hippos and whales would take 200 million years to occur by chance.

"Using the same reasoning, how long might it take 10 identical genes to be knocked out in the same creatures? The answer must be in the billions of years at the very least, and yet evolutionists claim hippos lost those ten genes in only 16 million years after they diverged from whales. This is far too short a time to make their case credible. (my bold)

"In summary, these new findings from mainstream biological research greatly bolster the case for design in biological systems and further weaken the evolutionary worldview, in which scientists must resort to magic to explain away the extraordinary convergence of biological systems, both at the anatomical and genetic level."

Comment: "According to Christian biochemist, Fazale (Fuz) Rana, who has written extensively on the problem of biological convergence, “The evolutionary paradigm fails in the face of the discovery of ‘repeatable’ evolution while biblical creation gains support from this phenomenon. What is interpreted as ‘repeatable’ evolution––morphologically indistinct and genetically unique organisms––is what one would expect if a single Creator has generated life throughout Earth’s history.'” Simon Conway Moris and I agree. Please remember Morris's powerful academic position. Note my bold about chance and gene change!!!

https://salvomag.com/post/burning-yet-not-consumed

"Denton explains that the level of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere – 21 percent – is highly fine-tuned to allow both efficient respiration and combustion – the chemical reaction that allows humans to extract energy from burning fuels, which kickstarted our technical civilization. If the oxygen level were to fall much below 16 percent, human cognitive faculties would be severely compromised, migraines would come far too frequently, and even moderate physical activity would prove exhausting. What’s more, plant-based fuels would not stay alight. Below 12 percent, no combustion at all would be possible.

"With anything higher than 24 percent, however, forest fires would ravage vast swathes of the continental earth. In addition, elevated oxygen concentrations would generate much higher levels of what’s called reactive oxygen species (such as hydrogen peroxide) inside our cells, which would degrade biomolecules at dangerous rates. Furthermore, Denton also points out the extraordinary fire retarding properties of nitrogen, that all but inert gas which makes up 78 percent of the earth’s atmosphere, keeping oxygen’s vicious reactivity in check, allowing fires to burn, but not uncontrollably so.

***

"Denton calls our attention to yet more life-affirming properties of oxygen. Consider, for example, the solubility of oxygen in water. If oxygen were just a little more soluble in water, the oceans would draw down too much of it from the atmosphere, stymying the progress of air-breathing land animals. If it were only slightly less soluble in water, the marine environment upon which human civilization depends, would collapse.

"Here again, the level of oxygen in the atmosphere, with its just-right solubility, allows for life to flourish on our planet. But if oxygen is not sufficiently soluble in water, how can enough of it reach the innermost recesses of the human body? It turns out that some unique properties of transition metals – iron in particular – are found at the heart of the myriad hemoglobin molecules packed inside our red blood cells. The chemical properties of iron make it possible to bind oxygen molecules just strongly enough to carry it to all cells of the human body, but weakly enough to have it released into the tissues of our bodies.

"In the upper atmosphere, ultraviolet light from the Sun breaks up oxygen molecules (O2) into single atoms. Then, an oxygen molecule can combine with an oxygen atom to create a gaseous substance called ozone (O3). Too much ozone is toxic to life, but the small amount created in the earth’s stratosphere helps protect life on land from the most damaging effects of ultraviolet light. Thus, in a splendid symmetry, we see the molecule of life also acting to protect life.

***

"The unique properties of oxygen allowed our ancestors to tame a flame, but not just to keep warm and cook food, but also to use its unique properties to reduce metal ores of copper and tin using charcoal. Materials such as these launched the human technological revolution, with the creation of brand-new materials like bronze. Later, when humans learned how to create even hotter furnaces, the extraction of iron from its ore became possible, and just think how that metal has transformed the human world. Indeed, in a very real sense, we still live in the iron age. Similarly, the combustive properties of oxygen allowed humanity to roast limestone into lime, a key ingredient of concrete, as well as to exploit vast reserves of fossil fuels which launched the industrial revolution."

