Owen Lovejoy on Ardipithecus ramidus

Owen Lovejoy, one of the leading scholars on all things australopithecine and one of the principle describers of the new Ardipithecus finds, describes the importance of the find in terms of our understanding of human/ape relationships. In Breitbart.com, he says:

"People often think we evolved from apes, but no, apes in many ways evolved from us," Lovejoy said. "It has been a popular idea to think humans are modified chimpanzees. From studying Ardipithecus ramidus, or 'Ardi,' we learn that we cannot understand or model human evolution from chimps and gorillas."

Lovejoy (and others) are arguing that the human/ape split came about long before the modern great apes arose and, thus, we share no behavioral or morphological traits in common. If the split between apes and humans was between eight and nine million years ago, that would mean eight million years of evolution for apes to become what they are today. That's a lot of time.

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More on Ardipithecus ramidus

The NYT has a killer story by John Noble Wilford on the new Ardipithecus find (yes, I know, it is NYT but it was too good to pass up) with an associated graphic. It gives one an idea of just how transitional this find really is:

The Ardipithecus specimen, an adult female, probably stood four feet tall and weighed about 120 pounds, almost a foot taller and twice the weight of Lucy. Its brain was no larger than a modern chimp’s. It retained an agility for tree-climbing but already walked upright on two legs, a transforming innovation in hominids, though not as efficiently as Lucy’s kin.

Ardi’s feet had yet to develop the arch-like structure that came later with Lucy and on to humans. The hands were more like those of extinct apes. And its very long arms and short legs resembled the proportions of extinct apes, or even monkeys.

Here is the accompanying graphic, from the NYT.



Every so often, a find comes around and galvanizes the scientific world. This is one such find. A. afarensis is a good case for a transitional form. Ardipithecus ramidus is so much more. It also shows, in true evolutionary fashion, that the transition to bipedalism took place over a considerable period of time and happened in mosaic fashion.

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Huge Dinosaur Prints in France

According to The Globe and Mail, a set of ginormous dinosaur prints has been discovered in France. The story notes:

The site of the find, high in the Jura mountains, was once a literal sauropod stomping ground: So far, 20 prints scattered on a 10-hectare site have been uncovered, paleontologist Jean-Michel Mazin of France's National Centre of Scientific Research said Wednesday.

Researchers believe there are hundreds, or even thousands, more still hidden, Mr. Mazin said.

The well-preserved footprints from the Late Jurassic period will help scientists learn more about sauropods, long-necked plant eaters that were giants among the dinosaurs. The hulking beasts who left their footprints in the mud 150 million years ago weighed 30 to 40 tonnes and were more than 25 metres long, the French research centre said.

Neat.

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New Mystery Find in South Africa

Lee Berger and Francis Thackeray have found "something" in South Africa. They just ain't sayin' what. Times Online has the story:

Why the secrecy? Simply, when a major scientific breakthrough is made, it is essential to first fully describe it to the scientific community. A peer-review process is completed and publication in an international scientific journal acts as a seal of authenticity and scientific rigour. Prior publication of any kind might diffuse both the significance of the discovery and the perceived veracity of the subject matter.

That’s why whatever has been discovered in South Africa must remain a secret.

Lee Berger has long worked in the field of australopithecine ancestry so I am guessing this is a find on the order of the importance of the Ardipithecus ramidus find publicized a few days ago. We shall see.

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Intelligent Alien Intervention Institute

Gordon Glover has a new video on Youtube that is a complete howl. It takes on the "academic freedom" legislation to point out that, given that we should be open to teaching "the controversy," anything can be thought of as science. In this case, it is alien technology. This eerily reflects the testimony of Michael Behe during the Dover/Kitzmiller trial, in which he stated that, under his definition of science, astrology would be included.




The best part is the picture of Seattle in the background, which is where the headquarters of the Discovery Institute is located.


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Richard Dawkins Isn't Taking it Anymore.

Newsweek, a magazine I don't ordinarily pick up, has an article by Richard Dawkins, and he is mad. On the fossil record, he writes:

We don't need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized. It is a bonus that we do actually have rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day. The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong. Nevertheless there are, of course, gaps, and creationists love them obsessively.

