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Tuesday, 20 December 2022

Be grateful for your body's flawless design.

A Physician’s Fantastic Voyage through Your Designed Body 

 Evolution news 

On a new episode of ID the Future, Your Designed Body author and physician Howard Glicksman takes a close looks with Philosophy for the People podcast host Pat Flynn at Glicksman’s new book, co-authored with systems engineer Steve Laufmann. As Glicksman puts it, he and Laufmann consider not just how the human body appears but what it actually takes for it to work and not die, and what this implies for evolutionary theory.


Begin by piling up the layers of complexity in the human body — the layer upon layer of complex interdependent systems. Then ask hard questions about whether any blind and gradual evolutionary process could have kept our evolutionary ancestors alive at every generational stage as all this was gradually engineered by countless random mutations over millions of generations, beginning with the first single-celled organisms billions of years ago. Once one faces those hard questions without retreating to vague just-so stories about nature needing vision (or hearing or any number of other bodily functions) and therefore magically evolving it, at that point Darwinism’s story of gradual and blind evolution collapses. The explanation that is left standing, according to Glicksman, Laufmann, and Your Designed Body, is intelligent design. Download the podcast or listen to it here

Darwinism's failure as a predictive model XVIII

 Darwinism's Predictions 

Cornelius G Hunter 

Ever since Darwin the universal evolutionary tree has been a unifying principle in biology. Evolution predicted that this universal tree can be derived by arranging the species according to their similarities and differences. And as more data became available, particularly from the dramatic breakthroughs in molecular biology in the latter half of the twentieth century, expectations were high for the determination of this tree. As one paper explains, “Once universal characters were available for all organisms, the Darwinian vision of a universal representation of all life and its evolutionary history suddenly became a realistic possibility. Increasing reference was made to this universal, molecule-based phylogeny as the ‘comprehensive’ tree of the “entire spectrum of life” (O’Malley and Koonin) But those expectations were dashed: “By the mid-1980s there was great optimism that molecular techniques would finally reveal the universal tree of life in all its glory. Ironically, the opposite happened.” (Lawton)

 

As one study explained, the problem is so confusing that results “can lead to high confidence in incorrect hypotheses.” And although evolutionists thought that more data would solve their problems, the opposite has occurred. With the ever increasing volumes of data, incongruence between trees “has become pervasive.” (Dávalos) As another researcher explained, “Phylogenetic incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branchings within and among the various taxa to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves.” (Woese) These incongruities are not minor statistical variations and the general failure to converge on a single topology has some researchers calling for a relaxation from “tree-thinking.” (Bapteste, et. al.) Nor are these incongruities limited to protein-coding genes. As one research commented, “I’ve looked at thousands of microRNA genes, and I can’t find a single example that would support the traditional tree.” (Dolgin) 

These incongruities have forced evolutionists to filter the data carefully in order to obtain evolutionary trees. As one paper explains, “selecting genes with strong phylogenetic signals and demonstrating the absence of significant incongruence are essential for accurately reconstructing ancient divergences.” (Salichos and Rokas) But this raises the question of whether the resulting tree is real: “Hierarchical structure can always be imposed on or extracted from such data sets by algorithms designed to do so, but at its base the universal TOL [tree of life] rests on an unproven assumption about pattern that, given what we know about process, is unlikely to be broadly true.” (Doolittle and Bapteste). 

References 

Bapteste E., et. al. 2005. “Do orthologous gene phylogenies really support tree-thinking?.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 5:33.

 

Dávalos L., et. al. 2012. “Understanding phylogenetic incongruence: lessons from phyllostomid bats.” Biological Reviews Cambridge Philosophical Society 87:991-1024.

 

Dolgin, E. 2012. “Phylogeny: Rewriting evolution.” Nature 486:460-462.

 

Doolittle, W., E. Bapteste. 2007. “Pattern pluralism and the Tree of Life hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:2043-2049.

 

Lawton, G. 2009. “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life.” New Scientist January 21.

 

O’Malley, M., E. Koonin. 2011. “How stands the Tree of Life a century and a half after The Origin?.” Biology Direct 6:32.

 

Salichos L., A. Rokas. 2013. “Inferring ancient divergences requires genes with strong phylogenetic signals.” Nature 497:327-331.

Woese C. 1998. “The universal ancestor.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95:6854-6859. 

On the salt of the earth and the design Inference.

