Search This Blog

Sunday 6 March 2016

On newly discovered Japanese plant species' surprising survival strategy.

New underground plant hides from the sun and parasitises fungi:

It’s a low-down, dirty cheat. A newly discovered Japanese plant spends most of its life hidden underground and steals nutrients from fungi rather than getting its energy from the sun.

Kenji Suetsugu of Kobe University came across the previously unknown plant in an evergreen forest on the subtropical Japanese island of Yakushima while documenting other fungi-parasitising – mycoheterotrophic – plants in Japan.

The plant’s stem is about 3-9 centimetres long and has between nine and 15 purple star-shaped flowers, which push up above the ground. Suetsugu has named it Sciaphila yakushimensis after the island.

The plant can’t photosynthesise and, like other mycoheterotrophs, steals the carbon it needs from a fungal host. The parasitic plant attracts strands of mycorrhizal fungus into its many hairy roots and then feeds off fungus growing inside the roots.

Life in the dark
Its parasitic lifestyle is an adaptation to the forest understorey, where the sun’s rays struggle to penetrate and so photosynthetic plants are rare, says Suetsugu.

Because it doesn’t rely on photosynthesising the sun’s light for its energy, it can stay underground, reducing the risk of being eaten by aboveground herbivores. It only pokes through the leaf litter to flower and fruit.

Vast fungal networks in the forest soil are linked up with plant roots and usually get their carbon from trees, in exchange for water and minerals that their tiny hairs extract from soil.

But mycoheterotrophs taps into this network and get the carbon from fungi, which got it from other plants to start with.

“These mycoheterotrophs are extremely rare and could not survive without a flourishing forest, sustained by species-rich underground fungal networks,” says Suetsugu.

Rare but not protected
Given that it only seems to have two small populations, the new species can be considered critically endangered, Suetsugu says. Other mycoheterotrophic plant species have recently been found in the area, but many are not yet officially protected.

Such plants are dependent on their host fungi, so Suetsugu says it will be necessary to conserve entire ecosystems to protect these rare plants. He recommends that regulators should restrict logging and construction to preserve these and other endemic species in the forest habitats of Yakushima.

Constantijn Mennes at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, says there is still a substantial amount of undescribed biodiversity, even in flowering plants.

“This observation adds to a large list of critically endangered mycoheterotrophic species, like species of Kupea and Kihansia in Africa,” he says.


Journal reference: Journal of Japanese Botany, Vol. 91 No. 1

On theistic naturalism's false dichotomy

The False Dichotomy Between Intelligent Design and Natural Causes
Casey Luskin 

In a previous article in this series, we saw that a self-described theistic evolutionist had left the BioLogos camp because he was concerned about the way BioLogos writers treat Darwin-critics:
I have got used to the vituperative and often incoherent level of discussion about faith and evolution in the last year or so. Generally speaking, as one would now expect, Gnus attempting to savage anything they can identify as a theist are the greatest offenders. But on BioLogos, a frighteningly similar kind of abuse, if usually expressed with more gentility, is directed not back at non-theists, nor even YECs, but at ID sympathisers....I think I can draw two tentative conclusions about the reasons for this degree of passion, which is clearly far more than an opinion that ID arguments are wrong. In my opinion, although BioLogos is quite a diverse forum, its "ruling spirit" is fundamentally committed to (a) methodological naturalism and (b) theological naturalism.
How does the "theological naturalism" of BioLogos influence its perspective on intelligent design (ID)? Unfortunately, for one, it seems to lead some ID-critics to wrongly think that ID denies that God can use natural causes.

For example, in his series on "Evolution and the Origin of Biological Information," Dennis Venema sets up a false dichotomy between intelligent design (ID) and natural causes, wrongly claiming ID that creates a "'natural versus God' dichotomy" or alternatively claiming that ID tries to "eliminate the possibility of divine action" when "we use science to understand natural cause and effect." Venema also states:
[D]escribing how specified information can arise through natural means does not in any way imply God's absence from the process. After all, natural processes are equally a manifestation of God's activity as what one would call supernatural events. So-called "natural" laws are what Christians understand to be a description of the ongoing, regular and repeatable activity of God. As such, the dichotomy presented in ID writings of "naturalism" versus theism is a false one: is not God the Author of nature, after all?
While defending naturalism, Venema has badly misstated the claims of ID: there is no false dichotomy in intelligent design that says God is never allowed to use natural causes. The only party who's setting up a false dichotomy here is Dennis Venema, in suggesting that if one accepts ID then God is no longer allowed to use "natural laws." 

Venema seeks to paint ID as bad theology which somehow denies that God is the author of all nature when God uses secondary material or "natural" causes. ID is a scientific theory and doesn't make such theological claims. Thus, as a science, ID never claims that if we observe the "ongoing, regular and repeatable activity" of "natural laws" then somehow God is absent from the process.