Dawkins then waxes on the existence of the flatworm, one of his favorite animals. He writes:

The Platyhelminthes, to a worm, are "already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history." But in this case, "the very first time they appear" is not the Cambrian but today. Do you see what this means, or at least ought to mean for creationists? Creationists believe that flatworms were created in the same week as all other creatures. They have therefore had exactly the same time in which to fossilize as all other animals. During all the centuries when all those bony or shelly animals were depositing their fossils by the millions, the flatworms must have been living happily alongside them, but without leaving the slightest trace of their presence in the rocks. What, then, is so special about gaps in the record of those animals that do fossilize, given that the past history of the flatworms is one big gap: even though the flatworms, by the creationists' own account, have been living for the same length of time? If the gap before the Cambrian Explosion is used as evidence that most animals suddenly sprang into existence in the Cambrian, exactly the same "logic" should be used to prove that the flatworms sprang into existence yesterday. Yet this contradicts the creationist's belief that flatworms were created during the same creative week as everything else. You cannot have it both ways. This argument, at a stroke, completely and finally destroys the creationist case that the Precambrian gap in the fossil record can be taken as evidence against evolution.

Here's the problem with the above argument: has Dawkins, in all of the years he has been battling creationists, not seen how often they move the goal posts? They argue, alternately, that the entire geologic column was created by Noah's deluge and then argue that the gaps in the fossil record show that evolution doesn't work. Nowhere is the cognitive dissonance of these arguments explained. Either the Cambrian Period existed, or it didn't. Dawkins is correct, you can't have one or the other. This has not stopped creationists from arguing both. The other favorite one is to argue, alternately, that there is evidence of a young earth and that the earth has the appearance of age. The logical fallacies of that are numerous but creationists flatly ignore them.

As far as the flatworms are concerned, they will simply argue that hydrodynamic sorting put them at the top of the column because they "floated" during the flood. Then they will castigate Dawkins for something else that the fossil record doesn't show. It is irrelevant that the global flood model can't explain ANYTHING that we find in the fossil record or that, despite the paucity of remains in the Cambrian, there exist mountains of evidence for evolution of other forms throughout geologic time. With regard to "missing links," Dawkins writes:

The silliest of all these "missing link" challenges are the following two (or variants of them, of which there are many). First, "If people came from monkeys via frogs and fish, then why does the fossil record not contain a 'fronkey'?" And, second, "I'll believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human baby." This last one makes the same mistake as all the others, plus the additional one of thinking that major evolutionary change happens overnight.

No, but it is easy to counter with the fact that we have frogamanders and fishapods, and that evolution explains the existence of both of those. Dawkins fully understands the science behind evolution, but has yet to fully understand the logical inconsistencies that comfortably fits into the gestalt of your average creationist.

UPDATE: forgot the link. It is fixed now.

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New Book by Lee Meadows Said to Bridge the Gap Peacefully

Lee Meadows of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has written a book that he says will help in the evolution controversy. The story, in Medical News, notes:

In his book, The Missing Link: An Inquiry Approach for Teaching All Students About Evolution, Meadows, a Christian and science educator, writes: "For too long evolution has been denied its place in science curriculum. School policies driven by misunderstanding and fear regularly displace widely recognized principles of science. But without understanding evolution, students - no matter what their religious beliefs - will never achieve the level of scientific literacy they need to make sense of even everyday practicalities such as how human viruses work."

Sadly, this is lost on most people. His tactic is very simple:

"Children have to understand evolution," he says, "but they don't have to believe it, and that is the key distinction that I have laid out in the book. So if a child asks if God made the whale, it's really an opportunity to talk about natural and supernatural explanations. You are not saying that one is better than the other, only that science is limited to natural explanations."

Unfortunately, I think that he has underestimated the level of hostility that your average creationist has for evolution, not to mention the Discovery Institute, which is doing its best to foster the eradication of the teaching of evolution everywhere. Still, it sounds like a good book to read.

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Ardipithecus ramidus: The Game Has Changed!

Wired (as well as a bunch of other sources) has a new article on the Ardipithecus ramidus find that has been analyzed. This find will change models of early human origins, for which there are actually more models than fossils. Don't misread that statement; there are plenty of fossils to reconstruct big chunks of our past but there are also some areas, particularly the early years, that are still sketchy. The article states:

“This is a landmark,” said Dean Falk, a University of Florida evolutionary anthropologist who reviewed the findings. “The field will go into a frenzy.”

