On spaceship earth's forcefield.

 

Solar Activity Reveals a Different Kind of “Privilege”

Daniel Reeves

Did you experience anything unusual a couple of Wednesdays back? Perhaps a feeling of impending doom, or even just a slight change in mood? 

No? Well, then perhaps you are more privileged than you think. 

On Saturday, January 29, the sun — you know, that yellow dwarf star around which we orbit at over 100,000 kilometers per hour — decided to throw a violent tantrum resulting in an eruption of high energy particles and magnetism. The outburst reached earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday, February 2. This coronal mass ejection, and the resulting geomagnetic storm in our atmosphere, likely had indiscernible — if any — impact on your less-than-momentous hump day. Unless I missed something, it didn’t even merit a mention in the weather forecast. 

A “Milquetoast Outburst”

According to Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert at the University of Southampton cited in a New York Times article, this solar incident was actually mild compared to what we can expect approaching the year 2025. “As the sun gets more active, it releases an increasing amount of extreme ultraviolet, which gets absorbed into our atmosphere,” Lewis explains. “The expectation is that the atmospheric density is going to increase by one or two orders of magnitude. That’s a way bigger change compared to what we’ve just seen with this particular event.” Or, as Robin George Andrews writes for the Times, this was a “milquetoast outburst” compared to “a more potent solar scream [that] has the potential to inflict greater harm.” 

So…does this mean that the world is coming to an end? Should you drop out of school or quit your job, and enjoy your last few toasty years on this doomed planet?

Not so fast. As Andrews points out, we are simply ramping up to the peak of an 11-year-long cycle in which the sun undulates between hyperactive and quiescent states. This solar cycle, coinciding with the reversal of the sun’s magnetic field, has already reached a violent peak one or more times in your lifetime and, just like Wednesday’s incident, that has had negligible — if any — impact on your daily life.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve taken this fact for granted — that a fierce coronal mass ejection from the sun has little effect on life at the surface of the planet. In fact, it is one of many privileges that humanity accepts as a given, regardless of our ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic standing: the privilege of living on a planet that is astonishingly protected in the midst of an otherwise inhospitable cosmos.

Blissfully Unaware of Bombardment

Like you, I was blissfully unaware that our atmosphere was being bombarded, and only stumbled upon the fact a few days ago in the Times. The article, “Solar Storm Destroys 40 New SpaceX Satellites in Orbit,” focuses on the impact of the solar ejection on the latest satellites launched into space as part of Elon Musk’s high speed Internet project. The reporter concludes that “the incident highlights the hazards faced by numerous companies planning to put tens of thousands of small satellites in orbit to provide Internet service from space.” 

True, the fact that 40 of the 49 new satellites launched into the lower atmosphere on February 3 could be knocked out by a routine solar outburst is a reminder of the incredible challenges facing aerospace technology. That’s a $100 million loss in hardware and launch costs incurred by SpaceX, as estimated by Dr. Lewis in the article. 

But there’s far more at stake. Without the combined protective effect of our unique atmosphere and geomagnetic field — a relatively rare phenomenon in the observable universe — even a “milquetoast outburst” from the sun would be sufficient to destroy all life on earth.

Yet this brief article was the only mention of the occurrence that I could find either in the New York Times or a handful of other major news sites. It goes to show how most of us take our privileged planet for granted. Perhaps an occasional demonstration of our cosmic entitlements could also remind us of the privileges that we all share as a human species — privileges that are considerably greater than those that threaten to divide us.

And still yet even more on the patron saint of the master race.

 

Racism Serves Darwinism, Darwinism Serves Racism

Richard Weikart

 

Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from Chapter 1 of Richard Weikart’s new book, How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.

