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Electricity Forms Your Heart
July 31, 2010 — Did you know your heart is an electrical appliance? That’s right. Currents of electrical ions are vital to its function as a contractile organ. Now, researchers at the University of California have found another thing electricity does for your heart: it guides the developing heart into the proper shape. This is a key study showing how epigenetic factors – factors above and beyond the genetic code – are essential for the formation of body parts.
The research team, publishing in PNAS,1 explained the purpose of their investigation (Note: morphogenesis refers to the origin of shape, and cardiomyocytes are the specialized muscle cells that make the heart beat):
Cardiac morphogenesis is a complex process that is mediated by a coordinated set of cellular and molecular as well as environmental factors. Recent studies have shown that epigenetic forces such as cardiomyocyte contractility and intracardiac hemodynamic flow regulate this process. Furthermore, in vitro studies suggest that cardiomyocytes can realign themselves according to electrical conduction directionality. However, because electrical cardiac conduction and mechanical contractile forces are intimately coupled in the intact heart, it is difficult to assess the individual contribution of these influences to overall heart organogenesis. Here, we make use of several zebrafish cardiac mutants to uncouple these two influences, and find that electrical conduction exclusive of contractile influences can directly participate in remodeling and morphogenesis of the vertebrate heart.
In other words, electrical conduction guides the individual heart cells into position during heart development. They said in the Discussion part of their paper that it is known that “The direction of growth and orientation of various cell types in tissue culture can be influenced by externally applied electric fields.” They added, “Furthermore, endogenous [inside organism] electric currents exist in a variety of tissues and have been hypothesized to influence cell migration and shape.” This paper announces confirmation of that hypothesis for heart formation: “Our in vivo results [using living zebrafish] indicate that physiologic electric currents can indeed have an impact on cell morphology and overall cardiac organogenesis.” The mutant fish without the electrical conduction working properly developed heart disease.
So how does this work? They explained, “These electrical effects might be mediated through intracellular calcium fluxes which can affect cell polarization. Furthermore, a number of cell surface receptors... can also be redistributed in the cell membrane by electric fields.” Does this finding provide hope for heart patients? Patients with electrical conduction disorders get better when the beats are re-synchronized. The researchers explained why that works: “Thus, overall cardiac improvement from the resynchronization of the ventricles in heart failure patients manifesting conduction disorders may be due to beneficial realignment and improved remodeling of the myocardium primarily from proper and synchronized electrical signaling.” Get the electricity right, and the heart shapes up. Now those defibrillation devices and electrical heart stimulators start to make more sense.
This means that stem cell therapy (07/20/2010) may need an electrical jumpstart to work properly: “Given that previous cardiac cell-based therapy has provided only a modest improvement in cardiac function,” they ended, pointing therapy in a new direction, “electrical cell–cell communication and stimulation may be required for optimal integration and alignment of engrafted embryonic cardiomyocytes and skeletal myoblasts in the injured myocardium to improve overall myocardial performance.” Live better electrically!
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Getting Animals from Here to There
July 30, 2010 — The world is a big place, and most animals are small. Yet many animals are found far from where their presumed ancestors lived. Most birds, naturally, can fly long distances, and some sea creatures can cross the oceans with the help of currents. That cannot explain all the cases, however. Here are some attempts by evolutionists to explain how animals got from here to there:
1. Land-locked reptiles: In the evolutionary saga, the first tetrapods invaded the land close to shore. Scientists at the University of London found reptile tracks, though, according to Live Science, found “ancient reptile tracks” in the Bay of Fundy at a location said thought to be 500 kilometers inland. According to New Scientist, the first land colonizers, frogs and amphibians, had to stay near the water. Howard Falcon-Lang gave his speculation on how the reptile track-makers got so far into the dry inland area: “Perhaps the coastal swampy forests were becoming overcrowded and the continental interior were empty spaces just waiting to be filled by pioneers.”
2. Aussie gloss: One would think that the unique marsupials characteristic of Australia would have evolved down unda. A new theory by a team at the University of Munster, Germany, believes, instead, that they evolved in South America (see Live Science and PhysOrg, “A hop from South America”). There’s a big ocean in between those locations – at least today. The supercontinent Gondwana is thought to have broken apart 80 million years ago. No wonder that PhysOrg said, “Debates have raged for decades about how to arrange the Australian and South American branches of the marsupial family tree.”