Falk’s assessment was echoed by paleontologists around the world, who have waited for 15 years since a handful of 4.4 million-year-old fossils, belonging to an unknown hominid species, were found in sediments along the Awash River in Ethiopia.

Even then, the fossils were clearly special. The name of the species, chosen by paleontologist discoverers Tim White, Gen Suwa and Berhane Asfaw of the Middle Awash Project, means “root ground ape” in local dialect. The fossils likely “represent a long-sought potential root species for the Hominidae,” they wrote in a 1994 Nature paper (.pdf).

Conventional wisdom is that hominids arose due to a group of Miocene apes (Kenyapithecus?) adapting to the forest/fringe environment as environmental cooling created more savannas. These early hominids then moved to the savannas permanently around 3-3.5 mya. This find suggests that the evolution of bipedal, hominid behaviour may have taken place more in a forest environment than a savanna environment. Here is a revised tree from Wired, showing Ardipithecus, which is now assumed to be the root species in the hominid lineage.


The other takeaway message here is that the split between the precursors of chimpanzees and the precursors of gorillas is further back than we thought. Ardipithecus shows extremely derived characteristics relative to chimpanzees. In the world of human palaeontology, this is huge. It clearly shows a step between the quadrupedal apes of the Miocene and the demonstratively bipedal australopithecines of the Plio-Pleistocene. Folks, this is as transitional as it gets.

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Discovery Channel Program on Ardipithecus ramidus

The Discovery Channel is going to have a program on the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus and the painstaking effort to reconstruct the morphology of this species. It will be on Sunday, October 11, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. From the story in Web Wire:

To accompany the program, Discovery today launched an extensive website, www.discovery.com/ardi, for people who want to know more about "Ardi" and her surroundings. In addition, UNDERSTANDING ARDI, a one-hour special produced in collaboration with CBS News, moderated by former CBS and CNN anchor Paula Zahn, will air at 11 PM (ET/PT). The special includes research team members Dr. Tim White, Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Dr. Giday WoldeGabriel, Dr. Owen Lovejoy, Brooks Hanson, Deputy Managing Editor for the Physical Sciences, Science and science journalist Ann Gibbons.

Set your TiVos or VCRs.

Dinosaurs in Chalk

In a story in the Harvard Crimson, it is reported that an art student has done a chalk mural of the history of life. The report states:

Yesterday, on a bright and sunny afternoon, Sidewalk Sam, a Boston-based artist most recognized for his chalked sidewalk murals, collaborated with Harvard Museum of Natural History to draw a timeline of the earth’s 4.6 billion year history and the diversity of life forms that existed during these eras.

The mural project began to materialize when a graduate student in paleontology, Ben Kotrc, met Sidewalk Sam during the summer at an event. The project attracted young children of all ages and encouraged students to marvel at the foreign life forms created by the artist and other collaborators.

Sounds neat, but, unaccountably, the story has no pictures. I wrote the Crimson the following comment:

Why would you write a story on some neat murals and not show the murals? It reminds me of the Monty Python's sketch: "For the first time on record, the 1972 eclipse of the sun."

Hopefully not too snotty but that sounds like the kind of thing that most people would want to see.

UPDATE: MuseumGoer adds a link to pictures of the sidewalk. They are here.

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It is Amazing What You Will Find Just Walking Around...

Geologists in India have stumbled (literally) upon a large cache of dinosaur eggs. The story in UPI states:

The site is part of an area rich in ancient organisms dating back 140 million years, geologists told The Times of India.

"We found clusters and clusters of spherical eggs of dinosaurs. And each cluster contained eight eggs," M.U. Ramkumar, geology lecturer of the Periyar University, said.

He said each egg was about 5 to 8 inches in diameter. They were lying in sandy nests of about four feet.

The clusters of eggs were under volcanic ash from the Deccan eruptions. Scientists have long thought the Deccan eruptions were a reason for extinctions in the area.

The eggs, which may be 65 million years old, were from both the Carnosaur, an aggressive, predatory dinosaur, and Sauropods, long-necked herbivores that became extremely large. Fossils of these reptiles were found on earlier expeditions but this is the first time so many nests and so many clusters of eggs were found, the newspaper said.

Neat.

