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Next to the witness stand for design;whales

More "Design of Life" Evidence: Whales

Evolution News & Views November 4, 2015 7:32 AM

Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth shares amazing information about humpback whales: their enigmatic songs, their multiple adaptations for aquatic life that defy the evolutionary mechanism, and the "miraculous web" of blood vessels that refrigerates the male reproductive organs to safe levels for sperm production. All of it defies explanations based on natural selection. But that's just the beginning when it comes to the largest animals that have ever lived -- larger even than the largest dinosaurs (see Brian Switek's discussion onSlate). Want to see humpback songs as sheet music? The Smithsonianhas printouts and recordings.

More About the Male Refrigeration System

The system actually works better when the whale swims hard. How can that be, when the testes are located right between the abdominal swimming muscles? It's like trying to keep a refrigerator cold between two furnaces.

It works because the blood pumps harder during exercise, allowing more heat to escape into the water through the dorsal fin and tail. The higher volume of cool venous blood then enters the "miraculous web" (Latin rete mirabile, read more here) between the abdominal muscles, where the heat from the arteries is transferred to the cooler veins before entering the testes. It's a marvelous solution: a "counter-current heat exchanger" (CCHE) mechanism.

As Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson explain in the film, without both internal testes and the refrigeration mechanism existing simultaneously, natural selection would halt, and whales would have gone extinct. Females, too, have a CCHE to protect the young during pregnancy. Similar CCHE systems are found in other marine mammals such as manatees and seals, providing more unlikely examples of "convergent evolution."

Conserving Energy

Blue whales are the largest whales, making them the largest animals on earth. How do they sustain their massive weight? An article from NOAA Fisheries says that they target the highest-quality prey in order to maximize energy gain.

These huge animals can span a basketball court and weigh as much as 25 large elephants combined, the article says. But they feed on tiny fish called krill that are less than an inch long. When prey is scarce, blue whales conserve oxygen for deep dives. When the fish are plentiful, they ram through the schools at high speed, a strategy called lunge-feeding. They have their ROI (return on investment) all figured out. By watching tagged blue whales off the California coast, Elliott Hazen and a NOAA research team were able to figure out their optimization strategy.

"The magic number for krill seems to be about 100 to 200 individuals in a cubic meter of water," Hazen said. "If it's below that range, blue whales use a strategy to conserve oxygen and feed less frequently. If it's above that, they'll feed at very high rates and invest more effort."

Long-Distance Travelers

Whales have an incredible capacity for long-distance migration. A pygmy blue whale set a new record. Science reports that a female named Isabela that had been photographed at the Galapagos Islands was seen eight years later off the coast of Chile, having traveled 5,200 kilometers, "the longest recorded latitudinal migration made by any Southern Hemisphere blue whale on record." Most likely this is an annual trip the whales make, over 3,200 miles one-way.

Humpback whales are long-distance migrators too. The Australians have "a cause for celebration" now that conservation efforts have led to a remarkable rebound in their numbers down under, Science Daily said.

Captain Dave Anderson, featured in the Illustra film, often sees humpbacks off Dana Point, California, that have traveled south from Alaska, where they had delighted viewers on cruise ships. PhysOrgreports the first sighting of a humpback near Hawaii on September 29, over a month earlier than normal. About 10,000 humpbacks winter in the oceans around Hawaii, usually November through May. That's where Anderson got that beautiful drone shot of a humpback with her calf.

Lucky Shot

You may recall the dramatic slow-motion scene in Living Waters of a humpback breaching the surface, rising high above the water and landing on its back with a mighty splash. Lad Allen and Jerry Harned got lucky on that shot. They were filming off the coast of Monterey with their Red Epic high-speed camera, looking for whales. But where are you going to point the camera, when they could be anywhere around the 360-degree horizon?arned pointed it out over the featureless water, turned on the pre-roll (a kind of camera memory) hopefully. As if on cue, the whale shot up right in the center of the field. Jerry hurriedly switched on the record button and got the whole sequence in high-definition slow motion -- a shot that still gives him chills when he thinks about it. As Paul Nelson said, "the language fails" when you see such wonders.

The Planet Needs Whales

Whales play a vital role in the global nutrient cycle. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a special issue in October about large mammals. One of the papers discussed "Global nutrient transport in a world of giants," describing the oversized role that whales play in spreading nitrogen around for other ecological communities:

Despite their vastly decreased numbers, the important role of whales in distributing nutrients is just now coming to light.Whales transport nutrients laterally, in moving between feeding and breeding areas, and vertically, by transporting nutrients from nutrient-rich deep waters to surface waters via fecal plumes and urine. Studies in the Gulf of Maine show that cetaceans and other marine mammals deliver large amounts of N to the photic zone by feeding at or below the thermocline and then excreting urea and metabolic fecal N near the surface. [Emphasis added.]

