On why linking Darwin to Hitler matters to Darwinists.

Why My Critics Care So Much About the Darwin-Hitler Connection

Richard Weikart

published my earlier historical works, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004) and Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress. Hardly anyone, however, bothered to engage the arguments, except for Robert Richards at the University of Chicago, whose critique of my position is riddled with errors, not only of interpretation, but also of basic facts.

As I demonstrate in my newly released book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, there is a fundamental tension between many Darwinists' claim that morality is an evolved trait -- thus having no objective reality -- and their moral indignation toward Hitler (and toward me for explaining how Darwinism informed Hitler's ideology).

To be sure, I have encountered some true believers in Darwinism who have told me that their Darwinian-inspired moral relativism leads them to the conclusion that Hitler was neither right nor wrong. I once held a conversation with a philosophy graduate student who defended moral relativism on Darwinian grounds. After I pressed him to see if he was willing to be relativistic about Hitler's atrocities, he uttered the stunning words, "Hitler was OK."

Maybe you think this student was just off his rocker. However, the leading evolutionary biologist and world famous atheist Richard Dawkins took a similar position in an interview, where he was being questioned about his moral relativism. Dawkins asked, "What's to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn't right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." If this is a tough moral question for Dawkins, he should stop pontificating about how religions are "the root of all evil," especially since he doesn't believe that evil actually exists!

Most Darwinists, however, including those who believe in the evolution of morality, do not have consciences as dead as Dawkins, so they are genuinely outraged by the historical connections between Darwin and Hitler. They consider Hitler truly evil, and they don't want their positive image of Darwin tarnished by any association with this evil man.

However, why do they care about this at all? If they believe, as many do, that morality is simply "an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes," as evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson and philosopher Michael Ruse famously put it, then what makes the illusions of some people superior to Hitler's illusions? Why do everything possible -- even denying obvious historical facts -- to obscure the historical linkages between Darwin and Hitler? I have a hunch that at some level they recognize that their evolutionary account of morality is inconsistent with reality.

In The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, I expose many of the inconsistencies within secular philosophies, such as Darwinism, materialism, positivism, and many others.

Dr. Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

On the alt-right and the monkey on Darwinism's back

Evolution and the Alt-Right

David Klinghoffer 

you know that a mostly online splinter called the "alternative right" or "alt-right" is currently a subject of bitter and voluminous indignation. At The Federalist today, Cathy Young has an interesting analysis ("You Can't Whitewash the Alt-Right's Bigotry"), taking issue with two other journalists at Breitbart who tried to explain the phenomenon in a sympathetic, even admiring manner.

There is great worry about the conservative brand image, and the alt-right figures prominently in that. Cathy Young's piece, you'll notice, has some intriguing references to evolution, "human biodiversity," "race-related genetic cognitive and behavioral differences," and related subjects. On that, she and other mainstream conservatives could have said much more. Though this has escaped focused attention, the alternative right draws heavily on themes of evolution-based racism. And that is significant.

Miss Young notes "retired California State University-Long Beach psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, who has some peculiar theories about Jews: namely, that Judaism is an 'evolutionary strategy' by which Jews seek dominance...It's 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' dressed up as evolutionary psychology."

Another writer cited by Young raises eugenic, or rather dysgenic, concerns:

"The Pro-Life Temptation" by Aylmer Fisher -- presumably a pseudonym stolen from the innocent British geneticist -- which cautions the alt-right against adopting an anti-abortion stance in knee-jerk opposition to liberals. The pro-life position is 'dysgenic,' since it encourages breeding by 'the least intelligent and responsible' women.

If you think you know where this is going, you're right. Fisher argues that, firstly, the pro-life position is "dysgenic," since it encourages breeding by "the least intelligent and responsible" women who are most likely to have abortions and who are "disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and poor."

Taken from the Radix Journal (more on it in a moment), that's ugly stuff and Miss Young does a service in pointing it out. In her article, our old nemesis John Derbyshire, scrubbed from National Review, makes an appearance, along with the alt-right "movement's online hubs such as Richard Spencer's AlternativeRight.com and Steve Sailer's VDARE." (Actually VDARE is edited by Peter Brimelow, not Steve Sailer, who has his own blog at another alt-right hotspot, The Unz Review. Once upon a time, I enjoyed editing them both as writers for National Review.)

