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Wednesday 7 December 2022

The thumb print of JEHOVAH: Human body edition II

 Your Designed Body: Hearing Is a Symphony of Parts 

Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt from Your Designed Body, the new book by engineer Steve Laufmann and physician Howard Glicksman. 

To hear, your body must collect acoustic signals from the environment (pressure waves in the air), channel them to the right locations, convert them into nerve impulses, send them to the brain, and correctly interpret them into experiences like speech and music. And, just as with vision, if any one of those parts works incorrectly, or even just a bit less efficiently, hearing is either severely degraded or impossible. 


The human ear can detect sound when the eardrum is displaced by as little as one-tenth the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. Yet it can also hear and correctly interpret sounds with acoustic pressure levels approaching the loudest sounds produced in nature (~1 kilopascal (kPa)). 


And you can do more than register sounds of varying pitch and volume. From an early age you could tell from the sound of your mom’s voice just how much trouble you were in, and which direction she was calling from (so you knew which way to run). These and other features of human hearing require — and by now this should come as no surprise to readers — not just one or two clever engineering solutions, but a suite of ingenious solutions upon ingenious solutions. 

The figure below illustrates the main parts of the body’s auditory system. Its many parts work together to gather sound waves from the environment and transmit them accurately and efficiently to the cochlea, where a subsystem called the organ of Corti converts them into nerve impulses and sends them to the brain.  



The ear is divided into three regions: the outer (external) ear, the middle ear, and the inner (internal) ear. We’ll walk through these parts in order — that is, following a sound wave as it moves from outside the body to the inside where it’s converted into information and eventually into an experience.

The Outer Ear 

The outer ear is made up of the pinna (ear flap), the ear canal, and the tympanic membrane (eardrum).


The pinna acts like a satellite dish, collecting sound waves and funneling them down the ear canal. But it does more than just collect. The pinna’s ridges and folds reflect and absorb certain frequency components of incoming sound waves. Since the pinna is not circularly symmetric, sounds coming from different directions have slightly different acoustic characteristics. This means certain frequencies in a sound will be slightly softer or louder depending on the direction they enter the ear. This allows you to tell the direction a sound comes from. This is why we instinctively look up when we hear a sound coming from above us. 


To further help with this, we have two ears for stereo sound. We can detect differences as small as ten microseconds in the time of arrival of the same sound in each ear. We can also detect subtle differences in loudness between our two ears. Coupled with the fine-grained sound-shaping done by the outer ear, this allows us to tell the direction of a noise and hear in three dimensions. That is, our minds can generate a three-dimensional understanding of what’s going on around us based solely on sounds.


Close your eyes and listen carefully to the sounds you hear. Where are they, both in direction (left or right, front to back, up or down) and distance away from you? If you have good ears and are used to exercising this skill, your hearing should prove informative on this score.

The ear canal is a hollow tube about two centimeters long. It forms an acoustic channel between the pinna and the eardrum. The ear canal may not seem interesting at first glance, but its length plays a crucial role in hearing.


Much like a pipe in a pipe organ, the outer ear consists of a rigid tube open at one end and sealed at the other. Incoming waves bounce off the closed end and create standing waves in the tube (ear canal). This amplifies sounds at or near the tube’s resonant frequencies (constructive interference) and dampens sounds at other frequencies (destructive interference). This increases sensitivity to particular frequencies while diminishing the amplitude of others. Basically, it’s a passive amplifier!


For the human ear, this amplification is strongest at around 3,000 Hz. While this is higher than the central frequencies of human speech, it’s exactly the range where the percussive elements of the consonants in human speech are most prominent, and the consonants are essential for distinguishing the nuances of human speech. 


The net effect is that the outer ear preprocesses incoming sound waves to maximize sensitivity to the natural frequencies of human speech. That is, our ears are fine tuned to hear best at the same frequencies we naturally speak.


The human ear can hear sounds from 20 Hz to around 20,000 Hz. Normal human speech ranges from 80–2,500 Hz. The lowest note on a tuba is 16 Hz, middle C on a piano is 262 Hz, and the highest note on a flute is 2,093 Hz. 


The eardrum (tympanum) is a small membrane, about one centimeter in diameter, at the inner end of the ear canal. It’s a durable piece of skin tightly stretched across an opening in the bony skull. The eardrum vibrates at the same frequency as an incoming sound wave, enabling it to accurately and efficiently transmit sounds from outside the body to the inside. All the while, it maintains a barrier that seals the delicate inner workings of the ear from foreign matter and bacteria.

The Middle Ear 

The middle ear is an enclosed air-filled chamber, beginning at the inner surface of the eardrum and ending at the cochlea.


The middle ear contains the ossicles, the three smallest bones in the body. These are the malleus (hammer), incus (anvil), and stapes (stirrup). They were given these familiar names because they resemble those objects in shape. Together, they transmit the vibrations of the eardrum into the inner ear. 


To do this, the malleus is attached to the eardrum and the incus, the incus is attached to the malleus and the stapes, and the stapes is attached to the incus and the oval window of the cochlea, as shown in the figure below.


