David Berlinski on the descent of man.

 Are Humans Progressing Toward Evolutionary Perfection?

Andrew McDiarmid

Are humans progressing morally as well as materially? What does it mean to be human in the cosmos? On a new episode of ID the Future, we bring you the second half of a stimulating conversation between Dr. David Berlinski and host Eric Metaxas on the subject of Berlinski’s book Human Nature.

In Human Nature, Berlinski argues that the utopian view that humans are progressing toward evolutionary and technological perfection is wishful thinking. Men are not about to become like gods. “I’m a strong believer in original sin,” quips Berlinski in his discussion with Metaxas. In other words, he believes not only that humans are fundamentally distinct from the rest of the biological world, but also that humans are prone to ignorance and depravity as well as wisdom and nobility. During this second half of their discussion, Berlinski and Metaxas compare and contrast the ideas of thinkers like psychologist Steven Pinker, author Christopher Hitchens, and physicist Steven Weinberg. The pair also spar gracefully over the implications of human uniqueness. Berlinski, though candid and self-critical, is unwilling to be pigeonholed. Metaxas, drawing his own conclusions about the role of mind in the universe, challenges Berlinski into moments of clarity with his usual charm. The result is an honest, probing, and wide-ranging conversation about the nature of science and the human condition. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Rocks are resisting the decarbon agenda?

 Geological Surprise: Ancient Rocks Release As Much CO2 As All the World’s Volcanoes

Scitech Daily

A University of Oxford study reveals rock weathering can be a major CO2 source, rivaling volcanic emissions. This insight is crucial for future carbon budget predictions.

New research has overturned the traditional view that natural rock weathering acts as a CO2 sink that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Instead, this can also act as a large CO2 source, rivaling that of volcanoes.

The results have important implications for modeling climate change scenarios but at the moment, CO2 release from rock weathering is not captured in climate modeling.

Future work will focus on whether human activities may be increasing CO2 release from rock weathering, and how this could be managed.

A Paradigm Shift in Understanding Carbon Cycle

A new study led by the University of Oxford has overturned the view that natural rock weathering acts as a CO2 sink, indicating instead that this can also act as a large CO2 source, rivaling that of volcanoes. The results, published on October 4 in the journal Nature, have important implications for modeling climate change scenarios.

Rocks and the Carbon Cycle

Rocks contain an enormous store of carbon in the ancient remains of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. This means that the “geological carbon cycle” acts as a thermostat that helps to regulate the Earth’s temperature. For instance, during chemical weathering rocks can suck up CO2 when certain minerals are attacked by the weak acid found in rainwater. This process helps to counteract the continuous CO2 released by volcanoes around the world, and forms part of Earth’s natural carbon cycle that has helped keep the surface habitable to life for a billion years or more.

Discovery of a New CO2 Release Mechanism

However, for the first time, this new study measured an additional natural process of CO2 release from rocks to the atmosphere, finding that it is as significant as the CO2 released from volcanoes around the world. Currently, this process is not included in most models of the natural carbon cycle.

The process occurs when rocks that formed on ancient seafloors (where plants and animals were buried in sediments) are pushed back up to Earth’s surface, for example, when mountains like the Himalayas or Andes form. This exposes the organic carbon in the rocks to oxygen in the air and water, which can react and release CO2. This means that weathering rocks could be a source of CO2, rather than the commonly assumed sink.

Methodology and Findings

Up to now, measuring the release of this CO2 from weathering organic carbon in rocks has proved difficult. In the new study, the researchers used a tracer element (rhenium) which is released into water when rock organic carbon reacts with oxygen. Sampling river water to measure rhenium levels makes it possible to quantify CO2 release. However, sampling all river water in the world to get a global estimate would be a significant challenge.

To upscale over Earth’s surface, the researchers did two things. First, they worked out how much organic carbon is present in rocks near the surface. Second, they worked out where these were being exposed most rapidly, by erosion in steep, mountain locations.

