Bacteria: The real world savers?

 “Bacteria Are Incredible” — Here Are More Illustrations

David Coppedge

In his latest “Secrets of the Cell” video, biochemist Michael Behe tells about wonderful bacteria that eat organic waste, remove smells from mud by conducting electricity, recycle plastic, aid our digestion, and more. “Folks, you can’t make this stuff up!” he exclaims. “Bacteria are incredible.”

That is true, and I provided some illustrations yesterday. Here are more. 

Think of man’s worst environmental disasters. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Chernobyl nuclear accident probably take priority on the list. The American Chemical Society posted a video showing how bacteria are good at cleaning up oil spills, radioactive waste and toxic chemicals — not that this fact gives humans license to damage the planet, but it’s interesting. The narrator, who demonstrates a controlled experiment with oil-eating bacteria in her kitchen, was surprised that the microbes that flock to oil spills need no genetic engineering. They get to work on their own and seem to enjoy it. “How cool is it that genetic tinkering is not always needed?” she comments. Much of our plastic debris, however, accumulates in the oceans where it collects in huge revolving garbage patches on the surface called gyres. How many people faithfully recycle plastic bottles only to find in news reports that China no longer accepts the West’s barges of compressed plastic, and so it ends up in the ocean anyway? It’s depressing. Some have remarked that recycling might do more damage than throwing it in the regular trash. For those trying to be environmentally conscious, that’s really depressing.

Environmental engineers fret as plastic waste accumulates and circulates in those gyres. But a few decades ago, scientists began to discover that these garbage patches are not lifeless deserts. They are teeming with a class of organisms collectively known as “neuston.” New Scientist reports:

Neuston are organisms that float on the ocean surface. They encompass a wide range of species, including blue sea dragons (Glaucus atlanticus), violet snails (Janthina janthina), blue button jellyfish (Porpita porpita) and by-the-wind sailors (Velella velella).

Rebecca Helm at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and colleagues found that there are more neuston in the center of the North Pacific Garbage Patch than at the edges. This is probably true worldwide, as similar garbage patches are found in the South Pacific, South Atlantic, and Indian oceans. At least some life forms are making a living on our trash! Some of the organisms are quite beautiful.

So now, Helm is worried that cleanup efforts could endanger these thriving communities of organisms. Another worry is that fish and whales could imbibe plastic by feeding on the neuston. There is a race against time to give the plastic-degrading bacteria time to work while the higher organisms enjoy their merry-go-round ride on artificial boats. There’s a research project: to what extent does the neuston ecosystem contribute to the breakdown of floating plastic?

If environmental engineers can find ways to accelerate bacteria’s good work, it may prove to be a much more cost-effective way to recycle plastic than packing it on barges. Maybe biodegradation could be started earlier in the process. Either way, it appears that the food chain, with microbes at the base, has the power to degrade all that plastic eventually if a true circular economy comes to fruition and the accumulation in the gyres ceases.

A Food Chain of Recyclers

Alice Klein’s article in New Scientist doesn’t mention the food chain, but earlier reports have found that microbes contribute to the breakdown of ocean garbage and even larger artificial junk. We know that organisms recycle our shipwrecks in the deep sea. If you want to visit the Titanic by submarine, you had better hurry; it could vanish by 2037. The EE Times explained why:

The iconic ocean liner is, in fact, disintegrating where it lies; as well as animals and plants, its inhabitants include bacteria, which are eating their home at a staggering rate. One type of bacteria transforms dissolved iron into insoluble iron oxide to create rusticles — like icicles, but made of rust. Other types of the dozen or so microbes present effectively eat the rusticles.

And so the evidence of man’s grandiose projects — elegant ballrooms under chandeliers on a doomed “unsinkable” ship — vanishes into memory, as the ocean reclaims its own. But there’s a happy side to some of our shipwrecks. Multitudes of fish and other sea creatures have taken up residence in and around battleships from the South Pacific, even those sunk by nuclear bomb tests. Considering this discovery, some ships have been submerged on purpose to provide havens for fish and scuba divers. Microbes and viruses are sure to be key players in those thriving ecosystems.

Don’t Dismiss Bacteria

Instead of dismissing bacteria as primitive remnants of early evolution, design-thinking scientists can help our planet’s tiny ecosystem engineers solve some of the most pressing problems facing us today. By looking at microbes as the intelligently designed systems they are — having shown their benefits in many ways — ID advocates can partner with them. Like the first ranchers, they can bridle and saddle up these tiny workhorses that come equipped to tackle planet-sized loads.

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What unbelievers need to believe.

 Three Realities Chance Can’t Explain That Intelligent Design Can.

Granville Sewell

The scientific establishment is slowly beginning to allow scientists who believe in intelligent design to have a platform. Why? It may be because the theory that the universe was crafted intentionally explains many realities that theories based on chance do not.