Sound waves make the eardrum vibrate, which vibrates the malleus, which vibrates the incus, which vibrates the stapes, which vibrates the oval window of the cochlea. But the key to hearing is how these bones are precisely shaped and interconnected to modify incoming vibrations. 


Interestingly, these bones are fully formed at birth and do not grow as the entire body around them grows from infancy to adulthood. These are the only bones in the body with this property. 


How does the body grow all its other bones while keeping just these specific ones from growing? What mechanisms and control systems are needed? So far, neither medical science nor biology has answers, but engineers know that such things don’t happen by accident, so there seem to be many interesting discoveries yet to be made. 

Less-than-Obvious Problems 

As you’d expect by now, there are some less-than-obvious problems with hearing that the body needs to solve.


First, just like all the body’s cells, the cells in the tissue surrounding the middle ear need oxygen for respiration. Since the middle ear is filled with air, these cells have direct access to a ready supply. But they will gradually absorb all the available air, causing a vacuum effect, which would reduce eardrum movement and impair hearing.


Without a way to replenish its air supply, the ear would quickly lose hearing acuity. To solve this problem, it uses a small tube, called the eustachian (auditory) tube, that connects the middle ear to the back of the throat. When you swallow or yawn, this tube opens, allowing fresh air to enter the middle ear. This equalizes the middle ear’s air pressure with the pressure outside the body. This tube can get clogged, as during a head cold, preventing the middle ear from equalizing pressure, which, as we all know, degrades hearing and causes earaches.


As a second and more formidable problem, sounds entering the body come through the air, but the cochlea is filled with fluid. The cochlea’s fluid, as we’ll see, serves a vital purpose, but it presents a thorny acoustic problem for accurate hearing. Because air is much less dense than liquid, and far more compressible, without some skillful engineering most of the energy of the sound wave would simply be reflected back into the ear canal. A rough analogy would be throwing a rubber ball at the sidewalk. Most of the ball’s energy is reflected in the ball’s bounce back to the thrower. Very little is transmitted to the sidewalk.

For proper hearing, then, the body needs to amplify the signal between the eardrum and the cochlea. The best way to do this is with a lever system. Since the malleus is attached to the eardrum and the stapes to the cochlea, this leaves the middle bone, the incus, to serve as a lever. But not just any lever will do. Only a very specific configuration of that lever will properly translate the pressure waves in the air into corresponding pressure waves in the fluid.  

Impedance Transformation 

The middle ear must provide a mechanical advantage to accurately bridge the different densities of air and fluid, and do so with minimal loss of either loudness or tonality. Mechanical engineers call this impedance transformation, a tricky problem to overcome in even a simple system.


The ear’s solution involves the precise shapes and configurations of all three bones of the middle ear. The malleus has a larger surface area than the stapes. Also, the two arms of the incus’s lever have different lengths. Each provides mechanical advantage. Pressure waves hitting the large area of the eardrum are concentrated into the smaller area of the stirrup so that the force of the vibrating stirrup is nearly fifteen times greater than that of the eardrum. This makes it possible to hear even the faintest sounds.


These bones can only do their job effectively when surrounded by air. If they were immersed in fluid, the viscosity of the fluid would degrade their mechanical properties. This drives the need for an air supply to the middle ear.


The three bones of the middle ear, and the ways they’re held in place by various tendons, act as a four-bar mechanism. The specific configuration in the ear is called a double-crank rocker. Engineers use four-bar mechanisms to fine tune mechanical relationships in systems where exacting precision and sophistication are needed, as they most certainly are in the middle ear. To achieve the necessary mechanical advantage, the shapes of the parts and the positions of the several hinge points must be precisely tuned, with little room for error. 


So, hearing hinges on the precise configuration of these three tiny bones, with their very specific shapes which are essential to their purposes. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the bones of the middle ear. 


Actual intelligence v. Artificial intelligence?

Dialogue with ChatGPT on Intelligent Design 

William A. Dembski 

Here is an interesting chat between me and OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the topic of intelligent design. Interesting especially how it ended. Think of ChatGPT as a context-dependent natural language generator that tries to respond relevantly to textual prompts from human users to simulate conversation. The first of these conversation bots goes back to the 1960s with Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza program. The current incarnation of these programs have become much more sophisticated, exploiting machine learning and big data. 


ME: What is intelligent design?

ChatGPT: Intelligent design is the belief that certain features of the universe and living things show signs of having been designed by an intelligent cause. It is often seen as an alternative to the theory of evolution, which proposes that species have changed over time through natural processes. Proponents of intelligent design argue that certain features of the natural world are too complex to have evolved through natural processes, and therefore must have been created by a higher power. This belief is not supported by scientific evidence, and is considered a form of creationism by many scientists.


ME: Why do you say that the belief in intelligent design is not supported by scientific evidence?


ChatGPT: There is no scientific evidence to support the belief in intelligent design. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is supported by a vast amount of scientific evidence, including fossil records, genetic data, and observations of natural selection in action. Scientists have studied the natural world for centuries, and the evidence overwhelmingly supports the idea that species have evolved over time through natural processes. In contrast, there is no scientific evidence to support the belief that certain features of the natural world were created by a higher power.