According to the new theory, a common ancestor of all the Australian marsupials hopped over before the land bridge became inundated (they based this on measures of retrotransposons in the genes of Australian and South American marsupials, not on fossil evidence). As usual, though, new solutions create new problems. “It is still a mystery how the two distinct Australian and South American branches of marsupials separated so cleanly, but perhaps future studies can shed light on how this occurred.” The BBC News coverage complicated the story by invoking a kind of circular migration pattern over unknown epochs. They envisioned the first marsupial ancestor in China moving across Gondwana South America, then into Australia, and back to Indonesia. It would seem this would allow for quite of bit of genetic mixing during the long periods of migration. One of the scientists is not sure when the genetic signature got locked into the Aussie groups. “It’s now up to other people, maybe from the palaeontology field, to find out when exactly it happened.”
For a related story on Australian marsupials, see this Science Daily article about a cave near New South Wales that was found loaded with marsupial bones said to be 15 million years old.
3. One-way birds: Not all birds are capable of long-distance migration. It’s long been unclear how certain species of birds arrived in North and South America. There’s a land bridge now (the Isthmus of Panama), but for a long time before South America bumped into the North American continent, a vast ocean separated the two. Science Daily reported on the thinking of researchers at the University of Nevada that suggests there was one-way traffic: “Avian lineages from the northern Nearctic regions have repeatedly invaded the tropics and radiated throughout South America,” said Brian Tilston Smith (U of Nevada). “In contract [sic, contrast] species with South American tropical origins remain largely restricted to the confines of the tropical regions.” He based his ideas on phylogeny the “molecular clock” hypothesis, because “the relatively poor fossil record has prevented us from understanding how the land bridge shaped New World bird communities.” Smith said, “Our study suggests the formation of the Panama land bridge was crucial for allowing cross continental bird migration.” But it doesn’t explain the one-way traffic, unless for some reason South America had better marketing. Some 50% of species in the South have Northern origins, the article said, but it’s only 10% the other direction.
4. Brazilian elephant: PhysOrg reported the discovery of a 12 cm tooth shows elephants made it to Brazil. They were previously known only as far south as Costa Rica. Maybe it was on vacation.
Charles Darwin spent two chapters in the Origin invoking geographical distribution as evidence for his theory of evolution. Modern evolutionists continue the tradition, with ample use of ad hoc reasoning.
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Things in Space that Shouldn’t Be
July 29, 2010 — A history of astronomy and a history of surprise discoveries in space would track pretty well. Recent stories show that the trend continues even today (6 reports from solar system to stars).
An article on PhysOrg about early results from the Herschel Space Observatory with its SPIRE camera quoted Ian Smail of Durham University, who analyzes results from the mission: “It is already clear that we live in a changing Universe and, thanks to Herschel and SPIRE, few things are changing faster than our perception of it.”
Looking back over 400 years of astronomy since Galileo and Kepler, Joseph Burns of Cornell University surveyed the many surprising discoveries made in space, especially in the last 5 decades of the space program: the Van Allen belts; Venus’s young surface; old, cold moons that proved surprisingly active; old, cold comets that showed evidence of hot formation; asteroids thought to be hard rock that turn out to be rubble piles; remarkable dynamism in Saturn’s rings; chaotic motions of moons; and more. “Few scientists envisaged that the neighbouring worlds explored by space missions would be so diverse, nor how entrancing many are.” Publishing his account in Nature,2, using the word “surprising” a number of times, he quoted a character from Tom Stoppard’s novel Arcadia in his conclusion talking about scientific revolutions: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
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Evolution of Segmentation Leads to Playing God
July 28, 2010 — Most animals come in segments – body plans that are divided into more-or-less similar parts. Arthropods, worms and vertebrates are examples (including humans, with their vertebral segments and rough division into head, thorax and abdomen). Where did the idea of segmentation come from? Some French evolutionists think it just appeared by chance and changed the face of the world.
The article in Science Daily makes a number of amazing claims:
# (1) Segmentation appeared by chance: “By chance, evolution may have played a winning card with segmentation, which profoundly marked the history of life on Earth.”