Dr. Jesse Zondervan, the researcher who led the study at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, said: “The challenge was then how to combine these global maps with the river data, while considering uncertainties. We fed all of our data into a supercomputer at Oxford, simulating the complex interplay of physical, chemical, and hydrological processes. By piecing together this vast planetary jigsaw, we could finally estimate the total carbon dioxide emitted as these rocks weather and exhale their ancient carbon into the air.”

This could then be compared to how much CO2 could be drawn down by natural rock weathering of silicate minerals. The results identified many large areas where weathering was a CO2 source, challenging the current view about how weathering impacts the carbon cycle. Hotspots of CO2 release were concentrated in mountain ranges with high uplift rates that cause sedimentary rocks to be exposed, such as the eastern Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains, and the Andes. The global CO2 release from rock organic carbon weathering was found to be 68 megatons of carbon per year.

Professor Robert Hilton (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford), who leads the ROC-CO2 research project that funded the study, said: “This is about 100 times less than present-day human CO2 emissions by burning fossil fuels, but it is similar to how much CO2 is released by volcanoes around the world, meaning it is a key player in Earth’s natural carbon cycle.”

Implications and Future Directions

These fluxes could have changed during Earth’s past. For instance, during periods of mountain building that bring up many rocks containing organic matter, the CO2 release may have been higher, influencing global climate in the past.

Ongoing and future work is looking into how changes in erosion due to human activities, alongside the increased warming of rocks due to anthropogenic climate changes, could increase this natural carbon leak. A question the team is now asking is if this natural CO2 release will increase over the coming century. “Currently we don’t know – our methods allow us to provide a robust global estimate, but not yet assess how it could change’’ says Hilton.

“While the carbon dioxide release from rock weathering is small compared to present-day human emissions, the improved understanding of these natural fluxes will help us better predict our carbon budget” concluded Dr. Zondervan.

Reference: “Rock organic carbon oxidation CO2 release offsets silicate weathering sink” by Jesse R. Zondervan, Robert G. Hilton, Mathieu Dellinger, Fiona J. Clubb, Tobias Roylands and Mateja Ogrič, 4 October 2023, Nature.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06581-9

Natural selection is a conserver not an innovator?

 Paper Digest: What Mutation Accumulation Tells Us About Evolution

Emily Reeves

In 2012, intelligent design proponents Robert W. Carter and John C. Sanford published a paper demonstrating the detrimental effects of mutational accumulation in the influenza virus. Though more than a decade old, this work caught my attention, among other reasons, for its possible relevance to our current experiences with COVID-19.

The paper demonstrates how mutational accumulation degrades genetic code over time — a concept championed by the ID community. The authors present a comprehensive historical analysis of mutational changes within the influenza virus H1N1, examining over 4,100 fully sequenced H1N1 genomes. Their results document multiple extinction events, including the previously known extinction of the human H1N1 lineage in 1957 and an apparent second extinction of the human H1N1 lineage in 2009. They state that the seeming extinctions appear to be due to continuous genetic erosion from the accumulation of mutations in the lineages. 

Fresh Look at a Familiar Virus

From the article, “A new look at an old virus,” in Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling:

It is therefore reasonable to ask if the striking reduction in H1N1 mortality might be due, in part, to natural attenuation resulting from deleterious mutation accumulation. Herd immunity is undoubtedly an important factor in reduced H1N1 mortality since 1918, but this may not be sufficient to explain the continuous decline in H1N1-related mortality over multiple human generations or the eventual extinction of the viral strain. Likewise, improved medical treatments, such as antibiotic treatment for flu-related pneumonia, were certainly a significant factor reducing H1N1 mortality, but these do not appear to fully explain the nature of the pattern of mortality decline seen for H1N1. For example, the exponential decline in mortality began before the invention of antibiotic treatment.

The Generative Power of Mutations 

ID proponents — including Carter, Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, Winston Ewert, and Stephen Meyer — have been critical of the generative power of mutations to produce information. That includes the information required by viruses to mutate into more virulent forms. Instead, these theorists have championed the idea that mutations overall tend to be harmful, degrading information-rich codes. This paper shows the degenerative effects of mutations even in the H1N1 virus, which has access to large population sizes and to the causal efficacy of natural selection. The authors show that mutations break code apart rather than build novel code. Let’s take a closer look.