Comment: The just right level of oxygen evolved over time as cyanobacteria evolved to produce it in our atmosphere. Living organisms evolved using antioxidant molecules to protective themselves from the destructive effects of oxygen. How does a chance development of evolution choose such a dangerous gas to use as a basis of life? It doesn't. Design is required to carefuly put it all together.

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2021/heads-up-cardiovascular-secrets-...

"Giraffes have sky-high blood pressure because of their sky-high heads that, in adults, rise about six meters above the ground — a long, long way for a heart to pump blood against gravity. To have a blood pressure of 110/70 at the brain — about normal for a large mammal — giraffes need a blood pressure at the heart of about 220/180. It doesn’t faze the giraffes, but a pressure like that would cause all sorts of problems for people, from heart failure to kidney failure to swollen ankles and legs.

***

"When cardiologist and evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz of Harvard and UCLA examined giraffes’ hearts, she and her student found that their left ventricles did get thicker, but without the stiffening, or fibrosis, that would occur in people. The researchers also found that giraffes have mutations in five genes related to fibrosis. In keeping with that find, other researchers who examined the giraffe genome in 2016 found several giraffe-specific gene variants related to cardiovascular development and maintenance of blood pressure and circulation. And in March 2021, another research group reported giraffe-specific variants in genes involved in fibrosis.

"And the giraffe has another trick to avoid heart failure: The electrical rhythm of its heart differs from that of other mammals so that the ventricular-filling phase of the heartbeat is extended, Natterson-Horowitz found. This allows the heart to pump more blood with each stroke, allowing a giraffe to run hard despite its thicker heart muscle.

"People who suffer from hypertension are also prone to annoying swelling in their legs and ankles because the high pressure forces water out of blood vessels and into the tissue. But you only have to look at the slender legs of a giraffe to know that they’ve solved that problem, too.

***

"In part, at least, giraffes minimize swelling with the same trick that nurses use on their patients: support stockings. In people, these are tight, elastic leggings that compress the leg tissues and prevent fluid from accumulating. Giraffes accomplish the same thing with a tight wrapping of dense connective tissue. Aalkjær’s team tested the effect of this by injecting a small amount of saline solution beneath the wrapping into the legs of four giraffes that had been anesthetized for other reasons. Successful injection required much more pressure in the lower leg than a comparable injection in the neck, the team found, indicating that the wrapping helped resist leakage.

"Giraffes also have thick-walled arteries near their knees that might act as flow restrictors, Aalkjær and others have found. This could lower the blood pressure in the lower legs, much as a kink in a garden hose causes water pressure to drop beyond the kink. It remains unclear, however, whether giraffes open and close the arteries to regulate lower-leg pressure as needed. “It would be fun to imagine that when the giraffe is standing still out there, it’s closing off that sphincter just beneath the knee,” says Aalkjær. “But we don’t know.”

"When a giraffe raises its head after bending down for a drink, blood pressure to the brain should drop precipitately — a more severe version of the dizziness that many people experience when they stand up suddenly. Why don’t giraffes faint?

"At least part of the answer seems to be that giraffes can buffer these sudden changes in blood pressure. In anesthetized giraffes whose heads could be raised and lowered with ropes and pulleys, Aalkjær has found that blood pools in the big veins of the neck when the head is down. This stores more than a liter of blood, temporarily reducing the amount of blood returning to the heart. With less blood available, the heart generates less pressure with each beat while the head’s down. As the head is raised again, the stored blood rushes suddenly back to the heart, which responds with a vigorous, high-pressure stroke that helps pump blood up to the brain.

"The great height of giraffes poses a problem when they drink: Lowering the head so far should dramatically increase blood pressure to the head. Lifting it again should cause a corresponding drop in cranial blood pressure — an extreme version of what often happens when a person stands up suddenly. Cardiovascular researchers are trying to understand how giraffes minimize this problem." [head up 220/180, head down 300/200 mmHg!]

