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Appreciate Yourself
May 29, 2011 — We like to showcase stories of amazing animals, but humans are special, too. What animal can boast some of the qualities that science has recently reported?
1. Math brain: Studies of Amazon tribespeople show that they have an innate understanding of Euclidean geometry, even without ever learning it at school. For the BBC News, Jason Palmer reported, “Tests given to an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu suggest that our intuitions about geometry are innate.”
People in the Mundurucu tribe only have approximations for numbers, and no language for geometry, but they showed comparable skill to French and US schoolchildren, even exceeding them in some ways.
The researchers believe this shows that geometry is intuitive for humans: “they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words.” They even grasped some non-Euclidean geometry better than some westerners, such as understanding that parallel lines on a sphere can intersect.
2. Baby skill set: Live Science posted a gallery of “Nine Brainy Baby Abilities,” including innate knowledge of social power, mind meld with dogs, following others’ moods, dancing, mimicking, learning during sleep, rudimentary math abilities, ability to learn language, and innate ability to judge character.
3. Infant rationality: A study in Science was titled, “Pure Reasoning in 12-Month-Old Infants as Probabilistic Inference.”1 Whether they can or Kant make a Critique of Pure Reason is a question for philosophers. The abstract said,
Many organisms can predict future events from the statistics of past experience, but humans also excel at making predictions by pure reasoning: integrating multiple sources of information, guided by abstract knowledge, to form rational expectations about novel situations, never directly experienced. Here, we show that this reasoning is surprisingly rich, powerful, and coherent even in preverbal infants. When 12-month-old infants view complex displays of multiple moving objects, they form time-varying expectations about future events that are a systematic and rational function of several stimulus variables.
See also the Live Science review of this paper. It commented that robot designers have biomimetics on their brain: “The goal, [Joshua] Tenenbaum [MIT] said, is a sort of ‘reverse engineering’ of infant cognition that might help robotics developers build machines that interact with the world more like the human brain does.”
4. Beautiful brain: Behind the outward shows of rationality are amazing cells. Science Daily posted a color picture of the brain’s most common cell, the astrocyte. “Long considered to be little more than putty in the brain and spinal cord, the star-shaped astrocyte has found new respect among neuroscientists who have begun to recognize its many functions in the brain, not to mention its role in a range of disorders of the central nervous system.” A group of researchers at the University of Madison-Wisconsin has now succeeded in culturing some of these cells in a lab dish.
Other animals have astrocytes, don’t they? “Astrocytes, some studies suggest, may even play a role in human intelligence given that their volume is much greater in the human brain than any other species of animal,” the article answered. They are involved in every brain function.
5. Blind as a bat: The BBC News, Medical Xpress and Live Science discussed how the blind can develop a sixth sense, a kind of echolocation, that helps them navigate in the absence of vision. “Some blind people are able to use the sound of echoes to ‘see’ where things are and to navigate their environment,” Live Science said. “Now, a new study finds that these people may even be using visual parts of their brains to process the sounds.”
In fact, even sighted people can learn how to echolocate. This raises the interesting idea that humans are “over-engineered” for perception, but through lack of practice fail to use all the latent abilities available to them.
6. Power stroke: When you switch from walking to running, your body switches gears. The power in walking comes from the hips, but when running, the body switches to get its power from the ankles, an article on PhysOrg discussed. Researchers at North Carolina State measured this “tradeoff” that occurs automatically; humans just take it in stride.
Microsoft has a novel take on human beings: use them as antennas. Live Science reported that since the human body gives off detectable electromagnetic signals, the signals could be harnessed to create a home automation system that learns the layout of the house, then automatically responds to the body. Some day you might turn on lights when you walk into a room, use gestures to turn up the thermostat or control the volume of music, or operate appliances without knobs or switches.
The human body is a natural antenna, the article said. “It reliably picks up the electromagnetic signals that emanate from all electrical systems and appliances in the home. These ambient signals can be used to create an affordable home automation system that controls household electronics with a pat on the wall or even a simple hand gesture.”
Many are already familiar with the Wii and Kinect game consoles that respond to body movements, and light switches that respond to hand clapping. Tapping into human electromagnetic signals opens up new vistas. The possibilities for “controller free living” are virtually limitless, reporter Leslie Meredith said.