ME: Seriously, no evidence? What do you make of the specified complexity that is evident in the genes and proteins of the cell? Why don’t you consider this as constituting evidence for intelligent design?


ChatGPT: The complexity of genes and proteins does not constitute evidence for intelligent design. In fact, scientists have been able to explain the complexity of these structures through the theory of evolution. The genetic code, for example, is the result of natural selection acting on random mutations over countless generations. The same is true for the proteins found in cells. While these structures are certainly complex, that complexity can be explained through natural processes.


ME: But all organisms share the genetic code and would not be alive without it. So the genetic code must in some sense predate existing life forms. Natural selection, by contrast, requires life already to exist. So it is misguided to claim that natural selection acting on random mutations can “produce the genetic code.” Wouldn’t you agree?


ChatGPT: An error occurred. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com. [Yes, this final output was in red.] 

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model VII

 Darwin's Predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

In the 1960s molecular biologists learned how to analyze protein molecules and determine the sequence of amino acids that comprise a protein. It was then discovered that a given protein molecule varies somewhat from species to species. For example, hemoglobin, a blood protein, has similar function, overall size and structure in different species. But its amino acid sequence varies from species to species. Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling reasoned that if such sequence differences were the result of evolutionary change occurring over the history of life, then they could be used to estimate past speciation events—a notion that became known as the molecular clock. (Zuckerkandl and Pauling)


In later decades this concept of a molecular clock, relying on the assumption of a roughly constant rate of molecular evolution, became fundamental in evolutionary biology. (Thomas, et. al.) As the National Academy of Sciences explained, the molecular clock “determines evolutionary relationships among organisms, and it indicates the time in the past when species started to diverge from one another.” (Science and Creationism, 3) Indeed the molecular clock has been extolled as strong evidence for evolution and, in fact, a common sentiment has been that evolution was required to explain these evidences. As a leading molecular evolutionist wrote, the molecular clock is “only comprehensible within an evolutionary framework.” (Jukes, 119, emphasis in original) The claim that the molecular clock can only be explained by evolution is, however, now a moot point as the mounting evidence shows that molecular differences often do not fit the expected pattern. The molecular clock which evolutionists had envisioned does not exist. The literature is full of instances where the molecular clock concept fails. For example, it was found early on that different types of proteins must evolve at very different rates if there is a molecular clock. For example the fibrinopeptide proteins in various species must have evolved more than five hundred times faster than the histone IV protein. Furthermore, it was found that the evolutionary rate of certain proteins must vary significantly over time, between different species, and between different lineages. (Thomas, et. al.; Andrews, 28)


The proteins relaxin, superoxide dismutase (SOD) and the glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GPDH), for example, all contradict the molecular clock prediction. On the one hand, SOD unexpectedly shows much greater variation between similar types of fruit flies than it does between very different organisms such as animals and plants. On the other hand GPDH shows roughly the reverse trend for the same species. As one scientist concluded, GPDH and SOD taken together leave us “with no predictive power and no clock proper.” (Ayala)


Evolutionists are finding growing evidence that the purported rates of molecular evolution must vary considerably between species for a wide range of taxa, including mammals, arthropods, vascular plants, and even between closely related lineages. As one study concluded, “The false assumption of a molecular clock when reconstructing molecular phylogenies can result in incorrect topology and biased date estimation. … This study shows that there is significant rate variation in all phyla and most genes examined …” (Thomas, et. al.)


Evolutionists continue to use the molecular clock concept, but the many correction factors highlight the fact that the sequence data are being fit to the theory rather than the other way around. As one evolutionist warned, “It seems disconcerting that many exceptions exist to the orderly progression of species as determined by molecular homologies; so many in fact that I think the exception, the quirks, may carry the more important message.” (Schwabe) 

References 

ndrews, Peter. 1987. “Aspects of hominoid phylogeny” in Molecules and Morphology in Evolution, ed. Colin Patterson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Ayala, F. 1999. “Molecular clock mirages.” BioEssays 21:71-75.


Jukes, Thomas. 1983. “Molecular evidence for evolution” in: Scientists Confront Creationism, ed. Laurie Godfrey. New York: W. W. Norton.


Schwabe, C. 1986. “On the validity of molecular evolution.” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 11:280-282.


Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences. 2d ed. 1999. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.


Thomas, J. A., J. J. Welch, M. Woolfit, L. Bromham. 2006. “There is no universal molecular clock for invertebrates, but rate variation does not scale with body size.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103:7366-7371.

Zuckerkandl, E., L. Pauling. 1965. “Molecules as documents of evolutionary history.” J Theoretical Biology 8:357-366.

 


Still seeking straight answers III

To trinitarians: please point out(if you are so able) the logical fallacy in the following premise or it's conclusion.




The triune God alone is the most high God, Jesus is not the triune God, therefore Jesus is not the most high God.  

Ps. As corollaries ,JEHOVAH is the most high God ,Jesus is not the most high God therefore Jesus is not JEHOVAH.


Anyone who is the most high God is greater than anyone who is not the most high God


JEHOVAH is the most high God,


Jesus is not the most high God,


Therefore JEHOVAH is greater than Jesus