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. We've reported here in the past on the evolutionary preoccupations of Derbyshire and another "race-realist" outlet, Jared Taylor's American Renaissance. But not till reading Cathy Young's post did I recognize that the mother lode of pseudo-conservative, pseudo-scientific racism is Richard Spencer's AlternativeRight.com, which as she points out has been rebranded as Radix Journal, "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States, and around the world."

Here, the vein of evolutionary thinking is particularly rich. We read, "Darwinian Evolution Revolutionized the Natural Sciences. The Social Sciences Have Been Immune for Too Long." In "What Is Identitarian Religion?," writer "Alfred W. Clark" tells of a "long-standing 'Trad Catholic' I know [who] told me recently that he had left the Church. [H]is 'conservative' priest had become obsessed with [among other things]...denouncing evolution because it's 'racist'." More:

And what of identitarian atheists and agnostics? Can they co-exist with identitarian religion? Since identitarian religion is not at odds with nature, and thus not at odds with evolutionary science, it does not threaten secular knowledge but offers itself as an additional societal glue.

Another writer wonders why few women seem enthusiastic about "race-realism":

The evolutionary basis for this doesn't seem too hard to figure out. As a prehistoric man, you have to decide the best way to find food and kill the members of the other tribe....

There is sympathy for eugenics, and much fretting about the "dysgenic menace." A writer notes an "antisocial Darwinism" where "Society favors the broken at the expense of the fixed. The result isn't so much that the fixed are crushed, but that the broken proliferate and become permanent dependents of the state." 

Richard Spencer shares his "Foreword to a new annotated edition of [racial eugenicist] Madison Grant's Conquest of a Continent [1933]," explaining that "Darwinism offers a compelling and rational justification for Whites to act on behalf of their ancestors and progeny and feel a shared since of destiny with their extended kin group."

Again, Alfred W. Clark asks, "What Is the #Altright?" He explains: 

Michael Brendan Dougherty recently called the alt-right "race obsessed". A better phrase might be: race realists. Most alt-righters actually take Darwinism seriously. (If you are at a loss of what "taking Darwinism seriously" means, you might want to read this book.) Young alt-righters are comfortable with modern science which shows that human biodiversity is a facet of life. The fact that so many today in Conservatism Inc. want either to ignore or deny human biodiversity, shows how untethered from reality modern conservatism has become. 

And much more along these lines. 

The Right has periodically sought to purge itself of tendencies like this, and it's engaged in such a purge right now. I prefer understanding to demonizing. Darwinian "conservatives" operate with a particular picture in mind of what a human being is -- a very different picture from the one posited by the Judeo-Christian tradition on which conservatism has drawn in the past. It's either man the animal or man in the image of an intelligent designer. Those are the choices.

From such a stark dichotomy, everything else is downstream. Recognizing as much would be a first step to restoring the health of a fractured and troubled movement.

Biology as tech/Biology as art III

Denton's Challenge: Are Leaf Shapes Adaptive?

Evolution News & Views

In his new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton provides a cavalcade of examples of non-adaptive forms in nature. On page 77, he points to angiosperm leaves as a case visible to everyone.

It is not only the unicellular world that abounds with what appear to be abstract formal patterns. Even on the most cursory and passing observation of some of the most familiar natural forms, such as the forms of leaves and the variety of phyllotactic arrangements that might be observed in any suburban garden, it is hard to resist concluding that a vast amount of botanical order serves no specific adaptive end. [Emphasis added.]

Our film Biology of the Baroque explores this further starting at 4:20, showcasing the wide variety of leaf shapes in a forest. Each plant has its own shape in the same environment, yet they live side by side. "But for Darwinian evolution to explain the shape of these leaves," the narrator states:

...there ought to be some reason why that specific shape caused one organism to live and another to die in a given environment. Yet there appears to be no functional reason why there are so many different leaf shapes. Much like Baroque architecture, these shapes seem extra, perhaps even decorative. They're not needed to survive. They are simply beautiful.