A visitor from the past would probably worry he was seeing witchcraft if a wave of the hand could turn on the lights – but it would just be a clever application of manipulating plain old natural forces, like the old theremin musical instrument that fascinated turn-of-the-20th-century viewers with music made by a wave of the hand. When humans can get cats to respond to gestures, then they’ve really got something.
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A Little Knowledge Without Ethics
May 28, 2011 — A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. When is knowledge enough? And can a lot of knowledge be a dangerous thing, too? Whether little or much, knowledge without ethics empowers evil.
1. Imbalance in India: Ultrasound is a wonderful invention that allows images inside the human body. In India, however, where culture and economics puts a premium on the male sex, its use has had devastating consequences. PhysOrg reported, “In Indian families in which the first child has been a girl, more and more parents with access to prenatal ultrasound testing are aborting a second female in the hope that a subsequent pregnancy will yield a boy, said the study, published in The Lancet.... Between 1980 and 2010, they estimate, four to 12 million girls were aborted because of their sex.”
The government has tried to stop the practice, but in a country where corruption is rampant, laws are easily set aside. “A 1996 government regulation designed to prevent the use of ultrasound for prenatal sex determination is widely flouted, the researchers say, pointing out that few health providers have been charged or convicted.” A little bribe goes a long way. This could not have happened before science brought the technology to know the sex of an unborn baby, but where does the fault lie?
2. Imbalance in China: The Three Gorges Dam was a monumental engineering effort in China that worried environmentalists and ethicists because of potential damage to the land and its people. Now that the reservoir is full, New Scientist reported, those worries have been realized.
Landslides, pollution, and economic upheaval with dire consequences for many displaced people are the result. The BBC News added that 1.3 billion people were displaced by a project that was the “contentious scheme even before it was approved.” Ignoring warnings that it would cause an “environmental catastrophe,” the government went ahead with the project.
Last week, in an unusual move, the government admitted “that the Three Gorges dam has caused significant environmental problems.” But they remain unfazed by the consequences. In fact, they are going to build more dams.
3. Endangered species: The Endangered Species Act has impacted many businesses and homeowners, depriving property owners of rights to use their land in freedom because of the claims of scientists that certain species would be adversely affected. “For more than 40 years,” Science Daily reported, “the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has published the Red List of Threatened Species describing the conservation status of various species of animals.”
Now, however, an international team is calling for a reassessment of the definition of endangered species. Are the one-size-fits-all criteria currently in use too simplistic? “Our results challenge the application of the same sets of threat criteria across living organisms and across regions,” the team said, admitting that “identifying which species are most at risk can be difficult....” While each case must be judged on the evidence, one wonders how many human beings have been deprived of their freedom, and what has been the impact on society and the economy, from the application of simplistic standards of assumed knowledge.
4. Climate change: For most of the past decade, global warming has been a doomsday scenario guaranteed by the scientific consensus unless drastic changes in the world’s economies were made. States have passed carbon taxes; the federal government pushed for cap-and-trade legislation; bodies of world governments agreed to make draconian cuts in emissions that would cripple their economies.
Many scientists still believe the threat is real. Maybe it is, but the IPCC, the world body that had been trusted with the scientific data to back it up, got caught in an embarrassing credibility crisis over the Climategate affair in 2009. Subsequent investigations found conflicts of interest and sloppy data gathering by the panel. Nature News discussed the latest moves to repair the damage and reform the IPCC, while a growing number of climate skeptics have claimed the threat is either overblown or unreal, leading to questions about how many nations and people might be suffering unnecessarily over a “little knowledge” about climate processes that may be too uncertain for human beings to grasp.
5. Fatherhood: An article on PhysOrg pointed to the grim realities of fatherless families, but attributed the causes to poverty and lack of education. Yet numerous men achieved success in spite of those causes. George Washington Carver was an orphan, was dirt poor, was discriminated against, and yet became a highly successful and benevolent scientist. Is it possible that the researchers behind the report are confusing causes and effects and ignoring other factors? How many times has the government tried to eradicate poverty and ignorance, only to make problems worse?