# (2) Evolution came up with segmentation either once or multiple times by “convergent evolution,” but the French think it happened once, because they found similar retrotransposons in the genes of the different segmented groups: “These similarities led them to conclude that the genes had been inherited from a common ancestor, which was itself segmented.”
# (3) Their finding constitutes proof, they think: “This old and controversial idea among zoologists [i.e., that segmented animals had a single common ancestor], had never been proved until now.” (4) Evolution would go the segmentation route because it’s economical: “Over millions of years, and exposure to changing environmental constraints, it is easier for an animal to specialize a segment into a specific tool in response to a need, than to create a whole new organ from scratch.” (5) Humans can play God by using the advantages of segmentation: “If one day we could play God and create artificial animals or even biomimetic robots, perhaps we too should think about it. But this is still within the realm of science fiction.”
So when did chance come upon this lucky advantage? They answered this question with a question: “Is it possible that they all inherited this feature from a very distant common ancestor that lived 600 million years ago, before the Cambrian explosion, which produced most of the large animal groups that exist today?” They had to envision an unknown, unseen common ancestor before the explosion, because the Cambrian strata show fully-segmented worms, arthropods (trilobites) and vertebrates doing just fine.
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Is Our World Natural?
July 27, 2010 — At first glance, the headline sounds absurd: is our world natural? Of course the world is natural. Nature is natural, isn’t it? Often, though, we picture what humans do as unnatural – oil spills, landfills, pollution, nuclear waste, crime, war. But if humans are a part of nature, then whatever they do is natural. Some recent articles show that the definition of natural requires some reflection (4 examples).
These and other examples show that defining natural is complex and problematic. Yet the word is important in origins debates. Evolutionists, whether atheistic or theistic, often demand that science restrict its explanations to natural phenomena subject to natural laws. Yet by using their human reason and intellect, they are, in a sense, acting “outside” nature by casting judgment on what nature entails and how it is to be understood. Explanation by its very “nature” is not a natural phenomenon subject to natural laws. It shouldn’t be surprising that this article began with a headline, “Is our world natural?” Sean Carroll, a Caltech cosmologist, asked if the universe itself is natural (see 05/11/2006).
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Recapitulation Theory Gets Recap
July 26, 2010 — The long-discounted “recapitulation theory” of Ernst Haeckel, the idea that the development of an embryo replays its evolutionary history, pops up every once in awhile in evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists (most notably the late Stephen Jay Gould) have long since disparaged the idea that evolutionary history would be preserved in embryos. In addition, photos of real embryos have put the lie to Haeckel’s fudged drawings he made to support his idea. According to Darwinian theory, only those mutations that survive should be preserved in an organism. What need would an organism have for embryonic replays of its ancestors? If something is non-functional in the present, neo-Darwinian theory requires, natural selection will weed it out.
Not all evolutionists seem to have gotten the news. The most recent example was presented without question by PhysOrg, which published a press release from Washington University School of Medicine. It’s right in the headline: “Baby brain growth mirrors changes from apes to humans.” Live Science did it, too: “Baby Brain Growth Reflects Human Evolution.” They continued, “Watching human baby brains grow is a little like watching evolution in action.”
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Dating of Impacts and Impacts of Dating
July 25, 2010 — Earth and Neptune were both on stage this week with stories of impacts. How do scientists know when they occurred?
1. Neptune: A comet struck Neptune 200 years ago. That’s what planetary scientists are claiming, according to National Geographic. The data only “suggests” this explanation, according to Space.com. Since nobody witnessed the impact in 1810 (Neptune had not even been discovered yet), how do they know? The data consists of elevated carbon monoxide levels in the outer atmospheric layers of Neptune compared with the lower layers, as measured by the Herschel spacecraft. According to one of the authors of a paper on the hypothesis, “The higher concentration of carbon monoxide in the stratosphere can only be explained by an external origin,” Another author added, “From the distribution of carbon monoxide we can therefore derive the approximate time, when the impact took place.”
According to the articles, similar techniques were used on Saturn to suspect an impact about 300 years ago. The only impacts on gas giants witnessed by humans have been on Jupiter. Scientists estimate the one that hit Neptune was twice as big as the first fragment of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 that struck Jupiter in 1994.
