Red flags?

A walk on the darkside?

Letters from deep time?

Why OOL science remains design opponents weakest point.

James Tour and the Challenge to Theistic Evolution from Synthetic Chemistry
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

On a new ID the Future podcast, Sarah Chaffee talks with biologist Ann Gauger about the new Theistic Evolution critique. After reviewing some of the contents of this intellectual feast, they focus on the chapter by Rice University synthetic chemist James Tour, “Are Present Proposals on Chemical Evolutionary Mechanisms Accurately Pointing Toward First Life?” His answer is an emphatic no.

Listen to the conversation here.

Dr. Gauger explains what synthetic chemistry means and elaborates a little on Dr. Tour’s exciting work in nanotechnology with its implications for fighting cancer. The bottom line is that a chemist like Tour, a very distinguished one, knows from a career’s worth of lab work how painstakingly difficult it is to synthesize molecules you want — that is, in a modern lab designed (intelligently designed) for such a purpose. Origin-of-life scenarios can’t, obviously, summon a laboratory and a team of top chemists at the dawn of life’s history and must therefore, if they refuse to consider ID, picture as possible things occurring in the wild that are difficult to accomplish with all the expertise and equipment available to Dr. Tour and his colleagues.

Only design can overcome that challenge. Yet TE proponents won’t consider it. That’s one of a variety of scientific and philosophical problems covered in this comprehensive yet accessible book.

It seems that Darwinism's undead minions are as restless as ever.

Zombie Watch: Debunked Finches Re-Emerge to Validate Darwin
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Peter and Rosemary Grant are the Princeton pair who have spent their careers on the Galápagos Islands trying to tease out the slightest bits of evidence to support the iconic myth of Darwin’s finches. Having received the  Royal Medal in Biology last summer, they’re at it again. That is despite having been soundly refuted by Jonathan Wells in his book  Zombie Science. Now that the Grants are passing the baton to younger researchers, we will undoubtedly be treated to more parades of this zombie icon.

In “Rapid hybrid speciation in Darwin’s finches” in the journal Science, four other lead authors, accompanied by the Grants, try to sanctify neo-Darwinism with a melodrama about three “species” of finches that can all interbreed. Mind you, they are all finches. They are all Galápagos finches. They are all family.

Any differences among the groups are tiny changes in beak size and shape, and changes in the songs one group sings.  Science Daily has a cartoon version of the story, complete with a lineage called “Big Bird”:

The arrival 36 years ago of a strange bird to a remote island in the Galapagos archipelago has provided direct genetic evidence of a novel way in which new species arise.

In this week’s issue of the journal Science, researchers from Princeton University and Uppsala University in Sweden report that the newcomer belonging to one species mated with a member of another species resident on the island, giving rise to a new species that today consists of roughly 30 individuals.

The study comes from work conducted on Darwin’s finches, which live on the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The remote location has enabled researchers to study the evolution of biodiversity due to natural selection. 

The first question is obvious: If they can interbreed, how can they be called different species? Darwin’s book was about the Origin of Species, not the origin of varieties. As Wells points out, “If they continue to breed and exchange genes, they are usually regarded as varieties of the same species, even if they are morphologically different (as is the case with dog breeds)” (Zombie Science, p. 68).

The “strange bird” that showed up was a lone male who had a slightly different song. He found a mate, they had chicks, and the family decided to live in the same community away from the others. This is called “reproductive isolation” and is considered by Darwinians as a step toward speciation. But people do that. How many stories are told of a wayfaring stranger appearing from a far country, finding a bride, and, over the objections of her family, taking her to start a new life together in a different place? Are they now “reproductively isolated”? Are they emerging as a new species? As Wells says in his charitable way, “Indeed, it is far from obvious why we should consider them separate species at all.” He gives an example:

The Ainu people of northern Japan and the !Kung people of southern Africa are separated not only physically and linguistically, but also (for all practical purposes) reproductively. Are they therefore separate species? Or are they all human beings? Of course the Ainu and the !Kung are all members of the same species.

Since the Galapagos finches regularly interbreed, why should we call them separate species, other than to make them appear to be evidence for evolution?

The  BBC News tries to have it both ways:

In the past, it was thought that two different species must be unable to produce fertile offspring in order to be defined as such. But in more recent years, it has been established that many birds and other animals that we consider to be unique species are in fact able to interbreed with others to produce fertile young.

They’d better not push that idea too far, or else they will be calling Japanese a different species from Germans. That’s no joke; to evolutionists, human beings fit in the category “other animals.”

The cartoon version accentuates the differences between the birds to make them look as different as possible. Science Daily continues:

The offspring were also reproductively isolated because their song, which is used to attract mates, was unusual and failed to attract females from the resident species. The offspring also differed from the resident species in beak size and shape, which is a major cue for mate choice. As a result, the offspring mated with members of their own lineage, strengthening the development of the new species.