Salt of the Earth Regulates Habitability 

 David Coppedge 

nasa’s astrobiology program leans heavily on the assumption that any location where liquid water can persist is a potential place for life to emerge and evolve. consequently, those interested in the question of life beyond the earth have typically limited their searches to watery places. usually those were planets orbiting within their particular “continuously habitable zone” (chz), defined as the distance from the host star where h2o could remain in the liquid state for long periods of time. the chz has inner and outer radii with temperatures between 0 and 100°c, the freezing and boiling points for h2o. if a planet stays within the chz throughout its orbit, it is deemed “habitable” whether or not it has inhabitants.


later astrobiologists realized that other locations with liquid water exist. subsurface oceans of water are suspected on icy moons like europa at jupiter, enceladus at saturn, triton at neptune, and possibly a few others. because in situ investigation of those places are unlikely till far in the future, we will restrict our discussion to the orbital chzs. one caveat about habitable zones is that they can migrate. some types of host stars become hotter or cooler over time. the chz, correspondingly, will move outward or inward. 

Faint Young Sun 

Our own sun is thought to have been 20 percent cooler in its early history. As Earth could not have migrated inward to adjust, this creates a “faint young sun paradox” that astrobiologists must address in their models of life’s history on Earth. If a faint sun resulted in Earth orbiting outside the CHZ for a time, it could have become a giant “Snowball Earth” that could only melt back to normal with difficulty. A Snowball Earth could be a dead end; the high albedo of water ice would reflect more solar warmth back out to space. Some doubt it could ever recover. It’s best, therefore, to avoid snowball scenarios in models of Earth history.


A deeper dive into requirements for habitability shows that it is too simplistic to assume that being “in the zone” (CHZ) qualifies a planet for habitability. The right atmosphere, crustal composition, inclination, obliquity, rotation period, and other factors bear strongly on the question. Books such as The Privileged Planet, Rare Earth, and A Fortunate Universe have added to the list of requirements, including factors like stellar class, the avoidance of tidal locking, and presence of a stabilizing large moon. Most recently, Denton’s The Miracle of Man and the earlier books in his Privileged Species series have focused attention on essential chemical elements for life — over a dozen of them — that must be available near the surface of putative habitable planets. His book The Wonder of Water (see the video below) explains H2O’s many properties that benefit life. 

Climate Consequences 

And yet one property of water — its ion content — has been largely neglected by astrobiologists. Table salt (NaCl) is the most common ionic compound in sea water. Its ease of dissolving in water sets up electrical properties between its positive sodium (Na+) and negative chlorine (Cl–) ions. As a paper discussed below says, “Salt affects seawater density and ocean dynamics via direct mass effects and through its influence on charge density and ionic interactions with polar water molecules.” One effect of salinity is lowering the freezing point of water; this is the reason for salting roads in winter.


Sea water on Earth presently contains about 35g/kg of NaCl. Has this value remained constant throughout the history of the Earth? And does the concentration of salt in a planet’s oceans have any effect on its habitability? Surprisingly, the relationship between salinity and habitability has received scant attention till now. News from Purdue University announced that “salt may be the key to life on Earth and beyond.”

The composition of the atmosphere, especially the abundance of greenhouse gases, influences Earth’s climate. Researchers at Purdue University, led by Stephanie Olson, assistant professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, have recently found that the presence of salt in seawater can also have a major impact on the habitability of Earth and other planets. 

The Purdue team modeled the effects of salinity and found that increases or decreases in ocean salt concentration have profound effects on habitability. Their paper, by Olson et al., “The Effect of Ocean Salinity on Climate and Its Implications for Earth’s Habitability,” was published open access in Geophysical Research Letters. 

The influence of atmospheric composition on the climates of present-day and early Earth has been studied extensively, but the role of ocean composition has received less attention. 

A major finding in the paper is that high salinity warms the climate by affecting ocean currents. This may answer, the authors believe, the faint young sun paradox: i.e., how our planet avoided the Snowball Earth scenario when the solar luminosity (solar energy per unit area, in watts per square meter) was 20 percent lower, according to theories of stellar evolution for G2 main sequence stars like our sun. 

We find that saltier oceans yield warmer climates in large part due to changes in ocean dynamics. Increasing ocean salinity from 20 to 50 g/kg results in a 71% reduction in sea ice cover in our present-day Earth scenario. This same salinity change also halves the pCO2 threshold at which Snowball glaciation occurs in our Archean scenarios. In combination with higher levels of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and CH4, a saltier ocean may allow for a warm Archean Earth with only seasonal ice at the poles despite receiving ∼20% less energy from the Sun. 

