Physics vs. Darwin

Physicist David Snoke on Denton's Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis
David Klinghoffer February 23, 2016 12:50 PM

I highly recommend reading a review, by University of Pittsburgh physicist David Snoke, of Michael Denton's Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. It's fascinating and wonderfully lucid. While expressing some disagreement, he concludes that the book deserves to sit on the same shelf with Stephen Jay Gould's work -- a high compliment whatever your position on evolutionary questions.

I think that Dr. Snoke's comments as a physicist are particularly helpful and illuminating. He draws a comparison to the "topological argument" well known in his profession:

We are all so programmed by the current evolutionary debate to see Darwinian evolution as the only viable materialist theory that it is hard to understand at first what Denton is proposing, if not intervention from a spirit world, and it is hard to grasp that there were evolutionists who preceded Darwin, with strong arguments against Darwin's ideas. To understand Denton's view (and Owen's) it is crucial to realize that it is first and foremost an empirical theory. Science has a long tradition of empirical theories which simply state the facts in unifying language without proposing any mechanism at all to explain them. Thus, for example, Newton famously proposed that gravity force could act at a distance, without proposing any explanation why. We are all so used to Newton's laws now that we forget how empirically driven it was. The same empirical approach was used to build the Periodic Table of chemistry, long before quantum mechanics explained why it has the form it does. In the same way, Denton, following Owen, draws us to look at a glaring and obvious fact of nature: that living organisms do not exist in a continuum of small differences with gradual transitions between them; rather, they exist in highly distinct types and forms, with specific identities and unique features for each type. Thus, for example, mammals all have four limbs, five digits per limb, two eyes, mammary glands in pairs, etc. These patterns persist over hundreds of millions of years despite all manner of selective pressure in different directions.

Darwinian evolutionists are familiar with these properties, of course, and have a standard explanation that they are leftover vestiges from archetypal ancestors. Against this, Denton has two main arguments. First, the record strongly supports the view that new Forms appear suddenly, without precursors. This is known as "saltation" -- the sudden appearance of a fully formed new structure. In all of the cases we know, the "transitional forms" between one type of organism and another do not consist of creatures with half-novelties, but rather, creatures with whole and complete novelties. Their transitional nature is identified because they have a subset of a larger set of several wholly novel features belonging to later descendants. But in each step that we see along the way, that which is new is whole and complete. The problem this creates for Darwinian evolution is similar to what is called a "topological argument" in physics. There are some things that can be continuously transformed into other things, while some things cannot. In the canonical example, a coffee cup can be transformed continuously into a doughnut, but not into a saucer. In the same way, all feathers are tubular, which requires a follicle with circular form, while reptile scales are flat sheets. Topologically, a flat sheet cannot be continuously transformed into a tube. (It was fascinating to me to hear that the dinosaurs-acquiring-feathers story actually creates new problems for Darwinism.) There are also more generalized topological arguments. Some molecular cycles in the cell are circular -- the so-called "chicken-and-egg problems" in which element A is required to create element B, and B is required to create C, but C is required to create A. These loops therefore have the same toplogical problem of lack of continuous generation from a prior process.

The transitional forms which indicate common descent also therefore create huge problems for gradual change via Darwinian selection as a mechanism. The most plain reading of the data is "descent with saltation." This occurs at every level. New organs occur suddenly, new processes occur suddenly (such as human language), and new genes occur: in every form of life there are whole genes (known as ORFans) that appear to be utterly unique to that form, with no homolog in any other type of creature. In some cases, even when genes from an ancestor are used, they are pressed into service to perform utterly new functions via the sudden appearance of a completely new set of switches and timers.

Snoke wrote his review for the Christian Scientific Society, so not surprisingly he asks about the relevance for Christians of Denton's "heavily empirical and materialist book." The "materialist" descriptor may be a little confusing, since Denton's view also "sounds a lot like neo-Platonism." Anyway, Snoke says this about anatomical features that seem to serve no purpose:

The idea of robust Forms is worth examining for the Christian. As Denton notes, much Christian thinking has been as utilitarian as Darwinist thinking. We tend to assume that everything in living systems must have a useful function. Perhaps some things, especially overall architectures, have their particular form not for function but for beauty or diversity. This leads to, for example, a helpful way of looking at the problem of male nipples. If we ask "What are male nipples for?" we are assuming a fully utilitarian view of living forms, and can get into knots trying to decide what they are good for, or if God has made a mistake. If we adopt a view of Forms, we can say that male nipples exist because the proper form for human bodies is to have nipples there.

