Major Fossil Find in Australian Cave 07/31/2002
A “find of a lifetime” – perfectly preserved Pleistocene mammal
skeletons, including those of marsupial “lions” – has been
made in a cave in western Australia, reports
National
Geographic. The article says, “The bones are in such good
condition that [paleontologist John] Long collected DNA samples from
several specimens, which he hopes to use to accurately date the remains.
The DNA will also be used to establish evolutionary links to modern marsupials
in Australia today.”
Very fascinating discovery, but what’s
evolution got to do with it? This is extinction, not evolution.
The modern world is impoverished of larger and more diverse species
that lived in the past. And if DNA can be extracted for dating, what
will this reveal about the true age of these bones, not just their assumed
age based on the geologic column? It would seem DNA would degrade
in much less time than Pleistocene age estimates would permit.
Next headline on: Fossils. •
Next headline on: Mammals.
Protein Evolution Recipe: Add a Pinch of Mutation and Stir 07/31/2002
In protein evolution, a lot of recombination mixed in with a little
mutation provides the best results, say two scientists publishing in
Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences. Proteins, made of long
chains of amino acids, have an uncanny ability to fold into just the
right stable structure out of an enormous field of possible folds.
How do they do it? How do proteins change through time and keep
stable thermodynamically? For their mathematical
model, Xia and Levitt simplified a three-dimensional problem down to two
dimensions, and ignored population size and evolutionary time. They
also used just short sequences – just 25 elements instead of the
hundreds in most proteins.
By adjusting the ratio of mutation to recombination, they were able to
get sequences to converge on the “prototype sequence” (i.e.,
the largest set of sequences that folded into the same basic
structure). This, they feel, may provide a solution to the
“Levinthal Paradox” – “given the exponential size
of the sequence space, how does evolution find the optimal sequence
in a reasonable amount of time when the fitness landscape is flat?”
They compare the ratio of recombination and mutation to temperature,
and conclude: “Nature is able to adjust the ‘temperature’
of evolution by tuning the relative rates of recombination and mutation.”
There are three major fallacies in this paper that destroy its
whole premise.
- Personification. You just saw them personify Nature
as a purposeful, intelligent being, working to solve the problem of protein
optimization by adjusting the controls.
This is the fallacy
of personification, a technical foul that throws them out of the
game. Personalities, allegorical or not, are disallowed in
evolutionary thinking.
- Oversimplification. They deal with short chains in only two
dimensions, which is simplistic enough (because the complexity increases
exponentially if they approach real-world protein dynamics), but they
also put no requirement for function on their sequences. They get
sequences to converge on an arbitrary shape, but what good is it?
What does it do? If it has no function, it is a worthless blob of
stuff. Here we have the twin fallacies of
glittering generalities and
extrapolation.
- Voodoo Economics. They pull information out of recombination and
mutation (see a similar theory reported
here July 9).
They admit that the vast majority of mutations are
lethal, harmful or (at best) neutral, but fail to give one example of
a mutation that, even with recombination, generates anything that is
useful or even interesting. They admit that “Mutation alone
results in native sequences that are far from optimal,” but the word
optimal (used often in the paper) implies information (think
about it). You cannot get information out of nothing.
William Dembski could say after reading
this paper, “The Lord hath delivered mine enemy into my hands.”
A major point of his recent book
No Free Lunch
is that you cannot get complex specified information without intelligence;
neither chance nor natural laws nor any combination of the two can produce
it. Invariably, in evolutionary models and algorithms like this one
(and Dembski proves it mathematically and illustrates it profusely),
evolutionists sneak in pre-existing information, and, like magicians pulling
items out of a sleeve or a magic hat while distracting the viewer, lead the
reader, dazzled with the graphs and equations and technical jargon, to think
he generated complex specified information de novo ex nihilo.
You just saw it right here, and we exposed the trick: they just overcame
Levinthal’s Paradox by treating recombination and mutation under
the guidance of Mother Nature as sources of new information.
Dembski proves this is as impossible as creating a perpetual
motion machine. If you do the bookkeeping, no evolutionary algorithm is
any better than random search. If it appears to locate a target, even
an unplanned one that improves “fitness” or whatever, in any
generalized phase space, it relies for its success on another phase space
of algorithms that must also be searched for a proper target algorithm, because
the phase space of algorithms also includes blind search. An
illustration he uses is that you can find a treasure (fitness) with a
treasure map (evolutionary algorithm), but without prior input of information
(which map is the right one), you have so many possible treasure maps to
search through that you are no better off than if you randomly searched
the island for the treasure with a shovel.
This principle applies generally, and is
guaranteed by the recently-proved No Free Lunch Theorems. Without
prior information that can restrict the number of maps to a subset
that has reasonable chance of success in the time allowed, you are stuck
with random walk.
Proteins contain complex specified information, because
the sequences they contain and the precise fold they achieve are tiny
subsets of the vast sea of possible sequences and folds, and they provide
useful functions for life. These scientists snuck in the information that
gave their model proteins the necessary hints to help them converge
on the target. This is cheating. There ain’t
no such
thing as a free lunch. The only acceptable algorithm, when playing
by naturalistic rules (i.e., no sneaking in prior information), is blind
search. With that constraint, the probability of a
usable protein by chance is so low, it would
never happen in trillions times quintillions of universes.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.
Living Network Keeps Vision Sharp 07/30/2002
Nature
Science Update reports on a paper in the Aug. 15 issue of
Development
about how your eye’s retina keeps a sharp focal plane.
A team of Italian scientists found that the
rod and cone cells interact to form a living web, keeping them equally
spaced in a thin monolayer. The web is composed of
microtubules in dendrite “arms” that grab their neighbors
and pull, keeping the cells at arm’s length like a group of
children holding hands and pulling outward into a tight circle.
Cells in the retina are exquisitely
ordered into horizontal layers and vertical columns that help them
process an image. ... Like a troop of identical soldiers with boots,
coats and caps aligned, cells that detect light lie in one layer
while those that send connections to the brain lie in another.
This ensures that light landing on a receptor is carried directly
down a column of cells and on to the brain.
Cells also lie at fixed distances from one another. They are packed
most closely at the centre of the eye, where our vision is sharpest.
The researchers were able to disrupt the network with a drug,
turning the dissected retina into a tangled mass. When the drug was
removed, the network reformed and became taut again. By
pulling each other’s strings to form this thin, tight
layer, the eye achieves optimum focus and sharpness. Nature
says, “This helps to build the exquisite architecture of the
retina that discerns fine details.”
Now, wait a minute... evolutionists
have been telling us for years that the
vertebrate eye
is a bad design
(dysteleology), because the photoreceptors are behind the
nerves, making the light have to go past a thicket of nerve cells
before hitting the receptors. So is the human eye an example
of “exquisite architecture” or not? Your eyeball has
120 megapixel resolution.
It performs with arguably the best
of all possible optics.
Is that good enough to qualify as exquisite? Human engineering is
crude compared to the
design that is staring us in the face.
No
eyes are so blind as
those
that will not see.
Next headline on: Human Body. •
Next amazing story.
Chickens and Turtles Are Sisters 07/30/2002
Chickens and turtles belong to sister groups, according to a new
phylogenetic study by two Glasgow evolutionists published in the
Royal
Society Biological Proceedings
Aug. 7
issue. In “Going nuclear: gene family evolution and
vertebrate phylogeny reconciled,” Cotton and Page got a
database of 118 vertebrate gene families to match the standard
textbook family tree (more or less). Recognizing all the
things that can happen to genes over time, they admit “it
can be very difficult to reconstruct potential evolutionary
scenarios.” Tree-builders haven’t had much luck
lately, they say:
Given the great deal of support for much of the current pattern of
vertebrate relationships, it is surprising how poorly molecular methods
have fared in reconstructing the broad outline of vertebrate
evolution. This is particularly worrying in the case of
mitochondrial genome sequences, which are relatively large markers that
have been thought of as ideal for phylogenetic work and are certainly
very commonly used.
They show two example trees built from molecular evidence that differ
markedly, and put strange bedfellows on the same branches, like wallaroos
with cows, snakes with hagfish, or humans with blue whales. To
throw their entry into the ring, these researchers used a technique
called “gene tree parsimony” that assumes a certain rate of
gene duplication and loss, and assumes the gene tree is known without
error. Noting certain other assumptions and potential problems,
they came up with a “reconciled tree” for vertebrates that
roughly matches trees inferred from fossils and external appearances
of animals, but admit there are important unknowns:
Finally, our method assumes that gene duplication and gene loss are the
only processes introducing disparity between gene and species
trees. Gene duplications have clearly been important in
vertebrates, as shown by the existence of many complex gene families in
vertebrate genomes ... but we cannot rule out that other processes
might introduce incongruence between gene and species trees.
Their resulting “reconciled tree” is then revealed,
with caveats: “In contrast to evidence from
mitochondrial sequences, our results largely agree with traditional views
on vertebrate phylogeny, but add new evidence to support some controversial
ideas ...” One example of controversy is putting the
coelacanth fish near the tetrapods
(four-footed animals): “the discovery
of the extant coelacanth Latimeria revealed many untetrapod-like
features ... casting doubt on how conclusive the morphological data
really are.” Another controversial result dealt with where
birds and reptiles fit on the tree: “The results of our analysis are
unconventional in placing turtles as the closest relative of birds....”
Molecular
phylogeny is a computer game played by evolutionists. The object of
the game is to force-fit puzzle pieces into a huge imaginary picture of common
ancestry. Look at the tweaking and assuming and omitting
and rigging they had to do to get their data to fit their target
tree, and still some strange results popped up. (Ask your parakeet if
it is the sister of your pet turtle.) We have been told with
aplomb that birds came from dinosaurs, and that story has been enshrined
in Jurassic Park; now are we to believe that turtles are the closest
relatives to our feathered friends?
If you had read just the bluffing title or abstract of
this paper, you would have been led to believe evolutionists have
solved their problems and can celebrate victory: “gene
family evolution and vertebrate phylogeny reconciled.” Hurrah!
Let the party begin! It is only to the skeptical inquirer (if you
will pardon the expression) that the damaging admissions come to light.
