Good Science Still Flourishing Without Darwinism

Take heart at the good things that
are coming from Darwin-free research,
especially findings that improve our lives

After three days of taking Darwinians to task for their storytelling nonsense, readers might get the impression that Darwin-bashing is all we do. No; we love good science! Researchers who do honest work deserve our thanks and support, especially those who improve the human condition. Take heart at just a few of the good things announced in the science news. For an attitude-setting introduction, watch this week’s Prager U video by Marion Tupy about how good life is today compared to previous times. Much of that progress was due to good, healthy scientific research.

Darwin-Free Understanding

Here are a few research stories by scientists who could say, “Darwinism? I have no need of that hypothesis.” These researchers help us learn things about the world by applying systematic logical thinking with data collected by observation and experiment. Is that not the essence of science? No storytelling required. Learn, publish, and maintain integrity throughout.

Embryology: Maintaining symmetry during body axis elongation (Smits et al., Current Biology, 9 Aug 2023). This team’s only mention of “evolution” has nothing to do with Darwinism. They test a hypothesis with a model that “evolves” the position of the midline axis of a fruit fly embryo over time, so that they could learn how an embryo maintains its left-right symmetry.

Botany: Heat Sensor Protects the Venus Flytrap From Fire (University of Würzburg, 22 Aug 2023). The Venus flytrap has fascinated everyone since Darwin, but no Darwinism is found in this investigation. Researchers wondered how the plant can recoup after fire. Through cleverly-designed experiments, they learned that the trigger hairs on the trap have specialized heat sensors that can detect rapid changes in temperature. That way they are not fooled by high temperatures alone, but by rapid rises. It allows them to hunker down in the grass, closing up shop till the temperature drops again.

Biochemistry: Deciphering the molecular dynamics of complex proteins (University of Konstanz, 22 Aug 2023). This article about how proteins come together into teams that function as a unit never mentions evolution. They invented a new technique, using NMR spectroscopy and computer simulations, to figure out how proteins move and connect in real time. So far they have only used it on some of the simplest molecular interactions, but hope their technique will become more widely used to solve bigger puzzles.

Ecology: Two-thirds of the world’s biodiversity lives in the soil (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research via Phys.org, 8 Aug 2023). Understanding our world includes understanding the distribution of organisms in it. A massive project to inventory soil organisms found some surprises.

The group with the highest proportion of species living in the soil is fungi—90% of them live there. They are followed by plants and their roots with 86%. Earthworms and mollusks such as snails make up 20%. “However, no one has yet attempted to estimate the diversity of the very small organisms such as bacteria, viruses, archaea, fungi and unicellular organisms,” says the first author, Mark Anthony from WSL. Yet they are crucial for recycling nutrients in the soil, for carbon storage, and they are important as pathogens and partners of trees.

The paper in PNAS mentions evolution three times, but it’s hard to see how the e-word helps that text in any way. Evolution is not mentioned in the press release at all. Instead, the focus is on understanding for stewardship. It “shows that the diversity in soils is great and correspondingly important, so they should be given much more consideration in conservation.”

Neuroscience: Gap junctions: The missing piece of the connectome (Current Biology, 7 Aug 2023). Two authors explore the previously underappreciated function of gap junctions in neurons. Much past science on fruit flies was wasted on Darwinism, trying to show how induced mutations with X-rays might cause improvements. Not these writers; the authors show a design that was not understood. According to a recent paper they analyze, gap junctions help explain how fruit flies keep their wings in sync with a steady wingbeat frequency.

Darwin-Free Human Betterment

Atmospheric Science: Water Harvesting in Death Valley: Conquering the Arid Wilderness (Pohang University of Science and Technology, 22 Aug 2023). Korean scientists are perfecting a method of capturing fresh water from thin air! Water availability is a huge concern in many countries around the world. And yet the atmosphere carries water, even in dry climates with low humidity. Wouldn’t it be great to squeeze water out of the air right at home, instead of walking for miles to the nearest well, as some people in poor countries have to do every day? The Korean team perfected cylinders made of metal-organic frameworks (MOF) that extract moisture at night and purify it during the day. They tested out their latest device in one of the hottest, driest places on earth: Death Valley, California.

During the experiments, the device harvested up to 285g and 210g of water per kilogram of MOF in Berkeley and Death Valley desert respectively. This represents a twofold increase in water production compared to the previous harvesters. Notably, the research team’s harvester successfully extracted water without generating any carbon footprint even in the extremely dry weather conditions including the highest temperature of 60℃ and the average night humidity of 14%. The team’s unique condenser and MOF-absorbent system, empowered the water harvesting process solely through the use of ambient sunlight, rendered additional energy sources or power supplies unnecessary.

Ecology: Oil eating microbes reshape droplets to optimize biodegradation (Phys.org, 18 Aug 2023). Oil slicks have wrought environmental disasters many times around the world. Yet scientists have been surprised to find “many microbes living in the ocean that feed on oil, eventually cleaning away oil not cleaned up by human efforts.” This research by French and Japanese scientists sought to learn how the microbes do it, and what might trigger them to degrade oil faster and more efficiently. They witnessed Alcanivorax borkumensis bacteria “learn” how to break down oil droplets with finger-like protrusions, thus increasing the surface area for faster breakdown.

Neurology: Largest genetic study of brain structure identifies how the brain is organised (University of Cambridge, 17 Aug 2023). In the days after Darwin, racist scientists measured brains to rank humans on an evolutionary scale. This study, by contrast, sought to understand what all the folds mean in human brains, and determine what genes are responsible for them. The paper in Nature Genetics says, “Together, these analyses identify distinct genetic organizational principles of the cortex and their correlates with neurodevelopment.” [Note: the paper is behind a paywall, so we do not know if Darwinese appears in it. The press release does not refer to evolution.] The intentions of the authors seem noble: “Our findings can be used to understand how changes in the shape and size of the brain can lead to neurological and psychiatric conditions, potentially leading to better treatment and support for those who need it.”