Also, regarding the implications of Denton's thinking that run contrary to Darwinian racism:

The idea of Forms also makes a difference when think about race and racism. Darwinism has always had an ugly flirtation and sometimes open marriage with racism. If all of life is a continuum of gradual changes, then it makes sense that various subgroups of humans would be at different stages in evolutionary development, some closer to apes and others closer to the next upward step. Darwin argued in The Descent of Man that "lower" versions of humans such as Hottentots were proof of his theory of evolution. But Denton makes the case that, like other creatures, humans have had a stable single Form since they first existed, with all the basic gifts of language and culture in all geographical locations from the very beginning.

Snoke observes the irony that current evolutionary thinking is so hidebound -- "calcified," is how he puts it -- that it took Discovery Institute, leading advocate of intelligent design (not a materialist theory), to give a forum to Dr. Denton, whom Snoke sees as a sort of latter-day Gould. I think Denton's structuralism is in fact best understood as a form of ID. But the point is well taken. In today's orthodox evolutionary circles, protected from criticism behind walls of academic prestige, the spirit of intellectual exploration and discovery is largely extinguished.


Editor's note: Get your copy of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis now. For a limited time, you'll enjoy a 30 percent discount at  CreateSpace by using the discount code QBDHMYJH.

Published paper on nervous system's information processing does just fine minus Darwinian gloss.

Design Paper Hits a Home Run
Evolution News &Views

Baseball lovers will appreciate this glimpse into what your senses and nerves have to do to bat a homer. A news item from Oregon State:

Researchers have discovered a mechanism of intercellular communication that helps explain how biological systems and actions -- ranging from a beating heart to the ability to hit a home run -- function properly most of the time, and in some scenarios quite remarkably. [Emphasis added.]

It's a noisy world out there. The batter can't focus on irrelevant sounds from the stands. The information coming in through his senses has to be sorted and organized quickly. Simple but accurate representations must be served to the brain. Then, the brain's decision has to signal responses in the muscles, nerves and heart. All this must happen very quickly. Each cell is a player on a vast field:

In this process, a chemical stimulus called ATP functions as a signaling molecule, which, in turn, causes calcium levels in a cell to rise and decline, and tells a cell it's time to do its job -- whether that be sending a nerve impulse, seeing a bird in flight or repairing a wound. These sensing processes are fundamental to the function of life.

So how does the body pull all this together? There are trillions of cells involved, all signaling each other. The resulting "interactive chatter" among them would be overwhelming, but the body takes advantage of collective wisdom. Physicist Bo Sun at OSU explains:

"The thing is, individual cells don't always get the message right, their sensory process can be noisy, confusing, and they make mistakes," Sun said. "But there's strength in numbers, and the collective sensory ability of many cells working together usually comes up with the right answer. This collective communication is essential to life."

Cells have a way of voting a consensus:

This interactive chatter continues, and a preponderance of cells receiving one sensation persuade a lesser number of cells reporting a different sensation that they must be wrong. By working in communication and collaboration, most of the cells eventually decide what the correct sensory input is, and the signal that gets passed along is pretty accurate.

Now let's put it together in a real-life situation requiring rapid response. Watch a baseball play from the cells' perspective, as the batter sees a 93-mile-per-hour fastball coming in low:

The photoreceptor cells in the batter's eyes see the pitch coming. Some cells see it as a curve in the dirt, and some mistake it for a changeup, a slower pitch. But the majority of the cells come to the correct conclusion, it's a fastball at the knees, and they spread the word. After extensive communication between all these cells, a conclusion is reached and the correct message is sent to neurons in the brain.

Think how fast this has to happen. That's a pretty rapid committee meeting! The conclusion is barely out the eyeballs, and the fastball keeps coming at 93 mph.

The brain cells, in turn, send a strong signal through nerves to muscles all over the batter's body, the shoulders, legs, and especially arms. The signals arrive and once again a collaborative process takes place, deciding what the message is and how to react. Calcium ions in muscle cells are triggered and a brutally fast-but-accurate response is triggered, swinging the bat. This entire process, from the ball leaving the pitcher's hand to contact with the bat, takes less than half a second.