The scientists estimate that whales transport almost four times as much nitrogen as terrestrial animals do. They also transport phosphorus and iron.

"Because of their enormous size and high mobility (and despite having many fewer species), great whales might have once transported nutrients away from concentration gradients more efficiently than terrestrial mammals," the writers say. These nutrients are also "assimilated more rapidly, and contribute to system productivity more directly than on land."

One of the diagrams in the paper, reproduced by Science Daily, shows the dependency of land animals on this nutrient cycle. Seabirds and "anadromous fish" like salmon carry these nutrients up rivers, where land animals like bears feed on the fish, profiting from the nutrients that whales had brought up from the deep ocean.

The authors even think that whales play a role in carbon dioxide levels that can affect the planet's climate. They estimate that whale populations have been reduced by 90 percent from levels before the Moby Dick whaling days -- raising alarms about ecological damage to planetary ecosystems. This interconnectedness of life raises fresh impetus to preserve these magnificent creatures.

A paper in Nature Communications reports something interesting about whale guts. Baleen whales have microbiomes with similarities to land animals, including humans. This is likely because, although they feed exclusively on marine animals, they have to digest chitin -- a polysaccharide from arthropod exoskeletons that is somewhat similar to the cellulose in plants that cows eat.

Like land herbivores, whales also have a foregut that helps pre-digest the polysaccharides. Since there are similarities and differences in the gut microbiomes, though, it's not clear they successfully tied the findings to the old tale of whale evolution from a four-footed land animal.

"Mammals host gut microbiomes of immense physiological consequence, but the determinants of diversity in these communities remain poorly understood," the paper begins sheepishly. "Diet appearsto be the dominant factor, but host phylogeny also seems to be an important, if unpredictable, correlate."

Sternberg explains in the film how the whale-evolution Captain Dave Anderson has taken an active role in rescuing whales. A thousand whales and dolphins a day, he says, die from being trapped in fishing nets. His Dolphin Safari website tells the story of Lily the gray whale, whose rescue made TV news and inspired an award-winning book Anderson wrote to raise awareness of the plight of marine mammals caught in nets.

Recently, he has been developing a low-cost floating beacon that whale watchers can fasten to nets that whales are dragging along with them. This allows rescuers to find the whale again and cut it free, using a special pole with V-shaped knife that allows the rescuer to cut off the net off without harming the animal.

Sadly, whales and dolphins are also threatened by a growing problem: plastic trash. PhysOrg show a picture of a dead sperm whale on a beach on Taiwan that was found to have plastic bags and fishing nets in its stomach. This may be one cause of the mysterious beachings of whales you hear about from time to time.

Anderson tells about how mylar balloons, let loose by thoughtless partygoers, often wind up in the ocean. Deflated and floating on the surface, they are mistaken for jellyfish, part of the whale's diet, and can lead to death when ingested. We all need to realize that trash washed down our storm drains can threaten the most magnificent animals on earth.

But let's end on a happy note. The drones that gave the Illustra team such spectacular aerial photographs of whales and dolphins are proving useful for science. NOAA Fisheries reports that hubcap-sized hexacopter drones are now being used to study gray whales from above. Like humpbacks, gray whales have made a remarkable comeback since 1994 when restrictions on whaling were imposed. With these new aerial monitoring tools, scientists hope to spread this success story to other species that are still endangered.

"Hopefully in the not-too-distant future," a NOAA marine biologist says, "there will be many healthy populations of large whales to study." With that, the beauty of their intelligent design will also be preserved for posterity.sequence is more "artistic license" than demonstrable fact.Captain Dave Anderson has taken an active role in rescuing whales. A thousand whales and dolphins a day, he says, die from being trapped in fishing nets. His Dolphin Safari website tells the story of Lily the gray whale, whose rescue made TV news and inspired an award-winning book Anderson wrote to raise awareness of the plight of marine mammals caught in nets.

Recently, he has been developing a low-cost floating beacon that whale watchers can fasten to nets that whales are dragging along with them. This allows rescuers to find the whale again and cut it free, using a special pole with V-shaped knife that allows the rescuer to cut off the net off without harming the animal.

Sadly, whales and dolphins are also threatened by a growing problem: plastic trash. PhysOrg show a picture of a dead sperm whale on a beach on Taiwan that was found to have plastic bags and fishing nets in its stomach. This may be one cause of the mysterious beachings of whales you hear about from time to time.

Anderson tells about how mylar balloons, let loose by thoughtless partygoers, often wind up in the ocean. Deflated and floating on the surface, they are mistaken for jellyfish, part of the whale's diet, and can lead to death when ingested. We all need to realize that trash washed down our storm drains can threaten the most magnificent animals on earth.