When Darwin began compiling evidence for biological evolution in his notebooks in the late 1830s, he included human evolution in his ruminations. He indicated that when human races confront each other, they fight and struggle with each other for supremacy. He wrote that differences in intelligence usually settle this conflict, though in the case of black Africans, their “organization” (presumably meaning their immunity to diseases that ravaged Europeans who moved to Africa) gave them an advantage in their homelands. His comments here imply that he thought not only that some races are more intelligent than others, but also that blacks were inferior in their mental abilities.¹

Scientific Justification for Racism

Darwin’s racist and imperialist attitudes were conventional for his time, but his use of racism to defend his theory of human evolution buttressed those attitudes in the decades to follow by providing scientific justification for racism among many of Darwin’s followers. Racism was not just an incidental part of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Rather Darwin considered racial inequality crucial evidence for his theory. In order to convince his contemporaries of his theory of evolution, he knew he needed to demonstrate the great variety within any given species, while minimizing the gap between different species. When applied to human evolution, this meant that Darwin had to stress human inequality on the one hand, and human proximity to apes on the other. Racism provided fodder for this argument, because Darwin placed the black Africans and Australian aborigines close to the apes in his racial hierarchy, while deeming the white Europeans far superior.

To be sure, when Darwin first published On the Origin of Species (1859), he mostly avoided the topic of human evolution. He understood that this was the most controversial part of his theory and that it would likely provoke resistance (as it did). As he explained 12 years later in the introduction to The Descent of Man, he had steered around the issue of human evolution “as I thought that I should thus only add to the prejudices against my views.”² Only in the closing paragraphs of Origin had he briefly mentioned that his theory would likely have ramifications for human origins. Thus, when Darwin mentioned “races” in the full title of his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, he likely meant primarily varieties or sub-species of animals and plants, rather than human races. However, Darwin later clarified in The Descent of Man that he viewed human races as varieties or sub-species,³ so everything he wrote in Origin did indeed apply to humanity. Darwin confirmed this in The Descent of Man, for one of its stated goals was to show that the evolutionary processes that Darwin had explained in Origin had brought about the origins of humans, too. The Descent of Man, in other words, argues quite explicitly for “the preservation of favoured” human “races in the struggle for life.”

Highly Problematic Features

Darwin’s conception of the struggle for life, or, as he more often called it, the struggle for existence, had highly problematic features when applied to humans. Darwin’s signature theory of natural selection through the struggle for existence was based on Thomas Robert Malthus’s population principle, which stated that humans (and other organisms) tend to reproduce faster than their food supply can increase. This implies that humans (and other species) are destined for mass death, since the food supply can never keep up with the ever-growing population. Darwin argued that because most organisms perish in their quest for limited resources, they are locked in an inescapable competition for those resources. This competition is most intense among members of the same species because they are competing for the same niche.

Despite the huge death toll resulting from the struggle for existence, Darwin considered it a positive force nonetheless, because it produced evolutionary progress. It weeded out the weak, sickly, and less capable — the “unfit” — while the “fit” survived and reproduced. In the last sentence of his chapter on “Struggle for Existence” in The Origin of Species, Darwin stated, “When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” Then, in the next-to-the-last sentence of the book, he stated, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”⁴ When applied to humans, this would mean that humans are contending with their fellow humans for scarce resources in a competition-to-the-death. The fittest humans will survive and reproduce, while the less fit will die.

Three Main Objectives of the Work

In The Descent of Man Darwin confirmed that he thought race played a central role in this struggle, so racism is not an incidental element of the book. Darwin explained from the outset the three main objectives of the work: 1) investigate whether humans are descended from some other animals; 2) explain the process of human evolution; and 3) describe “the value of the differences between the so-called races of man.”⁵ Of the seven chapters covering human evolution, one is entitled, “On the Races of Man,” and racial themes also emerge in many of the other chapters. 

Toward the beginning of the book’s second chapter, “Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals,” Darwin insisted that certain races were mentally inferior to others:

Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who does not use any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakspeare [sic]. Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other.⁶

Howard and Clarkson, incidentally, were leaders in the British abolitionist movement, and Darwin considered them the epitome of moral goodness. They were, of course, Europeans, as were Newton and Shakespeare, and clearly Darwin was identifying them as “the highest men of the highest races,” in contrast to the “lowest savages.” Thus, Darwin buttressed his theory of human evolution by asserting that Europeans were not only intellectually superior, but also higher on the scale of morality. This is highly ironic, of course, because these allegedly morally superior Europeans were at the time exterminating the supposedly morally inferior natives of the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere. Darwin apparently had no conscience about genocide, since he saw nothing amiss about allegedly morally superior people killing off those they deem inferior.