We hate being a party pooper at the Royal Society ball, but someone needs
to call “fowl” here if the chicken-turtle soup will make you ill.
Related story: Next headline on: Darwinism and
Evolutionary Theory.
SETI Turns Up Anomalous Signal 07/29/2002
Astronomy Picture
of the Day for July 28 shows what an anomalous signal from the SETI
project looks like. Scanning the skies for signals of extra-terrestrial
intelligence, once in awhile a signal of unknown origin arouses interest
and hope, but usually there is a terrestrial explanation. Scientists
must rule out all human explanations before inferring the possibility of
a signal from aliens. This one is probably coming from a GPS satellite.
The SETI project underscores the validity of
the main intelligent design arguments. Even though most SETI researchers
are evolutionists, they know that a radio transmission through space can
be an indicator of intelligent design. In the movie Contact
based on the novel by the avid SETI enthusiast Carl Sagan, radio astronomers
detected a series of 100 prime numbers and knew such a signal could have
no natural cause. William Dembski has elaborated on this and many
other indicators of intelligent causes in his recent book
No Free
Lunch. He provides a mathematical proof that information of
sufficient complexity that conforms to an independent specification is a
reliable indicator of intelligence, and that such “complex specified
information” can never arise by natural causes, chance, or any
combination of the two. In practice, this is what SETI researchers
believe, yet evolutionists have summarily denounced
Dembski’s book because it rules out the naturalistic origin
and evolution of life. So then why is SETI operating by the same
principle, that complex specified information indicates intelligence?
Some evolutionists respond that any signal detected by
SETI would be coming from other beings like us, that evolved by mutation
and natural selection. But they cannot prove that. There would
be no way for them to know the transmitters were not angels or demons.
Intelligent agents can be notoriously sneaky; demons could be liars,
impersonating aliens that claim to have evolved. Remember the old Twilight
Zone episode “How to serve man”? The aliens’ manual
seemed so thoughtful, till the human victims realized it was a cookbook.
An entire TV series “V” was once built on this plot, that
“the alien visitors - our friends,” though outwardly kind and
compassionate, were really devious monsters intent on farming humans for
food. The Bible predicts that the “father of lies,” Satan, will
deceive
many in the last days with
signs and lying wonders.
Wouldn’t SETI be the ideal platform for a world-wide deception!
Even in Contact, it was hard to tell whether the shape-shifted alien
talking to Jodi Foster was a carbon unit or some kind of spirit-being.
The point is, if SETI does turn up an intelligent signal some day, it will
provide no support for evolution, because we will be unable to validate the
true nature, and integrity,
of the senders. But one thing we will know for certain; the
message came from a mind, and that is what illustrates Dembski’s
point so well. Evolutionists just hate it when somebody uses their own
logic against them.
Next headline on: SETI. •
Next headline on: Intelligent Design.
Smile Your Way to Long Life 07/29/2002
Your attitude about aging can give you a new lease on life, or
drive you to the grave, says the American Psychological Association
in a report summarized on
EurekAlert.
A longitudinal study of 660 Ohio residents showed that a positive
outlook could increase life span by 7.5 years on the average.
There are many factors in these kinds
of studies; diet and exercise play their part, as do genetics and
the environment. But it makes sense that attitude is an
important factor for health. These researchers should have just
read the words of the wise
king
Solomon, who said long
ago, “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken
spirit dries up the bones.” This illustrates what the eminent
British astronomer John Herschel said, “All human discoveries seem
to be made only for
the purpose of confirming more and more strongly the truths that come on
high and are contained in the
sacred writings.”
Two great scientists of faith featured in our online
book The World’s Greatest Creation Scientists
knew how to age gracefully. Samuel F. B.
Morse said late in life, “The nearer I approach the end of my
pilgrimage, the clearer is the evidence of the divine origin of the
Bible, the grandeur and sublimity of God's remedy for fallen man are
more appreciated, and the future is illumined with hope and joy.”
Michael Faraday as an elderly man was asked
if he had any speculations
about the afterlife. He responded, “Speculations? Man,
I have none. I am resting on certainties.” Then he
quoted II Timothy 1:12,
“I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep
that which I have committed unto him against that day.”
For those, like Morse and Faraday, who trust God’s
promises revealed in his word,
old
age is a blessing from God and a reason for hope and joy. If
God
is with us to the very end of our lives, and
death
is graduation to heaven, what is there
to fear? Moses said,
“So teach us
to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.•
And for the young who are too busy with fun and adventure to even think
about the distant horizon of old age, Solomon advised,
“Remember
your Creator in the days of your youth,” well before the bodily
aches and pains of old age set in. Good attitudes must start early,
especially the fear
of the Lord which leads to life.
Next headline on: Health. •
Next headline on: Bible.
When Your Emergency Response Team Fails, Cancer Can Result 07/26/2002
Each cell in your body has a team of enzymes called
DNA Damage Response.
Like a skilled repair team, they know exactly how to fix all kinds of
DNA emergencies: double-stranded breaks, broken tips, unraveled ends, and
dozens of other potential problems. Many cancer cells
exhibit unrepaired DNA and instability in the chromosomes.
In a special section on genome stability in the July 26 issue of
Science,
Paula Kiberstis and Jean Marx explain that “For a cell, maintaining
the integrity of its genome is of paramount importance. If it
fails in this task and manages to divide anyway, both of its daughter
cells may inherit an abnormal chromosome complement, with potentially
dire consequences.”
A current debate among biochemists revolves around whether the damage
causes cancer, or the cancer causes the damage.
They introduce three papers that deal with evidence that failures in
DNA damage repair are implicated in many types of cancer, and conclude,
“Whatever the outcome of these debates, the quest for answers has
certainly produced many fascinating insights into the molecular weaponry
that enables a cell to defend the integrity of its genome.”
Do you hear the language of intelligent
design in these statements? Molecular weaponry, integrity,
damage response – find a rock or body of liquid that takes this
kind of care of itself. The moon hasn’t repaired its craters,
but your body flies into action to clot its cuts and heal its wounds.
Now we realize that on the molecular level of the cell, a large team of
programmed tools and processes are present to handle every contingency.
It is only on the very rare occasions when the DDR team is overwhelmed that an
error slips through, but even then, backup systems often go into action.
Most of the time we don’t even know that something
went wrong and got fixed, silently and without fanfare, to keep us on
our feet. If we knew how many times the DDR team had a big problem
to solve just under our skin, and cancer got arrested just in the nick of time,
would probably go into shock. When and why it fails sometimes, to some
people and not others (and to all of us eventually), are questions for
theologians. Meanwhile, if you are healthy right now, thank God for
the DDR, your unsung heroes, working tirelessly 24x7 without ever getting
an award.
Next headline on: Health. •
Next headline on: Human Body. •
Next amazing story.
The Hopeless Task of Building Evolutionary Trees 07/25/2002
A paper posted in the online early addition July 25 of the
Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences starts out with an optimistic subtitle:
“An efficient solution for the problem of large phylogeny
estimation,” but then opens with a tone of despair:
Optimality criterion-based phylogeny inference is a notoriously difficult
endeavor because the number of solutions increases explosively with the
number of taxa. Indeed, the total number of possible unrooted,
bifurcating tree topologies among T-terminal taxa ... [corresponds]
to nearly 32 billion different trees for 14 taxa and 3 X 1084
trees (i.e., more than the number of atoms in the known universe) for 55
taxa. ... As most mathematicians expect that no such algorithm [i.e.,
polynomial time solution] exists, one is forced to admit that no future
civilization will ever build a computer capable of solving the problem
while guaranteeing that the optimal solution has been found.
Instead of number-crunching the impossible, the authors propose a heuristic
approach. Heuristic approaches sacrifice the goal of getting an
optimal tree in hopes of getting one faster that has maximum likelihood
(ML). Lemmon and Milinkovitch wrote a computer program that converges
quicker on an ML model with larger number of taxa. They call theirs
the “metapopulation genetic algorithm.” It is a
quasi-Darwinian model that tries to optimize trees based on mutations
and selection, and it can incorporate
rate heterogeneity estimates into the
model. The authors try their program on real and imaginary
populations and compare their results with other heuristic methods.
Were you ever told in biology class that
generating a phylogenetic tree from the raw data was mathematically
impossible, and that no future civilization would ever overcome
this barrier? Probably not, yet textbooks are replete with
neat, authoritative-looking phylogenetic trees. So how do they
determine them? By heuristic methods, which by translation,
means guesswork, inference, trial-and-error, hunches and hope.
Their model incorporates a number of optimization parameters, such as
rate heterogeneity, which means that not all
genes mutate at the same rate, and branch length,
the presumed evolutionary distance between taxa.
The tweak space is enormous, and they already have a mental picture
of what they want, so this whole approach is based on
circular reasoning. If the program
outputs a tree that agrees with the evolutionary assumptions, is scores
high; otherwise, it is rejected. Does this provide any confidence
that evolution is being confirmed empirically? Is this how scientists
in our universities should be spending their time, playing Darwinian
computer games?
Instead of explaining how mutation and natural
selection could produce a Monarch butterfly or a
finch or a peppered moth in the first place, scientific papers on evolution
seem obsessed with trying to uncover phylogenetic relationships that
are impossible to calculate objectively or verify independently without
begging the question whether common ancestry is even true.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.
What Does a Fossil Bird Eat? Fossil Seeds! 07/24/2002
A new species of fossil bird, Jeholornis prima, has been discovered in China,
reports CNN,
that provides “important clues about how animals
lived and evolved.” What clues? Well,
the article states, “Scientists said the skeletal structure shows
that this bird was capable of powerful flight, but was also built to
sit in trees. Those discoveries provide a further relationship
between birds and some theropods, the carnivorous dinosaurs of the
Jurassic and Cretaceous periods that walked on two legs and had small,
grasping forelimbs.” Anything else? It had a long tail,
resembling Dromeosaurs, which are presumed related to birds. And it ate
seeds. What does that imply? According to Thomas Holz,
paleontologist at the University of Maryland, “The other birds we
know of at this time were probably meat eaters, fish, or insect eaters,
based on their teeth. This guy was sort of a pioneer, giving us
the oldest evidence so far that birds ate plants.” The
discovery is announced in the
July
25 issue of Nature.