Enter Current Biology to the rescue of Darwinian functionalism. In "Evolutionary and Environmental Forces Sculpting Leaf Development," evolutionary botanists Daniel H. Chitwood and Neelima R. Sinha try to give adaptive reasons for leaf shape.

Leaf shape is spectacularly diverse. As a major component of plant architecture and an interface for light capture, gas exchange, and thermoregulation, the potential contributions of leaves to plant fitness are innumerable. Particularly because of their intimate association and interaction with the surrounding environment, both the plasticity of leaf shape during the lifetime of a plant and the evolution of leaf shape over geologic time are revealing with respect to leaf function. Leaf shapes arise within a developmental context that constrains both their evolution and environmental plasticity. Quantitative models capturing genetic diversity, developmental context, and environmental plasticity will be required to fully understand the evolution and development of leaf shape and its response to environmental pressures. In this review, we discuss recent literature demonstrating that distinct molecular pathways are modulated by specific environmental inputs, the output of which regulates leaf dissection. We propose a synthesis explaining both historical patterns in the paleorecord and conserved plastic responses in extant plants. Understanding the potential adaptive value of leaf shape, and how to molecularly manipulate it, will prove to be invaluable in designing crops optimized for future climates.

And so the debate is engaged. They want to explain the spectacular diversity of leaf shapes in an adaptive context. To accomplish this, though, they would have to relate unguided genetic mutations to selection at the molecular level. They admit up front that "The molecular mechanisms underlying such morphological diversity are even more poorly understood." 

Yet, patterns of correlation among leaf shapes across extant species, temperature and precipitation, and between fossil leaves and the paleoclimate, provide tantalizing glimpses into hypotheses unifying the development, evolution, and environmental plasticity of leaf shape with the possible functions it might confer.

They make the following suggestions for possible adaptive reasons for leaf shapes:

1. Plasticity: Shapes are not fixed in a particular species; leaves respond during development to environmental cues as they grow. "The leaves displayed by a plant at successive nodes reflect the developmental and environmental context of each leaf from initiation onwards."
2. Time: Leaf shape across geologic time is sensitive to the environment. "Relationships between leaf dissection and paleoclimates provide the most sweeping evidence of the responsiveness of leaf dissection to temperature and precipitation," they claim. As evidence, they point to studies that show "leaf serration can be used as a reliable index of the paleoclimate."
3. Climate: Leaf shape is plastic within one plant's lifetime and across geologic time, they say. "That plasticity within the lifetime of a single plant, extant species distributions, and correlations with the paleoclimate follow each other suggests an intimate relationship between leaf morphology and climate." 
4. Transpiration: "Paleoclimate correlations are focused on marginal serrations, which have been hypothesized as a constraint arising in thinner leaves more reliant on major veins, an adaptive feature allowing early season growth in deciduous forests, sites of increased transpiration, or that arise from hydathodes to maintain optimal leaf turgor." This is not true of all plants, however. "Similar plasticity in annuals observed in cold temperatures involves more than just serrations and cannot be explained by features exclusive to woody eudicots alone."
5. Sunlight availability: "Leaf dissection may simply reduce leaf area and affect canopy light interception...."
6. Economy: "....while also minimizing the distance between photosynthetic tissue and veins."
7. Heat transfer: "The potentially reduced leaf area in dissected leaves also facilitates heat transfer, reducing the boundary layer effect, but leaf shape likely also affects boundary layers independent of size."
8. Embryonic packing: "Leaf dissection may even reflect developmental constraintsrelated to packing in buds."
9. Compound leaves: "The possible functions of compound leaves have centered on the associated costs of producing a branch with many leaves vs. a complex leaf with many leaflets, and the premium put on vertical growth and 'branch shedding'."

All these hypotheses amount to little more than suggestions and just-so stories. They admit that none of them constitute a general law.

While hypotheses about the function of leaf shape are fascinating, they are numerous and cannot be generalized. Focusing on changes in shape common to evolutionary transitions into new environments, plastic responses in model organisms and patterns observed in the paleorecord may help narrow the field of relevant hypotheses to arrive at a more robust understanding of leaf morphology.