Nobody bats a thousand, we know. The real wonder is that the batter connects at all.

On a perfect day -- the cellular debate over what pitch was coming was sufficiently short-lived, the timing exact, the muscle contractions just right -- the ball explodes off the bat and sails over the center field fence.
On a more realistic day -- since the best hitters in the world only succeed 3 times out of 10 -- the ball bounces weakly to the second baseman for an easy out. This in turn triggers the collective groans of 30,000 disappointed fans. But the heart has cellular communication that continues to guarantee its normal beating, and the player lives to bat another day.

Behind this colorful description is a scientific paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the chemical details of cellular signaling, without the baseball references. The paper is notable for its mention of "design principles" and utter lack of Darwinian vocabulary like natural selection, phylogeny, or evolution. Enjoy this refreshing outlook, loaded with design concepts:

Decoding the cellular response to environmental perturbations, such as chemosensing, photosensing, and mechanosensing, has been of central importance in our understanding of living systems. To date, most studies of cellular sensation and response have focused on single isolated cells or population averages. An emerging picture from these studies is the set of design principles governing cellular signaling pathways: these pathways are organized into an intertwined, often redundant network with architecture that is closely related to the robustness of cellular information processing.

The Oregon State researchers had a hunch that a higher level of information processing is going on:

However, many examples suggest that collective sensing by many interacting cells may provide another dimension for the cells to process environmental cues. Examples, such as quorum sensing in bacterial colonies, olfaction in insects and mammals, glucose response in the pancreatic islet, and the visual processing of retinal ganglion cells, suggest a fundamental need to revisit cellular information processing in the context of multicellular sensation and response, because even weak cell-to-cell interaction may have strong impact on the states of multicellular network dynamics. In particular, we seek to examine how the sensory response of cells in a population differs from that of isolated cells and whether we can tune between these two extremes by controlling the degree of cell-cell communication.

They've set up an intriguing question. How does the inside of a body respond to cues from the outside? What translates sensations into chemical signals? How are those signals communicated inside cells and between cells? The OSU team describes their approach:

We study a population of fibroblast cells that responds to a chemical stimulus (ATP) and communicates by molecule exchange. Combining experiments and mathematical modeling, we find that cells exhibit calcium oscillations in response to not only the ATP stimulus but also, increased cell-cell communication. Our results show that, when cells are together, their sensory responses reflect not just the stimulus level but also, the degree of communication within the population.

And thus, with exemplary scientific techniques, they shed light on a phenomenon of great interest to us all. OSU's Dr. Sun explains why this is "remarkable":

"These processes of collective sensory communication are usually accurate, but sometimes work better than others. Mistakes are made," Sun said. "Even so, this process makes life possible. And when everything goes just right, the results can be remarkable."

We don't know if these folks at OSU will appreciate the applause, but ask any researcher anywhere: Would a Darwinian spin have added anything to this paper? Baseball games are familiar to us all, and each time a batter swings, these phenomena -- cell signaling, quorum sensing, and information processing -- really happen. The evidence for "design principles" is pretty clear every time the batter connects with the ball. Learning about how that happens makes for good scientific work; it is sufficient without a narrative gloss about how it might have "evolved."
Show us the phenomenon, describe how it works, and advance our understanding with sound laboratory practices. If the phenomenon exhibits good design principles, it's OK to say so. If all scientists followed OSU's example in this paper, and if science reporters wrote like the author of the news items cited above, then the science-consuming public would be well served.

Between education and indoctrination.

What Is Teaching Evolution All About?
Sarah Chaffee 

In Education Week, Adam Laats and Harvey Siegel offer a seemingly humane and generous compromise on teaching evolution in public schools. "Teaching Evolution Isn't About Changing Beliefs," says the headline.

Authors of a new book from the University of Chicago Press, Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation, they argue that students should learn about evolution, but not be indoctrinated in it. Students, they say, simply need to understand the theory, but teachers should not force them to believe it.

While I agree with part of their approach, their propositions are obvious -- almost too much so. They write:

By teaching comprehensive science curricula that includes evolution and teaching students to confront subjects they may not agree with, schools are not trying to change beliefs. Understanding is enough.