But let's end on a happy note. The drones that gave the Illustra team such spectacular aerial photographs of whales and dolphins are proving useful for science. NOAA Fisheries reports that hubcap-sized hexacopter drones are now being used to study gray whales from above. Like humpbacks, gray whales have made a remarkable comeback since 1994 when restrictions on whaling were imposed. With these new aerial monitoring tools, scientists hope to spread this success story to other species that are still endangered.

"Hopefully in the not-too-distant future," a NOAA marine biologist says, "there will be many healthy populations of large whales to study." With that, the beauty of their intelligent design will also be preserved for posterity.

Is democracy past its prime?:Pros and cons.

The revolution rolls on

Michael Behe's Challenge -- Past, Present, and Future
Evolution News & Views

Twenty years after Darwin's Black Box, the irreducibly complex outboard motors showcased by Michael Behe still confound Darwinism. That's one theme of our upcoming documentary Revolutionary:  Revolutionary: Michael Behe & The Mystery of Molecular Machines, which heads to Texas next month for previews. Behe's challenge is the past, the present, and the future.

Look at this quote from a paper in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

The bacterial flagellar system has been an object of intense study for many years. It has helped to elucidate issues of assembly, motility, and chemotaxis at a molecular level in a relatively simple system, typically containing ∼40 different proteins. It has also been the icon for creationists in the United States who deny evolution. [Emphasis added.]
Ah, the bacterial flagellar system. The paper by scientists from Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, and the U.S. (University of Virginia) purports to show how a simpler flagellum in a species of archaea provides evidence for evolution of the more complex flagellum in bacteria. It's satisfying to reflect that the authors remain irritated by the "creationist" icon. They can't let it rest.

As expected, they refuse to cite Behe directly (or any other ID source), so their only references supporting the "creationist" charge are to 6-to-12-year-old writings by Kenneth Miller, Barbara Forrest, and E.H. Egelmann. Have it your way. What matters is the substance of Behe's argument and evidence, which attracted the attention of researchers in four nations.

Meanwhile, farther east -- particularly in Japan -- scientists don't seem quite so motivated to defend Darwin. Two new papers dealing with molecular motors show their openness to design thinking.

Cilium Mimicry

The first deals with designing a mimic of cilia, another one of Behe's examples of irreducibly complex (IC) systems. Five biomedical engineers from Tokyo, writing in Science Advances, succeeded in making "Artificial cilia as autonomous nanoactuators." They call this "Design of a gradient self-oscillating polymer brush with controlled unidirectional motion."

Here, we have prepared a polymer brush surface similar to a living cilium, exhibiting self-oscillating and unidirectional wave motion of the grafted polymer at the nanometer scale.... This study provides a new concept to design autonomous polymer brush surfaces effective in the nanometer scale as bioinspired dynamic soft materials.
They pay tribute to the design in cilia and other cellular machines that inspired their own work:

Spatiotemporally well-ordered mechanical actuation of biomacromolecules in the nanometer-order scale driven by chemical reactions, such as enzymatic reactions, plays an important role in living organisms. For example, motor proteins bind to a polarized cytoskeletal filaments and use the energy derived from repeated cycles of adenosine 5′-triphosphate hydrolysis to move steadily along them. In addition, many motor proteins carry membrane-enclosed organelles to their appropriate locations in the cell. Cytoskeletal motor proteins move unidirectionally along an oriented polymer track. In this process, they use chemical energy to propel themselves along a linear path, and the direction of sliding is dependent on the structural polarity of the track. Recently, the construction and design of these biomolecular motor systems with well-controlled unidirectional motion have become an area of great focus in advanced sciences.
The word "design" appears ten times in the paper. References to evolution are completely absent.

Another team worked on imitating the cilia in hair cells of the inner ear. Publishing in Nature's journal Scientific Reports, they proudly announce, "Here we present a novel, completely biomimetic flow sensor which attempts to replicate the intricate morphological organization and function of the hair bundles of the hair cells" found in zebrafish. Neither of the cheap imitations, however, contain anything like intraflagellar transport in biological cilia (see our report). As for the origin of these intricate structures, the team treated evolution as magic: "Nature's evolutionary path led to sensors of high functionality and robustness, in terms of material properties, anatomical architecture and energy expenditure." That's all the press Darwin got. They used the word design, though, 15 times.