He considered the intellectual superiority of Europeans so self-evident that he wrote in a later chapter, “The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said.”⁷ Despite its apparent obviousness (to him), however, later in the same chapter he did write more about it. He trotted out scientific evidence for intellectual disparities among races that he (and many other European scientists) considered compelling: the difference in their cranial capacities. 

According to the data cited by Darwin, the Europeans have the largest cranial capacities at 92.3 cubic inches, while Asians have 87.1 cubic inches, and Australians have only 81.9 cubic inches.⁸ The lesson appeared unarguable: Europeans have greater intellectual abilities than do other races. Darwin used this same line of evidence to argue that women are intellectually inferior to men. (It should be noted that cranial capacity measurements cited above turned out to be inaccurate and misleading, and the relationship between cranial capacity and intelligence has been found to be neither straightforward nor well correlated.⁹) Later, when discussing the gap between present-day humans and simians, Darwin mentioned that the gap would only increase as the “savage races” were exterminated, because the black Africans or Australian aborigines were currently the closest races to the gorilla, which he considered the highest of the ape species.¹⁰

A Racial Struggle for Existence

In a four-page section “On the Extinction of the Races of Man,” Darwin explained that the primary cause of the extinction was a racial struggle for existence, which results in the decimation of weaker tribes and races. He claimed that the disappearance of ancient races was not the result of environmental factors or adverse circumstances. Rather, he averred, “Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race.” Though disease may aid some people in these racial competitions, direct killing is also involved, because “when one of two adjoining tribes becomes more numerous and powerful than the other, the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and absorption.” Darwin thought that in most cases the so-called civilized peoples were winning this bloody contest: “When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.”¹¹

What shouldn’t be overlooked here is that from Darwin’s perspective, this pattern of natural selection by racial extermination was the path to human progress.

Notes

1. Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 537.
2. Darwin, Descent, 1:1.
3. In The Descent of Man chapter “On the Races of Man,” Darwin confirmed his belief that human races differ considerably, not only physically, but also in their mental capacities. For this reason, he considered races to be distinct sub-species. Darwin, Descent, 1:216, 227.
4. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species [1859] (London: Penguin, 1968), quotes at 129, 459.
5. Darwin, Descent, 1:3.
6. Darwin, Descent, 1:35.
7. Darwin, Descent, 1:109–110
8. Darwin, Descent, 145–146.
9. Daniel Graham, “A Bigger Brain Is Not Better,” Psychology Today, March 9, 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-internet-brain/202103/bigger-brain-is-not-necessarily-better.
10. Darwin, Descent, 1:201.
11. Darwin, Descent, 1:238.

Designed evolution continues its ascent over evolved "design"?

 

New Study in Nature Showing “Non-Random” Mutation Spells Trouble for Neo-Darwinism

Casey Luskin

 

A correspondent asked me about a recent paper in the journal Nature, “Mutation bias reflects natural selection in Arabidopsis thaliana,” aka the commonly studied flowerweed, thale cress. The abstract states, “Since the first half of the twentieth century, evolutionary theory has been dominated by the idea that mutations occur randomly with respect to their consequences. Here we test this assumption with large surveys of de novo mutations in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana.” They show that “epigenome-associated mutation bias reduces the occurrence of deleterious mutations in Arabidopsis, challenging the prevailing paradigm that mutation is a directionless force in evolution.”

That mutation is “directionless” or “random” is a traditional axiom of evolutionary biology. My correspondent wanted to know what it means to consider that some mutations may be “non-random” after all. She supposed that she was asking a “dumb question.”