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Tyrannosaurus Rex and Trichomonosis: The Dinosaur to Bird Avalanche of Evidence Continues

The Chicago Sun-Times has an article on what may have killed the famous Tyrannosaur named Sue, which currently resides in the Field Museum. According to the story, by David Newbart:

Theories abound on what led to the demise of the Field Museum’s most famous specimen: shortly after the Tyrannosaurus rex was found, some wondered if a series of holes in the back of her massive skull were bite marks suffered during a ferocious battle with another meat-eating dinosaur.

But researchers have honed in on a culprit far smaller: a throat infection caused by a single-celled organism.

Writing in Tuesday’s edition of the online journal of Public Library of Science One, researchers from the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere theorize that the parasitic infection could have led to an autoimmune response that eventually could have led Sue to starve to death 67 million years ago.

Now the punch line: the infection shows evidence of being caused by the Trichomonosis bacteria which is found in only one other sub-class: birds. Given all of the other palaeontological evidence that the the theropod dinosaurs and Aves share a common ancestry, what are the odds they would share the same kind of infection by chance?

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Hollywood Reporter Review of Creation

The Hollywood Reporter has a favorable review of the movie Creation, the story of Charles Darwin and his relationships with his wife and children and the struggle in writing On the Origins of Species. Ray Bennett writes:

Thanks to the writing, pacing and Bettany's nuanced performance, it is one of the best delineations of intellectual and emotional struggle seen on film in many a year. The actor's scenes with Annie and Emma have an extraordinary tenderness that grips the heart just as Darwin's scientific dilemma engages the brain. West is unaffected and winning as the girl, and Connelly, with a perfect English accent, shows the wife's anguish as well as her undying loyalty.

Sure wish I could see it.

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Symposium on Evolution by NLM/NIH

The National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health will be hosting a symposium on evolution. The announcement appears on the NLM page and states, in part:

Darwin may have finished the page proofs, but the process of persuading scientists and the public about evolution had just begun. Darwin pieced together evidence for his theory of natural selection from many sources, including studies of domestic breeding, anatomical similarities among species ("homology"), embryology, the sequential order of fossils, and the presence of vestigial organs. Bur whether this evidence ever constituted "proof" of evolution was questioned at the time and remains unsettled today, in part because of broader cultural and religious concerns about evolution. The "proofs" were far from finished in 1859.

This symposium brings together a line-up of internationally-renowned scholars, representing a cross section of disciplines, who will discuss historical, philosophical and scientific perspectives on Darwin and evolution. It has two general aims. First, it seeks to trace the different ways in which evolution has been understood in this period, and how these ways of understanding related to the changing basis of scientific evidence on evolution. Second, it seeks to explain why scientific "proofs" of Darwinian evolution have been unpersuasive to many individuals, including those who promote creationism and intelligent design. The speakers' perspectives on evolution have raised important questions about the nature of the evidence in favor of evolution, and the relationship between proof and belief. Put another way, a focus on Darwin's critics and supporters can illuminate the many ways in which "proof" has been understood in the last 150 years.

If you are in the Rockville area, stop by today.

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Off Topic: Dark Matter Hunter

Wired has a story on attempts by physicists to find the elusive Dark Matter that "must" be there. The story, by Brandon Keim notes:

“Even if we don’t know what dark matter is, we know how it must act,” said Eduardo Abancens, a physicist at Spain’s University of Zaragoza and designer of a prototype dark matter detector.

According to physicists, only around five percent of what makes up the universe can presently be detected. The existence of dark matter is inferred from the behavior of faraway galaxies, which move in ways that can only be explained by a gravitational pull caused by more mass than can be seen. They estimate dark matter represents around 20 percent of the universe, with the other 75 percent made up of dark energy, a repulsive force that is causing the universe to expand at an ever-quickening pace.

At the heart of Abancens’ team’s detector, which is called a scintillating bolometer and resembles a prop from The Golden Compass, is a crystal so pure it can conduct the energy ostensibly generated when a particle of dark matter strikes the nucleus of one of its atoms.

Three things struck me about this story. First, it is really cool that modern technology can come to the aid of physicists in this way. Two, this is how science is supposed to work, with hypothetical questions being answered in either confirmation or non-confirmation of a theory (existence of dark matter). Three, if an evolutionist said anything like this, creationists would be sounding it from the rooftops and popping the champagne corks, celebrating the "death of evolution" as a theory. Every day, the Discovery Institute proclaims that evolution cannot explain this, that or the other. Funny how this never seems to apply to cosmology or astrophysics.

