[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today, I'm speaking with paleo entomologist Dr. Guntur Beckley. A senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, beck served as curator for amber and fossil insects in the Department of Paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. He earned his PhD in geosciences from Eberhardt. Carls University in Tubingen. Beckley specializes in the fossil history and systematics of insects, the most diverse group of animals, and especially dragonflies. So Gunter likes to be called the fossil insect guy. Hey, Gunter. Welcome back.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: So. Hi, Andrew. So it's great to talk again.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Yeah, good to have you back. Well, since the summer of 2022, you've been publishing a weekly series of
[email protected] called Fossil Friday, where you highlight a different fossil each week. I noticed it kind of started with you sharing images from your own collection, images you'd taken, which was really cool. And then you had a caption with it, and slowly and surely they started to get longer as you provided more information. And then you threw in some context on the argument on why it challenges the Darwinian story. So it's really grown as a series it's been great to see. And in this series, you illuminate the story of each organism, the question that it brings up for evolutionary assumptions, and you describe the part it plays in the larger story of the fossil record. So what inspired you to start such a series?
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Well, actually, the Fossil Friday itself is not really my idea. My original idea, this whole Fossil Friday thing apparently originated, according to my research, 2013 as a Twitter phenomenon. So there was a hashtag Fossil Friday, and on these Fossil Fridays, amateurs and professional paleontologists met at Twitter and exchanged images and so on. And then there was a popular blog on Public Library of Science PLOS from 2016 to 2019, which was called Fossil Friday, and some natural history museums jumped the train. So there was a fossil Friday by American Museum of Natural History and by Smithsonian. And even our dear friends from the National Center for Science Education had a Fossil Friday for a while. So I basically thought, well, would be interesting to have a Fossil Friday from an ID perspective and to illuminate the fossil evidence from Darwin critical side. And, yeah, this developed and turned out to be quite more popular than I expected and more widely read than I expected. So I even received some positive feedback from prominent paleontologists, who, of course, prefer to stay anomalous, for obvious reasons.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Sure. But that's good. That's great that you've had some reach. And now that you mention it, when we put out Darwin's Doubt, I worked with Stephen Meyer on that book, and we took advantage of the hashtag Fossil Friday, too, when we put out different fossils that he mentions in his book. So we probably jumped on that train years ago as well. Well, many of our listeners will be familiar with the Cambrian Explosion, the geologically abrupt appearance of many major animal body plans in the fossil record. We're talking here about another explosion, though, the Avalon Explosion, a precursor to the Cambrian Explosion that triggered the arrival of more advanced marine organisms like sponges. Can you tell us, just for context, a little bit about the Avalon Explosion? What types of creatures did it introduce and where does it fit in the timeline?
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So the so called Avalon Explosion preceded the famous Cambrian Explosion, and it happened in the last period of the Pre Cambrian era. And this period is called the Adiacaran period, lasted from about 575 to 542,000,000 years ago. And what happened there is that you have a sudden appearance of you cannot even call it fauna because it's not animals. It's called the adyakaran biota. And what you'll find there is the first complex macro fossils. So fossils of organisms that even a layman would recognize as fossil organisms, not just tiny fossilized microbes or something like that, but they show a body plan which is very different from anything that came later, either in the Cambrian Explosion or any later time period. So they have a kilted air mattress like body structure. They have a strange symmetry, a glide symmetry. So they are not bilaterally symmetric or radially symmetric like other organisms. They have a fractal growth pattern. They have no visible organs. So they look very different from anything else. Nobody really knows what they are, if they are animals, plants, fungi, or independent way to multicellularity. And they include iconic organisms like Dickinsonia and Sprigina and chania and so on. And when you look at these organisms, most of them were sessile. They lived on the seafloor. There is hardly any evidence or no evidence for predation. And that's the reason why a famous paleontologist, Mark McManaman, called this the Garden of Idyakara, of course, alluding to the biblical Garden of Eden because it was a biota without predation.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Okay, so if it's in the timeline as a precursor to the Cambrian, correct?