Such questions need to be asked before accepting the opinions of “economists, sociologists, and public policy experts” in academia. The “experts” undoubtedly omitted to include input from the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and other conservative organizations that might beg to differ on the causes and cures of fatherless families. In fact, a survey of the ideology of the researchers behind this study might be illuminating. How many of them view government as the solution to all social ills?
There’s an exhibition on display at Trinity College Dublin called “Human+: The Future of Our Species”. Even the leftist-leaning journal Nature found some of the art, supported by the Wellcome Trust, unsettling.1 Anthony King wrote about the exhibit that challenges what it means to be human. “Genetics and artificial intelligence figure prominently among its themes of augmented abilities, authoring evolution, extended ecologies, life at the edges and non-human encounters.”
Some of the exhibits include a man transplanting an ear onto his arm, a robot that makes threats to critics, a robot that makes viewers ill at ease by imitating their facial expressions, a film showing robots boring holes into human bodies, and a place where viewers can get genetically tested for a gene that is claimed to cause high risk behavior. This particular piece caught King’s eye:
Taking a still darker turn is the sculpture Euthanasia Coaster. Should medical wonders allow us extended lifetimes, boredom may bedevil us. Julijonas Urbonas imagines a humane and thrilling exit: death by roller coaster in the form of an exhilarating 500-metre drop followed by a series of loops, the G-forces of which would kill passengers in a state of intense euphoria.
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How They Do It: Amazing Organisms
May 27, 2011 — The plants and animals around us seem so ordinary, but they all are so extraordinary, the extraordinary becomes ordinary simply because of their numbers. But if you expanded the sample space to include the entire solar system, what we have in earth’s biosphere should astonish everyone. Here are some notable fellow creatures.
Nine amazing creatures described, with quotations that are eye-opening.
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Mars as Anomalous Runt
May 26, 2011 — The Mars rover Spirit is now dead in its tracks (JPL) but the planet under it continues to rumble, in theoretical overhauls and anomalies. Mars has been much on the mind of news reporters this week after a new paper speculated that the red planet grew up fast and then stopped as a runt.
In Nature,1 Dauphas and Pourmand studied ratios of isotopes of hafnium (Hf) and tungsten (W) to envision a history of Mars much different than previously assumed. Their model makes Mars form in about one-fifth or less the time previously assumed to be required. In the same issue of Nature,1 Alan Brandon summed up the new idea: “It seems that Mars had grown to near its present size by 2 million to 4 million years after the Solar System began to form,” he said. “Such rapid growth explains why the planet is much smaller than Earth and Venus.”
Any explanatory gains, however, appear to be offset by puzzles, according to Bloch’s Law, “Every solution breeds new problems.” Brandon said, “The authors finding that rocky bodies the size of Mars accreted within 2 million to 4 million years has ramifications for models of early planetary history.” Some of these ramifications confirm earlier theories, while others contradict them:
With such an early time for Mars accretion, which probably led to the formation of a global magma ocean, how do we explain the times for magma-ocean solidification of around 100 million years after the Solar System began to form that are obtained from measurements of Lu (lutetium)-Hf and Sm-Nd chronometers in Martian meteorites? Magma oceans are not supposed to take that long to solidfy. This suggests that, although Dauphas and Pourmand have provided us with a key constraint on the early formation and evolution of our planets, we still have much to learn.
None of the three authors explained how primary accretion (the gathering of dust particles into bodies large enough to grow by gravitational attraction) might have occurred; they all began by assuming large bodies were already present. They also assumed the truth of the controversial theory that earth’s moon formed by collision of a Mars-sized body into our planet. Philosophically speaking, it is usually not a good idea to resort to ad hoc conditions to explain anomalies.
Live Science posted three videos of Mars, The Changing Face of Mars, Where’ All the Water Go? and What Went Wrong on Mars? which includes some dramatic flyovers of Martian terrain based on orbital photographs. The narrator divines unobserved Martian prehistory as if an eyewitness. PhysOrg and Science Daily presented the Dauphas-Pourmand theory uncritically, treating the isotope ratios as unproblematic chronometers that allow scientists to see the unobserved past in a kind of crystal ball.
Space.com recounted the history of failed spacecraft at Mars, the “spacecraft graveyard.” Keep an eye on JPL Mars Exploration for latest news on this fall’s planned launch of the next-generation red rover, Mars Science Laboratory, recovering from an incident that did not damage the backshell (see PhysOrg).