Humans do this, too. Think of cases where an immigrant population kept to themselves, because they had their own culture and music. This affected their “mate choice,” as well.

The paper in Science makes a big deal of hybridization (see here about how rampant hybridization is scrambling Darwin’s tree). Science Daily explains:

A critical requirement for speciation to occur through hybridization of two distinct species is that the new lineage must be ecologically competitive — that is, good at competing for food and other resources with the other species — and this has been the case for the Big Bird lineage.

But again, the human analogy gives the lie to this idea. If an Ainu woman married a !Kung man, we wouldn’t, needless to say, call their children hybrids. In addition, human tribes in many places on Earth are reproductively isolated, yet successful. They can even be reproductively isolated in the same country, preferring to marry ones that have the same tastes or looks. The idea that they must be competitive comes from Malthus and Darwin, not from real life.

Here’s another glitch in the story not apparently noticed by the researchers:

Researchers previously assumed that the formation of a new species takes a very long time, but in the Big Bird lineage it happened in just two generations, according to observations made by the Grants in the field in combination with the genetic studies.

They sound delighted to find that speciation occurred fast, but think of what that means. Those islands have been isolated from the mainland for at least 8 million years — maybe 90 million. Unless the evolutionists believe the Big Bird incident was extremely rare or unique, such hybridizations should have been frequent. If so, wouldn’t the gene pool be scrambled beyond recognition? If rare, the story begins to look like a case of special pleading. Neither option is particularly helpful to Darwinian theory. The paper appeals to “rare and chance events” to explain Big Bird. Isn’t it odd that such a rare event happened while the Grants just happened to be watching? What’s the probability of that?

Why do the Darwinians make so much of so little? The reason: the Galápagos Islands are holy ground. Researchers will work for years to honor the founder of their worldview.

Mining the womb?

China Shows Eugenics Is Not a Thing of the Past
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

As Todd Butterfield points out on an ID the Future episode, we may mistakenly think of eugenics as a horror from the history of a century ago, from which all good people pulled back in disgust when they saw the science, or pseudoscience, embraced to the fullest by Nazi Germany.

But Discovery institute’s Wesley Smith reminds us that eugenic practice is a frontier currently being explored, prominently, by China in the form of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), allowing for the selection of preferred babies and the disposal of others. Ostensibly intended to combat disease, it’s equally possible to pick embryos for life for other reasons entirely. The technique is ripe for abuse, to say the least.

Wesley explains that, as a tyranny, China is a Wild West of sorts for unethical science, with the government and its researchers answering to no one. And he worries of an international “race to the bottom” as other countries bow to pressure and follow Chinese scientists where they lead. It’s chilling — human life as a “resource,” available to be exploited.  Listen to the new podcast here.

And yet more primeval tech v. Darwin.

Telescope-Like Eyes in a “Simple” Mollusk
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

You may not eat scallops with quite the same gusto again. The humble shellfish of the phylum Mollusca, a staple seafood delicacy, could have seen the fishermen coming — with hundreds of elegantly designed eyes. Now that scientists have had a detailed look at the tiny eyes of scallops, superlative adjectives are rising to the surface. Phys.org  says:

Scallops may look like simple creatures, but the seafood delicacy has 200 eyes that function remarkably like a telescope, using living mirrors to focus light, researchers said Thursday

Like a telescope? Yes! The eyes of Pecten maximus use biological concave mirrors, like the Newtonian telescope design. And there’s more design to talk about.

Scientists have known since the 1960s that these shellfish that inspired the Shell Oil logo had “eyes” of some sort, but it was difficult to dissect them. Now, new imaging techniques that freeze them before they can dry have allowed researchers from Lund University and Weizmann Institute to see them in detail and model how they work.

One thing that is interesting about the paper in Science by this team of ten researchers is that there is no mention of evolution. No, not even phylogeny, ancestor, mutation, or natural selection. The focus is on its unique functional design.

Although multilayered retinas have infrequently been observed in other animals, in these cases, they are used to enhance light sensitivity or act as spectral filters. In contrast, in the scallop, the upper and lower parts of the retina seem to be specialized for discriminating different fields of view. Thus, at the highest hierarchical level of organization, the complex 3D shape of the scallop eye mirror appears to be controlled to focus light from a broad field of view onto two retinas placed at different heights above its surface.

How Is the Scallop Eye Constructed?

Unlike other eyes in the animal kingdom, the scallop’s visual system uses mirrors in addition to a weakly refracting lens. The light path passes through a cornea, then an iris, then a lens, then through crystals of guanine stacked like tiles. The crystals form a biological concave mirror that reflects the light back through the system and onto a unique two-layered retina.