We ain't there yet, in other words. They leave the problem of leaf shape virtually unexplained, despite the fact that "Integrating natural variation in leaf shape with molecular pathways has always been a central goal of evolutionary developmental biology."

How much time to the Darwinians get? They've been thinking about this problem for 157 years at least. Must a functionalist story be served up, no matter how fraught with anomalies? Think again about the diversity in a forest, all these leaf shapes coexisting in the same environment. Where is a general law that would make them all trend toward the same shape? There is none. The diversity is still spectacular.

Denton's book is filled with other examples. "It's OK if it's just a maple leaf," he says in the video:

You can perhaps pass over the maple leaf, but if non-adaptive order, like the maple leaf, permeates the biological world, and if a lot of the taxa-defining novelties seem to be non-adaptive, you now have a nightmarish scenario when the fundamental assumption of Darwinism is that all these novelties in nature are adaptive suddenly looks very insecure.

Intelligence is a cause that can make things beautiful and diverse. After 157 years, its explanatory robustness is doing a much better job than fruitless attempts to seek "tantalizing glimpses into hypotheses" in a search for "possible functions" in the adaptationist program.

Darwinism vs. the real world XXV

Keeping Cool, Warming Up: Appreciating the Body's Temperature Control System

Howard Glicksman

Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

As I showed in the last two articles in this series, heat is the transfer of energy from one object to another, whereas temperature is a measure of an object's internal energy or its degree of random molecular motion. The body must control the temperature of its internal organs (core temperature) because the molecules that make up the cells and perform the functions of life work best within a certain temperature range: 97o-99oF (36o-37oC). 

When it comes to heat and temperature, the laws of nature make two demands on the body. First, they demand that heat be released when energy is used to do work. At complete rest, the body releases a minimum amount of heat from its basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is mostly under control of thyroid hormone. However, since the body must remain fairly active to survive, it releases even more heat due to this work. And second, the laws of nature demand that a warmer object transfer heat energy to a cooler one when they come in contact with each other. Sit in cold water or a hot sauna and your body will either lose heat to, or gain heat from, its surroundings. 

In summary, the body's core temperature is determined by how much heat it produces through metabolism, whether it is at complete rest or not, and how much heat it loses to, or gains from, its environment. My last article looked at how the body, through thyroid hormone regulation, takes control of the BMR to help keep the core temperature within the normal range. However, there are other very important mechanisms the body uses to take control to keep the real numbers of core temperature where they need to be to survive within the laws of nature.

Any activity causes the body to use more energy and release more heat, above and beyond the level of the BMR. And since the body is always in contact with its surroundings (usually air, but sometimes water), it is always losing or gaining heat from its environment. Since these changes can take place rapidly, the body must have the ability to react quickly enough to correct the situation and keep its core temperature under control. In other words, besides using thyroid hormone to control the BMR, moment-to-moment thermoregulation must take into account, not only the heat released by the body's activity, but also the heat lost to, or gained from, its surroundings. This requires all three control components. 

The first thing you need to take control is a sensor to detect what needs to be controlled. The body has two different sets of temperature sensors which are called thermoreceptors. There are peripheral thermoreceptors in the skin that detect either hot or cold. Their main function is to warn the body when it is being exposed to very high or very low temperatures which may result in tissue damage (thermal burn or frostbite). In addition, the body has central thermoreceptors, which detect the core temperature, and are located within the chest, the abdomen, and the hypothalamus.

The second thing you need to take control is an integrator that can take the data it receives from the sensors, compare it with a standard, decide what must be done, and then send out orders. The hypothalamus is the integrator for core temperature control. Currently, we don't fully understand how it knows what the proper core temperature should be for survival. It is thought that the hypothalamus acts like a thermostat and keeps the body's core temperature around a set-point, which for most healthy people is 97o-99oF (36o-37oC). 

If the core temperature rises above the set-point, the hypothalamus sends out messages to limit heat production and promote heat loss. If the core temperature drops below the set-point, the hypothalamus sends out messages to promote heat production and limit heat loss. Besides sending messages to make you aware of being too hot or too cold, the hypothalamus also uses neurohormones in the sympathetic nervous system to keep moment-to-moment control of your core temperature. 