Let us ask again, looking at just
the raw data, what’s evolution got to do with it? Here
we have a specimen that was 100% bird. It had large wings and was probably
a strong flyer, it perched in trees, and ate seeds. So do many
birds today. It had a gizzard. So do birds today.
It had a long tail. So do some birds today.
It is extinct. So are some birds today. From the reconstruction,
it looks like Jeholornis was a pretty handsome bird, not a transitional
form. Put it in a zoo and nobody would think it was evolving out of
Dinotopia. Where is the evolution, we ask, if not in the imagination
of the evolutionists, who seem compelled to perch all their birds in
ancestral trees?
Next headline on: Birds. •
Next headline on: Fossils.
Evolution, the Cover Story of U.S. News 07/23/2002
The July 29 issue of US News and World Report
is devoted to “The New Reality of Evolution” with four
articles:
- How evolution works, and why it matters more than ever by Thomas Hayden.
- Species, life’s mystery packages by Jessica Ruvinsky.
- Evolution timeline: an idea’s brilliant career.
- Life’s Grand Design: a new breed of anti-evolutionists credits it to an
unnamed intelligence by Holly J. Morris.
That last article, about the Intelligent Design movement and its
critics, is one of the longest in the series and forms the last word.
Presenting both sides of the controversy, it mentions the debate going on
in Ohio about whether the school board should allow alternatives to Darwinism.
On July 30, Don Batten of
Answers
in Genesis wrote a critique of the series.
If you can just get your logical mind
past the smokescreen that says “evolution is science, creation
is religion,” you are ready to enter graduate school in
baloney detecting. Evolutionists cannot,
for the life of them, get that through their skulls that naturalism
is atheistic philosophy masquerading as science.
Atheism is just as “religious” as any religion or philosophy,
and creation is just as “scientific” as evolution in terms of
defining an interpretive framework for the data (which are accessible
to both sides). Evolution extends far beyond anything that can
be observed or tested. The minor changes observed in genes and
bacteria do not justify an interpretive framework that wants to explain
giant Sequoias from algae, or blue whales from (ultimately) hydrogen.
The scientific method was brought into being by Christians
and creationists who believed, without reservation, in intelligent
design. It was the belief in design, regularity, and natural
law that motivated them to explore the wonders of nature that had been
designed by a transcendent, omnipresent God, specifically the God
of Scripture. Yes, nature obeys natural law, but natural laws did
not bring nature into being; that demanded intelligent design.
While frustrating to see US News call evolution
reality on its cover, and repeat so many of the evolutionists’
favorite disfactoids, it is heartening to see the news media
give prominent place to the case for intelligent design. Even in
the pro-evolution articles, they do mention some prominent questions that
anti-evolutionists have raised. But reporters, like most lay people,
tend to stand in awe of scientists and accept as truth whatever they are
told. They cannot be expected to discern truth from error when told
whoppers like “Scientists have confirmed virtually all of Darwin’s
postulates” or that evolution is helping us understand modern
medicine. If the reporters had been regular readers of
Creation-Evolution Headlines, they would know better.
There is not one postulate of evolution that we have not shown, from
the best evolutionary sources themselves, to be other than vaporware
or tall-tale telling, when examined in detail under the
baloney detector. Need examples?
Try this, or
this one
(compare our report with the first paragraph of their
first
article). Need more? Try
this
one, or this or this
among many others (work your way through the Chain Links on Darwinism for
a lot more). Everything you have been taught about evolution is wrong,
and they admit it, one detail at a time, until you step back and notice
that all the details add up to a different picture entirely.
Meanwhile, discoveries about the complexity of life
are choking evolutionary theory all shades of blue and purple.
Suggestion: switch the science reporters with the Capitol
Hill reporters. Get the political reporters to ask the same kinds
of hard-hitting questions to the scientists, where like Phillip Johnson
suggests, they refuse to take bluff or evasion for an answer.
Now that would be freedom of the press.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. •
Next headline on: Intelligent Design. •
Next headline on: Education.
Gene Expression More Complicated Than Thought 07/22/2002
Scientists used to think one gene produced one protein, and that a gene
was an uninterrupted sequence of DNA code. No longer. Genes
actually have coded regions, called exons, interspersed by non-coding
regions called introns. There may be many introns per gene, and
somehow the cell knows how to cut them out before making messenger RNA,
which then delivers the code to the ribosome, where proteins are made.
Are the introns just junk, then, destined for the
cutting-room floor? Apparently not. The introns are involved
in helping determine which exons get joined together, and by “alternative
splicing,” the cell can get more mileage out of the gene.
Some genes can code for several forms of a protein, depending on the
order in which the exons are spliced together. Scientists at
the University
of California, Santa Cruz have developed new techniques to try to
understand how cells make sense of all the pieces. Manuel
Ares explains (emphasis added):
The coding sequences of our genes are all broken up and spread out, and
there is a whole cellular machinery involved in patching it together
so that the code makes sense. This splicing process gives the cell
the ability to try new combinatorial arrangements of
information. You have all this information in the genome, but
then the cell can interpret it in different ways.
The press release says that genes are turning out to be much more
complicated than originally thought. “Differences in the
editing of genetic information may, in fact, be a significant source
of genetic variability. Researchers ... have now taken a big step
toward understanding how this editing process (known as splicing)
is regulated.”
Think of letters being organized into
words: that is like the DNA code, which has a suite of spell checkers
and proofreaders to be sure the words are spelled correctly. But
the words need to be organized into sentences and paragraphs.
At this level, too,
something is controlling the sentences and paragraphs of DNA words so
that the result “makes sense,” as the article states.
And just as words can be reorganized into many different sentences, and
sentences into different paragraphs, cells can organize the coded
information in numerous ways. All this is made possible by another
regulatory layer made up of
protein machines and systems that cut, splice, arrange, restore, and
proofread the sentences and paragraphs before the blueprint goes out
to the ribosome factory. It’s incredible.
This area of gene expression, with the possibility of
epigenetic factors (i.e., above-gene) regulating how genes are
cut and spliced under different circumstances and within different cells,
is one of the hottest new areas in cell biology. It adds a
whole new level of complexity to a system (gene transcription) that was
already astonishing in its complexity and elegance. The cell
almost seems designed to resist evolutionary explanations; there is
nothing in the elemental properties of molecules that would make them
want to do these things — without programming.
Notice how Dr. Ares emphasized
the word information. Information is a massless, colorless,
odorless entity that can turn collections of letters into books, keystrokes
into software, and metal into robots. Information never arises
without intelligence, but with intelligent design, the possibilities for
information and function are boundless. Nature can produce letters,
but only Shakespeare can organize them into Hamlet.
Nature can produce notes, but only Beethoven can mold them into a
Pastoral Symphony. Nature can produce chemicals, but only
God can make a tree.
Next headline on: The Cell. •
Next headline on: Intelligent Design. •
Next amazing story.
Grand Canyon Young, Carved Quickly 07/22/2002
The signs are going to have to change at Grand Canyon viewpoint
displays, if new theories of its formation described on
EurekAlert
become the new standard. No longer will visitors be told that slow,
gradual erosion over millions of years carved this classic example
of uniformitarian processes. The new paradigm might well
describe how massive dam breaks scoured out major portions of the
canyon, including Marble Canyon and the inner gorge, within days or even
hours — and not millions of years ago, but 700,000 or less.
“Grand Canyon Geologic Infant” reads the headline.
Evidence is mounting that much more water flowed down the Colorado River
in the recent past.
Some geologists have found evidence of Pleistocene flows 37 times higher
than the largest known Mississippi flood. The article states,
“USGS scientist and University of Arizona graduate Jim O’Connor,
along with UA hydrologist Victor Baker and others, also has found evidence
of a 400,000 cfs [cubic feet per second] flow that occurred about 4,000
years ago. The only flow that is comparable to Pleistocene flows
would be if Glen Canyon Dam failed.” Some flow estimates go higher
than a million cubic feet per second.
On the western end,
a series of volcanic lava flows dammed the canyon several times, forming
lakes that filled quickly and broke catastrophically, “almost
instantaneously.” Using the cosmogenic
radionuclide method,
they dated one of the lava flows at only 1300 years old. The steep
nature of Marble Canyon and the Inner Gorge, like slot canyons, are indicative
of rapid downcutting, the geologists say. The latest issue of
the journal Geology
also has a paper on Grand Canyon.
“Did it take a little water a lot of time, or a lot of water a
little time?” is a riddle posed often by creation geologists.
This year’s official Grand Canyon newsletter, handed out to visitors
at the entrance stations, is already mentioning the latter as gaining
acceptance by geologists. Each year at
the canyon rim, ICR scientists have made
the case that the canyon shows evidence of rapid erosion. There is
a major paradigm shift taking place among uniformitarian geologists, based on
what — religious bias or Biblical literalism? No — the
evidence. Why not turn the claim of bias around and say that the millions
of years story was based on uniformitarian bias? Increasingly,
uniformitarianism, championed by Charles Lyell in the 1800s and taken
for granted for 150 years, has been seen to be just that, a bias that
colored the interpretation of geological formations and stretched them
falsely into millions of years of gradual processes. If
Grand Canyon, the textbook example,
has been shown to be a youthful feature formed quickly, then what of the
others?
Actually, this story needs further revision.
There is also evidence that the layers themselves formed quickly; huge boulders
of Shinumo quartzite in the Tapeats sandstone; no evidence of
multimillion-year time gaps between the Muav and Temple Butte formations, between the Hermit and
Coconino layers, and between the Kaibab and Toroweap limestones;
the vast extent of uniform strata, such as the highly-crossbedded
Coconino sandstone, are examples. Other evidence indicates the
upper parts of the canyon were also carved quickly. The
Redwall limestone’s amphitheater-shaped side canyons appear to have been
formed by sapping, and higher-elevation structures along the rim such as
Cedar Mountain and Red Butte appear to be remnants of an episode of sheet
erosion on a gigantic scale. In addition, the million-year radioactive
dates commonly attributed to Grand Canyon lava flows have been called
into question by creation geologists doing independent research.