2. Earth: A new impact crater was found in the deserts of Egypt, according to Space.com – one of the most pristine ever found. National Geographic has a good picture of it. Because of its lack of erosion, they estimated the crater formed within the last 2,000 years. Called Kamil Crater, it is 147 feed in diameter and 52 feet deep. This leads astrophysicists to estimate the characteristics of the impactor: “Based on their calculations, the team thinks that a 4.2-foot-wide (1.3-meter-wide) solid iron meteor weighing 11,023 to 22,046 pounds (5,000 to 10,000 kilograms) smashed into the desert—nearly intact—at speeds exceeding 2.1 miles (3.5 kilometers) a second.”
Based on estimates of the number of impactors orbiting our region of the solar system, the scientists estimate that 1,000 to 10,000 such impactors should strike earth each million years. Why are more not found? An Italian scientist explained, “The reason why they are rare, however, is that, on Earth, weathering rates are high—small craters are usually easily eroded or buried.”
For more on crater count dating methods, see this list of search bar results.
Which is easier: (1) to make up a story about something in the past that was not observed, or (2) to predict when something will happen? If planetary scientists can tell us when and where a meteor will strike and form a crater, that would be very impressive. “Too many variables!” they would rightly complain. But those same variables are time-independent. When you see them predicting 10,000 impacts each million years, that would be 4.5 to 45 million craters over the assumed age of the earth. It smells like a theory-rescuing device to say they were all eroded and weathered away. Not all portions of the earth erode at the same rate. Geologists tell us there are some rock outcrops 3.8 billion years old. Surely some evidence, direct or indirect, of 45 million craters should be detectable beyond the 176 National Geographic said have been discovered.
It appears there is some potential for testing deep time here. Take the assumed flux of material, the assumed age of the earth, the compositional content of the impacting material, the geological column, reasonable erosion rates, and research the question: is there evidence for this much meteoritic or cometary material in the rock record of our planet? Let’s not just take the secular geologists’ word for it. They are wedded to deep time. It would never occur to them to doubt their spouse: besides, it would be in bad taste. It’s up to the untied to ask such questions
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When Evolutionary Theory Gets It Wrong
July 24, 2010 — Evolutionary theory tends to make certain predictions about cells, tissues and organs. A long history of evolutionary errors, twists, turns and dead ends would lead to a build-up of junk. Recent examples show instances where nothing could be further from the truth. Other reports show complexity being pushed farther down the tree of life.
1. Primary cilia are not evolutionary relics: An article at PhysOrg said, “It’s safe to say that cilia, the hairlike appendages jutting out from the smooth surfaces of most mammalian cells, have long been misunderstood – underestimated, even.” The article goes on to say that many believed they served no purpose, being “regarded as merely an evolutionary relic – the cellular equivalent to the human appendix.” The discovery that many debilitating or life-threatening diseases can be traced to defects in primary cilia were some of the first clues scientists had been wrong. They are currently viewed as the antennae of the cell. “Of late, however, it has become increasingly clear that primary cilia serve as powerful communication hubs,” the article pivoted. “(After all, they do sort of look like antennae.)”
2. Astrocytes are not evolutionary glue: The star-shaped cells in the brain called astrocytes were long thought to be mere scaffolding or glue for the more-important neurons. An article on Science Daily said, “Astrocytes are a subtype of a group of brain cells known as glia (which means ‘glue’ in Greek). Glial cells are the most abundant cells in the human brain – outnumbering neurons by a factor of ten to one. Until very recently, glial cells have been thought to be the less exciting sisters of neurones [sic], merely providing them with structural and nutritional support.” New findings show that they can “taste” the blood flowing through the brain, and increase or decrease the breathing response to regulate carbon dioxide levels in the blood.
3. Stress hormones and immunity: did they evolve?: An article on immune reactions in PhysOrg noted that even mild ones impose significant energy costs. An “evolutionary anthropologist” found this out, but did not present a theory for the origin of immune systems, nor for their evolution over time. Any understanding in evolutionary theory was put into future tense: “Understanding the costs of immunity and the immunomodulatory actions of hormones are central to understanding the role of immunity in human life history evolution.” Later, the article admitted that evolution has been assumed, not demonstrated: “The metabolic responses to mild, acute infections and injury in humans have been relatively unexplored, despite the fact that much work in evolutionary anthropology relies on the assumption that immune maintenance and activation impose costs.”