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Precambrian Rabbit or Evolutionary Transition?
May 25, 2011 — Some evolutionists have defended their theory by proposing a falsification test: the discovery of a Precambrian rabbit. No such fossil has ever been found, partly because any stratum containing a rabbit fossil would never have been labeled Precambrian in the first place. But evolutionists would be surprised at finding complex non-marine multicellular eukaryotes in Precambrian strata, and this has just been announced in Nature.
A team led by Paul Strother of Boston College with help from Oxford University and University of Sheffield has announced “Earth’s earliest non-marine eukaryotes.”1 “Direct evidence of fossils within rocks of non-marine origin in the Precambrian is exceedingly rare,” they said. In Arizona, they found not only ambiguous traces, but oodles of clear evidence for freshwater eukaryotes:
Here we report the recovery of large populations of diverse organic-walled microfossils extracted by acid maceration, complemented by studies using thin sections of phosphatic nodules that yield exceptionally detailed three-dimensional preservation. These assemblages contain multicellular structures, complex-walled cysts, asymmetric organic structures, and dorsiventral, compressed organic thalli, some approaching one millimetre in diameter. They offer direct evidence of eukaryotes living in freshwater aquatic and subaerially exposed habitats during the Proterozoic era. The apparent dominance of eukaryotes in non-marine settings by 1?Gyr ago indicates that eukaryotic evolution on land may have commenced far earlier than previously thought.
The date of one billion years is nearly twice as long ago as the Cambrian explosion. The paper shows over a dozen specimens of different shapes and levels of organization, from spherical clumps of cells to others with differentiated structures. “The Torridonian assemblages contain some striking examples of microfossils that show complexity that goes considerably beyond that of simple leiospheres” [i.e., nondescript clusters]. Some have vesicles, outer walls and armlike projections (thalli). They figured these organisms were “approaching a tissue-level grade of organization.”
Where would these fit into evolutionary theory? Some evolutionists posit the origin of life at 3 billion years ago. These organisms, at 1 billion years, would represent early experiments into multicellular organisms. The small sizes, they said, argue against them being blastulae (early developmental stages of metazoans). “The simplicity of these balls of cells precludes their systematic assignment within the Eukarya,” they said; “However, their morphology, in combination with larger, probably multicellular thalli (Fig. 3 b), indicates that evolutionary processes that preceded tissue-grade multicellularity in marine settings, such as cell-to-cell adhesion, were also evident in non-marine settings by 1?Gyr ago.”
This means that “Early eukaryotes were clearly capable of diversifying within non-marine habitats, not just in marine settings as has been generally assumed.” Because terrestrial environments offer more variety, “Such habitat heterogeneity translates directly into increased speciation potential,” they claimed.
Another interesting fossil was reported in the same issue of Nature.1 A giant version of anomalocaris, the terror of Cambrian seas (as pictured in the opening of the film Darwin’s Dilemma; see trailer) has been found in Ordovician deposits in Morocco. Science Daily has an artist rendition of the creature that measured up to three feet long – a foot longer than earlier records, and 30 million years younger than other specimens famous from the Burgess Shale.
The “extraordinarily well-preserved fossils” also show a series of “segments across the animal’s back, which scientists think might have functioned as gills.” So not only was this creature more complex, it “existed for much longer and grew to much larger sizes than previously thought,” the article said. How were they fossilized? “The animals found in Morocco inhabited a muddy sea floor in fairly deep water, and were trapped by sediment clouds that buried them and preserved their soft bodies.”
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Earth Still Privileged Planet
May 24, 2011 — Astronomers have found over a thousand extrasolar planets now. How does our solar system compare? Thanks to the Kepler spacecraft, we now have a catalog of 1,235 alien planet candidates after just four months of operation. Of the 408 that have been found in multiple-planet systems, 170 of these containing two to six planets have been pictured in a “Kepler Orrery” posted by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The press release says, “most of those look very different than our solar system” (see also 05/21/2011, bullet 2).