Flagellum Focus

Back in the 1990s, Behe relied on relatively crude electron micrographs of flagella. Imagine twenty years ago if he had been able to see in detail one protein in the stator of the flagellum. That's what Japanese scientists from Nagoya University revealed with advanced imaging techniques. So has the case for design grown stronger or weaker since Darwin's Black Box was published? A paper in Nature's open-access journal Scientific Reports reveals the answer. You can see their composite image of the stator protein MotA here:



It looks more like a well-designed outboard motor than ever!

Many bacterial species use spiral propellers (flagella) attached to motors to move through a liquid environment. An interaction between the rotor and stator components of the motor generates the rotational force required for movement. The stator converts electrochemical energy into mechanical force after undergoing a structural change caused by a movement of charged particles (ions) through an internal channel. Previous studies investigated the stator and its interaction with the rotor by constructing mutant proteins and analyzing their functions. However, little was known about stator structure.
A team of Japanese researchers led by Homma's laboratory of Nagoya University have now purified the stator protein MotA from a bacterium found in hot springs (Aquifex aeolicus) and analyzed its three-dimensional structure using electron microscopy mainly in cooperation with Namba's laboratory of Osaka University.

The stator protein MotA shows an elegantly crafted channel for ions. These are arranged in groups of four at the base of the stator on the cytoplasmic side. Two slender molecules of MotB extend into the periplasm. Identifying the structure is an important step on the way to figuring out how the flagellum works.

The stator is one of the most important parts for the proper functioning of the bacterial flagellar motor, and is believed to work as an energy-converting unit that transduces electrochemical potential gradient across the cytoplasmic membrane into mechanical force. The interaction surfaces of the stator and the rotor have been well studied by mutational analyses. However, the mechanism governing energy conversion remains unknown because of the lack of structural information on the stator.
How is chemical energy converted into rotational energy (torque)? "It is believed that the ion influx through the channel induces a conformational change in the stator, allowing its interaction with the rotor to generate torque," they say.

A little reflection suggests that the components must be well matched. Imagine for a moment a flow of ping-pong balls trying to turn a large metal turbine. It wouldn't work. Somehow, in ways still to be determined two decades after Behe's book was published, tiny hydrogen ions or sodium ions are able to make particular parts of the stator undergo conformational changes that can get the rotor to turn. How that works is bound to be interesting. We know from the discussion in Unlocking the Mystery of Life that not only must the parts be well matched, they must be assembled in the right order, in the right amounts, at the right place and time -- all directed by instructions in the genetic code.

While these Japanese researchers do not mention Behe or his conclusions, their work underscores the case for irreducible complex molecular machines as prima facie evidence for intelligent design. Nowhere do they credit evolution for the motors of the cell:

Various motor proteins are essential for different biological activities such as cell locomotion, cell morphogenesis, metabolism, and material transport. Motor proteins convert various types of energy, such as ATP hydrolysis or electrochemical potential, into mechanical force for directional motion. Motor proteins are divided into two types: linear motors, such as myosin-actin and kinesin/dynein microtubule motors; and rotary motors, such as ATP synthase and bacterial flagellar motor.
Behe's intuitive first impression of the flagellum, "That's an outboard motor!" has stood the test of time. That's what the Japanese teams still call the cilium and the flagellum in 2016.

Scratching the Itch

Now back to the PNAS paper. Did the Western nations solve Michael Behe's challenge? If so, they have a strange way of claiming success:

The proteins that form the bacterial flagellar system have no known homologs in eukaryotic cells. The eukaryotic flagellar [sic], based on a microtubule-containing axoneme, is vastly more complicated. In fact, the current estimate for the number of different proteins in the axoneme is ∼425. In contrast, the archaeal flagellar system appears simpler than the bacterial one and can contain as few as 13 different proteins. As with the eukaryotic flagellar system, the archaeal one does not have homology with the bacterial one and must have arisen by means of convergent evolution.
Ah yes, convergent evolution again. But think about what they say here. The "vastly more complicated" eukaryotic flagellum has no known commonalities with the bacterial flagellum, and the bacterial flagellum has no homolog in the archaeal flagellum: "In archaeal flagellins, however, no homology has yet been found outside of the N-terminal domain with any bacterial or eukaryotic proteins." Do they show any common ancestry between these motors? None. Are we to believe, then, that blind processes happened upon three naturalistic miracles independently?

Notice that the archaeal flagellar system that "appears simpler" contains as few as 13 different proteins. How many different parts were required for the mousetrap? Behe's pithy illustration of an IC system had only five parts. How much more is an IC system with 13 parts, or with 40 parts, each unrelated to machines with similar functions in other types of cells?

If the best that evolutionists can come up with in response to Behe is "convergent evolution," then his 1996 statement can be seen as prescient: "An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution" (p. 39). Only he could reword it now with much more confidence: Irreducibly complex biological systems continue to pose a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution and are best explained by intelligent design.