Exactly the Question to Ask

Actually, it’s not in the least a dumb question — it’s exactly the right question to ask! In the context of this paper, what “non-random” means is that mutations are less likely to occur in gene-coding DNA — especially in what they call “essential genes.” This overturns two standard assumptions of the modern theory of evolution.

In evolutionary biology, it’s generally thought that mutations are “random” in two respects:

1. Mutations occur with equal likelihood across the entire genome. So there’s no part of the genome that is MORE or LESS likely to experience mutations than any other part of the genome. This is supposed to mean mutations are not directed or concentrated, but in a sense are randomly distributed across the genome. 
2. Mutations occur without regard to the needs of the organisms, meaning they are random and not directed for or against what the organisms needs to survive. 

The Nature study found evidence against both (1) and (2). In Arabidopsis, some parts of the genome are LESS likely to experience mutations, and those parts of the genome that experience fewer mutations tend to be the REALLY important parts of the genome that you wouldn’t want to be mutated because in those sections, mutations would most likely break genes that are very important to the organism.

A Look at the Specifics

Now let’s get into more specifics. In the genomes of most higher organisms, only a small percentage of the DNA represents genes that encode proteins. The Nature study found that sections of the Arabidopsis genome that encode genes are LESS likely to experience mutations than the “intergenic” regions — the sections of the genome between genes that don’t encode proteins. They found that “the frequency of mutation was 58% lower in gene bodies than in nearby intergenic space.”

They further found that “essential genes,” such as those basic genes responsible for translation (e.g., converting the information in DNA into proteins), had even LOWER mutation rates compared to other genes that had more specialized functions.

Please also note this important point: The study was able to directly measure mutations after they occurred in the plant but before mutations could have been affected by natural selection, which might “weed out” certain mutations that have deleterious effects. So the authors think they have provided a true and accurate measure of mutations as they occur in the DNA.

Or to put it another way, mutations don’t occur randomly in the sense that some parts of the genome are less likely to experience mutations than other parts of the genome. Instead, mutations DO occur with respect to the needs of the organism. That is, in certain respects life seems to be designed to minimize mutations in the places where they would do the most damage to the organism’s basic functions.

Implications for Evolutionary Biology 

The implications for evolutionary biology are profound. If mutations aren’t equally distributed across the genome, and aren’t random with respect to the needs of the organism, then two basic tenets of the standard neo-Darwinian model are false. This also could spell trouble for neo-Darwinism because it suggests that mutation rates are lowest in areas where mutations would presumably be needed to foster evolution — i.e., they are lowest in the genes.

If mutation rates are low in the gene-coding DNA, then it will take even longer for new complex traits to arise by mutating functional genes. This exacerbates what Darwin-skeptics call the “waiting time” problem, where it takes too long for necessary mutations to arise — far longer than the amount of time allowed by the fossil record. 

Return of the Waiting-Time Problem

Intelligent design proponents have already identified the waiting time problem as a fundamental mathematical obstacle to neo-Darwinian evolution. Our colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology last year, “On the waiting time until coordinated mutations get fixed in regulatory sequences,” which did mathematical modelling of the waiting time to generate traits requiring N mutations to provide an advantage. The paper found a serious challenge to neo-Darwinism:

[T]he fossil record is often interpreted as having long periods of stasis, interrupted by more abrupt changes and “explosive” origins. These changes include, for instance, the evolution of life, photo-synthesis, multicellularity and the “Avalon Explosion”, animal body plans and the “Cambrian Explosion”, complex eyes, vertebrate jaws and teeth, terrestrialization (e.g., in vascular plants, arthropods, and tetrapods), insect metamorphosis, animal flight and feathers, reproductive systems, including angiosperm flowers, amniote eggs, and the mammalian placenta, echolocation in whales and bats, and even cognitive skills of modern man. Based on radiometric dating of the available windows of time in the fossil record, these genetic changes are believed to have happened very quickly on a macroevolutionary timescale. In order to evaluate the chances for a neo-Darwinian process to bring about such major phenotypic changes, it is important to give rough but reasonable estimates of the time it would take for a population to evolve so that the required multiple genetic changes occur. [Internal citations omitted.]