The H1N1 influenza virus has circulated in the human population for 95 years. In the notorious outbreak of 1917–1918, it infected a staggering 40 percent of the human population. The H1N1 virus caused a death rate of 2 percent and continued to circulate until 1957, seemingly going extinct, only to reappear in 1977. Carter and Sanford pondered whether natural attenuation, resulting from the accumulation of mutations, could be the reason for the virus’s loss of virulence and its apparent extinction. The authors also discuss the relevance of their work for medicine and public policy. For example, given the prevailing belief that mutations produce genetic novelty, there was much anticipation, up to the 2009 outbreak of “swine flu” (a combination of H1N2 and H1N1), of a resurgence of a highly evolved deadly variant of H1N1.

RNA viruses have a known susceptibility to mutational degeneration, and scientists have even speculated that increasing a virus’s mutation rate may be a way to control viral epidemics. The H1N1 RNA virus’s genome has eight RNA segments, which code for 11 different proteins. For this virus, there is a reconstructed version of the 1918 genome and thousands of fully sequenced influenza viruses. Because of this existing data and knowledge, Carter and Sanford could test their attenuation model by examining mutation accumulation rates in the influenza lineage over time. They also looked to see if codon specificity moved towards a particular host preference — human, swine, and bird (duck).

A Relatively Constant Rate

After plotting the relative mutation count (y-axis) over time (x-axis) for the 2009–2010 “swine flu” outbreak, the authors discovered that mutations were accumulating at a relatively constant rate. The rate of linear accumulation also extended back to the original introduction (meaning the rate of mutation didn’t change and mutations kept accumulating), with one exception. There is a sharp discontinuity between the apparent extinction of the virus in 1957 and its reappearance in 1977. The researchers hypothesized that a frozen strain of the virus may have been reintroduced to the population, and that strain had fewer mutations than the major circulating strain that went extinct. This strain circulated until 2009, at which point it also appears to have gone extinct. 

Carter and Sanford argue that the swine flu of 2009 did not arise from the 1977 reintroduced strain. That is because it carried the full mutational load of the strain that went extinct in 1957. This observation led them to think that it was unlikely to be a significant threat, in contrast to if it had had a more intact genome. Importantly their analysis shows that this virus arose not due to adaptive mutations within H1N1 — as expected if evolution has generative power to design new living systems — but from horizontal transmission of new genetic material from other bird influenza strains. They present strong evidence that the H1N1 genome has been systematically degrading since 1918.

This [referring to systemic degradation] is evidenced by continuous, systematic, and rapid changes in the H1N1 genome throughout its history. For example, there was an especially rapid and monotonic accumulation of mutations during a single pandemic (Figure 1). Similarly, there was a continuous and rapid accumulation of mutations over the entire history of the virus (Figures 2 and 3), including a similar steady increase in nonsynonymous amino acid substitutions (Figure 3). While mutations accumulated in the human H1N1s, there was a parallel accumulation of mutations in the porcine H1N1 lineage (Figure 4).

The authors conclude that while some beneficial mutations occur, many more deleterious mutations are also occurring at the same time. Carter and Sanford also observed a clear erosion of codon bias over time without a net movement towards any single host preference (human, swine, and bird). They write:

It appears that the H1N1 strains currently in circulation are significantly attenuated and cannot reasonably be expected to back-mutate into a non-attenuated strain. The greatest influenza threat, therefore, is the introduction of a non-attenuated strain from some natural reservoir. This suggests that a better understanding of the origin of such non-attenuated strains should be a priority. Our findings suggest that new strategies that accelerate natural genetic attenuation of RNA viruses may prove useful for managing future pandemics and, perhaps in the long run, may preclude the genesis of new influenza strains.

Great Contemporary Significance

As we can see, design-based thinking sheds light on topics of great contemporary significance, such as how viruses spread through populations. For me, having lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper was a refreshing read. It provides hope that as COVID-19 continues to degrade, the human population can expect less of a threat from this nasty virus. As, however, the introduction of a non-attenuated strain from a reservoir would cause the pandemic to continue, there are some caveats to this prediction.