[00:06:04] Speaker A: Yes, prior to the Cambrian explosion. But there is no continuity to the Cambrian Explosion. So it's contrary to some claims. It's not the phylogenetic precursors. There is no relationship or connection or gradual development into the Cambrian animal phyla. It's a totally different group of organisms that we find in the Avalon Explosion.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Okay, so a new and distinct infusion of information.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Well, one recent entry in your Fossil Friday series is turning out to be very popular, actually. You call it? 70 years of textbook wisdom on origin of multicellular life turns out to be wrong. And in it, you report on a new study from researchers in Denmark that overturns decades of evolutionary dogma. Can you start by telling us what the prevailing view has been for the last seven decades on the origin of multicellular life?
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So this prevailing view started basically with a famous paper that appeared 1959 in Nature by Nursal. And this paradigm that originated with this paper is called the Oxygen Availability hypothesis, or the Oxygen Control hypothesis. And what it says is that increase in oxygen content or raise in oxygen content was a kind of precondition for the emergence of large and complex multicellular organisms on Earth. And the reason, the postulated reason for this is that either there is a certain constraint in terms of size when organisms simply depend on diffusion to get oxygen, then there's a size limit. So you would need a higher oxygen content to grow in size if you are relying on diffusion for air supply. And this is one approach. The other approach relates to metabolism and aerobic metabolism. So the use basically to extract power or energy from oxygen. And this was only possible after the origin of complex cells with mitochondria, which happened then about 2.32.5 billion years ago. And there you have something that is called the Great Oxygenation Event, where you can show in the geological layers by isotope analysis that there's an increase in oxygen content. And then in the past 20 years, about there have been many studies that have shown a stepwise increase in oxygen content over the precambrian with two main pulses. And the second pulse was always said to correlate with the idyacaran. So you would have a second steep increase in oxygen content. And this correlates with the first appearance of macrophossils and of larger multicellular life. And so this was, of course, evidence that this larger oxygen content is related to the origin of complex multicellular life in the idyakaran in the Avalon explosion. So this became the mainstream consensus and the textbook wisdom for decades.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Okay, so what were the findings of the new Austrinder et al. Study that overturned it?
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Now, if we look at the Austrander paper, which is the paper that I discuss in this recent Fossil Friday posting, we first have to remember that what I just mentioned, that these many previous study all found this correlation of increased oxygenation with the Avalon explosion with the Idakaran. And just to give one quote by a paper by McFadden et al. In 2008, they said in the abstract, following the second oxidation event, between 550 to 542,000,000 years ago, there was a worldwide increase of idiacra organisms, complex microscopic life forms, an event recently dubbed as the Avalon explosion. So that was the mainstream view. And now the Austrander team of scientists looked at this very geological period and at a certain phenomenon in the geological layers that is called the Shuram excursion. And this Shuram excursion relates to a excursion of carbon isotope, a negative excursion of carbon isotope.
And this is exactly at the time period of the Iyakaran where the first multicellular life appeared. And what they made is an elemental analysis, an isotope analysis. And surprisingly, they found the opposite of all previous studies and could document very precisely that the previous studies got it wrong and that the Idacaran is not only not related with an increased oxygen content, but is actually correlated. With a lower oxygen content and even with so called seafloor anoxia, which means oxygen deprivation on the seafloor, which is quite significant because all life in the Idakaran was constrained to the seafloor. There were no swimming organisms in the Idakaran. It was seafloor life, and there were anoxic conditions. So the opposite of all the mainstream view for 17 years. And actually there was another paper in the same journal by a Chinese team of scientists, Gong Etal, and they came to the same result with different method and from a different locality. And there have been other papers which may resonate with these findings. There was a paper in 2021 by Bostock et al. And what they found is sounds like it's corroborating this, but it's a little bit different because they found that when you make a transition from anaerobic so oxygen less to aerobic world with oxygen, then first the oxygen rise will suppress the evolution of macroscopic multicellularity.
So this would constrain multicellularity, and only when levels of oxygen get much higher, then it would have a positive effect. So they, in a way postulate a kind of dose dependence of oxygen.
But this does not contradict the traditional hypothesis because still the high oxygen content in the Idyakaran, the supposed high oxygen content in the Idyakaran, would be postulated as reason for the complex multicellular life. But the new study definitely shows that this is not the case.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Okay? Now, if it wasn't increased oxygen that brought about the origin of multicellular life, do the study's authors offer up any other ideas?