Following the standards of the field, the study in Journal of Theoretical Biology adopted standard evolutionary assumptions that mutations are random — i.e., equally likely across the entire genome and occurring without respect to the needs of the organism. But the new study in Nature suggests that both these assumptions are false — and false in a way that probably makes it harder for neo-Darwinism to evolve new traits.

Transposons: ugly ducklings no more?

Cinderella Story? Transposons Gain New Respect

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

 

 

They’ve been called selfish. They’ve been labeled as parasites. They’ve been demonized as viral interlopers clogging up our chromosomes with useless copies, taking advantage of our replication mechanisms to perpetuate themselves. These characterizations of retrotransposons, retroviruses, and transposable elements (TEs), also called “jumping genes,” fit the Darwinian picture of entities in it for themselves, getting all they can at the expense of others, in a mindless race for fitness and survival. Recent studies indicate a changing attitude toward one of design. Though it’s too early to tell, TEs may turn out to be a Cinderella story — in line for restoration to the status of essential parts of our genomes, our health, and our lives.

“Myelin Is a Gift from Retroviruses”

Michael Denton has written about the big advantage myelin gives to neurons. “This design allows for what is termed ‘saltatory conduction,” he writes, “where the nerve impulse, instead of travelling sedately and continuously down the axon, jumps from node to node, vastly increasing the speed of transmission.” 

Now John Hewitt writes at Phys.org that “Myelin is a gift from retroviruses.” It’s not the only gift from these “opportunistic” elements that “make up over half our genome” —

Functional retrotransposons have been progressively implicated in all manner of things neurobiological.The maintenance of stem cell identity and mosaicism, incidence of neurological diseases and fusion of cells in the brain by sundry spike proteins are all now understood to be jobs for transposable elements. Writing in the bioRxiv preprint server, researchers have now discovered that vertebrate myelin likely originated when retrovirally derived elements inserted in the genome at key positions to trigger massive expression of their signature protein, Mbp (myelin basic protein). [Emphasis added.]

Hewitt continues to cast these TEs into evolutionary roles, but a design interpretation becomes possible when we compare his story with the fate of the junk DNA story. First there were a few examples found of function in the junk. Those numbers grew, to where now some believe all noncoding DNA is functional. In a previous article at Phys.org, Hewitt had admitted that the ENCODE results startled scientists into reconsidering the role of TEs. That project along with earlier studies showed that TEs were being translated, and appeared to be active in somatic cells, not just in germline cells.

Alongside these prodigious announcements was a parallel observation that much more of the genome is actually transcribed than had formerly been appreciated. Rather than just a few genes being expressed here or there, studies revealed that upwards of 80 percent of our entire genome is likely translated into some kind of RNA. With half a genome’s worth of retroviral additions, many of these transcriptions are undoubtedly retrotransposons one sort or another.

TEs: Enemies, Frenemies, or Friends?

More intimations of a change in attitude about transposons appeared this year. At The Scientist, Christie Wilcox wrote about “Adapting with a little help from jumping genes.” 

TEs, also called transposons or jumping genes, are often cast in a negative evolutionary light. And there is a reason for that: when these sequences insert themselves into new places in the genome, they can mess up genes or alter their expression. They’re sometimes called junk DNA, or worse, genomic parasites, the idea being that they would mutate their host genomes into oblivion if they weren’t almost always silenced by epigenetic modifications such as methylation. But recent research is illuminating the intricacies of TE function and adding texture to this simplistic model.

Wilcox quotes scientists who relate their changes in thinking. The trend these days is to see transposons less as “parasites” and more as “symbionts” that can cause benefit or harm, depending on where they land in the genome. For instance, by regulating genes near to their insertion points, they can “preadapt” an organism to changes in the environment. Here’s an interesting case involving one of evolution’s favorite icons, the peppered moth:

Arguably the most immediate and dramatic impacts TEs have on genomes occur when they insert into active genes. They can jump into coding regions, altering protein sequences, or they can insert into noncoding regions and alter gene splicing or expression. This is what happened in peppered moths, when a 22-kb TE inserted into the cortex gene and led to overproduction of melanin, turning dark the normally lightly bespeckled moths and improving their survival in polluted environments.