These and many other evidences are discussed in ICR’s excellent book
Grand
Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe. You will never look at
Grand Canyon the same.
Now that secular geologists are coming up with
interpretations that are increasingly similar to those of creationists,
let this be a lesson from history. Generations of tourists have been
fed a flawed story based on philosophical presuppositions. They were
not given alternatives. The story was presented with all the authority
of establishment science, and undoubtedly caused many unprepared tourists
to doubt the Genesis record. Now, in our time, we have watched a
startling reversal of a story that seemed etched in stone. What other
uniformitarian stories, like dams with cracks, are posed for a monumental
collapse? We have numerous candidates right here; check through our
Chain Links on Geology and Dating Methods for examples.
Next headline on: Geology. •
Next headline on: Dating Methods.
DVD of Intelligent Design Documentary
Released 07/19/2002
The recent film on Intelligent Design,
Unlocking the Mystery of
Life (March 2002), has just come out on DVD.
The DVD version contains over 45 minutes of additional
resources, including lists of references, original footage from the
Galápagos Islands, and 14 frequently asked questions answered by
the scientists in the film (Behe, Meyer, Johnson, Dembski, Nelson, Wells,
Minnich and Kenyon): questions such as, What are the limits of
natural selection? How complex is a cell? What is the
information content of the human genome? What is the most striking
aspect of the bacterial flagellum? Is Intelligent Design
a means of inserting religion into science? What is
irreducible complexity? How did Darwin propose a test that could
falsify his theory? What is the status and future of
intelligent design? The DVD is
available here and from
Illustra Media.
Next headline on: Movies. •
Next headline on: Intelligent Design.
Cheating Scientists Arouse Concern, Stimulate Policy Changes 07/19/2002
Plagiarism, falsifying data, lying about discoveries, stealing
secrets – these and other dishonest practices among university
researchers are on the increase and causing concern in the
scientific community. Recently, for instance, Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory fired a physicist for lying about the alleged
discovery of two new atomic elements (Nature Science Update, July 18).
According to
Science
July 19, the Department of Health and Human Services is asking for
feedback on its new report Integrity and Scientific Research,
which it figures will arouse disagreement on both definitions and
enforcement. Last week (June 11),
Nature printed
several stories about scientific misconduct, urging scientific
organizations to wise up and clean up their act.
How did integrity evolve? Was it
like the evolution of altruism,
another case of game theory among the selfish genes? From an
impersonal beginning devoid of moral content, where did humans gain
an intrinsic feel for the correctness of “Thou shalt not steal” and
“Thou shalt not covet”? Can something come from nothing?
Next headline on: Politics.
Quasar Packs Iron Punch 07/19/2002
A young quasar has too much iron – nearly three times what our
Solar System has. This is surprising, because conventional
wisdom would say iron takes a long time to be created out of old
supernovas to be so abundant in a young quasar. Astronomers
at the Max Planck
Society explain the conundrum:
Where does iron come from? According
to astrophysicists, iron, like all other heavy elements, is created in
the center of massive stars and is expelled into space once these stars
explode as supernovae at the end of their lives. The material then
mixes with the interstellar matter and may form new stars and planetary
systems. Our solar system was formed after several generations of
stars and therefore contains enough heavy elements like iron, oxygen etc.
to form Earth-like planets which can sustain life. ...
We observe the quasar at a time when the universe was only about 1.5
billion years old; in contrast, our sun was formed 9 billion years
after the Big Bang. This is significant in that the center of
this young quasar already contains a larger fraction of iron than our
much older solar system. Either there is a previously unknown
much more efficient way of producing iron, or, at the time when the
quasar emitted its light, the universe was already older than expected. ...
The iron abundance is of such significance because iron represents a
kind of “cosmic clock”: all heavy elements were produced
after the Big Bang in the interior of stars by the processes described
previously. The creation of iron took considerable time: at least
1.5 billion years to produce the metal abundances of our sun. It
is therefore highly surprising that an object as young as the quasar
AMP 08279+5255 already contained a larger fraction of iron than our sun
which is much older. Either there is a more efficient way of
producing iron - some kind of “iron factory” - or the
universe, at a redshift of 4, is already older than previously
expected. ...
Even a very high rate of type-I supernovae can only partly explain the
observations of large amounts of iron, they say. They choose to
believe instead that the universe must be older than assumed, perhaps
due to the recently-claimed cosmological constant (dark energy) that
is accelerating the expansion of the universe.
What do you do with anomalies?
Scientific theories are rarely neat and clean; there are usually
irritating pieces of data that don’t fit. Sometimes it is
the irritating piece that yields the fundamental new insight or
overturns the paradigm. These scientists have chosen not to question the
Big
Bang paradigm and conventional theories of nucleosynthesis, but
to rescue them by positing the universe must be older than expected,
due to some kind of mysterious
dark energy, where “dark”
means undetectable, unobservable, inferred, hypothetical, or imaginary.
Next headline on: Stars. •
Next headline on: Dating Methods. •
Next headline on: Cosmology.
Odd Crested Pterosaur Discovered 07/19/2002
Two Brazilian paleontologists report the discovery of a new
kind of pterosaur, Thallasodromeus sethi, that had a
large, thin bony crest. The crest appears to have been
filled with blood vessels and may have functioned as a heat
exchanger. The shape of its long beak suggests it skimmed
over the water to scoop up fish.
The paper is published in the
July 19
issue of Science. A popular account with artist’s
reconstruction can be found on
MSNBC.com
There do not appear to be any
transitional forms leading up to this creature. Like most
dinosaurs, it appears abruptly in the record, fully formed, fully
adapted, without gradual precursors.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs. •
Next headline on: Fossils.
Debate 07/19/2002: Some of the most vocal
advocates for and against the intelligent design movement square off
on Research News in
Science and Theology Online, and the sparks really fly.
Defending I.D. are Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe and William Dembski;
opposing it are Michael Ruse, Robert Pennock and Eugenie Scott.
We applaud these rare opportunities for
both sides to be heard. One thing should be clear; human emotions
run high even in intellectual circles. You’ll need a good
Baloney Detector to dissipate the heat from the
light. There’s plenty of ridicule, loaded words, second-guessing,
irrelevant analogies, bandwagon, authority and circular reasoning to
dodge in your hunt for arguments of merit (when reading Scott, notice
the best-in-field fallacy and
shifting the burden of proof). The moderator, while recognizing
the need for honest presentation on both sides of
important issues, so impugns scientific creationism that he considers it his
duty to move readers away from that position. To him, the truth of
evolution is so well established beyond any question that the Bible
cannot have any credibility or authority in matters of natural science or
prehistory. He treats this as a truism so intuitively obvious as
to make him seem embarrassed to even have to bring it up. Defenders of
Biblical creationism are, by his fiat, not permitted to respond.
If he would read just a few months of Creation-Evolution Headlines,
he would quickly find that the edifice of evolution in which he trusts
is a house of cards, and a vast interlocking program of vaporware
(Eugenie Scott applies this term to I.D., but we supply ample references,
where she asks you to just accept her verdict on her authority.)
The moderator needs to recollect the
Murphyism
known as Finagle’s Third Law:
“In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct1,
beyond all need of checking, is the mistake. Corollaries: (1).
No one whom you ask for help2 will see it. (2) Everyone who
stops by with unsought advice3 will see it immediately.”
1Evolution.
2Ruse, Pennock, Scott.
3Wells, Behe, Dembski.
Now go watch the movie.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design.
Evolution by Competition – or Cooperation? 07/18/2002
The July 18 issue of Nature
contains a review of a new book that challenges
some fundamental concepts of Darwinism. The book,
Acquiring Genomes: A Theory
of the Origins of Species by Lynn Margulis and Dorian
Sagan, views evolutionary history not as competition, but
cooperation. Instead of nature consisting of competing species
fighting one another for limited resources in a Malthusian manner,
Margulis sees the opposite, cooperation and sharing, as the
driving force for speciation and evolution. Since earliest
times, she believes, bacteria have shared their genomes such that
any evolutionary tree of life is now hopelessly muddled and
indistinct. Margulis is well known for having advanced the
theory, now widely accepted, that chloroplasts and mitochondria
were once free-living organisms that became incorporated by symbiosis
into eukaryotic cells. In this book, the authors view symbiosis
as central to evolutionary history.
Axel Meyer, in his review, praises Margulis and Sagan for
their visionary proposals, but thinks they go too far. He
accepts the reality of lateral gene transfer, symbiosis and genome
sharing, but thinks they account for rare speciation events that
are exceptions to the old-fashioned Darwinian rule.
While calling the book stimulating and provocative, Meyer holds to
the conviction that the evolutionary history of life can still be
read in the genes.
It’s interesting to compare this
book review with last week’s review in Nature of
the Dembski’s book No Free Lunch.
Both books seriously undermine Darwinian theory, but Dembski was
trashed and Margulis is praised. Why? Margulis, despite
her radical ideas that threaten to undermine 140 years of Darwinian
dogma, is a materialist; Dembski is a theist. Margulis proposes
a new theory of speciation that works within the principles of
methodological naturalism, but Dembski advocates Intelligent Design.
Understanding this difference is crucial. It is not that
classical Darwinism or Margulis’ new paradigm are any more
supportable by empirical evidence than Intelligent Design; in fact,
as we have repeatedly demonstrated for nearly two years in
Creation-Evolution Headlines from their own best sources, the
current of evidence is strongly against both naturalistic theories.
The source of animosity against Intelligent Design is philosophical.
The evolutionists have chosen in advance that God, intelligence,
design, or any manifestation of these concepts is disallowed in science,
no matter how strongly the evidence supports them. All evidence
must be filtered through the grid of naturalism to be called scientific,
whether or not design is staring the investigator in the face. Any
just-so story or ad-hoc myth is preferable to design! That is why
Margulis gets away with just a slap on the wrist, even though she
undermines neo-Darwinism, but William Dembski is portrayed as a villain
who wants to return us to the dark ages, even though his book presents
a rigorous mathematical and logical schema for sorting out chance,
necessity and design. One would think that science should be an
open-ended search for the truth about nature, and should not rule out a
whole class of causes that could be fruitful in explaining phenomena,
but no: the scientific elite have pontificated that intelligent causes
are disallowed in biology, even though they are routinely used in
cryptography, archaeology, forensic science and SETI already.