Comment: we have no idea why giraffes devloped like they are from the standpoint of purposeful development. The giraffe series has a big gap in neck length, just as the whale series has big gaps. It is extremely difficult to imagine chance mutations did this. Fits much better with a designer at work. dhw should recognize they fit into their ecosystem.

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/article-by-david-snoke-spontaneous-appea...

"Dr. Snoke’s recent article, published in Biocosmos, dives into the important topic of the link between the 2nd law of thermodynamics, information theory, and living systems. He explores the notion of physical law, similar to the 2nd law, that applies to information, and concludes that “there is a fundamental entropy problem with the origin of life.”

"It is natural to define information as an extensive physical property similar to heat and entropy. This approach has been used in the physics community for many decades.

"Information can be defined as the elimination of possibilities. The more possibilities that are eliminated, the more information that is gained.

"The Second Law tells us that entropy cannot decrease. Is there an equivalent law for information?

"Dembski has proposed, as an axiomatic assertion, that information can never spontaneously increase. Can we do better, to create an information principle based on the Second Law? (my bold)

"Living systems are to all intents and purposes equivalent to Maxwell’s demons, in that they are information processors that perform selection processes. We may therefore conclude that there is a fundamental entropy problem with the origin of life."

Source article: https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.2478/biocosmos-2022-0006

Abstract: "It is often argued both by scientists and the lay public that it is extremely unlikely for life or minds to arise spontaneously, but this argument is hard to quantify. In this paper I make this argument more rigorous, starting with a review of the concepts of information and entropy, and then examining the specific case of Maxwell’s demon and how it relates to living systems. I argue that information and entropy are objective physical quantities, defined for systems as a whole, which allow general arguments in terms of physical law. In particular, I argue that living systems obey the same rules as Maxwell’s demons

***

"The Second Law can be used to make an argument against the spontaneous appearance of life and mind, but such an argument requires careful attention to definitions of terms like information and entropy and understanding the physical quantities involved.

***

"the crucial property for information content here is not knowledge or communication, but selection. An information-processing system selects and acts on one of Ω possibilities. It is possible, of course, for an intelligent agent to perform selections, but a selection process does not intrinsically require the presence of intelligence; any physical system which has a macroscopic action one way in response to a particular selected state, and not the same way in response to others, may be said to engage in selection.

***

"In defining information in terms of selection, we have assumed the existence of some information-processing system, which gives a macroscopically distinguishable response to certain states. We can therefore talk of information in terms of function. This leads to an alternate definition of information instead of Shannon information, which we may call functional information.

***

"From basic considerations, we can assume that the spontaneous appearance of an information-processing machine has the same improbability as a negative entropy fluctuation equal to a negative entropy fluctuation equal to the apparent loss of entropy in obtaining the machine’s initial action without the presence of the machine.• The spontaneous appearance of 1-bit information processors in natural pattern formation does not point the way toward spontaneous formation of million- to billion-bit processors as are common in living systems (such as human brains). For each new bit to be processed, another natural process with its own natural length scale or natural time constant must be posited. There is an upper bound to how many of these exist in nature, presumably of the order of the number of free parameters in the laws of nature themselves. Living systems are to all intents and purposes equivalent to Maxwell’s demons, in that they are information processors that perform selection processes. We may therefore conclude that there is a fundamental entropy problem with the origin of life." (my bold)

Comment: Highly technical article. I've plucked out the meat. T repeat the old point: life uses provided information to run its systems. That life had to have an original source of useful information when life started.

https://uncommondescent.com/information/eric-hedin-information-and-nature/

"The question of the significance of human existence comes sharply into focus as we consider the origin of life itself. Do the laws of nature support the origin of life from nonlife, or do they argue against it? In order to address this question, it is helpful to consider a defining characteristic of all living things, namely their phenomenal information content. Naturalistic explanations attempting to reach the heights of information content found in even the simplest living thing have appealed to “dumb luck” or to some unobserved natural law. However, consideration of the known and observed laws of physics in conjunction with the finite limits of “chance” within our universe appear to rule out any natural origin of the vastly complex biomolecular metropolis found within the cells of life. (my bold)