Notice the wholesale change in the story. (This is assuming that the dark moths land on blackened tree trunks, which as Jonathan Wells has documented, is factually incorrect; we’re just using Wilcox’s opinion as an indication of a change in attitude.) Instead of positing a random single-nucleotide mutation being selected blindly in the old neo-Darwinian way of thinking, a sequence of coded information is now used in the explanation. A Darwinist would have to argue that code able to help the moth just “happened” to pre-exist and landed in the right spot of a gene to turn it dark. It’s possible to imagine that, but more difficult to support as a blind process. Wilcox shares another case of preadaptation by a transposon:

Unlike point mutations, some TEs come preloaded with genetic motifs that may affect the expression of nearby genes. Certain populations of Drosophila carry the TE insertion FBti0019386, for example, which contains transcription factor binding sites that are activated during a bacterial infection and that increase expression of the immune-related gene Bin1. Flies carrying FBti0019386 are more likely to survive inoculation with a pathogenic strain of Pseudomonas.

One other example is that TEs may become activated by stress. This could indicate that they stand ready to assist the organism in hard times by regulating gene expression.

An Evolving Picture

Like Hewitt, Wilcox fits the new findings into an evolutionary narrative, but that slant may be difficult to maintain at the rate discoveries are coming in. Readers should recall how similar attempts were made to cast junk DNA and vestigial organs in Darwinian terms. In the end, it was function that won out, and design explanations were vindicated. Design theorists may be once again ahead of the curve in explaining these mysterious pieces of mobile code — mysterious, because questions remain that will continue to challenge both approaches:

“You can find transposable elements in virtually all the organisms that have been studied [genetically], from bacteria to eukaryotes,” notes evolutionary biologist Josefa González of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). But while TEs are nearly universal throughout living organisms, their prevalence varies widely. In some organisms, TEs dominate, accounting for up to 90 percent of the genome, while in others, transposable elements make up only a fraction of the entire genetic code. When abundant, TEs can grow the size of the genome to enormous, unwieldy proportions that continue to baffle scientists.

The picture of TEs is changing from “selfish opportunists” to “occasional partners in regulation.” Basically, TEs are being described as larger versions of random mutations occasionally found to persist by natural selection. But can any Darwinian narrative be sustained, when the point of Darwinism is to imagine adaptation by sheer dumb luck? Why would a stretch of code many kilobases long, existing simply for its own replication, just happen to be useful to another organism? 

“If Something Works”

Recall Paul Nelson’s maxim, “If something works, it’s not happening by accident.” Humans have been reproducing since their appearance on earth. And yet still today, many healthy babies are born, with all their parts in working order, and many of those grow to be strong and athletic adults. If TEs making up half the human genome were so selfish and parasitic, how could that continue for many hundreds or thousands of generations with genomes filled with parasites? 

For over a decade, contributing authors at Evolution News have hinted that endogenous retroviruses and other mobile elements might have functions (McLatchie 2012, Luskin 2015, Hunter 2017, Luskin 2019). Yet questions remain about their quantities, distributions, and effects in organisms. Are the targets where TEs insert themselves random or purposeful? What happens when they cause disease — could those cases be due to broken processes? Why do proportions of TEs vary so widely between organisms? Is there a pattern in the distribution somewhere? The subject of gut biota has undergone a major rethink over the years; now, scientists understand that we have a profoundly necessary and complex relationship with our bacterial partners; sometimes they cause problems, but usually the relationship works. Could there be an analogous relationship with our TEs? 

The easy way out is to call it random. Now that pro-Darwin establishment scientists and reporters are increasingly admitting that TEs are not useless or selfish after all, design theorists can take a strong lead in proposing testable hypotheses that consider foresight and software engineering principles. Code that can jump around is code nonetheless.