Step over that line and doubt atheism, and you’re the enemy.
With that in mind, it is interesting to note just how
radical Margulis’ new paradigm is against neo-Darwinism. Instead
of ruthless competition, we have cooperation. We have a nicer, kinder,
gentler view of the world, where living things help one another for the
common good.
Instead of the WWF, we have the grandmotherly kindergarten teacher smiling
over the children who are learning how to share their toys. What
does this do to Nazism and communism, which were built on the belief that
only the fittest survive, and the weak should be exterminated to advance
the race? Will a Margulian world lead to a utopian society, friendly
to the environment, free of war and bloodshed? Don’t count on it.
If individualism is frowned on, and individuals must give up their rights
for the good of the whole, whoever does not comply becomes the enemy of
the state just as surely as in Stalinism. “Building toward
consensus,” a revised form of the Hegelian dialectic, is already a
popular phrase that depicts this attitude. No one must claim
ownership of the truth; we must all be tolerant, learn from one another, and
share our resources. This could become as totalitarian as Stalinism,
or worse, because its naked intolerance of independent thought
would be masked by smiling faces that coerce individuals into acquiescence,
because the elite, the Ministry of Love, knows what is good for them.
It’s the law of nature, isn’t it? Sound familiar?
Spencer has been reincarnated in a new guise. Some historians have noted
that scientific paradigms seem linked to the favored
political philosophies
of their era. Darwinism seemed just the thing for both
communism and
laissez-faire
capitalism of the 19th and 20th centuries; but now, evolution by
symbiosis and cooperation is sweet music for the age of
tolerance and multiculturalism.
Margulis,
though respected, is still considered borderline fringe by most evolutionary
scientists, however, though most accept her endosymbiont hypothesis.
For a rebuttal to the idea that
mitochondria and chloroplasts were acquired by the cell early
in eukaryote evolution, see this
response
by Don Batten. The Gaia Hypothesis advanced by Margulis and
Lovelock (the idea that life molded the earth for its own existence, or
that earth and life are symbiotic) is a little too
New-Age for most evolutionists. It smells of the
personification fallacy, and
doesn’t seem naturalistic enough; it has also been eagerly snatched up
as a prop for New
Age groups. Still, it has made an
impact on the thinking of evolutionists, who tend these days to view nature
at least a little more in terms of cooperation than ruthless competition. Would that
Marx, Nietzsche, Spencer, Haeckel, Carnegie, Hitler, Lenin and the other
social Darwinists could have seen what future scientists would
think of their “undeniable truth” – the belief that nature,
red in tooth and claw, favors the strong over the weak.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.
Violations of Second Law Observed at Micro Scale 07/17/2002
Australian physicists obtained experimental evidence that micron-sized particles
can violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics for up to two seconds. They
observed a bead in motion that was just as likely to extract energy from the
environment as dissipate energy to the environment. This provides confirmation
for the Fluctuation Theorem of Evans (1993) and, they feel, might have impact on
nanotechnology and the understanding of life processes:
That entropy-consuming trajectories can be
discerned for micron-sized particles over time scales on the order of
seconds is particularly important to applications of nano-machines and
to the understanding of protein motors. The fluctuation theorem
points out that as these thermodynamic engines are made smaller and as
the time of operation is made shorter, these engines are not simple
scaled-down versions of their larger counterparts. As they become
smaller, the probability that they will run thermodynamically in
reverse inescapably becomes greater. Consequently, these results
imply that the fluctuation theorem has important ramifications for
nanotechnology and indeed for how life itself functions.
The paper, published in
Physical Review
Letters for July 29, 2002 is summarized in
Physics
News Update. On July 23,
Nature Science
Update posted an article on this finding, but recalls that James
Clerk Maxwell knew this way back in
1878, writing in Nature then,
“The truth of the second law is ... a statistical, not a
mathematical, truth, for it depends on the fact that the bodies we deal
with consist of millions of molecules... Hence the second law of
thermodynamics is continually being violated, and that to a
considerable extent, in any sufficiently small group of molecules
belonging to a real body.” Nature Science Update concludes,
“For larger systems over normal periods of time, however, the
second law of thermodynamics is absolutely rock solid.”
We have known also since the 1930s that
weird behaviors can occur at quantum levels. These are quickly swamped by
normal Newtonian behavior at larger scales with larger numbers of particles
and longer time samples. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of
the best-established laws in all of science, is primarily a statistical
generalization about phenomena at macro scales involving many particles.
At quantum levels and microscopic scales, violations are statistically
possible, even certain, as Maxwell said.
What does this mean for our understanding of cellular processes?
Not much; since the probability is equal for increasing or decreasing
entropy at some level, and only for two seconds maximum,
it might just mean that molecules might not need to expend as much
energy in their motions on occasion.
It might be like getting a tailwind as often as in a headwind in a plane, but
has no bearing on the direction chosen by the pilot. What does this mean
for the origin of life? Nothing. This is a physical effect
that has nothing to do with the origin of complex specified information.
Nanotechnologists might have to take this effect into account
when building microscopic machines, and it might become a
factor when analyzing molecular motions in the cell.
But it would be an unwarranted
extrapolation
to rush to judgment that since the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be
violated at the molecular level in special circumstances, the
Second Law is no longer a problem for evolution.
That would be like claiming that since a ball might bounce higher
than it fell once in awhile, we have a possible
way to explain the origin of an encyclopedia by chance.
See also the June 27 headline on Maxwell’s
Demon.
Next headline on: Physics.
Humans Evolved Long Life to Finance Teenagerism 07/17/2002
Teenagers consume more than they produce, so humans evolved a longer
life span to make sure they pay it back, according to
a new theory by Kaplan and Robson in the
Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (online preprints, July 16).
Noting the disparity between chimp and human lifespans, they apply
economic theory to human evolution to explain the coevolution of
bigger brains and longer lifespans.
New
Scientist summarizes the report, and quotes Michael Rose of the
UC Irvine as thinking it’s the best paper on the evolution of
teenagers he’s ever read. But he cautions, “If you’re
a good applied mathematician, you can come up with a model to give you
any conclusion you want.”
If you purged evolutionary theory of
the personification fallacy,
you would have little left. This is a foolish application
of economic theory where it doesn’t belong. Who is the
investor, where is the bank, and where is the SEC to enforce the
law? Did chimps figure out this investment strategy?
Did they care once they got their ROI?
Were teenagers worth the trouble?
Next headline on: Early Man. •
Next dumb story.
How Your Electric Motors Work 07/16/2002
Did you know your body, and the bodies of everything from bacteria to
giant Sequoia trees, run on electric motors? No kidding.
We’ve reported on the amazing little protein motor
ATP synthase several times before.
It runs at 6000 rpm and generates ATP, which your body needs for every
chemical reaction, every muscle movement, and every blink of an
eye. Now, in the
July issue
of the journal Structure, an international team of biochemists,
including one of the winners of the Nobel Prize
(Dr.
John E. Walker), has examined the
action of this amazing molecular machine in more detail than ever before.
They have analyzed just one third of the rotational cycle of the top part
of the motor, called F1-ATPase. The bottom part of this
two-part motor, the F0 unit, is composed of a dozen parts that
turn like a merry-go-round in response to proton fuel. Attached to
the center is the gamma subunit that looks like a camshaft.
It has a stalk and a protruding section that rotates with the F0
ring. In contact with the cam is the non-rotating F1
machine, composed of six lobes, the alpha and beta subunits, alternately
arranged like slices of an orange around the central stalk. As the
cam turns, it forces changes in shape of the alpha and beta lobes,
mostly the beta lobes. Arranged in pairs, the six lobes
provide a three-stage manufacturing plant for ATP; while one is loading
the two ingredients, another is squeezing them together, and a third is
simultaneously ejecting the finished product.
In this paper, the scientists carefully analyzed what
happens to the alpha and beta subunits during one-third of the rotation.
They found that the positive charges on the gamma protrusion (the cam)
create an “ionic track”.
Corresponding negatively-charged amino acids on the lobes, like motor brushes,
respond to the ionic track by causing changes of shape in the lobes,
making them move in, out, up or down appropriate to the stage of manufacture
of ATP. Though the gamma shaft appears to turn smoothly, the lobes
seem to snap open and shut very quickly, within nanoseconds.
These “conformational changes” (i.e., moving parts) are involved
in the efficient manufacture and release of ATP molecules; exactly how they
do it is an area still under study. They do know, though, that the
precise placement of certain electrically-charged amino acids in the
various protein subunits stimulates the motions along the ionic track, so
the cam involves both electrical and spatial (steric) interactions,
something like a rotor in a car’s engine. The entire assembly
operates at submillisecond rates, and is reversible – it can burn
ATP to generate protons. The diagrams show that the motor parts look
like coils, chains and complex tangles of molecules, not like the hard
metal cylinders and pistons with which we are familiar, but they perform
analogous functions at this submicroscopic scale.
Even though the coiled amino acid chains twist and turn and
stretch, the machine is stable, fast and highly efficient,
The authors refer to it as a “finely tuned machine.”
This paper reads almost like a description
of a gasoline powered piston engine. Imagine being in auto shop
and listening to the teacher lecture about how the spark forces the piston
down and how it turns the crankshaft, etc., with all the moving parts
and valves interacting in a coordinated cycle, and you get a rough analogy
to what these scientists are saying about this biological motor.
ATP synthase
is so small you could fit
120,000 of them on the head of a pin! The entire assembly is only
10 nanometers wide and about 12 nanometers high. The discovery of
true rotary motors made out of protein molecules was so astonishing, its
discoverers won the Nobel Prize
in chemistry in 1997. These are not just simple
spinning widgets, but finely-tuned engines made up of multiple parts
that interact in highly specific ways. Just one wrong amino acid at
some of the active sites can bring it to a halt.
The article contains detailed
diagrams of how the parts look and how they work together.