The third thing you need to control something is an effector that can do something about the situation. When it comes to thermoregulation, the effectors the body uses can either be voluntaryor involuntary. 

When the hypothalamus makes you conscious of a significant rise or fall in the core temperature, making you feel too hot or too cold, you can voluntarily do something to try to correct the situation. If you are too hot you can reduce the amount of heat your body produces by stopping your present activity and coming to a complete rest. You can remove some of your clothing to allow the heat to leave your body easier. You can get out of direct sunlight to prevent its heat from warming you too much or turn on a fan or pour cold water on yourself to help your body lose more heat. In contrast, if you are too cold, you can increase the amount of heat your body produces by increasing your activity level, like rubbing your hands together, stamping your feet, or moving around more. You can put on heavier clothing to prevent your body from losing too much heat. You can go out into the sunshine or stand near something hot, like a fire or wood stove or jump into a hot tub so you can receive more heat. 

Besides doing things that promote heat loss and limit its production when we feel too hot or promote heat production and limit heat loss when we feel too cold, our body has several involuntary (automatic) mechanisms in place to achieve this as well. 

When, despite all efforts, the body is still too cold, the hypothalamus can activate two other effectors to promote heat production. One of them is to make the muscles shiver. This shaking activity does not move the bones to perform work, but instead produces more heat for the body. The other effector for increased heat production causes the release of certain hormones to increase the body's metabolic rate and release more heat from cellular respiration and fat. 

However, the main effector for thermoregulation is the skin. The skin is the outer layer of the body, which is in direct contact with its surroundings. It is made up of many different types of cells that together serve to protect the body from many aspects of nature, like friction, chemicals, and microbes. It is the unique nature of the skin's circulation and the presence of millions of sweat glands that provide it with the equipment to help the body control its core temperature. 

The blood flow within a given tissue or organ is usually related to its metabolic needs -- in other words, how hard it is working. However, this is not the case for the skin. In fact, the amount of blood flow in the skin is usually much more than its metabolic needs demand. The skin, particularly in the hands, feet, ears, nose, and lips, has blood vessels that allow direct connections between the arterial and venous systems. These arterio-venous connections facilitate rapid blood flow by shunting blood directly from the arteries to the veins while bypassing the capillaries. Being so close to the surface of the body, the warm blood that travels in the circulation of the skin has a tendency to cause the body to lose heat by radiation and conduction aided by convection. In general, the more blood flow to the skin surface, the more heat loss from the body, and the less blood flow to the skin surface the less heat loss. 

When the body's core temperature changes, the hypothalamus adjusts the amount of messages it sends along the sympathetic nerves to the muscles surrounding the blood vessels in the skin. These nerve impulses result in the release of a neurohormone called norepinephrine. Norepinephrine attaches to specific receptors on these muscles and tells them to contract. When the body's core temperature drops so that you feel cold, the hypothalamus responds by sending out more messages along these sympathetic nerves, which makes them release more norepinephrine. More norepinephrine makes the blood vessels in the skin contract more. This results in less blood flow to the skin surface and less heat loss from the body. 

When the body's core temperature rises so that you feel hot, the hypothalamus responds by sending out fewer messages along these sympathetic nerves, which causes the release of less norepinephrine. Less norepinephrine makes the blood vessels in the skin relax more. This results in more blood flow to the skin surface and more heat loss from the body by radiation and conduction aided by convection. 

In addition, the skin has millions of sweat glands that can release perspiration onto its surface. This promotes further heat loss by evaporation as the water on the skin picks up heat from the body and is turned into water vapor. The hypothalamus triggers sweating through the sympathetic nerves, but instead of using norepinephrine as the chemical messenger, it uses a neurohormone called acetylcholine. 

Acetylcholine attaches to specific receptors on the sweat glands to turn them on. When the body's core temperature rises and you feel hot, the hypothalamus sends out more messages along the sympathetic nerves that supply the sweat glands, making them release more acetylcholine. More acetylcholine makes the sweat glands secrete more perspiration. This results in more heat loss from the body by evaporation. When the body's core temperature drops so that you feel cold, the hypothalamus responds by sending out fewer messages along the sympathetic nerves that supply the sweat glands, making them release less acetylcholine. This makes the sweat glands secrete less perspiration, resulting in less heat loss from the body. 