A stress hormone has been discovered in a lowly lamprey, reported PhysOrg. The discovery supposedly “sheds light on how stress hormones evolved.” Yet the only support for evolution is that the sea lamprey has one stress hormone, and humans have more than 30. Evolution was assumed in this article, too: “Most jawless animals similar to the lamprey didn’t survive into the modern era, so they’re not available for us to use as we strive to learn more about how human systems developed,” the lead researcher said. “The sea lamprey, a survivor, gives us a snapshot of what happened as vertebrates evolved into the animals we know today.” He did not say where the lamprey’s hormone came from, or why, if lampreys evolved into the animals we know today, they still are doing fine in the seas today. A baloney-detecting reader challenged that assumption in the comments.
4. Junk no mo: Science Daily printed another study that shows the concept of “junk DNA” is dying or dead. The headline was, “Redundant Genetic Instructions in ‘Junk DNA’ Support Healthy Development.” This was another nail in the coffin: “The noncoding region is often surprisingly large; in humans, some 98 percent of the genome merits ‘junk’ status. But according to David Stern, a Princeton professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, scientists increasingly believe ‘junk DNA’ is crucial for turning the information encoded in genes into useful products.”
5. Pluripotency goes way back: “Mexican Salamander Helps Uncover Mysteries of Stem Cells and Evolution,” headlined Science Daily. Yet the only evidence was pluripotency being found farther back in the evolutionary story than thought. “We’ve produced evidence that pluripotency – the ability of an embryonic stem cell to become absolutely any kind of cell – is actually very ancient in evolutionary terms,” claimed Dr. Andrew Johnson of the UK National Stem Cell Network. “Even though received wisdom is that it evolved with mammals, our research suggests that it was there all along, just not in many of the species that people use in the lab. In fact, pluripotent cells probably exist in the embryos of the simple animals from which amphibians evolved.” Somehow, he believed that the lack of evolution made evolutionary sense: “since mammals evolved directly from reptiles it makes sense that the genetic mechanisms controlling embryo development remain largely unchanged from axolotls to humans.” Johnson also had to explain the evolutionary loss of this capability in certain lines of frogs.
In a breathtaking display of faith in evolution, Johnson called on convergent evolution, backwards evolution, the power of suggestion, and some new declaration of independence known as the “freedom to evolve” –
Dr Johnson said “Within our new theory of evolution pluripotency came first and so germ plasm would have to have evolved independently several times in species within the branches of the tree, for example in frogs and many fish. This is a process called convergent evolution – where a common advantage leads to several species developing features that make them appear more similar, rather than less.
“What is the advantage of germ plasm such that it would have evolved several times? We had to resolve the argument that germ plasm wasn’t necessary because pluripotency did the job just fine. We knew that with germ plasm pluripotency is not necessary, because the embryos contain primordial germ cells anyway. This explains why the Nanog gene became dispensable, and was lost from the DNA but it doesn’t explain what is the advantage to having germ plasm.”
Dr. Johnson and his colleagues suggest that the evolution of germ plasm liberates the soma of an organism to evolve more rapidly, simply because the embryo doesn’t need to induce germ cells – they are already there because of germ plasm. As a result of this, the genetic mechanisms that control the soma are free to evolve, because they are no longer occupied with producing the signals that induce primordial germ cells from pluripotent embryonic cells.
Sometimes “evolution” itself becomes a vestigial organ or junk-DNA word to a news story. An article on Science Daily, for instance, was titled “Quantum Entanglement in Photosynthesis and Evolution,” but then had nothing further to say about evolution. Instead, the article marveled at the efficiency of the structures of photosynthesis. They employ quantum effects in their handling of electrons. As a result, they “are so efficient at converting light into energy – doing so at 95 percent or more.” Some of the most primitive microbes on earth, the cyanobacteria, accomplish this trick. Nothing was said about how the efficient light-harvesting structures could have evolved. Instead, the conclusion took a biomimetic turn: “this understanding of quantum energy transfer and charge separation pathways may help the design of solar cells that take their inspiration from nature.”
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The Evolution of Integrity
July 23, 2010 — Scientists are having to deal with a crisis that overlaps with theology: integrity. What is integrity? Where did it come from? How could it evolve? How is it to be measured? Questions like these are usually not answered with ammeters and test tubes, but they must be faced. A crisis of integrity in scientific research is casting serious doubt on the future of science. In addition, the attempts by scientists to explain spiritual, moral and intellectual matters raises further questions about the limits of science. This week, Nature had a lot to say about the nature of integrity.