You can almost sense their excitement as they describe this molecular
machine, which someone has called the most important protein in the
universe. You will also notice that evolution is not even mentioned
once in the paper, nor any hint of a speculation on how this machine evolved;
this accords with our frequent observation that evolutionary speculation
is inversely proportional to the facts available for study. Meanwhile,
I think I’ll go to the filling station and fill up with protons.
Pizza sounds good...
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. •
Next headline on: Human Body. •
Next amazing story.
Astrobiology Then and Now: Still Dry 07/15/2002
Space.Com
has an online debate about whether or not life is rare in the universe.
(The same articles are also posted on
Astrobiology
Magazine, with additional illustrations.)
The discussion was stimulated
by Ward and Brownlee’s book Rare
Earth, which propounded the opinion that the lucky accidents required
for advanced life to evolve on a planet were too improbable to produce
many civilizations like ours. You can read various experts’
opinions about this question which, being a topic utterly devoid of
evidence, is an open field for speculation. David Grinspoon, in his
first entry, tries to insert a note of caution:
It is always shaky when we generalize from experiments with a sample
size of one. So we have to be a bit cautious when we fill the
cosmos with creatures based on the time scales of Earth history (it
happened so fast here, therefore it must be easy) and the
resourcefulness of Earth life (they are everywhere where there is
water).
This is one history, and one example of life. When our arguments rest
on such shaky grounds, balancing a house of cards on a one-card
foundation, we are in danger of erecting structures formed more by our
desires than the “evidence.”
In the third installment, Brownlee echoes the caution:
As is the case in the solar system, animal-like life is probably
uncommon in the cosmos. This might even be the case for microbes:
how can scientists agree that microbial life is common in our celestial
neighborhood when there is no data? Even the simplest life is
extraordinarily complicated and until we find solid evidence for life
elsewhere, the frequency of life will unfortunately be guesswork.
We can predict that some planetary bodies will provide life-supporting
conditions, but no one can predict that life will form.
The entire debate series about extra-terrestrial life
can be read on
Astrobiology Magazine
as of July 29, and also on Space.Com:
- The
Hostile Universe: Are life-nourishing environments rare in the universe?
- Alien
Proximity: How near might the nearest extraterrestrial lifeforms be?
- Complex
Life: What are the odds for complex life, and what are the conditions
necessary?
- Avoiding
Doom: Is our own predicted demise a fate due any aliens that might be out
there?
- Elusive ET:
If extraterrestrials are common in the universe, why haven’t we detected
them yet?
On a related topic, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began
showing historical NASA films as part of a monthly series.
Today’s entry was “Who’s Out There?” (1975) narrated by
Orson Welles. Recalling his own infamous 1938
War of the Worlds radio
broadcast that panicked the nation, he reviewed the disappointing Mariner
missions that dashed hopes of Martian cities and canals. But he expressed
the contemporary hope that microbial life could exist there, given that
H2O was found to be present in the Martian clouds and ice
caps, and probably produced the apparent river channels seen from orbit.
Welles prophesied that the discovery of one bacterium on Mars, maybe by
the upcoming Viking spacecraft (1976), would demonstrate that life was the
rule rather than the exception, another instance in the story of the evolution
of evolutions going on on planets around billions of stars.
The scratchy, discolored
old movie also featured a panel of prominent scientist-philosophers of the
day, including Philip Morrison, George Wald, and a young Carl Sagan,
expressing their confidence that a million civilizations could exist in the
Milky Way galaxy alone, probably communicating in a network of advanced
societies that would surely view our civilization as primitive.
That was then, this is now. The
enthusiasm about finding life in the universe has not waned among
astrobiologists, but a big dose of reality has set in. Only selective
reporting would give the impression we are closer to finding life out
there. In most respects, the situation is worse for the true
believers. Certainly life has not yet been detected anywhere beyond
earth, by SETI or any spacecraft. Conditions on the early earth
are not like the gases of Jupiter, as once supposed. Evidence for
a non-reducing atmosphere, and probably the existence of
oxygen, have
made belief in life emerging from a primordial soup less plausible by
orders of magnitude. Worse, the discoveries in biochemistry that cells
are made up of molecular machines and
factories has made it more difficult
to imagine that simple molecules could self-organize into life.
Viking
did not find life,
Pathfinder
did not find life,
Mars
Global Surveyor and
Mars
Odyssey have not found life, and most scientists downplay
the alleged
Martian meteorite as a dead-end trail.
In addition, increased understanding about the anthropic coincidences of
earth and the universe are casting doubt on the assumption that life must be
a natural by-product of stellar and planetary evolution.
The book Rare Earth represents a growing belief that conditions on
our planet were too special to expect to find life to be commonplace.
This Space.Com debate series contains interspersed expressions of hope,
but clearly reveals that realism puts severe constraints on the existence
of life, its longevity, and its ultimate fate.
The debate also illustrates the amount of faith operating
in the religion of materialism. Nowhere in this debate
do the participants even hint at the possibility that there might be
a God, who created life and sustains it, even though the majority of
people on this planet believe that. Instead, chemical and biological
evolution are taken for granted as facts for which no further proof is
needed. (Browse through our Chain Links on Life and Darwinism to
see how bankrupt those beliefs are.) But the philosophical position
of materialism puts them in all kinds of speculative dilemmas,
out of which they weave the most exotic tales
out of their own imaginations (such as alien societies finding ways to
stir the hydrogen in their stars to make them last longer).
If theists spun such yarns they would be laughed to scorn.
The premise of naturalism forces these scientists to hope for discovering
more life in space, even though ours is the one and only example so far.
Because it is impossible to
prove a universal negative, however, astrobiologists are sure to continue
indefinitely in their search.
Regardless of one’s beliefs about the prospects for finding life in the
universe and what it would mean, astrobiology at this point is still based
only on undying faith, hope, and love for one’s own imagination –
an imagination that, rejecting revelation from a Creator God, hopes to
relieve its loneliness by discovering fellow complex assemblages of matter
emerging out of the cosmic hydrogen. Maybe the aliens
will be more friendly than the invading monsters portrayed in War of the
Worlds. But if their lives are just as purposeless and
meaningless as ours, how much comfort will that be? At best, it
would provide some companionship during the brief
merry-go-round ride before
the heat death of the universe shuts down the carnival forever.
There is an alternative hope, one in which
the
springs of living water never run dry.
Next headline on: Origin of Life. •
Next headline on: Astronomy. •
Next headline on: Mars. •
Next headline on: SETI. •
Unlucky in the Sky Without Diamonds 07/12/2002
A team led by a researcher at
Lawrence
Livermore Labs has found microscopic diamonds in
interplanetary dust particles, but not enough for current theories.
The common belief is that nanodiamonds formed early in the solar nebula
before the sun turned on,
and should be most common in the outer reaches of the solar system,
but the counts don’t seem to add up.
“We presumed that if we studied (micro) meteorites (also known as
interplanetary dust particles) from comets further out in our solar
system, we would find more nanodiamonds,” said John Bradley, team
leader. “But we’re just not seeing them. One
theory is that some, perhaps most, nanodiamonds formed within the inner
solar system and are not presolar at all.” According to
Bradley, “This raises all sorts of questions about the origins of
the solar system.” Bradley explains in his paper in the
July
11 Nature (emphasis added):
We have identified a class of meteoritic materials in which
nanodiamonds are either depleted or absent. Assuming that this
trend continues as more IDPs [interplanetary dust particles] are
examined, and regardless of whether these particles are from comets or
‘comet-like’ outer asteroids, the discovery of a class of
cosmically primitive, carbon-rich IDPs deficient in nanodiamonds is
unexpected. The simplest explanation is that at least some
meteoritic nanodiamonds formed in the inner solar nebula, and not in a
presolar environment. But there is evidence that meteoritic
nanodiamonds formed under reducing conditions, and conditions in the
solar nebula are believed to have been oxidizing, although nanodiamonds
can also form under oxidizing conditions. An alternative
explanation is that nanodiamonds are indeed presolar, but that their
abundance decreases with heliocentric distance. In this model,
much of the solid matter of the outer Solar System is processed inner
Solar System material that was circulated through the accretion disk
and then transported outwards. Perhaps nanodiamonds are not
uniformly distributed among carbon-rich non-cluster IDPs, or their
(cometary or asteroidal) parent bodies are not as primitive as we have
assumed. Any one of these explanations has profound implications
concerning our understanding of the early Solar System.
Dust and ice from the outer solar system has long been assumed to be
primordial, but if indeed it has been processed by the inner solar
system and transported outwards, all bets are off about dating the
particles.
Meteorite ages have been the standard by which
solar system dates have been judged, but what if
meteorites have been subject to melting and refreezing, rather than being
primordial remnants
of an assumed solar nebula? Would that not affect parent and
daughter product ratios, and render their dates unreliable?
Put this possibility in context with this other
recent story about anomalous short-lived
radionuclides, and other Solar System
headlines about apparently young objects like
Saturn’s rings, serious questions
arise. If the meteorite dating that was seemingly so solid is cast
into doubt, the potential for error in the commonly-accepted age of
4.6 billion years is enormous.
Next headline on: Solar System. •
Next headline on: Dating.
Did Life Begin in an RNA World? 07/11/2002
The
July
11 issue of Nature contains an Insight feature on RNA,
with seven articles on this versatile molecule, until recently
considered the little servant to the more important DNA. RNA
is a rising star in astrobiology circles, because it
has been shown to possess some enzymatic activity and take part in
gene regulation and expression, and in many more roles beyond just
translating DNA. Could life have
started on an RNA platform before DNA and proteins took the
limelight? One of the chief architects of the RNA World hypothesis,
Gerald
Joyce of Scripps Institute, examines the current thinking in
some detail, and though optimistic, notes some serious difficulties
(emphasis added):
- It seems likely that RNA has the capability to support life based
on RNA genomes that are copied and maintained through the catalytic
function of RNA. There are substantial gaps, however, in
scientific understanding concerning how the RNA world arose, the degree
of metabolic complexity that it attained, and the way that it led to
DNA genomes and protein enzymes.