In summary, the body's control of its core temperature involves not only thyroid function and the BMR, but also the sympathetic nervous system. By necessity, life is a dynamic process in which the body must stay active and internally produce heat while at the same time externally losing or gaining it from its surroundings. When the hypothalamus receives data from the central thermoreceptors, compares it to the set-point, and determines that the body is too hot or too cold, it tells the conscious mind to do something to try to correct the situation. In addition, it sends out messages along sympathetic nerves to the blood vessels and the sweat glands in the skin which either promotes or limits heat loss. The result is that the body is usually able to control its core temperature and thereby survive within the laws of nature. 

It would seem that the system the body uses for thermoregulation knows what it's doing. However, to do its job properly the hypothalamus needs (1) central thermoreceptors throughout the body to detect its core temperature, (2) the ability to adjust the messages it sends out along the sympathetic nerves based on the set-point using (3) norepinephrine for the blood vessels in the skin and (4) acetylcholine for the sweat glands which, to have an effect, need (5) norepinephrine and (6) acetylcholine receptors, respectively. If any one of these six parts were to be missing, or not working properly, the whole system would fail and the body would not be able to control its core temperature. Biochemist Michael Behe has described such a system, where the absence of any one part renders it useless, as irreducibly complex -- a hallmark of intelligent design. The system our body uses to control its core temperature demonstrates irreducible complexity. 

However, this is not enough to explain how human life can survive within the laws of nature. Real numbers have real consequences and, if the core temperature rises too high or drops too low, it causes severe impairment of enzyme activity and with it, the metabolism. When it comes to thermoregulation, the body would seem to have natural survival capacity because the hypothalamus seems to inherently know, not only what the thyroid hormone level should be, but alsowhat the set-point should be.

Next time, in the context of thyroid function, we'll look at what happens when the numbers don't add up as they should.

And still yet more on pre-evolutionary design.

Another Problem Bacteria Have to Worry About, and How They Solve It Effectively

Evolution News & Views 

In 1665, the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens put two pendulum clocks next to each other. To his surprise, after half an hour or so, they started swinging in sync (actually, anti-sync, in opposite directions). No matter where he put them, or how off-sync they started, it happened over and over. This phenomenon, called phase locking, has been confirmed in many different situations, including heart cells that twitch together, fireflies that fire together, and moons that synchronize their spin with their orbital velocity. 

In 2002, Nature reported that the "350 year mystery" of Huygen's clocks had just been solved. If there is just the right amount of energy transfer between two oscillators, experiments showed, they will begin oscillating in sync. More recent articles, such as in Scientific Reports and Live Science (2015), and again by different scientists in Scientific Reports this year, claim again that the 350-year mystery has just been solved. These announcements suggest that the intriguing phenomenon is still not fully understood. 

Synchronization can have good or bad biological consequences. Jonatan Peña Ramirez (co-author of the 2016 paper in Scientific Reports) says in Live Science:

"Something similar happens in living organisms," Peña said. "For instance, inside the human body, there are several biological rhythms -- respiration, heartbeat and blood perfusion, just to mention a few of them. It has been found that when some of these rhythms synchronize with each other, the energy consumption is minimal; hence, in this case, the onset of synchronization is beneficial. On the other hand, synchronization can also be dangerous or detrimental; it is widely accepted that the process of seizure generation is closely associated with abnormal synchronization of neurons." [Emphasis added.]

Too bad nobody warned bacteria about this. Since their first appearance on earth, these "simple" microbes confronted a deleterious synchronization problem. On one hand, they need a reliable biological clock that keeps sync with 24-hour day/night cycles. On the other hand, they have to divide on a regular basis. The two cycles are close enough in time to create a phase-locking situation. If not mitigated, the cell cycle could force the circadian clock to lose accurate time. Somehow, though, the bacteria are able to keep the two cycles from interfering.