Perhaps the simplest and best argument for intelligent design is to clearly state what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design, as I did in my book, In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Peter Urone, in his physics text College Physics, writes, “One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena.”

This is what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design: that the origin and evolution of life, and the evolution of human consciousness and intelligence, are due entirely to a few unintelligent forces of physics. Thus you must believe that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into computers and science texts and jet airplanes and nuclear power plants and Apple iPhones.    

These four unintelligent forces of physics may indeed explain everything that has happened on other planets, but let us look at three essential elements of our human existence and examine whether the currently believed origin theory can explain them.

1. The Origin of Life

To appreciate that we still have no idea how the first living things arose, you only have to realize that with all our advanced technology we are still not close to designing any type of self-replicating machine; that is still pure science fiction. We can only create machines that create other machines, but no machine that can make a copy of itself. 

When we add technology to such a machine, to bring it closer to the goal of reproduction, we only move the goalposts because now we have a more complicated machine to reproduce. So how could we imagine that such a machine could have arisen by pure chance?

Maybe human engineers will someday construct a self-replicating machine. But if they do, I’m sure it will not happen until long after I am gone, and it will not show that life could have arisen through natural processes. It will only have shown that it could have arisen through design. 

2. The Origin of Advanced Life Forms

Furthermore, imagine that we did somehow manage to design, say, a fleet of cars with fully automated car-building factories inside, able to produce new cars — and not just normal new cars, but new cars with fully automated car-building factories inside them. Who could seriously believe that if we left these cars alone for a long time, the accumulation of duplication errors made as they reproduced themselves would result in anything other than devolution, and eventually could even be organized by selective forces into more advanced automobile models?  

No, we could confidently predict that the whole process would grind to a halt after a few generations without intelligent humans around to fix the mechanical problems that would inevitably arise, long before we saw duplication errors that held any promise of advances. 

The idea that it could even be remotely plausible that random mutations could produce major improvements relies completely on the observed but inexplicable fact that, while they are awaiting rare favorable mutations, living species are able to preserve their complex structures and pass them on to their descendants without significant degradation. We are so used to seeing this happen that we don’t appreciate how astonishing it really is.  

But perhaps trying to imagine designing self-replicating cars, and trying to imagine that these cars could make progress through the accumulation of duplication errors, may help us realize that we really have no idea how living things are able to pass their current complex structures on to their descendants, generation after generation — much less how they evolve even more complex structures.

Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, in his 2019 book Darwin Devolves, writes:

Darwinian evolution proceeds mainly by damaging or breaking genes, which, counterintuitively, sometimes helps survival. In other words, the mechanism is powerfully de-volutionary. It promotes the rapid loss of genetic information. Laboratory experiments, field research, and theoretical studies all forcefully indicate that, as a result, random mutation and natural selection make evolution self-limiting. … Darwin’s mechanism works chiefly by squandering genetic information for short-term gain.

So, according to Behe, duplication errors, even when organized by selective forces, have the same effect on living species as we would expect them to have on self-replicating cars: only devolution and degradation.

Also, here we have not even discussed what is generally considered to be the main problem with Darwinism: its inability to explain the appearance of major new, irreducibly complex features that consistently appear suddenly in the fossil record. (I discussed this problem in my article “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” and in the second part of my video “Why Evolution is Different.”)

3. The Origin of Human Intelligence and Consciousness

Trying to imagine that the accumulation of duplication errors made by our fleet of self-replicating cars could eventually result in conscious, intelligent machines might help us to realize that the evolution of intelligent beings, capable of designing computers, science texts, jet airplanes, and Apple iPhones, is an especially monumental and unsolved problem. 

In my video “A Summary of the Evidence for Intelligent Design,” I began my fifth point with a picture of three children in the 1950s. One of them is me, the other two are not. I saw the world from inside one of these children. I saw every picture that entered through his eyes, I heard every sound that entered through his ears, and when he fell on the sidewalk, I felt his pain. How did I end up inside one of these children? 

This is a question that rarely seems to trouble evolutionists. They talk about human evolution as if they were outside observers and never seem to wonder how they got inside one of the animals they are studying. They consider that human brains are just complicated computers, and so to explain how we got here they just have to explain how these mechanical brains evolved. 

But even if they could explain how animals with mechanical brains evolved out of the primeval slime, that would leave the most important question — the one evolutionists never seem to even wonder about — still unsolved: How did I get inside one of these animals?

The argument for intelligent design could not be simpler or clearer: Unintelligent forces alone cannot rearrange atoms into computers and airplanes and nuclear power plants and smartphones, and any attempt to explain how they can must fail somewhere because they obviously can’t. Perhaps this is the best way to understand why explanations without design will never work, and why science may finally be starting to recognize this.

Cross-posted from The Federalist with permission of the author.