The poster is accompanied by an animated version that shows the 170 systems revolving like gears (see also PhysOrg). Due to selection effects of the transiting method, Kepler has tended to find systems with low inclinations. These have planets smaller than Neptune, because large gas giants can perturb the orbits of member planets into higher inclinations. The Kepler team was surprised to find so many multiple-planet systems in their quarry: over 100, when only two or three were expected. It is still too early, though, to detect earth-mass planets within their stars’ habitable zones.
How do planets form? The astronomical community has undergone a paradigm revolution in the last decade about planet formation (05/07/2001). Ever since Laplace, astronomers have assumed that disks of dust and gas will slowly condense into planets (the nebular hypothesis). The discovery of “hot Jupiters” (gas giants orbiting extremely close to their parent stars) was shocking. It indicated that planets migrate inward and will quickly be destroyed unless they can form faster than the core accretion model permits.
This was a factor contributing to a newer “disk instability” model that posits clumps within the disk condensing rapidly into planets – a “heretical” view when first proposed (06/03/2003, 03/21/2006). All such models have problems of their own, however (09/22/2003, 08/27/2004, 08/06/2004, 07/15/2005). In either case, an upper limit typically given for planet formation has been ten million years or less to avoid the death spiral.
Ten million years now appears too long. Observations of IC 348, a cluster of stars thought to be two or three million years old, shows that the dust is rapidly depleting in nine disks detected. Universe Today interpreted what this means: “If planets are forming in IC 348 at the same frequency in which they form in systems astronomers have observed elsewhere, this would seem to suggest that the gravitational collapse model is more likely to be correct since it doesn’t leave a large window in which forming planets could accrete. If the core accretion model is correct, then planetary formation must have begun very quickly.” Join Voisey’s headline for the story was, “Want to Make Planets? Better Hurry.” The 05/07/2001, 06/03/2003 and 05/21/2009 entries show this has been known to be a problem for at least a decade.
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Embryonic Stem Cells Left in iPS Dust
A few years ago, scientists were clamoring for access to human embryos for stem cell research. Now, the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) from human skin and other adult tissues has sidetracked interest in embryonic stem cells. The momentum is clearly going with iPS. Is there any longer a need for embryonic stem cell research?
9 cases of advances in adult stem cells provided.
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"Enlightenment" History of Science Being Rewritten
May 22, 2011 — It’s a common myth that enlightenment atheists gave birth to the scientific era by casting off the darkness of the Christian middle ages and replacing magical arts like alchemy with the scientific experimental method. Historians of science know better. A couple of recent articles help set the record straight.
Alchemy has long had a bad rap, but that is beginning to change. Professor Lawrence Princippe (Johns Hopkins University) has spent 30 years investigating the writings and experiments of alchemists, and has concluded that many of them were “real scientists” doing valid work in chemistry. Among the respectable practitioners were Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.
This does not mean that the methods of alchmemists deserve a comeback, or that their belief that base metals could be turned into gold should be taken seriously, but rather that for their time, they were pursuing real scientific questions with the limited materials available to them. Sara Reardon described the growing recovery of alchemy’s reputation in Science.1
In a Nature blog,1 James Hannam, historian of science and author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution wrote to correct misconceptions about the relation of Christianity to science. Right off the bat he made a list:
The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.
After dispensing with the myths, he listed positive cases of the church supporting science. Churches supported the teaching of science and even built observatories into cathedrals, for example. Hannam then pointed out that Christians did science as an act of worship when it was unprofitable. He mentioned a historical point rarely considered:
It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe [sic] away.
Hannam went on to describe how the Middle Ages, dominated by the Church, was actually a time of innovation and progress. Even the Dark Ages that preceded it was a time of advance, he said, in spite of the depression caused by the fall of Rome.
Why, then, do so many people get the idea that Christianity and science are opposed? Hannam presented a brief conspiracy theory, pointing out that the conflict of science with religion arose only during the “enlightenment” (his mock quotes and non-capitalization).
Voltaire and his fellow philosophes opposed the Catholic Church because of its close association with France’s absolute monarchy. Accusing clerics of holding back scientific development was a safe way to make a political point. The cudgels were later taken up by TH Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, in his struggle to free English science from any sort of clerical influence. Creationism did the rest of the job of persuading the public that Christianity and science are doomed to perpetual antagonism.