Now, Dutch scientists, appropriately, have discovered the mechanisms bacteria use to avoid phase locking. Publishing in PNAS, they point out that it is no easy trick to escape the forces of physics:

Huygens famously showed that two mechanically connected clocks tend to tick in synchrony. We uncovered a generic mechanism that can similarly phase-lock two rhythmic systems present in many living cells: the cell cycle and the circadian clock. DNA replication during the cell cycle causes protein synthesis rates to show sharp, periodic jumps that can entrain the clock. To faithfully keep time in the face of these disturbances, circadian clocks must incorporate specific insulating mechanisms. We argue that, in cyanobacteria, the presence of multiple, identical chromosome copies and the clock's core protein-modification oscillator together play this role. Our results shed new light on the complex factors that constrain the design of biological clocks.

You can imagine the problem. Picture yourself as a conductor trying to keep a steady beat before a school band, while outside some machinery is emitting loud periodic sounds off of your rhythm. It would be tempting to synchronize your downbeats with the machinery. One way to protect your beat from outside influences would be to install heavier insulation in the walls to mask the sound. 

The problem is worse for the cyanobacterium S. elongatus used in the research, because both rhythms are "intricately intertwined," they point out. The circadian clock keeps a steady rhythm by transcribing and phosphorylating 3 proteins, KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC, calibrated by day-night cycles and other environmental cues. Interrupting this rhythm periodically, the process of mitosis copies all the DNA, sending surges of protein, including the clock proteins, into the mix as the cell prepares to divide. For the clock, this "can dramatically alter its behavior and impair its function." 

Think about it; the circadian clocks in both daughter cells must keep time through all this construction work without losing a beat. They do this with "specific insulating mechanisms," the paper says, employing not just one, but two complex methods:

We argue that the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus has evolved two features that protect its clock from such disturbances, both of which are needed to fully insulate it from the cell cycle and give it its observed robustness: a phosphorylation-based protein modification oscillator, together with its accompanying push-pull read-out circuit that responds primarily to the ratios of different phosphoform concentrations, makes the clock less susceptible to perturbations in protein synthesis; the presence of multiple, asynchronously replicating copies of the same chromosome diminishes the effect of replicating any single copy of a gene.

Graphs in the paper show how pulse waves get damped by these mechanisms, so that the cell cycle's rhythms are effectively insulated from the circadian clock. And they're right; it is complex. The bacterium uses a transcription-translation cycle (TTC) and a protein-phosphorylation cycle (PPC) to weaken the coupling between the cell cycle and the clock. Another enzyme, RpaA, which communicates the clock output to downstream genes, is effectively insulated from the cell cycle by the TTC and PPC. Independently, the bacterium also uses multiple chromosome copies to insulate the clock from protein surges:

The presence of multiple chromosome copies has a still more striking effect: If the cell has four copies after division (rather than only one), as can often be the case in S. elongatus, and if these are replicated one after the other, then the dose of the clock genes changes much more gradually, and cell-cycle effects are almost completely lost. Thus, S. elongatus may have evolved to carry multiple, identical chromosome copies in part to insulate its circadian clock from its DNA replication cycles.

ID advocates know not to choke on the phrase "may have evolved." What else could they say? That this multi-part protective mechanism was intelligently designed? One sympathizes with the authors' plight. Omitting the obligatory word "evolved" could likely have disqualified the paper from publication. Take comfort in the fact that design received equal mention with evolution. For example,

We propose that cyanobacterial clocks have evolved specific features that can mitigate this effect. More broadly, this generically strong coupling to the cell cycle implies important constraints on the design of biological timekeepers if they are to remain accurate in dividing cells....

Our analysis thus highlights an important constraint on the design of circadian clocks in organisms from bacteria to humans.

Something had to be aware of this problem long before Huygens discovered it in 1665, and had to come up with insulating mechanisms to prevent it. Was it natural selection? Unlikely; the cell needed multiple methods to solve this one type of crisis. It needed to build a TTC, a PPC, and allow for multiple chromosome copies timed to replicate in series. That's three complex systems for one solution. Without all these methods working together, the circadian clock would likely drift, resulting in dramatically altered behavior and impaired function. Was that the work of sheer dumb luck that "may have evolved" that way?