On one level, this makes a lot of sense. Students do need to understand evolution. It is important that teachers educate them on the evidence for neo-Darwinism.

This approach is also a big improvement on recent National Science Foundation-supported research aimed at investigating ways to get students to accept -- not just understand -- evolution.

However, Laats and Siegel leave out some crucial information. For one thing, they seem to believe that only parents who think "the world is only 6,000 years old" would have a problem with teaching evolution as unquestionable dogma. Not so.

Many parents and educators who value critical thinking and, frankly, honesty in education advocate that students be exposed to the fascinating ambiguities of current knowledge about biological origins.

The authors, however, simply ignore that there is a major scientific debate over evolution. They say:

Evolutionary theory is a building block of our understanding of life. As the best existing scientific explanation of the way our species came to be, how evolution works is vital for all students to understand. Students should not have the right to opt out of learning about a central tenet of contemporary science. But if students have religious objections to the theory's implications, the public school has no right to insist that they believe it -- that is, to regard evolutionary theory as true.

Much of this is very close to correct, as far as it goes. They neglect to mention, though, that some scientists are currently questioning whether Darwinian evolution is "the best" explanation -- and therefore if it is indeed foundational to our "understanding of life."

Researchers are asking whether natural selection acting on random mutations is able to account for the complexity of life. If Darwinian theory with its proposed mechanism of change is in need of a major reevaluation, as substantial mainstream scientific opinion now concedes, that should not be concealed from young people. Not if education is about seeking the truth.

The real issue isn't "creationism" or religion versus evolution. I should add too, for the umpteenth time, it's not about intelligent design either. (See our Science Education Policy.) It's about whether students will be introduced to a fair picture of mainstream research on a vital subject of scientific inquiry.

This brings us to the second part of Laats and Siegel's argument: Teachers should require students simply to understand -- not accept -- evolution. Again, this is true. A teacher should not try to make a student internalize any theory of evolution. They can simply require that the student learn the proposition -- which should mean analyzing it intelligently not just spitting it back on command -- if they want to achieve a certain grade. But students may not be gaining an accurate understanding of evolution if they learn only the scientific strengths, and not the weaknesses, of the theory.

Laats and Siegel try to outline what teaching evolution is not about. But they do not address what it is about. The goal of scientific instruction, ultimately, is not to confirm or upend any religious teaching.


It is partly about how information is presented. But it is mostly about the information itself -- interacting with it, and drawing conclusions based on critical reasoning and examining the evidence.

Darwin is outnumbered and outgunned?

Vindicated by Behe: Devolution Is Natural, Evolution Is Not.

 Granville Sewell

 

 

I know many other mathematicians and engineers who share my low opinion of Darwinism, but most are reluctant to express their views publicly because they feel that the issue is simply outside their area of expertise and they will not be taken seriously. I also tend to defer to specialists on scientific issues outside my discipline — until those specialists try to tell me something clearly absurd, for example, that unintelligent forces alone could have reorganized the basic particles on Earth into computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. Then I don’t hesitate to jump into the debate. I have done so, for example, in a 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer opinion piece, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” and in a 2017 Physics Essays article, “On ‘Compensating’ Entropy Decreases.”

A Very Simple Principle

It is really not necessary to be a biochemist or a paleontologist to understand the main issue in the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design. That is because it is a very simple principle, as I keep emphasizing: natural (unintelligent) causes do not create order (or information). They destroy it. That is the main theme of the first half of my video “Why Evolution Is Different.”

While every other natural process tends to turn order into disorder, Darwinists have always believed that natural selection is the one unintelligent process in the universe that can create spectacular order out of disorder. So I feel vindicated by Michael Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, which disputes this belief, and argues that despite all the claims about the creative powers of natural selection, it has never actually been observed to produce anything new and complex, only “devolution”:

 Darwinian evolution proceeds mainly by damaging or breaking genes, which, counterintuitively, sometimes helps survival. In other words, the mechanism is powerfully devolutionary. It promotes the rapid loss of genetic information. Laboratory experiments, field research, and theoretical studies all forcefully indicate that, as a result, random mutation and natural selection make evolution self-limiting….Darwin’s mechanism works chiefly by squandering genetic information for short-term gain.