In closing, Hannam said that both “science and religion are the two most powerful intellectual forces on the planet,” pointing out that “Both are capable of doing enormous good, but their chances of doing so are much greater if they can work together.” He ended by congratulating Lord Martin Rees winning of the Templeton Prize as a “small step in the right direction.”
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Carbon Units Study Carbon Unity
May 21, 2011 — Life’s dependency on carbon was so distinctive to aliens in Star Trek, they nicknamed humans “carbon units.” With its four valences, carbon is able to form an almost infinite number of complex molecules based on chains (polymers) and geometric shapes. But does the presence of carbon in abundance explain the appearance of life? Evolutionists desire a unified, “bottom-up” story that derives complex life from particles exploding out of the big bang by undirected processes and natural law. Here’s a look at stages in the grand story.
1. Whence carbon? Over a half century ago, flamboyant astrophysicist Fred Hoyle realized that a finely-tuned resonance state in nuclear reactions going on in the interiors of stars was responsible for carbon nucleosynthesis. Now, according to PhysOrg, researchers at North Carolina State University have modeled the Hoyle State state from first principles and proved it correct. Dean Lee at NC State commented, “This work is valuable because it gives us a much better idea of the kind of ‘fine-tuning’ nature has to do in order to produce carbon in stars.”
2. Whence carbon-rich planets? Once you have carbon, what happens to it? Much of it remains in stars, but supernovas can blast it and other heavy elements out into molecular clouds. As theory has it, these clouds condense and form planets (but see 05/21/2009, 06/09/2009, 08/21/2009, . Rocky planets might have abundant carbon.
Science news outlets are asking if the Kepler spacecraft has found one. Space.com asked, “Is the Rocky Alien Planet Gliese 581d Really Habitable?” It’s seven times bigger than earth, but appears to lie in the circumstellar habitable zone (see other habitable zone requirements in the 02/26/2011 commentary). Beyond that, nobody knows if it has the requirements for life, and detection of life is beyond current capabilities.
Guillermo Gonzalez, astrobiologist, intelligent design advocate and co-author of The Privileged Planet (see video version on YouTube), was asked about the likelihood of life on this world on ID the Future. He said that other factors, such as plate tectonics and the right atmosphere and temperature, will have to be evaluated.
Uncommon Descent noticed that Gonzalez, who predicted in his book that habitable planets would be rare, has been right in that prediction so far – but that didn’t win him any awards in academia. After The Privileged Planet came out proposing that life was rare in the universe, he later lost his tenure battle at Iowa State due to the intolerance of some atheist professors for his views on intelligent design (05/22/2007 bullet 7, 11/08/2007, 12/16/2008).
An article on New Scientist agrees that worlds like ours are rare, and is worried about it. In “No place like home: Our lonesome solar system,” Lee Billings quoted planet hunter Geoff Marcy saying, “Our system is a rarity, there’s no longer a question about that. The only question that remains is, just how rare is it?”
3. Whence carbon-based life? Is that end of the road – a planet with carbon and other heavy elements that just sits there? Obviously, evolutionary scientists would like to see those elements self-organize into living cells.
A story on Science Daily promised “important clues to how life originated from non-life and how modern cells came to exhibit complex behaviors.” Unfortunately for tantalized readers, the researchers at Penn State did not bring carbon to life. They played with toy models of cells. They “generated simple, non-living model ‘cells’ with which they established that asymmetric division – the process by which a cell splits to become two distinct daughter cells – is possible even in the absence of complex cellular components, such as genes.” Whatever this oversimplified model has to do with the origin of life is anyone’s guess.
One researcher claimed, “We observed that even model cells can divide in a structured way, which implies a kind of intrinsic order.” Whether that order was intrinsic or was inserted by the investigators into the system, since they tweaked variables in their model to get the outcomes they desired, is a good follow-up question. They modeled various carbon-based molecules such as amino acids and lipids to get their toy cells to divide without genetic control. It was left unstated if real molecules would do such things. Real cells divide with a host of complex machines, and require accurate copying of millions of base pairs of DNA.
They saw their work as just a piece of a puzzle: “Scientists have simulated early-Earth conditions in laboratories and have demonstrated that many amino acids – the biochemical constituents of proteins – can form through natural chemical reactions,” Christine Keating [Penn State] said. We hope our research helps to fill in another part of the puzzle: how chemical and spatial organization may have contributed to the success of early life forms.” Taxpayers can thank the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health for funding these imaginary scenarios.