"The science of information theory allows the quantification of the information content of physical systems such as stars, rocks, molecules, and books. The information content of a system composed of many parts, such as atoms, is low if the various parts don’t have to be in a specific relation to one another. In nature, examples of low-information systems would be a cloud of water molecules or a pile of dirt. Rearranging the particles of water or dirt doesn’t ruin the system; if an airplane flies through a cloud, stirring it up, it’s still a cloud. Another type of system found in nature is an ordered system, such as a snowflake or a salt crystal. These also have a low information content because the regular, repetitious pattern of the atoms composing the crystal can be easily specified with only a few instructions or decisions. “Stirring up” a crystal will ruin it, but it can be easily re-formed since its ordered structure follows a simple pattern, governed by specific interatomic bonds. Thus, both complex but random systems, like clouds, and specific ordered systems, like snowflakes, have low information content. Either of these systems can form naturally since they have lower information content than the precursors (dispersed water droplets or vapor) out of which they formed. (my bold)

***

"Since the information content of the entire physical universe has always been lower than that found in even the simplest living organism, we can conclude that no scientific examination of the initial conditions of the universe or of planet Earth could yield a naturalistic prediction of life (with its fantastically high information content) at any later time in the history of the universe. In consequence, since life came into existence on Earth, a reasonable conclusion is that the source of this exponential jump in information content comes from beyond nature—from a super-natural source.

***

"In principle, information can be coalesced out of the environment, but not to a degree any greater than already contained within the environment. It has been repeatedly shown that the information content of even a single large protein molecule far exceeds that of the entire nonliving universe, and the information content of even the simplest living thing is so much higher that were our universe 10^500 times bigger it would not come even close to sufficing for a naturalistic origin of life. (my bold)

***

"What kind of structures is nature good at producing? Stars! Astronomers estimate that the universe contains at least 10 billion trillion stars, formed through the gravitational collapse of primarily hydrogen and helium gas clouds. Stars, however, have a relatively low information content. We can understand this conceptually by imagining sticking a giant spoon into a star and stirring it up. After you pull the spoon out, what has become of the star? Have you permanently destroyed it? No, its internal fusion energy production will only be temporarily interrupted, because the laws of nature will cause it to settle back down into its former state, and it will shine just like before. Compare this to what would happen if you stirred up a living thing, even a single cell, in such a way that you rearranged all its atoms. Doing so would irreparably destroy the intricate internal chemical structures within the cell, and no matter how long you waited, it would not settle into its former state. The laws of nature could not recreate what your stirring destroyed.

"The information content of the universe exponentially increased with the formation of the first living organism. Since natural processes always work to lower the information content of any closed (or effectively closed) system over time, the origin of life represents an unnatural event in the history of our universe. And yet, it obviously came to pass! If life’s origin defies natural causes, then a supernatural Cause becomes a plausible explanation. If a skeptic demands a miracle as a reason to believe, consider that God has provided just such a confirmation of his reality in the abundance of life abounding on planet Earth."

Comment: Note at times ID sneaks in God. It is on their not so 'private' website. What is important in this article is a clear discussion of the use of information theory as ID views it. dhw seems to think information is a dirty word, based on past discussions. Understanding the theory based on Shannon's initial work is a vital part of understanding how to view ID theory.

https://bigthink.com/the-well/atheism-rare-rational/

"You are a member of a very peculiar species. Of all our quirks, the human religious impulse may be our most distinctive one. We build skyscrapers? Big deal, bowerbirds construct ornate decorative nests and they have brains the size of almonds. We live in really big societies? Great, so do ants, whose brains are even tinier. We can do math problems? Wonderful, but so can slime molds, and they don’t even have brains!

***

"Most people who have ever lived believe in some sort of god; they are as certain of their gods as of their breath. But not a single organism outside our immediate evolutionary lineage has ever contemplated the existence of a god. Think about that for a moment: as far as we know, every single sentient being in the universe that has ever believed in a god is a member of our odd little species, and almost every member of our species has believed in a god. To scientists interested in evolution and human nature, religion is a puzzle that screams to be solved.