The researchers write, "Our results shed new light on the complex factors that constrain the design of biological clocks." Light on design is a beautiful thing.

Want a list of previous articles about circadian clocks at Evolution News? Here you go.

How human speech contributes to Darwinism's crisis.

Human Language: Noam Chomsky, Universal Grammar, and Natural Selection

Michael Denton

Editor's note: In his new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton not only updates the argument from his groundbreaking Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985) but also presents a powerful new critique of Darwinian evolution. This article is one in a series in which Dr. Denton summarizes some of the most important points of the new book. For the full story, get your copy of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. For a limited time, you'll enjoy a 30 percent discount at CreateSpace by using the discount code QBDHMYJH.

In the early 1960s, in one of the landmark advances in 20th-century science, Noam Chomsky showed that all human languages share a deep invariant structure. Despite their very different "surface" grammars, they all share a deep set of syntactic rules and organizing principles. All have rules limiting sentence length and structure and all exhibit the phenomenon of recursion -- the embedding of one sentence in another. Chomsky has postulated that this deep "universal grammar" is innate and is embedded somewhere in the neuronal circuitry of the human brain in a language organ. Children learn [human] languages so easily, despite a "poverty of stimulus,"1 because they possess innate knowledge of the deep rules and principles of human language and can select, from all the sentences that come to their minds, only those that conform to a "deep structure" encoded in the brain's circuits.2

The challenge this poses to Darwinian evolution is apparent. Take the above-mentioned characteristic that all human languages exhibit: recursion. In the sentence, "The man who was wearing a blue hat which he bought from the girl who sat on the wall was six feet tall," the italicized words are embedded sentences. Special rules allow human speakers to handle and understand such sentences. And these rules, which govern the nature of recursion, are specific and complex. So how did the computational machinery to handle it evolve? David Premack is skeptical:

I challenge the reader to reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness. Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or protohumans were hunting mastodons... Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers to be able to remark, "Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack"? Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules, of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like. For discussions of that kind, syntactical classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.3

There is considerable controversy over what structures in the brain restrict all human languages to the same deep structure. Some linguists reject an innate neurological organ devoted specifically to language. Conceiving that it is only the brain's general abilities that are "pre-organized," they envisage language as a learned skill based on a "functional language system" and design constraints, distributed across numerous cortical and subcortical structures.

Yet however it is derived during development, there is no doubt that a unique deep structure underlies the languages of all members of our species. It is because of the same underlying deep structure that we can speak the language of the San Bushman or an Australian aborigine, and they in turn can speak English. The fact that all modern humans, despite their long "evolutionary separation" -- some modern races such as the San of the Kalahari and the Australian aborigines have been separated by perhaps 400,000 years of independent evolution -- can learn each other's languages implies that this deep grammar must have remained unchanged since all modern humans (African and non-African) diverged from their last common African ancestor, at least 200,000 years ago. As Chomsky puts it:

What we call "primitive people"... to all intents and purposes are identical to us. There's no cognitively significant genetic difference anyone can tell. If they happened to be here, they would be one of us, and they would speak English... If we were there, we would speak their languages. So far as anyone knows, there is virtually no detectable genetic difference across the species that is language-related.4

As I mentioned in the last article in this series, it is not only the deep structure of language that has remained invariant across all human races. All races share in equal measure all the other higher intellectual abilities: musical, artistic, and mathematical ability, and capacity for abstract thought. These also, therefore, must have been present in our African common ancestors more than 200,000 or more years ago, and must have remained unchanged, and for some reason latent since our common divergence. To suggest that language and our higher mental faculties evolved in parallel to reach these same remarkable ends independently in all the diverse lineages of modern humans over 200,000 years ago or more, would be to propose the most striking instance of parallel evolution in the entire history of life and be inexplicable in Darwinian terms.

References:

(1) Chomsky, The Science of Language, p. 5.

(2) Ibid., Part 1.

(3) David Premack, "Gavagai! Or the future of the animal language controversy," Cognition 19: 207-296, see pp. 281-282.

(4) Chomsky, The Science of Language, p. 13.

Image: Noam Chomsky, by jeanbaptisteparis via Flickr.