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Kevin Spacey in Inherit the Wind

Kevin Spacey is appearing in the play Inherit the Wind at the Old Vic, in London from September 18 through December 20. Charlie Piane of Broadwayworld.com writes:

Trevor Nunn says: "I directed scenes from this remarkable play when I was a student, and realized then just how electric and involving it could be for audiences. So I feel unusually fulfilled, more than a generation later, to be able to direct Kevin Spacey and David Troughton in this Titanic clash of ideas. The debate it presents, that goes to the heart of what freedom means in America, continues to find its way into the courtrooms of the United States in Darwin's Anniversary year. Somehow, I don't think Jerome Lawrence and Robert E.Lee would be surprised".

I would stop by if I could

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Birds to Dinosaurs: The Avalanche of Evidence Continues

PhysOrg is reporting on the discovery and description of a four-winged dinosaur that provides more evidence of the dinosaur-bird transition. The article notes:

Until now, A. huxleyi was thought to be a primitive bird. It was presumed to have been a near-contemporary of Archaeopteryx, the first recognised bird, which flew around 150 million years ago.

But these opinions were based on an incomplete fossil.

The new, nearly-complete specimen gives a different picture, suggesting that A. huxleyi is millions of years older than Archaeopteryx and has both dinosaur and avian features.

It is the long-sought evidence that proves birds descended from theropod dinosaurs, argues Xu.

Interestingly, when complete individuals of Archaeopteryx were discovered, several researchers went back to their drawers and pulled out what they thought were theropod dinosaurs and discovered that they had misclassified them! This find also continues to blow a hole in the creationism argument that focuses on Archaeopteryx being a bird and, thus, not descendant from dinosaurs—an argument that grows more dishonest with every new discovery:

Scientists have long argued about the evolutionary line taken by birds.

Some have said bird-like dinosaurs appear too late in the fossil record to be the true ancestors of birds, an argument known as the "temporal paradox."

The debate has raged for years mainly because the fossil evidence is so rare or fragmented.

The new evidence comes from in Daxishan, in Jianchang county in northeastern China.

It was found in rock dated to the early part of the Late Jurassic, between 151 and 161 million years ago, which means it is clearly older than Archaeopteryx.

There is now a wealth of evidence for over two dozen different forms that show the transition from dinosaurs to birds. Time to stick this one in the "arguments that creationists shouldn't use" pile.

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When is Darwin Not Darwin?

Useless News and World Distort has an article on the giveaway of a particular version of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. It has a rebuttal. Dan Gilgoff writes:

In time for the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, a major Christian ministry is publishing an edition of the book that features an introduction rebutting the theory of evolution and making the case for intelligent design. The ministry, Ray Comfort's Living Waters, is distributing tens of thousands of free copies on college campuses nationwide.

Kirk Cameron, star of the '80s sitcom Growing Pains, has recorded a video promoting the project, above.

Lost on these people is that you can't make a scientific case for intelligent design. You can only make a case against evolution. Good luck with that one. From the Living Waters boilerplate:

This introduction gives the history of evolution, a timeline of Darwin's life, Hitler's undeniable connections to the theory, Darwin's racism, his disdain for women, and his thoughts on the existence of God. It lists the theory's many hoaxes, exposes the unscientific belief that nothing created everything, points to the incredible structure of DNA, and the absence of any species-to-species transitional forms. It presents a balanced view of Creationism with information on scientists who believed that God created the universe—scientists such as Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Nicholas Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Michael Faraday, Louis Pasteur and Johannes Kepler. It uses many original graphics and "is for use in schools, colleges, and prestigious learning institutions." The introduction also contains the entire contents of the popular booklet, "Why Christianity?"

Not dead sure what any of that has to do with evolution, since none of the people mentioned is a biologist. And what is Kirk Cameron's profession? Oh yeah, he's an ACTOR. He is not a biologist. He has no biological training. The arguments are old, tired and have been rebutted so many times that there is simply no excuse for them. No wonder the scientists are hopping mad. Flat-earth christianity marches on.