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Not in the actual paper. In the actual paper, they just describe the new findings. But in the accompanying press release, the authors indeed offer a speculation. And they, of course, happily embrace their discovery of this opposite correlation of now low oxygen content with the idyakaran and the Avanon explosion, and basically say, well, if it's not high oxygen, that probably it was the low oxygen which was responsible for the origin of multicellular life. And so one of the co authors said in the press release verbally so again a quote so, if not extra oxygen, what triggered the era's explosion of life? Perhaps the exact opposite. But of course, that doesn't postulate any kind of causal connection. Why should low oxygen content let suddenly complex new body plants spring into being? And to me it looks a little bit like this. There's an old saying, or rather it's a logical fallacy, which is called a correlation does not imply causation, that this doesn't count too much in evolutionary biology nowadays because only because you find this correlation doesn't explain how this phenomenon came about.
So another point in this, of course, is if you have a theory which makes certain predictions and this was mainstream, accepted without questioning for 70 years, and then the theory suddenly embraces the exact opposite. This shows this theory is compatible with any kind of data. Whatever the data are, they are incorporated into the story and theories of this type, which can explain everything and can accommodate any kind of data, there is nothing that could refute the theory, are basically heuristically empty and are not good scientific theories. And so I would say this is something that counts against Darwinian evolutionary theory, that it is explaining everything and nothing.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: That's a great insight. Well, in your article, you mentioned recent communication with a paleobiologist colleague who claims to have landed on a solution to the Cambrian Explosion. Has he found a good explanation? And how does that interaction fit with these new findings about oxygen?
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Yeah, that was quite interesting, actually. The colleague is Ken Tau, who was a senior, now retired, was a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. And he contacted me and has read some of my previous articles about the Cambrian Explosion and said, but maybe you should look at my solution to the Cambrian Explosion, and maybe you have overlooked it. And indeed, I have to admit, I didn't know about his suggestion. So I looked into it. And what he did is he had two papers which are already quite long ago. One was in 1970, the other in 81. And what he showed is that there are two crucial amino acids. One is hydroxyproline, and the other is hydroxy leucine. And these amino acids are required for building up certain proteins, so called structural glucoglycoproteins, these proteins that are required to build a rigid body, which you require for more complex body types to have, let's say, collagen or skeleton EXO or endoskeleton. This is, of course, necessary to have more complex bodies. And he postulated that emergence of these two new amino acids is directly related because of the involved Chemics to a higher oxygen content. And that this explains why before, you had this boring billion where only microbes existed because the oxygen content was too low. And then gradually the oxygen content rose until it reached a certain threshold, and these two amino acid could emerge. And then, boom, you have complex life because now you can have these structural proteins. But, of course, when I looked into this, I immediately thought there are two general problems with this thing. One is that it fails to distinguish so called necessary conditions from sufficient conditions. Of course, having these structural proteins is a necessary condition to build a more complex body plan, but it doesn't explain how you get this body plan. That would be the second point is it doesn't offer any kind of causal explanation. Where does the information come from to build a new animal body plan? It doesn't pop into being just because you have two new amino acids available.
And I also, of course, objected to him that, based on this new study by austranda that there is no direct correlation of the appearance of complex first life with a higher oxygen content. But he responded that in his model, this lower oxygen content would still fit the predictions of his theory. That's fine, but the problem then is that then he loses any kind of temporal correlation of the appearance of oxygenation and appearance of complex life, because oxygenation happened already about two and a half billion years ago, and complex life originated about 500 million years ago.
So there is no direct correlation anymore. And he would explain this gap away with the old artifact hypothesis, saying, well, there were probably precursors, but they were too small or too soft bodies and were no suitable layers, and so on. You know this stuff. But this, of course, has been addressed, and it has been addressed by Steve Meyer in his book talking about the artifact Hypothesis. And I've written about it. You can also look at Evolution News on an article, the Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis. It has basically been debunked by the discovery of dozens of so called Burgess shaped localities in the Idyakaran, where you would have the sedimentological possibility to discover soft bodied small animal precursors, but there is nothing but algae. And so this artifact hypothesis has even been rejected by mainstream experts. So, to make a long story short, no, I don't think that his hypothesis based on these two amino acids solves the Cambrian Explosion at all.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Okay, so no good materialist explanations quite yet. Now, what's interesting is I was studying this story and came across a paper in the journal Science about the Avalon Explosion. The authors state that the Avalon Morphospace expansion mirrors the Cambrian Explosion, and both events may reflect similar underlying mechanisms. Now, you argue that the fossil record is discontinuous with long periods of status, punctuated by geologically sudden infusions of new information that usher in new biological diversity. What underlying mechanism then, do you think best explains life's great biological explosions?