1. Culture of corruption: Did you know the Department of Health and Human Services has an Office of Research Integrity? Its health science administrator, Sandra Titus, along with Xavier Bosch of the University of Barcelona, laid out the problem of research integrity in an opinion piece in Nature:1
Despite attention to research misconduct and other issues of research integrity, efforts to promote responsible behaviour remain ineffective. Misconduct continues, and evidence suggests that increasingly stressful competition for funds and the rush to publish may further erode ethical behaviour. We believe that real change requires a fundamental shift: to be taken seriously, standards of ethical conduct must be linked to funding.
Improvement is badly needed.... On the basis of six pooled studies, up to 34% of scientists admitted to one or more questionable research practices such as inappropriate analysis, over-interpretation of findings and changing study design.”
In addition, few scientists are willing to report misconduct by peers. Titus and Bosch noted that a whole generation of cheaters is coming up through student ranks, used to the cut-and-paste world of messaging, unable to make independent decisions, woefully untaught about integrity issues, comfortable with sharing everything through electronic social networks. Smuggling answers to tests is a cinch with hand-held devices. “Undergraduate cheating is pervasive, with students adopting the behaviour of their peers,” they said. Their behavior “suggests that this generation may cheat throughout their lives, whether they are scientists, builders or bankers.”
2. Peer pressure: In the same issue of Nature,2 Gerald P. Koocher and Patricia Keith-Spiegel put positive peer pressure to the test. They studied reactions of scientists who intervened when they saw unethical practices by peers. Results were mixed. “As for the interveners themselves, their chances of a good or bad outcome were about 50/50, ranging from increased respect to a loss of perceived career prospects.” Yet not intervening sometimes left emotional scars that lasted for years. Understandably, those in junior positions were found to be less likely to report infractions by their superiors.
The I-word integrity was prominent in their last paragraph:
Maintaining scientific integrity by helping to ensure an accurate research record is an obligation shared by all researchers. If colleagues who are in a position to take action fail to act, poor behaviour might remain uncorrected and could well spread or be repeated. Our survey highlights that researchers have a commitment to research integrity, and that many are acting on their beliefs by gently attempting to correct bad science. Such willingness needs to be encouraged and strengthened.
The authors encouraged ways of promoting a culture that welcomes correction and values integrity. Getting that requires another character quality highlighted by a subsection heading: “The courage to act.”
3. Doubt and influence: It would seem that the scientific journals have an obligation to create that culture of integrity. Nature let readers in on a dispute between integrity and influence. Oreskes and Conway authored a book called Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury, 2010). Brian Wynne reviewed the book favorably in this week’s issue of Nature,3, concerned more for how scientists position themselves in the media than for matters of integrity and truth:
The doubters’ success lies in the way that policy questions are framed, with science placed at the centre. If a policy commitment is reduced only to a question of whether the science is right or wrong, then evidence can easily be made to unravel. Paradoxically, this happens when science attains its greatest political influence, when it goes beyond supplying the facts to defining the public meaning of problems. Public-policy issues always have dimensions beyond science, and require more than technical responses. When framing debates, policy-makers should prioritize discussion of social benefits as well as science: there are many good non-scientific reasons to reduce global environmental footprints and consumption frenzy, and to pursue greater justice, for instance. If the many factors that go into a policy commitment are recognized, science does not become the sole centre of authority and the sole target for opposition.
Three scientists wrote a letter to Nature complaining about Oreskes and Conway’s criticisms of William Nierenberg, a nuclear physicist who led the Scripps Institute, who died in 2000, whom the authors in the June 10 issue had lumped in with the “merchants of doubt” about climate science, a group of “doubt-mongers” who need to be defeated by the scientific community.4 On the contrary, Nicholas Nierenberg with Walter and Victoria Tschinkel said; William was an “independent thinker who was always willing to say what he thought, regardless of what was popular or expected. He knew that building public support for science begins with a constant regard for the truth.”5 Those attributes appear to be essential in any definition of integrity.
4.