ID proponents who believe in God never deny that God can use secondary material "natural" causes to achieve his will. In those instances, ID would simply say that material causes are the best explanation. ID does not "eliminate the possibility of divine action" when "we use science to understand natural cause and effect." To wit: ID proponents have often inferred design from the fine-tuning of the laws that govern the universe and make it friendly for life. Indeed, this is an area where BioLogos supposedly agrees with intelligent design. In any event, Venema's description of ID is backwards: in contexts of physics and cosmology, the actions of natural laws themselves can trigger a design inference.

Remember, ID is a cautious scientific theory and not a theological doctrine. When ID theorists look for scientifically detectable design at the biological level, they often treat natural causes as background. So the biological design that's detected normally involves features that (1) go well beyond the capacities of natural causes, and (2) exhibit telltale signs of intelligent agency (such as being the product of foresight). On the other hand, when ID infers a natural cause, pro-ID theists would simply say God used a natural cause, and would not say that God is somehow "absent."

All theists who support ID affirm that God is behind, in some sense, every event. "Natural cause" never means (for theists anyway) "not caused by God." I'm not aware of any ID theorist who is also a theist who has ever claimed otherwise.

This leads us to the question, why does ID critique theistic naturalism, and how does ID contrast with theistic evolution?

Theistic naturalism isn't merely the view that God at times (or even most of the time) works through natural causes. Rather, it is the view that assumes that God must only use natural causes and is never allowed to work in other ways that might break the "ongoing, regular and repeatable activity" of "natural laws." 

ID rejects such assumption-based views. ID is entirely compatible with the view that God at times (or even most of the time) works through natural causes. But ID isn't precommitted to answers about how God must have acted, and leaves open the possibility that sometimes God doesn't use "natural" causes. ID simply wants to follow the evidence where it leads. 

Thus, theistic naturalism is the wholesale assumption that if God exists, He must always use secondary material causes, and is never allowed to act in nature in a scientifically detectable way. The reason ID proponents critique naturalism is because it tends to presuppose materialistic answers to all questions about how life arose and diversified.

There are thus two potential extreme positions in this debate: (A) Everything is detectably designed and God never uses natural causes, or (B) Nothing is detectably designed and God always uses natural causes. 

Ironically, though ID critics (wrongly) accuse ID proponents of adopting extreme position (A), it is ID-critics themselves, including many theistic evolutionist proponents of theistic naturalism, who seem to adopt extreme position (B). This makes for bad science because it presupposes the scientific answers, and bad theology because it tries to dictate to God what He ought to do. 


In contrast, ID rejects both extreme positions, and uses this motto: let's not presuppose answers, but let's follow the evidence where it leads.

From the Cambrian era,further reason to doubt Darwin.

From the Cambrian Explosion, a Remarkably Preserved Image of a Nervous System
David Klinghoffer March 2, 2016 3:54 AM

Quite beautiful, isn't it? Like a dragon float from a Chinese New Year parade. The Washington Post calls it an "ugly arthropod." Are they blind?

News from Cambridge University of an unprecedented Cambrian find from, in fact, China:

A 520 million-year-old fossilised nervous system -- so well-preserved that individually fossilised nerves are visible -- is the most complete and best example yet found, and could help unravel how the nervous system evolved in early animals.

How did this arthropod's nervous system "evolve"? Suddenly, it seems, all but out of a clear blue sky, as far as we have any reason to say. What's striking about the new images of Chengjiangocaris kunmingensisis, a product of the Cambrian explosion, is the remarkable detail preserved from soft tissue. The difficulty of preserving soft tissue was once given as a reason that the Cambrian animals' precursors seem not appear in the fossil record.

At some earlier stage of life's history, these features were not there -- then they were. This is said to help "unravel" the mystery of evolution. More:

Researchers have found one of the oldest and most detailed fossils of the central nervous system yet identified, from a crustacean-like animal that lived more than 500 million years ago. The fossil, from southern China, has been so well preserved that individual nerves are visible, the first time this level of detail has been observed in a fossil of this age.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are helping researchers understand how the nervous system of arthropods -- creepy crawlies with jointed legs -- evolved. Finding any fossilised soft tissue is rare, but this particular find, by researchers in the UK, China and Germany, represents the most detailed example of a preserved nervous system yet discovered.

Again, the question of what this means for evolution:

For [Javier Ortega-Hernández, of the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology,] and his colleagues, a key question is what this discovery tells us about the evolution of early animals, since the nervous system contains so much information. Further analysis revealed that some aspects of the nervous system in C. kunmingensis appear to be structured similar to that of modern priapulids (penis worms) and onychophorans (velvet worms), with regularly-spaced nerves coming out from the ventral nerve cord.

In contrast, these dozens of nerves have been lost independently in the tardigrades (water bears) and modern arthropods, suggesting that simplification played an important role in the evolution of the nervous system.


The nervous system is information rich, and "these dozens of nerves" were lost by tardigrades and today's arthropods. These latter creatures evolved in part by losing information, not gaining it -- becoming simpler, not more complex. So where did the information come from in the first place? They don't say. They can't say.