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah, so the paper you mentioned is very interesting indeed. It's the Chanel paper from 2008 in Science about the Avalon explosion. And let me start again with a little quote from this paper which even highlights the really crucial point more.
They say a comprehensive quantitative analysis of these fossils indicates that the oldest Idyakara assemblage, the Avalon assemblage, already encompassed the full range of Idakara Morphospace. And this means in the Idyakaran, you had three different assemblages of biota. The first was the Avalon assemblage about 575 to 565,000,000 years ago. That was the first pulse of the Avalon explosion. And then you have the so called White Sea assemblage. And then finally the terminal assemblage is the Nama assemblage. But you find the full Morphospace already with the first assemblage. So right at the beginning of the Avalon explosion, not slowly developing over a long period of time. So you find exactly the same pattern as in the Cambrian explosion and the Avalon explosion. You find a sudden appearance of new body plants without precursors in the preceding layers, followed by a bloom of these body plants and a rapid diversification. And finally, a mass extinction event. And of course, if you find such a similar pattern, then it's quite obvious, or if not obvious, but at least likely, that there could be similar mechanisms at work that produce such similar patterns of the data. But on the other hand, if we now look at this new Austronder paper, then we find that the Avalon explosion correlates with low oxygen and the Cambrian explosion correlates with high oxygen. This could rather point that at least it's not the same material causes that are at work because you have very different external conditions for these two explosions. So, obviously, being an ID proponent, I have personally come to the conclusion that the best explanation for these sudden appearances are not materialistic mechanistic explanations, but that the best explanation for these bursts of biological novelty are activities of an intelligent agents and are intelligent Design. Because we know from our experience in the universe that it's only the activity of intelligent agents that can produce new specified information, because agents are goal directed and have a plan in view which they then enact.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: And similar to good storytellers who can see the end in mind, they don't release everything at once, like not all the information is in the biosphere at once. And so when we say Intelligent Design, it's not just a gaps argument. This is an argument for specific discrete deposits of new information that would be required to produce new forms of life at distinct periods in the geological timetable. So that's what we're talking about here. Well, one website that covered the story summed it up this way cheers to the scientific process. The idea is that science moves forward as previous working hypotheses are proved right or wrong by new studies and experiments. Okay, fair enough. In other words, we hold our educated guesses loosely, knowing they can and often will need to be revisited and readjusted as new evidence emerges. I mean, that's science, right? We can all agree with that. Now, does the proposal of mind as the source for these great infusions of biological information, does that stop science in its tracks? Or can science still progress with the working hypothesis of intelligent design?
[00:24:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. So first to just make a brief comment about this argument from oh, well, it's just scientific progress, which you often encounter. Also, if you follow the comments on social media, is you are stupid, you don't understand science. This is just how science goes. Data change and you update your scientific hypothesis. That's all fine, nobody denies this. The crucial point is when you always incorporate conflicting evidence with ad hoc hypothesis, that is not how science should work. So of course, you should not throw away a good scientific hypothesis with the first anomalous data. But when problematic data and conflicting evidence accumulates, which it does, as we show in the ID community when we critique neodarvitism that there's an accumulation of problems and of conflicting data, then these conflicting data should reach a threshold where you start to question your initial hypothesis and maybe even challenge your underlying paradigm. And if this doesn't happen, but you just try to rewrite your narratives, then it's no longer good science, but you're doing basically something like totally make a cosmology by creating every new EP cycle to protect your hypothesis from falsification. So second part of the question was, is it a science stopper? And I don't even understand the question. Why should it be a science stopper? Only because you allow for one different additional type of possible cause, which is totally uncontroversial in other fields, like archaeology or forensics or city.