Some other animals, including spiders and beetles and even silver-haired monkeys, use guanine crystals for spectacular visual displays. This instance, though, deserves a new kind of design prize for the ultimate in functional art:

Perhaps the most complex optical function of guanine crystals in nature is in image formation. This function demands an extremely high degree of ultrastructural organization because light must not only be reflected but also focused. The hierarchal organization of the scallop mirror is finely tuned for image formation, from the component guanine crystals at the nanoscale to the overall shape of the mirror at the millimeter level. The scallop controls the crystal morphology and spacing to produce a tiled multilayer mirror with minimal optical diffraction aberrations, which reflects wavelengths of light that penetrate its habitat and are absorbed by its retinas. The mirror forms functional images on both retinas, which appear to be specialized for different functions.

What can you say but “Wow! That’s amazing”? We tend to think of vertebrate eyes as the best, but for its needs, the “simple scallop” has achieved optical nirvana.

Even Jerry Coyne was impressed. Over at  Why Evolution Is True, he posted some of the best pictures and videos of scallops and their amazing eyes. But when it came to explaining them, all he could say was:

The mirror reflecting light onto an image-detector is precisely the way reflecting telescopes work, though human-constructed mirrors are very different from those of the scallop. In fact, I don’t think humans are capable of making mirrors like this bivalve does. As Leslie Orgel once said, evolution is cleverer than you are.

Ring the gong for that show!

The electron micrographs show tile-like crystal squares arranged like roof tiles in stacks. Everything in this arrangement is for a purpose, they explain:

The key to the functionality of the mirror lies in the regular square plates of β-guanine, which constitute the mirror’s basic building blocks. This unusual square morphology differs markedly from the theoretically predicted prismatic growth form of guanine. In this morphology, the crystal face with the highest refractive index (n = 1.83) is preferentially expressed, as is also the case in many other highly reflective natural photonic systems. The crystals are arranged so that the high-refractive-index faces are oriented toward the direction of the incident light across the mirror (fig. S1), creating a highly reflective surface. The square-plate morphology is also optimized for tiling. Each layer of the mirror is formed from an almost perfectly tessellated mosaic of two-dimensional (2D) squares — closely resembling the segmented mirrors used in reflecting telescopes. In Euclidean geometry, there are only three possible ways to completely tile a surface using regular congruent polygons: with equilateral triangles, with hexagons, or with squares. Crystal tiling minimizes surface defects at the crystal interfaces that would cause optical diffraction effects (which would result in a reduction in the image contrast) and optical loss owing to transmission of light through the mirror. Thus, at the lowest hierarchical level of organization, the scallop controls crystal growth to produce a crystal morphology that minimizes surface defects in the mirror and enables the formation of a highly reflective surface.

There’s more. The surface of the concave mirror is not perfectly spherical, but has a variable curvature with a flattened base. This sends the reflected light off-axis in two directions, to the proximal retina for the lower visual field, and to the distal retina for the upper visual field. “The nonspherical symmetry and tilt of the mirror produce more complex vision than was previously imagined,” they explain. “A simple on-axis, spherical mirror would not result in opposite sides of the visual field being focused as distinctly separate images at different heights above the mirror.”

How Does It Work?

Although it’s impossible to know for sure what the creature actually perceives, ray-trace models indicate that the scallop obtains more finely focused vision for nearby objects that move (triggering defense or escape behaviors), along with a wide field of peripheral vision that “could provide useful information to control and guide its movement while swimming with jet propulsion or to assess static features of its habitat.” The two types of focus also expand the dynamic range of vision, similar to how rods and cones overlap in brightness sensitivity in vertebrates.

One more question: Why does the scallop need 200 of these light detectors? For that, we have to consider the brain of this creature:

What benefit does the scallop receive by having up to 200 eyes located on the periphery of its semi-circular mantle, spanning ~250°? Ray tracing reveals that the images formed on both retinas of one eye vary substantially in focal quality across their visual fields. Interestingly, the optic nerves from nearly all of the eyes project on to the lateral lobes of the parieto-visceral ganglion (PVG), the site of visual processing in scallops. We speculate that neural processing in the PVG can combine the visual information from the substantially overlapping and differently focused views from multiple eyes, allowing the scallop to improve visual acuity relative to the isolated eye and potentially to determine the depth of features in the environment. This would offset the drawback of limited areas of well-focused vision in individual eyes.

This is a complete system, in other words, with all the contributing parts working together to optimize visual acuity. A short video by the AAAS (see the top of this post) puts the whole picture together.

It’s so good, the authors conclude, human engineers would do well to imitate it:

The crystal morphology, multilayer structure, and 3D shape of the scallop’s eye mirror are finely controlled to produce functional images on its two retinas. Understanding the strategies that organisms use to control crystal morphology and arrangement for complex optical functions paves the way for the construction of novel bio-inspired optical devices. In particular, the resemblance of the scallop’s tiled, off-axis mirror to the segmented mirrors of reflecting telescopes provides inspiration for the development of compact, wide-field imaging devices derived from this unusual form of biological optics.

So is design science a science stopper? Does scallop vision not make sense except in the light of evolution? We rest our case.