- Depending on the nature of the prebiotic environment, available
building blocks may have included amino acids, hydroxy acids, sugars,
purines, pyrimidines and fatty acids. These could have combined
to form polymers of largely random sequence and mixed
stereochemistry (handedness). Some of the polymers may have
had special properties, such as adherence to a particular mineral
surface, unusual resistance to degradation, or the propensity to form
supramolecular aggregates. Eventually every polymer, no matter
how stable, would have succumbed to degradation.
- When the environment is altered, the special properties
associated with a particular polymer may no longer apply and the
capacity for self-replication may be lost. Persistence in a
changing environment requires a more general mechanism for
self-replication that allows the polymer sequence to change
somewhat over time, but retain its heritage in most of the sequence
that is unchanged.
- If the building blocks of RNA were available in the prebiotic
environment, if these combined to form polynucleotides, and if some of
the polynucleotides began to self-replicate, then the RNA world may
have emerged as the first form of life on Earth. But based on
current knowledge of prebiotic chemistry, this is unlikely to
have been the case. Ribose, phosphate, purines and
pyrimidines all may have been available, although the case for
pyrimidines is less compelling.
- It is difficult to visualize a mechanism for
self-replication that either would be impartial to these
compositional differences or would treat them as sequence
information in a broader sense and maintain them as heritable
features.
- The chief obstacle to understanding the origin of RNA-based
life is identifying a plausible mechanism for overcoming the
clutter wrought by prebiotic chemistry.
- Another approach is to hypothesize that life did not begin with
RNA; some other genetic system preceded RNA, just as it preceded DNA
and protein. This approach has met with substantial progress in
recent years, despite the lack of guidance from known metabolic
pathways in biology regarding the chemical nature of a precursor to
RNA.
- It is also possible that RNA-based life was preceded by a
replicating, evolving polymer that bore no resemblance to nucleic
acids. Self-replication without darwinian evolution has been
demonstrated for certain peptides and even small organic
compounds. Why not cast the net broadly and consider any polymer
that is capable of self-replication? A critical issue then
becomes whether there is a sufficient diversity of polymer
sequences that can be replicated faithfully to provide the basis
for darwinian evolution.
- The catalytic potential of TNA, PNA and other proposed precursors
to RNA has not yet been explored, but any cogent
hypothesis regarding pre-RNA life must consider whether that
prior genetic system could have facilitated the appearance of
RNA.
- There is no known ribozyme in biology that catalyses the
template-directed polymerization of NTPs [nucleoside 5'-triphosphates,
a putative building block for RNA], but such molecules have been
obtained using test-tube evolution. Like the evolution of
organisms in nature, evolution of RNA in the laboratory involves
repeated rounds of selective amplification, linking the survival of an
RNA species to its fitness. In the laboratory, fitness is
defined by the experimenter, for example, based on the ability of
RNA to catalyse a particular chemical reaction.
- A pool of one copy each of all possible 40mers [RNA chains of 40
nucleotides], with a mass of 26 kg, just might be achievable, but it is
not clear if 40 nucleotides are sufficient to provide robust RNA
polymerase activity. ... As a rule of thumb, the error rate of
replication per nucleotide must be no more than about the inverse of
genome length, corresponding to 99% fidelity for replication of a
100mer and 97.5% fidelity for replication of a 40mer. There may
be polymerase ribozymes that meet these requirements, although such
molecules have not yet been demonstrated.
- The above discussion ignores other obstacles to RNA-catalysed RNA replication, such as maintaining a supply of activated mononucleotides, ensuring that the ribozyme will recognize its corresponding genomic RNA while ignoring other RNAs in the environment, overcoming stable self-structure within the template strand, separating the template and product strands, and operating in a similar manner on the product strand to generate new copies of the template. Additional genetic information might be required to overcome these obstacles, but a longer genome would necessitate an even higher fidelity of replication.
- Although the central process of the RNA world was the replication
of RNA genomes, some form of metabolism must have supported the
process. In keeping with the second law of
thermodynamics, the increase in order that occurs in a
genetic system is achieved through the expenditure of high-energy
starting materials that are converted to lower-energy products.
- There are several important reactions in nucleotide synthesis that
have not yet been carried out with a ribozyme. ... The
possibility of a more complex RNA-based metabolism is purely
conjectural.
- Other RNA-based functions for which there is no evidence in
biology, such as nucleotide synthesis and RNA polymerization, are
assumed to have existed in the RNA world based on first
principles, but it is important to recognize that this assumption is
not supported by available historical evidence.
- It is often said, again based on first principles rather than
historical evidence, that RNA-based life must have entailed some
form of cellular compartmentalization.
- Although RNA is well suited as a genetic molecule and can evolve to
perform a broad range of catalytic tasks, it has limited chemical
functionality and thus may not be equipped to meet certain
challenges and opportunities that arise in the environment.
An important innovation of life on Earth was the development of
a separate macromolecule that would be responsible for most catalytic
functions, even though that molecule contained subunits that were
poorly suited for replication. The invention of
protein synthesis, instructed and catalysed by RNA, was the crowning
achievement of the RNA world, but also began its demise.
- It is not known whether the invention of protein synthesis
preceded or followed the invention of DNA genomes. The primary
advantage of DNA over RNA as a genetic material is the greater chemical
stability of DNA, allowing much larger genomes based on DNA.
Protein synthesis may require more genetic information than can be
maintained by RNA.
- A largely open question concerns the origin of the genetic
code. The aminoacylation of RNA initially must have provided
some selective advantage unrelated to the eventual development of a
translation machinery.
- The next step towards the origin of the genetic code was the formation of peptide bonds between amino acids that were attached to RNA. The products of this reaction must have conferred some selective advantage, even though the peptides probably would have been too small and too heterogeneous in sequence to function as catalysts. ... It is not clear, however, how the detailed assignments of the genetic code were made.
- Insight into the origin and operation of the RNA world is
largely inferential, based on the known chemical and biochemical
properties of RNA. In the best of circumstances those
inferences are supported by examining the role of RNA in contemporary
biology. Without that support one must be careful not to draw
detailed conclusions regarding these historical events.
In another paper in the RNA series,
Moore and Steitz
provide a detailed look at the latest findings on the workings of the
ribosome, and how the messenger and transfer RNAs come together in
close quarters to synthesize proteins with high fidelity.
Because the inner workings of ribosomes are composed almost solely of
RNA, they also surmise the ribosome started in an RNA World: “it is
almost certainly true that the overall abundance of RNA in the modern
ribosome reflects an evolutionary history that started with an all-RNA
particle.” Most of the article is composed of detailed
step-by-step process descriptions, with diagrams, of all the working
parts and the “conformational changes” they undergo (i.e.,
moving parts). Nevertheless, they take a paragraph to speculate on
how this elaborate machinery evolved, beginning: “It has often been
emphasized that no enzyme as complex as the modern ribosome could possibly
have emerged from the primordial soup in a single step.”
The ‘proto-ribosome’ might have been
a one-subunit object that catalysed peptide bond formation in an uncoded,
non-processive way, and thus made small oligopeptides of random sequence
that were not proteins in the modern sense, and may have had some other
purpose. It probably gained its decoding function, and the small
subunit with which that function is associated, later, in parallel with
the evolution of the genome and of tRNA.
Thus, the bulk of the article deals with observable mechanics of this
highly-coordinated system, but the evolutionary speculation, as in
Joyce’s article, is almost entirely devoid of experimental support.
How many show-stoppers does it take to
stop a show? Every one of Joyce’s listed problems (and there
are others), is serious enough to forbid progress toward life.
It’s a tale only an atheist could love, but here it is prominently
featured in Nature. Notice that we are not picking on straw
men, but the best champions the Darwin Party has to offer. Gerald
Joyce, Mr. RNA World himself, lays out the latest and greatest story in
the world’s most prestigious science journal. Are you impressed?
It has been said that those who like sausage and respect
the law should not watch either being made. By the time this RNA-World
tale gets sanitized and stripped of the critical details and packaged for
student heads that can’t even spell DNA, it will look neat and clean
and delicious. Well, we just took you on a tour into the sausage
factory and held up the baloney for your gaze, so you could decide whether
to smack your lips or puke.
Why take so much space on this story? Because in
a real sense, this story is foundational to all the evolutionary tales
that follow: all the ape-man
fossils, all the finch beaks and peppered moths and phylogenetic trees
that the evolutionists feel much more comfortable showcasing. Here,
at the very root, the situation is hopeless. It’s the minnow
trying to jump Niagara Falls. Everything is against them, yet
hoping against hope, all they can do is imagine the impossible.
As usual, you can find the personification fallacy
and circular reasoning pervading
their hypothetical fantasylands. Joyce mentions information
16 times, but never explains where it comes from; he just pulls it right
out of the magic hat. He acknowledges that DNA and RNA can store
it, and that polypeptide chains without it are useless, but totally
glosses over this most serious difficulty. With an imagination that
would make Lewis Carroll envious, he pictures RNA yielding its genetic
information that it gained by chance or magic to DNA, and then taking on
a translation role to pass it to proteins. He glosses over the
chirality problem, merely imagining that clay
surfaces or the RNA backbone might somehow overcome it.
Gaps are partly filled in with test-tube evolution (how’s
that for an oxymoron). If relevant to anything at all, test-tube
evolution is intelligent design! It is investigator interference
in nature, substituting unrealistic conditions and isolating products
to force a result that would never happen spontaneously.
He admits that accurate replication, up to 97% or higher, is a must.
He admits that short chains are useless, but ignores the fact that the
longer the chain, the lower the probability it
will be useful or single-handed, to the point of being too improbable to
occur anywhere in the universe.
At every step he is like a man in a helicopter above Niagara Falls pulling
the little minnow in a wire cage up through the torrent, when nature would
never do the things he requires without lots of intelligent help.
Why do evolutionists get away with this?
It is because of a prior commitment to naturalism that
evolutionary tales like the
RNA
World Hypothesis survive in spite of
overwhelming problems. To them, only natural causes are allowed
in science,
so if they can invent what they think is a marginally plausible tale
by which it might have happened, it is acceptable (see the
best-in-field fallacy).
By excluding intelligent design from
the very definition of science, they have thrown away the key to understanding
nature, and have made imagination their idol.