Only if you look at cosmology and biology, suddenly it's not allowed to let the data decide if there could be another cause at work. So I would rather say naturalism is a science stopper because it based on a certain worldview which is accepted a priori. It excludes certain possible causes a priori without looking at the data. No, intelligent causes are not allowed. And I would instead say, let the data speak. Let's look at the data. Let's take our standard methodology to detect and distinguish random causes and mechanistic causes and natural law causes from intelligent causes and let the data decide instead of our worldview deciding what we can use as best explanation. This is also related a little bit to my own story because some people think I have become an intelligent design proponent because I became religious and became a religious fundamentalist, which of course I didn't. I never became a religious fundamentalist, and I didn't become an ID proponent for religious reasons, but for scientific reasons. But what I indeed realize is that I had been a religious fundamentalist in a way for the secular religion of naturalism, because there you had a kind of dogmatic view that you protected with atok hypothesis and didn't allow for any kind of thinking out of the box. So I would say, again, long story short, that naturalism is the sciencetopper and not Intelligent Design. We don't say God did it in every case. It's just let's look at the data and let the data decide which cause is the best explanation.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: Right. A very important you know, what you're saying echoes what Stephen Meyer said recently in his interview with Joe Rogan. He says science is always provisional, but there are many stable theories that have persisted because of a preponderance of evidence that points to and continues to point to the same conclusion. So important not to be too married to a particular idea, not to cherish it so much that you're willing to sacrifice the scientific process just to hold on to a particular idea.
Well, Gunter, as we wrap up here, here's a question for you. Why should we care about ancient fossils and levels of oxygen in the remote past? I mean, what possible bearing does that have on our lives today?
[00:29:01] Speaker A: Again, a good question. So first part of the question would be why care at all about fossils? So there my answer would be human beings are curious and we are interested in the big question. So in origins question where do we come from? And so on. So that's what makes us human instead of animals. And it's not for nothing that every worldview and that is not only Darwinism for naturalism, but every religion in the world has a kind of creation story which shows totally independent from the question if any of them are true or not, but that humans are interested in this question how did everything come about? How did animals originate? How did humans originate? How did this world that we see around us originate? So that is one reason why I think it's important to look at fossils because there we have this kind of window into ancient past where we can not just speculate, but really see what happened in the past. And the second part of your question would of course be this kind of are there any practical consequences possible bearing on our lives? And there I think there is indeed a very big difference. If it turns out if naturalism should be right and we are just a cosmic accident in a universe, as Richard Dawkins said, of blind, pitiless indifference, then this is of course very different. It makes a lot of difference for how we feel and how we think about ourselves. As if it should turn out that mind is involved in is fundamental and is involved in the origin of the universe and the history of life, because this would open a window for true purpose and true meaning, which makes all the difference for us. We are beings who long for meaning. And if we should find that the universe is full of meaning, it's a very different place to live in, as in a meaningless universe. So I think it makes a big difference for our lives.
And this of course, doesn't mean that again, any particular religion or origin story is correct. You would need different inferences to explore this question. But at least as soon as we have evidence which, for example, the design inference can provide that mind and activity of an intelligent mind is involved in this whole process, then there is the window open for meaning and purpose, because mind intrinsically is about meaning. Mind is always about something. So meaning is built into the workings of mind. And so I think this really is important and really is something that people will find to make a difference in their daily lives, at least if they think about such questions.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. And there's a lot of talk about being authentic and being true to yourself. Well, when it comes to the big questions. Yes, live out what you're believing. And if you think this is all an accident, that's going to come out in how you treat people, how you live, the purpose you find. And if you think it's not an accident, if you think mind is involved even in the remote past, you're going to live a different way, and you're going to be indeed true to yourself. So that's a challenge for us all. Well, Gunter, it's such a delight to connect with you again. Thanks so much for giving us your time and an update on this story.
[00:32:43] Speaker A: This was my pleasure.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: Well, to learn more about Dr. Beckley's work, visit his website. It's WW beckley. At that's bechlyat, you can stream or download more episodes of ID, the future on your favorite podcast platform, be it Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts and more. You might also be interested to know that each episode can be played on YouTube now, so you can turn there and listen to it as well. For more resources on each episode, visit idthefuture.com. Until next time, andrew McDermott for Idthefuture thanks for listening.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