Ecological Consequences 

Too much salt, on the other hand, can be hostile to life. Watch plant roots bend to avoid salt in a news item from the University of Copenhagen. The Purdue authors did not consider the effects on organisms with 50g/kg NaCl (their highest model value). Some organisms are remarkably salt-tolerant now, but evolutionists do not think they began that way. The Dead Sea, with over 340 g/kg, is dead for a reason. Rising salinity in California’s Salton Sea has killed most of the fish that once attracted anglers to its shores (Desert Sun). On Mars, the pervasive concentration of perchlorate salts worries some astrobiologists about the possibility of life there. 


Other consequences of changes in salinity not discussed by the paper in detail include interactions with other ions and elements critical for life. Tinkering with salt is likely to cause unintended consequences.

Fine Timing 

The paper’s conclusions rest on assumptions that are difficult to test and are somewhat dubious. For instance, modeling high salt concentration initially to keep the planet from freezing under a cooler sun could appear like special pleading; how do they know salt concentrations did not start initially low instead, increasing as water eroded the continents? Do they have an experimental basis for presuming higher salinity in the past? They cite a couple of papers, but note that  

Archean salinity remains poorly constrained. Our goal is thus not to offer a definitive view of a single moment in Earth’s history; instead, our goal is simply to explore the response of the climate system to changing ocean salinity and to assess the potential significance of these effects in the context of reduced solar luminosity on early Earth. 

More important for a design view of the Earth is the relation between salinity and habitability. Is the value of 35g/Kg NaCl a “Goldilocks” value? Has the salinity value remained stable while life was present, but fluctuated, increased monotonically, or decreased prior to life’s appearance? If both questions yield affirmative answers, there might be evidence of fine timing to consider, a possible homeostasis in salt geology as well as salt biology. Notice the delicate balance that results from changes in salinity, according to the authors: 

Present-day seawater with a salinity of 35 g/kg freezes (and is most dense) at −1.9°C, and saltier oceans freeze at progressively lower temperatures. In combination, these three density effects may profoundly affect the density structure of the ocean, its circulation, and ocean heat transport to high latitudes with consequences for sea ice formation. Even small differences in sea ice formation may yield significant climate differences through interaction with the positive ice-albedo feedback. 

Then the authors point out that salinity is a dynamic value. It thus becomes crucial to understand the sources and sinks of salt. 

Sodium (Na+) and chlorine (Cl−) are the primary ions contributing to ocean salinity today. The residence times of Na+ and Cl− ions in the ocean are 80 and 98 Myr, respectively, much shorter than the age of the Earth. 

The authors point out that salinity also affects the concentration of atmospheric CO2. This becomes another complication not previously considered in climate models. Notice the word “coincidence” in this eye-opening statement: 

The salinity evolution of Earth’s ocean is not yet well constrained, but constant salinity through time would be a notable coincidence or imply some currently unknown feedback. Climate models that implicitly assume present-day salinity may thus yield misleading views of Earth’s climate history. 

The paper raises interesting new questions more than it provides definitive answers: 

It is thus unclear whether accounting for changes to sea salt aerosol in our model would have a large effect on climate and whether these effects would amplify or offset warming with increasing salinity in our model scenarios. The relationships between ocean salinity, atmospheric water vapor, cloud nucleation, precipitation patterns, and surface temperature on short and long timescales remain an exciting opportunity for future work. 

A Critical Role 

That’s enough quotation to point out the criticality of salt to habitability. Those interested in the details can follow the authors’ arguments in the paper. Suffice it to say that a planet designer would have had to regulate an additional factor — salt — to make it livable. Liquid water alone is not enough to maintain a CHZ. One cannot tinker recklessly with salt concentration without knocking a planet out of the Goldilocks zone. If the models require beginning with a cooler sun, was it a lucky coincidence to start with higher salinity to keep the Earth warm, then decrease it steadily as the sun brightened?


The Purdue research adds two factors to the list of requirements for habitability that Denton, Gonzalez, Richards and others have compiled: (1) fine tuning of salt concentrations for a stable climate, and (2) fine timing of salt dynamics under a changing solar constant. Maybe there is something new under the sun after all: the salt of the Earth.