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Saturday, 24 September 2022

Charles Darwin, back to the future?

 Listen: Darwin Returns from the Future 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

On a classic episode of ID the Future, hear the concluding episode of I, Charles Darwin, in which author Nickell John Romjue’s time-traveling Darwin returns to his family home and offers some final reflections on his eye-opening visit to the 21st century. Download the podcast or listen to it here.


Part 1 of the audio series is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit www.icharlesdarwin.com 


What does the origin of life have to do with Darwinism?

It has become obvious to many, present company included, that Darwinism is less about explaining the origins of anything,and more about explaining away the technology manifest in living systems. That being the case the origin of life is very relevant . Being prebiotic, the origin of life is by definition pre Darwinian ,thus if the technology that Darwinists are attempting to explain away via their theory precedes Darwinian evolution that would certainly constitute a fail. 

Why no rise of the machines.

 New from Science Uprising — Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, and the Human Difference 

David Klinghoffer 

The latest Science Uprising episode is out and what it has to say is important. From the late Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk, some of the smartest people on Earth have issued warnings about the looming danger posed by artificial intelligence. Not only is AI an amazing technology, they say, with the potential for uses both good and bad, but it threatens to replace and destroy humanity. The media love this particular concept and continually seek to scare us with it. Why?


The episode calls out the idea for what it is: applied materialism. Materialism is the denial of a spiritual reality. It animates Darwinian thinking, and it drives the panic about AI. After all, if humans are no more than “meat machines,” then a superior machine, equipped with AI, could well choose to do away with us. However, as four notable scholars explain here, AI runs on algorithms, which are essentially a recipe. AI does only what it’s programmed to do. Humans transcend algorithms. We do things that computers will never be able to accomplish: 

An Unexpected Gift 

Interviewed for the episode, Robert J. Marks, John Lennox, Jay Richards, and Selmer Bringsjord have profound things to teach. Dr. Marks, for example, is a renowned computer engineer at Baylor University who directs Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. He says that by its nature, AI is locked in a silo or box where it exercises its ability to run algorithms. Creativity, not mere copying or following commands, entails thinking “outside the box.” That’s how it can surprise us with genuine novelty. It’s why new ideas often come to us from out of the blue: not summoned but given as an unexpected gift.


This, too, may be why artists notoriously live disordered lives, and why totalitarian societies are typically poor in art (as distinct from kitsch or propaganda) and in creativity generally. The regimentation is not compatible with giving free rein to the human difference. It’s something to think about as rule by authoritarian experts becomes more and more the expectation in our own culture. Young people especially need to understand this. Watch the new Science Uprising now and share it





The OOL'S antiDarwinian bias continued.

 The “Clumping” Problem and the Origin of Life 

Walter Bradley

Casey Luskin 

 Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin on the question, “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” This is the fifth entry in the series, a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series so far here. 

Assuming that prebiotic organic polymers could be created under some set of natural conditions, the origin of life still cannot occur unless the requisite molecules can be concentrated or “clumped” together in some protective container where necessary chemical reactions can take place. In living organisms, such environments are the basic unit of life — the cell. But could something like a cell membrane arise naturally before life existed? 


In the 1970s, biochemist Sidney Fox and colleagues believed they had uncovered primitive cell membrane-like structures called protenoid microspheres.1 Other structures called coacervates were proposed, first by Oparin, as potential precursors to modern cell membranes.2 Because these structures lack any metabolism and the ability to self-reproduce,3they clearly could not constitute life. But even if these structures could do those things, they are unable to perform the most basic protective function of cell membranes: discriminate among nutrients, waste products, and toxic chemicals. 


Campbell’s Biology, a prominent college-level biology textbook, explains this requirement: 

One of the earliest episodes in the evolution of life may have been the formation of a membrane that enclosed a solution different from the surrounding solution while still permitting the uptake of nutrients and elimination of waste products. The ability of the cell to discriminate in its chemical exchanges with its environment is fundamental to life, and it is the plasma membrane and its component molecules that make this selectivity possible.4 

A Smart, Active Gatekeeper 

Undoubtedly the textbook is correct: Without this extremely important protective barrier, the earliest forms of life would be unable to obtain food and be vulnerable to harmful molecules and chemical reactions in the outside environment, such as oxidation. The membrane also keeps the cell’s components together to allow for necessary cellular processes to take place. But the “lipid bilayer” of modern cells is no mere passive wall — it’s a smart, active gatekeeper capable of allowing water and nutrients in, and letting waste products out. Specialized machines embedded in this smart membrane discriminate between helpful and harmful substances through a variety of biochemical pathways and molecular pumps. Hence the problem for origin-of-life theorists — as synthetic chemist James Tour of Rice University explains, no origin-of-life experiments have ever created “the required passive transport sites and active pumps for the passage of ions and molecules through bilayer membranes.”5 

Daunting Complexity 

Tour elaborates on the daunting complexity of cell membranes that remains unexplained by origin-of-life theorists:


Researchers have identified thousands of different lipid structures in modern cell membranes. These include glycerolipids, sphingolipids, sterols, prenols, saccharolipids, and polyketides. For this reason, selecting the bilayer composition for our synthetic membrane target is far from straightforward. When making synthetic vesicles — synthetic lipid bilayer membranes — mixtures of lipids can, it should be noted, destabilize the system.

Lipid bilayers surround subcellular organelles, such as nuclei and mitochondria, which are themselves nanosystems and microsystems. Each of these has their own lipid composition.

Lipids have a nonsymmetric distribution. The outer and inner faces of the lipid bilayer are chemically inequivalent and cannot be interchanged.6

Despite modest progress with the synthetic production of microspheres, coacervates, and similar structures, the lack of any discrimination ability means the clumping step in the origin of life has not been explained. 

Notes 

1)sidney W. Fox, John R. Jungck, and Tadayoshi Nakashima, “From Protenoic Microsphere to Contemporary Cell: Formation of Internucleotide and Peptide Bonds by Protenoid Particles,” Origins of Life 5 (1974), 227-237. 

2)Emanuele Astoricchio, Caterina Alfano, Lawrence Rajendran, Piero Andrea Temussi, and Annalisa Pastore, “The Wide World of Coacervates: From the Sea to Neurodegeneration,” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 45 (August 2020), 706-717.

3)Zhu Hua, “On the Origin of Life: A Possible Way from Fox’s Microspheres into Primitive Life,” Symbiosis 4 (2018), 1-7.

4)Jane B. Reece, Lisa A. Urry, Michael L. Cain, Steven A. Wasserman, Peter V. Minorsky, and Robert B. Jackson, Cambell’s Biology, 9th ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2011), 125.

5)James Tour, “An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Inference Review: International Review of Science 3 (2017), 2.

6)Tour, “An Open Letter to My Colleagues.”