Neuromedicine: A new mechanism encouraging the brain to self-repair after an ischemic stroke (Tokyo Medical and Dental University, 22 Aug 2023). This press release shows how neuroscientists learned more about an automatic process in the brain that attempts to repair damage after an ischemic stroke. Clarifying the process might lead to new treatments encouraging this built-in repair mechanism.

Physiology: Study Reveals Unexpected Importance of the Thymus in Adults (Massachusetts General Hospital, 2 Aug 2023). This study confirms earlier findings that people who have their thymus removed suffer adverse effects. “Compared with adults who did not have their thymus removed, adults who underwent thymectomy had a nearly three-times higher risk of dying over five years and a two-times higher risk of developing cancer during that time,” the article says. Other patients were put at higher risk of autoimmune diseases. Dr Jerry Bergman wrote (24 Aug 2020) that Darwinians formerly included the thymus in their list of vestigial organs. He showed this to be false, because the thymus is functional throughout life. This article states that doctors still believed the thymus is nonfunctional in adults, indicating that the myth has persisted to the present.

Zoology: Researchers deconstruct bee stinger to help develop tiny medical devices (University of New South Wales, 17 Aug 2023). Biomimetics—the imitation of nature’s solutions—continues to thrive in Darwin-free science that improves human life. By studying the bee stinger in detail, these scientists hope to design improved micro devices for drug delivery. “Bee stingers are incredibly complex structures with numerous moving components that also happen to be incredibly effective and efficient at what they do,” Dr Ramirez Esquivel said. “The more we look into it, the more we find amazing intricacies related to how it does its job.”

Unfortunately, the press release writer inserted evolution into the text at one point, claiming, ” understanding the evolution of the bee’s stinger is a great example of how we can make progress by learning more about other animal and plant species.” Given the article’s focus on amazing and intricate design, the sentence sounds awkward and unnecessary. Learning about animals and plants does not require wearing materialist glasses, as Linnaeus and Lammerts demonstrated.

The Downfall of Darwin Storytelling?

A very interesting book review appeared in Current Biology this week (21 Aug 2023). It’s titled, “Telling Stories About Unseen Ancestors.” The reviewers, Alan Love and Gunter Wagner, spoke well of a new book by Ronald Jenner, Ancestors in Evolutionary Biology. Jenner is a Darwinist who strongly opposes intelligent design, but he also is concerned about the bad habit of Darwinian storytelling. Here are a few telling admissions from the review that expose Darwinism as an embarrassing yet unavoidable storytelling enterprise:

• Thinking about ancestors is paramount for evolutionary science; concepts such as ‘the last common ancestor’ of some group of organisms are frequently invoked. However, ancestors are not directly observable.
• In his new book Ancestors in Evolutionary Biology: Linear Thinking About Branching Trees (2022), Ronald Jenner, of the Natural History Museum in London, simultaneously affirms the impulse to tell evolutionary stories about unseen evolutionary ancestors and exposes the (sometimes) flimsy evidential basis on which it is done, as well as common missteps in criticizing the endeavor.
• The book’s central message is that “evolutionary biology is a story telling discipline” (p1) and that an admission of this fact is the first step in pursuing the task more rigorously.
• A central conceptual claim by Jenner is the explicit articulation of what he calls ‘lineage thinking’: “the realization that the systematic and morphological relationships between collateral relatives are expressions of a more fundamental type of relationship — namely that between ancestors and descendants” (p38). Ironically, the notion of an ancestor is an underappreciated and little understood concept despite its centrality to evolutionary theorizing.
• Imagination is a key part of the arsenal of reasoning deployed by biologists in the form of “evolutionary intuitions”: “assumptions or generalizations about how evolution is generally thought to occur and which are thought to be applicable across taxa” (p124).
• Hypothetical ancestors with strong precursor potential continue to exert a powerful influence: “It is typically specialists most knowledgeable about the morphological minutiae of their chosen organisms who develop the strongest evolutionary intuitions” (p170). Many biologists might resist being characterized as having intuitions like this, but Jenner’s history and contemporary observations demonstrate they are ubiquitous….
• The problem Jenner addresses is worse: “The unobservable entities and events of evolutionary history are empirically inaccessible […] Common ancestry cannot be observed” (p3, p79). Ancestors are not only unseen now; they are confined to the past and only accessible by inference.
• As Jenner has it: “Telling more or less informed stories is our only route to making sense of evolution” (p329).

Science was supposed to replace storytelling narratives. If weaving stories is unavoidable in Darwinism, then it should be acknowledged that Darwinism is a narrative enterprise and does not qualify as science at all.

One last bad example to illustrate: Thick ones, pointy ones – how albatross beaks evolved to match their prey (The Conversation, 12 Aug 2023). Three Darwin Party faithful boast, “Our new research published today shows how albatross species evolved different beak shapes to make the most of the ocean’s food resources.” Oh come on. Got science?

Calling all scientists: expel “lineage thinking” and “evolutionary intuitions” from your daily workflow, and your science will improve. Kick the habit of making up stories to defend the Bearded Buddha. Return your D-Merit badge and renounce your membership in the Darwin Party before Humpty Darwin falls. You’ll be ahead of the crowd of losers looking back with shame at what they used to believe and teach.

Humpty Darwin sits on a wall of foam bricks held together by decayed mortar. Cartoon by Brett Miller commissioned for CEH. All rights reserved.