One lesson the promoters of “framing” science for the public seem to underestimate is the doubt their own claims engender. Consider some recent claims made in the science press:
* Bellyflop: An article on BBC News claimed that watching frogs bellyflop “shows how frogs evolved.”
* Pet Darwin: According to PhysOrg Pat Shipman of Penn State has a “New hypothesis for human evolution and human nature.” Our love for pets led him to propose that “the interdependency of ancestral humans with other animal species... played a crucial and beneficial role in human evolution over the last 2.6 million years.”
* This is your brain on cooking: New Scientist printed again the idea that humans owe their big brains to the invention of cooking. Chew on this sentence for evidence: “Now the proponents of the cooked-food hypothesis are presenting fresh evidence in support of the idea – and it all comes down to how you chew.”
* In the dark: New Scientist gleefully reported the idea that every black hole may harbor another universe. In fact, “We could be living inside a black hole ourselves,” a singular idea.
* War strategy: Again at New Scientist, Metin Bosuglu claimed to give scientific authority to the view that “You can’t fight violence with violence.”
* Scientific atheism: Michael Murray, Jeffrey Schloss and John C. Avise continued their anti-Christian letter writing in PNAS this month, arguing basically that God wouldn’t have created a world like ours, and therefore intelligent design theory is wrong.6
Most people thought science deals with chemistry, physics and biology. When scientists speak far beyond the data, and make outlandish claims bearing on matters they cannot really claim to know anything about with certainty, that behavior, perceived as arrogance, itself creates doubt – especially when it seems to support political ideologies at variance with the beliefs of many. A mark of integrity is knowing one’s limitations.
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Tiny Life in Extraordinary Motion
July 22, 2010 — Don’t despise small things. Miniature plants and animals can pack some amazing punch and technology, as shown in two recent findings.
1. Plant explosion: Peat moss. That’s the filler in our indoor plant soil and the stuff of bogs where archaeologists find finely-preserved human remains. What you didn’t know is that it packs a wallop—spore guns that are so powerful, they produce a mushroom cloud. Live Science reported that its pots shoot its spores out at 89 miles per hour, producing accelerations of 36,000 G’s. Some spore clouds reach 80 times the height of the spore capsule before slowing down from air resistance.
The tiny plant produces a vortex ring like a smoke ring, an “extremely efficient way for a material to move through space.” Because of its success at spreading its spores, Sphagnum moss covers about 1% of earth’s land surface – an area more than twice the size of Texas. Joan Edwards [Williams College], who along with Johan L. van Leeuwen [Pomona College] published their findings in Science, said, “Sphagnum’s body is very simple, and yet it’s doing this very complicated thing.” Pressure builds up in the tiny capsule like a pressurized super soaker squirt gun, then pop! goes the efficiently-designed cloud of spores. “It’s really special,” she said. “Other mosses do exciting things, but not this exciting.”
2. Animal tractor: We’ve all seen caterpillars crawl, with waves of motion proceeding from back to front. Scientists at Tufts University found something else, reported Science Daily: the insides move to a different drummer than the outsides. “They found that the gut – essentially a tube suspended at the rear and head of the caterpillar and decoupled from the body wall – moved nearly a full step in advance of the surrounding structures,” the article said. “In contrast, gut movement was ‘in step’ with motion of the head and rear.”
This “crazy crawl,” Live Science said, is unlike any other motion seen in the animal kingdom: “their guts slide forward before the rest of their body does.” It took visible and X-ray videos to see the process. Live Science said the researchers wanted to know if this motion provides an advantage; Science Daily wondered if it provides an evolutionary advantage: “More research is needed to determine if this phenomenon gives caterpillars an evolutionary advantage, in the same way that synchronizing breathing and tissue movements benefits running vertebrates, or arm swinging by walking humans increases stability and reduces metabolic costs.” That sentence begs the question that advantageous traits evolved.
Regardless of how the caterpillar came up with its crazy crawl, the scientists are eager to imitate it. They envision a new kind of soft-bodied robot that might use the same inside-first, outside last propulsion mechanism. “Understanding this novel motion system may help efforts to design soft-bodied robots,” said Barry Trimmer of Tufts University.
For additional small wonders of propulsion, see the entries about water striders (08/07/2003), the froghopper (08/01/2003), plant drill bits (05/11/2007), maple helicopters (10/21/2009) and other “Amazing Facts” chain links.
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