4. Whence life complexity? Give evolutionists all the carbon-based molecules they want – will they get life to form and evolve? Will the amino acids form proteins (see online book) that can evolve into complex life? Michael Lynch and Ariel Fernandez, scientists at the University of Chicago, reported PhysOrg began with proteins, and then speculated that “Errors in protein structure sparked evolution of biological complexity.” That’s right: complex life is the result of mistakes. This idea was published in Nature.1
Over four billion years of evolution, plants and animals grew far more complex than their single-celled ancestors. But a new comparison of proteins shared across species finds that complex organisms, including humans, have accumulated structural weaknesses that may have actually launched the long journey from microbe to man.
This new idea is actually un-Darwinian. In a nutshell, PhysOrg said, “random introduction of errors into proteins, rather than traditional natural selection, may have boosted the evolution of biological complexity.” Has can that be? Is there any complex system that gets better with the introduction of random errors? The article continued, “Flaws in the ‘packing’ of proteins that make them more unstable in water could have promoted protein interactions and intracellular teamwork, expanding the possibilities of life.”
Jason Palmer cheerfully echoed this “could have” story on the BBC News, quoting Michael Lynch [Indiana U], who added this un-Darwinian comment: “We’ve opened up the idea that the roots of complexity don’t have to reside in purely adaptational arguments.” The team felt that new protein interactions “nudged complexity forward” with functional possibilities. No actual possibilities were presented. Wouldn’t many of these actions be deleterious? Don’t proteins denature into sticky, shapeless masses unless they fold correctly? To solve this problem, they had another could-have story up their sleeves: “The authors suggest then that other adaptations occur that ‘undo’ the deleterious effects of the sticky proteins.”
Co-author Fernandez applied the tinkerer metaphor to their idea while tossing a useful line to intelligent design advocates: “Natural designs are often one notch more sophisticated than the best engineering,” he said in the PhysOrg article. “This is another example: Nature doesn’t change the molecular machinery, but somehow it tinkers with it in subtle ways through the wrapping.” (See personification.)
Palmer’s BBC story included a curious quote by Ford Doolittle [Dalhousie University] about this “new evolutionary pathway that didn’t exist before.” Doolittle commented about what he perceived as useless complexity in real life: “Darwinists are a little bit like the pre-Darwinists before them, who would have marveled at the perfection of God’s creation.” Doolittle disagrees with Lynch about the repair of deleterious proteins; instead, he imagines cells with “presuppression” mechanisms that would protect them from mistakes. “But we both agree that much of complexity does not have an adaptive explanation.” They also agree that it does not have a design explanation, but that goes without saying; their idea presents a random explanation: stuff happens.
That’s a new label for creationists: “pre-Darwinists”. Will they like it?
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Peppered Moths Are Back
May 20, 2011 — One might think that past embarrassments about the peppered moth as evidence for evolution would keep evolutionists reluctant to mention them. A team from the University of Liverpool either didn’t get the message, or shed all reluctance anyway. They published a new paper about Biston betularia in Science,1 calling the moth story “a textbook example of how an altered environment may produce morphological adaptation through genetic change” and “one of the most widely recognized examples of contemporary evolutionary change.” Their paper, however, only discussed which mutations might have produced the black variety. The black ones, apparently losing their color due to a single mutation, did better when the trees were darker, but are now rapidly disappearing. No long-term evolutionary adaptation was demonstrated. Here’s how the paper ended:
The rapid spread of an initially unique haplotype, driven by strong positive selection, is expected to generate the profile of linkage disequilibrium we have observed, establishing that UK industrial melanism in the peppered moth was seeded by a single recent mutation that spread to most parts of mainland Britain and also colonized the Isle of Man (fig. S4). Paradoxically, although the carbonaria [black] morph is now strongly disadvantageous and consequently rare in the United Kingdom, the rapidity of its decline has minimized the eroding effect of typica [white] introgression on the molecular footprint of strongly positive selection created during its ascendency.
This means that the mutant appeared recently, spread for awhile, and is dying out, without leaving much of an evolutionary trace on the species.
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