This has been stated very potently by Richard Lewontin in a
classic quote you should read in our Baloney Detector under the section
on subjectivity. It also makes
them hate and vilify anyone who disagrees with their naturalistic
philosophy (see next headline, for example). As the Apostle Paul put
it, they did not
like to retain God in their knowledge.
For relief from the fantasyland of Joyce’s article,
read Moore and Steitz’s description of the ribosome in all its glory.
The intricate fit and precision of this molecular machine will make you
stand in awe. This is the empirical evidence; it shouts out
intelligent design. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Next headline on: Origin of Life.
Book Review 07/11/2002: William Dembski’s latest book
No Free Lunch
is reviewed by Brian Charlesworth in the
July 11 Nature.
As expected, it is patronizing and ruthlessly critical: Dembski is
described as a reactionary, wanting to want to turn the clock back
to a time when people appealed to gods and goblins to explain
natural phenomena, (presumably like Newton, who is Charlesworth’s
first citation).
But instead of dealing with the mathematical theorems on which the
book is based (it sounds like he didn’t even read it),
Charlesworth instead focuses on the character of
God who would create “nasty” things like tigers and tapeworms.
He also argues that evolutionary studies are, while incomplete,
filling in gaps gradually: “Human evolution provides an excellent
example of this, with the fossil discoveries of the twentieth century
providing a resounding confirmation of Darwin’s hypothesis of an
African origin of modern humans.” (Now read the next
headline story, below).
Next headline on: Intelligent Design.
New Hominid Fossil Shakes the Human Family Tree (Again) 07/11/2002
Everything you learned in school about human evolution is wrong,
if a new skull fragment found in Chad by
Michel Brunet maintains
its place in the family tree.
Named Sahelanthropus tchadensis or “Toumaï” for short,
it is shaking up ideas about mankind’s evolution.
The BBC
calls it “astonishing” and “the most important
anthropological find in living memory,” but doubters are not convinced
it is more than just a small gorilla or proto-gorilla skull, or something
else unrelated to human evolution.
Nature
Science Update calls the small 6-7 million year old skull
the oldest hominid fossil, but it already had features more
advanced than later Australopithecines, some claim. Bernard
Wood of George Washington University laments the sad state of
human paleontology:
“When I went to medical school in 1963, human evolution looked
like a ladder,” he says. The ladder stepped from monkey to
man through a progression of intermediates, each slightly less ape-like
than the last. Now human evolution looks like a bush. We
have a menagerie of fossil hominids - the group containing everything
thought more closely related to humans than chimps. How they are
related to each other and which, if any of them, are human forebears is
still debated.
Wood chooses to believe it was just an animal alive at the time
humans were evolving, but others claim it has hominid features, like
smaller canines, thicker tooth enamel and a point on the back of the
skull that some feel hints it might have walked upright.
Nature blames the paucity of fossils of the period on the
lifestyle habits of the creatures, and interestingly, notes that
“The forests favoured by chimps, and apparently by early hominids,
are not conducive to fossil formation. Chimps, for example, have no
fossil record.”
In a related story on
Nature
Science Update, Henry Gee puts the new fossil in historical
perspective of earlier claims of human fossils, particularly John
Dart’s discovery of Australopithecus. The full
comments by Bernard Wood are in the cover story of the
July 11 Nature, with links to the
two scientific papers presenting Toumaï to the world by
Michel Brunet et al.
What are we to think when every new
hominid discovery “blows the socks off” (their words) the
story of human evolution? Let’s understand something
important here: if you have a branching bush, you do not have any
proof of evolution. The branches are all inferred; the only
data are the leaves. Now mentally erase the branches, and
picture leaves hanging in mid air at random; this is the modern
data about the human lineage. Anybody see evolution here?
Add to that the fact that the dating methods are all highly suspect, and that
you have rival teams competing for their place in the history books
(see this July 12
BBC
story, for instance),
then tell us if you think paleoanthropology has any claim to being legitimate
science. Remember all that hand-wringing that went on
just five months ago? Existing
ideas were tossed into the trash, and nobody could even define what it
meant to be a hominid. It’s deja vu all over again.
Don’t forget that fossils exist in the present.
The stories about how they got the way they are and how they evolved from
one to another are just that: stories made up by people alive today.
This applies not only to human fossils, but to the whole fossil record.
Bernard Wood says, “Here we have compelling evidence
that our own origins are as complex and as difficult to trace as those of any
other group of organisms.” If human paleontology is
this bad, what did he just say about the rest of the fossil record
of evolution?
On July 12, Answers
in Genesis posted their response to this fossil find. On July 18,
Mark Hartwig
took a cynical sneer at the find on his Weekly Wedge Update. Meanwhile,
National
Geographic (long time promoter of human evolution propaganda) chimed in
that “one of most important things this skull tells us is how much we
don’t know.” So will they publish any retractions for decades
of stories about the Leakeys that now seem old hat or irrelevant?
No way.
To an evolutionist, it doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong,
so as long as you are working by the rules of methodological naturalism.
So it’s perfectly acceptable to hop from one false lead to another
indefinitely; someday, we may get nowhere. Doesn’t this way just
feel so much better than merely accepting
the
Creator’s word for how it happened? This is a good time
to review our Concise Guide to Evolutionary Theory.
Next headline on: Early Man. •
Next headline on: Fossils. •
Next dumb story.
Church Attendance Increases Marriage Rate 07/10/2002
A Penn State
study shows that increased church attendance correlates with higher
rates of marriage, particularly for minority women. Presumably the
reasons include the promulgation of higher values and virtues for marriage
and more role models to observe. Church attendance was seen to be
about equal to socioeconomic status as a predicter of marriage.
Let’s try to interpret this in
evolutionary terms, since the Richard Dawkins & Eugenie Scott crowd would
not grant any real validity to a Genesis foundation for marriage or
a real God who created the institution of marriage. We must see
church attendance as a sociological phenomenon that evolved as a defense
against wandering males. Women evolved church as a sexual strategy
to force males into longer-term relationships in which the scrutiny of
the group could act as a check on male promiscuity.
All the accoutrements, like singing
Amazing Grace, are opportunities for the males and females to
evaluate one another’s fitness by their vocalizations. Thus
church is a memetic strategy for bringing the fittest individuals into close
contact for the propagation of their genes. Are you choking yet?
It’s good that church attendance is correlated to
marriage, because cyclic single parenthood (children having children) is
a very serious problem among minority women. It could be argued
that it is the decline of moral values in part because of a culture that
treats humans as mere animals that leads to unbridled sexual activity
without responsibility. Evolution has no moral code, and provides
a good excuse for anyone who wants to have sex whenever and with whomever
he wants to rationalize it with a veneer of scientific respectability.
If this sounds unfair, just look at what the PBS
Evolution TV series taught in Episode 5,
Why
Sex?,
picturing apes having sex orgies with the implication that if animals do it,
why not people, too. How’s that for pouring gasoline on the fire
of lust, producing even more unwed mothers and illegitimate children growing
up in fatherless homes? What a contrast to Biblical morality!
A good church that teaches the
Bible elevates marriage and reminds us lustful and selfish beings of
the words of God thundered from Mt.
Sinai and written with the finger of God on tablets of stone,
Thou
shalt not commit adultery. It shows the divine purpose of
marriage as the union of two souls
created
in the image of God.
Some balancing points are in order regarding this article.
(1) One’s motives for going to church should be
purer than just to find a marriage partner. (2) Not all churches are
created equal in terms of helpfulness for marriage (some advance the
homosexual agenda and teach unbiblical doctrines).
(3) Some otherwise good churches need to do more to bring singles
together and see this as a good and healthy role for their ministry.
Many singles feel that churches cater mostly to married couples and kids,
but treat them as second class citizens.
For a recent essay on their frustration, see this
Breakpoint article
by Julia Duin.
Next headline on: Health. •
Next headline on: Bible.
Repetition, Not Randomness, Builds Genes 07/09/2002
Three Japanese scientists writing in the
July
17 Journal of Molecular Biology propose that genes and
proteins began not by purely random sequences of building blocks,
but by chains of repeating structures. Noting that the human
genome contains nearly 50% repetitive sequences, they see this as
the seed bed for new proteins and genes. In a lab experiment,
they built six “microgenes” of arbitrary sequence (some
based on parts of actual genes), and cloned them into chains of
various lengths. They found some of them would be expressed
in a bacterial cell and accumulate, and a few would have some
secondary structure like alpha-helices and beta-sheets. This,
they believe, provides experimental support for Susumu Ohno’s
hypothesis that the first proteins arose from repeating sequences
of short oligonucleotides:
He proposed that oligomeric repeats should easily arise from
unequally primed replication processes, and that such repeats
should give birth to new coding frames. Attractive features
of this hypothesis are: (1) large open reading frames readily emerge
from repeats of a shorter sequence, provided it is devoid of
termination codons; (2) the resultant genes are tolerant to
insertions and deletions; and (3) the translation products of
such periodic genes have a greater propensity to form higher structure.
From chains with a lot of repeating units but a few random inserts
and deletions, they feel Darwinian selection could originate new
genes and proteins.
Baloney detecting is an art.
When confronted with esoteric papers filled with technical jargon
in prestigious scientific journals, it’s very easy to get
intimidated into just accepting whatever they say. But if you
grasp a few basic principles, the baloney stands out clearly in the
fog of bluff. These scientists are basically saying you can
get language out of repetition, like getting new words out of
abcabcabcabcabcabcabc kqtkqtkqtkqtkq pwgjpwgjpwgjpwgjpwgjpwjg and
stringing them together with a few mistakes thrown in for fun.
Will it work? They demonstrated it in a test tube, didn’t they?
Consider the following:
- Starting materials: They kicked off from the 99-yard line,
by using already-built parts of genes and translating them through
an already-working translation apparatus. They used already
available single-handed building blocks.
- Investigator interference: At every step, they made the
molecules do what they naturally don’t do. They admit
that random sequences have a short half life, and that they had to
keep termination codons out of their microgenes.
- Translation: They never explain how a translation mechanism
would ever arise that would have the same language convention
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