"On closer inspection, religion is not an evolutionary puzzle so much as two evolutionary puzzles. First is the puzzle of faith: the puzzle of how Homo sapiens — and Homo sapiens alone — came to be a religious species. Second, there is the puzzle of atheism: how disbelief in gods can exist within an otherwise religious species. If belief in god(s) is truly an evolved human universal, how is it that millions or maybe billions of people today don’t believe in any? How can a defining feature of our species (which religion most definitely is!) not be a defining feature of our entire species?

***

"Religion comes so intuitively and naturally, per this cognitive byproduct view, that atheism is a rare exception and must require cognitive effort to be sustained. In the words of Pascal Boyer, penned in a prominent summary:

“'Some form of religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.”

***

"There is little scientific reason to believe that rationality and science are key causal contributors to atheism in the aggregate. This makes it all the more ironic that public-facing atheists who speak so reverently of science tend to be the most vocal advocates of the faulty notion that rationality is a prime driver of atheism. They’ve got the science wrong.

***

"Religion is no less an evolutionary product than is a raptor or a ribosome, worthy of the same scientific awe. Through the processes of genetic evolution, we have been endowed with minds capable of imagining gods, and through the processes of cultural evolution, we have evolved intricate structures of beliefs and norms that have helped propel our species to greater and greater cooperative heights. The seemingly bizarre religious rituals that many deride as irrational may in fact be cultural evolutionary tricks that help create cooperative societies. (my bold)

"To me, this intricate cultural evolutionary play is infinitely more fascinating and fulfilling than the shallow, wholesale dismissal of religion offered by vocal public atheists. And to appreciate it, all you need to do is open yourself up to the possibility that over the millennia, religions may have survived and thrived in part because they served an evolutionary purpose. Of course, atheists need not subscribe to a given religious faith to appreciate it; one needn’t accept or praise something simply because it was useful in cultural evolution. But everyone — including atheists, which I am — can have a more mature, scientifically literate, and fulfilling relationship with religion if we are open to the possibility that it doesn’t poison everything."

Comment: so, the author, whose science research found no answers [not copied by me], thinks religion is a coercive scheme to control societies and atheism in an odd-ball outcome by some folks, who are no more rational than the rest of us. Agnosticism not considered. Why not?

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/darwins-tree-of-life-is-just-ground-cover/

"Some of us started to doubt the Tree of Life when so many life forms started acting like they don’t know their proper place in it. Just for example, octopuses and spiders don’t realize that invertebrates — especially those with tiny brains — aren’t supposed to be that smart.

"But that, it turns out, is really only a minor issue. Here’s a discussion of some of the other issues:

"Paleontology poses an insurmountable challenge to the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin himself predicted that countless intermediate animal forms must exist within the fossil record, given that organisms gradually evolved from one species into the next. However, what the fossil record actually shows is the exact opposite, namely, that whenever new species appear, they do so suddenly and without evidence of precursory forms in the geological record. The most prominent example is the so-called Cambrian explosion which happened around 530 million years ago, when about 20 animal phyla suddenly showed up on the stage of life out of the clear blue, as it were, but with no intermediate forms from the Precambrian strata. Given that no attempt to reconcile paleontology with evolutionary theory has succeeded, Darwinian evolutionists have come to admit that the fossil record doesn’t fit with their theory, as we will see at the end of this video. For the same reason, they’ve started to turn their focus towards another field of study in their search for support of evolution: Homology and phylogenetic trees. This episode assesses these efforts and shows why neither homologous structures nor tree of life studies support evolutionary theory."

Video: https://youtu.be/dT08h5dhTxM

Comment: Homology and genetic comparisons don't work to make a tree. Really trying to deny Darwin's common descent. Mirrors dhw's complaint that the road to humans was too torturous as a reasonable approach for God to follow.