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Darwin and Faith

Nick Spencer of the Guardian has an interesting article on Charles Darwin, evolution, and faith. Titled Darwin's Complex Loss of Faith, Spencer argues that Darwin's work on evolution did not kill his faith in God, but did alter it dramatically. Spencer also puts this in historical context:

Up until his return from the Beagle in 1836, Darwin considered himself an "orthodox" Christian. There is no reason to doubt this although it is important to recognise that his orthodoxy was a specific early 19th century, rational, demonstrable, civilised, gentlemanly kind of orthodoxy. In particular, it was heavily influenced by William Paley whose Natural Theology confidently argued that nature contains "every manifestation of design… [that] design must have had a designer … That designer must have been a person [and] that person is God." Christianity for Darwin was primarily a proof to be established and Paley did that admirably.

When his emerging theory began to undermine these ideas, it also undermined the Christianity that was built on them. It didn't happen immediately. Darwin's notebooks show him trying to accommodate an intellectually credible idea of God and his new theory – in many ways successfully.

It had only been recently that new ideas of the age of the earth and coldly factual observations of the geological record had radically revised science's understanding of the earth and its inhabitants. Darwin's faith was not unusual in that respect. As Spencer correctly points out, it was not evolution that separated Darwin from God:

When, however, his daughter Annie died in 1851, aged 10, suffering moved from being a theoretical problem to an agonisingly personal one. Most Victorian families lost children (Darwin himself lost two others in infancy) but Annie was his favourite and, unlike most Victorian fathers, he had witnessed every last, degrading moment of her short life. The experience destroyed what was left of his Christian faith.

The claim that evolution destroyed Darwin's faith is, thus, only a half-truth, usually made to prove somehow that evolution killed God. By the same reckoning, the claim that evolution had nothing to do with his loss of faith (which was entirely due to Annie's death) is no more accurate, and is often made for equally polemical purposes (usually to demonstrate that evolution presents no challenges whatsoever to religious belief).

I would posit that a faith that sees evolution as a threat to the very existence of God is not a very strong faith and certainly one that is worth examining.
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William Dembski and Jello

In the gufuffle about the new Dembski/Marks paper that, according to them and the Discovery Institute, constitutes evidence against evolution, several people across the blogosphere have commented on the paper by David Wolpert from 1997 that took Dembski's application of the NFL theorems to the woodshed. It is every bit as devastating as the testimony by Jeffrey Shallit for the Dover-Kitzmiller trial. This is even more true because Wolpert is the co-creator of the No Free Lunch theorems, along with William Macready¹. Wolpert's article is titled William Dembski's treatment of the No Free Lunch theorems is written in jello, a title that does not leave much to the imagination. So what are the No Free Lunch theorems? Wolpert writes:

These theorems, loosely speaking, say that the performance-weighted measure of domains in which some search algorithm A beats some contender algorithm B exactly equals the measure of domains for which the reverse is true. So, for example, in attempting to find a high point on a surface, a hill-ascending algorithm will perform no better than random search, and in fact no better than a hill-descending algorithm, over the space of all surfaces one might search. In short, according to these theorems there is no free lunch; without tailoring one's algorithm to the domain at hand, one has no assurances that that algorithm will perform well on that domain.

Dembski has taken the theorems and argued that if search algorithms are analogous to genetic changes in the environment and that genetic change is an "unguided random process," then no amount of evolutionary change will amount to anything. But Wolpert has concerns about how Dembski has applied the theorems and how well it applies to the biological world:

Indeed, throughout there is a marked elision of the formal details of the biological processes under consideration. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is that neo-Darwinian evolution of ecosystems does not involve a set of genomes all searching the same, fixed fitness function, the situation considered by the NFL theorems. Rather it is a co-evolutionary process. Roughly speaking, as each genome changes from one generation to the next, it modifies the surfaces that the other genomes are searching. And recent results indicate that NFL results do not hold in co-evolution.

The reason there is a marked elision of the biological details is that Dembski has demonstrated numerous times that he does not understand the biological details, having never worked in the field or studied how organisms change over time. As Wolpert and other people have pointed out, Dembski assumes the same fitness function for all environments. This in no way describes biological reality or how selection works. Why is it that Dembski refuses to acknowledge this?


¹D. H. Wolpert and W. G. Macready, “No free lunch theorems for search,” Santa Fe Institute, Sante Fe, NM, Tech. Rep. SFI-TR-05-010, 1995.

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