Only Devolution Occurred

As another illustration that selection and mutations can only degrade, in this interview on German TV, geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig recounts (minutes 24:00 to 28:00, turn on English subtitles if you don’t speak German) the well-funded attempts at, among other places, his own Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, to speed up evolution in plants using radiation and advanced artificial selection techniques. Lönnig reports that only devolution occurred: the only progress observed before this effort was given up was that the genes that made some plants toxic were damaged, making these plants more useful as animal fodder.

That it seems even superficially plausible that random mutations could produce major improvements relies completely on the observed but inexplicable fact that while they are awaiting rare favorable mutations, living species are able to preserve their complex structures and pass them on to their descendants without significant degradation, generation after generation.

To appreciate how astonishing this is, imagine that it were possible (though it is far beyond our current technology) to construct a fleet of cars that contained completely automated car-building factories inside, with the ability to construct new cars — and not just normal new cars, but new cars containing automated car-building factories inside them. If we left these cars alone and let them reproduce themselves for many generations, is there any chance we would eventually see major advances arise through natural selection of the resulting duplication errors?

Of course not. We could confidently predict that the whole process would grind to a halt after a few generations without intelligent humans there to fix the mechanical problems that would inevitably arise. And we don’t need to know the details of how these cars work and reproduce to predict this, because there is a simpler principle involved here: devolution is natural, evolution is not.

The Argument Could Not Be Clearer

I am very grateful that there are biologists like Michael Behe and W.E. Lönnig who doubt Darwinism, because doubts expressed by mathematicians like me would otherwise never be taken seriously. But you really do not have to study the biochemical details to understand why the accumulation of genetic accidents cannot produce human brains and human consciousness. And you do not really need to study mutations for thirty years, as Lönnig has done, to predict that bombarding plant chromosomes with radiation would not lead to major agricultural advances.

The argument against Darwinism, or any other attempt to explain what has happened on Earth without intelligent design, could not be simpler or clearer: a few fundamental, unintelligent, forces of physics alone cannot rearrange the fundamental particles of physics into computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. And any attempt to explain how they can must break down somewhere, because they obviously can’t

Saving Darwin?

Behe on Darwinism’s Rescue Helicopters
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Darwinian evolution is a 19th-century scientific theory of biological origins, from before genetics, before advanced microscopy, a time when the scientific understanding of the basis of life was foggy at best. It sounds improbable that such a theory would survive unamended into the 21st century. In fact, some Darwinists insist that Darwinism has been superseded, even killed off, by alternatives — just not anything suggestive of intelligent design. More sensibly, such “adds-ons” are understood as efforts to rescue the original theory.

On a new episode of ID the Future, biochemist Michael Behe talks with host Andrew McDiarmid about these alternatives — the rescue helicopters of the world of evolutionary biology — that seek to save the creaky relic of unguided evolution. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Who’s Rescuing Whom?

Some favorite rescuers include, perhaps most prominently, neutral theory, along with evolutionary developmental biology, natural genetic engineering, game theory, and the multiverse. About rescue animals and their owners, you often hear that it’s hard to say who is rescuing whom. Would anyone be talking about the completely evidence-free multiverse if it weren’t for the need to save materialist theories from their own inadequacies? The big problem, though, with all of these add-ons is that none begins to explain how complex innovations in life arise. But that is what we really mean when we talk about “evolution.”

The conversation is based on Part 2 of Behe’s new book Darwin Devolves: The New Science about DNA That Challenges Evolution. The book has been the subject of intense scientific debate, most recently in the form of an exchange with colleagues Greg Lang and Amber Rice in Dr. Behe’s own department at Lehigh University. Behe responds to them here, here, and here. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that in the discussion sparked by Darwin Devolves, there is much more to come!

Where adults are still in charge?

Past Years of Hype Notwithstanding, Adult Stem Cells Are Now the “Gold Standard”
Wesley J. Smith

During the Great Embryonic Stem Cell Debate, circa 2001-2008, I watched “the scientists” blatantly lie about the supposedly low potential for adult stem cells and the CURES! CURES! CURES that were just around the corner from embryonic stem cells. You remember: Children would soon be out of their wheelchairs and Uncle Ernie’s Parkinson’s would soon be a disease of the past.

The pro-ESCR campaign was filled with so much disinformation and hype — willingly swallowed by an in-the-tank media — all in a corrupt attempt to overturn the minor federal funding restrictions over ESCR imposed by the President, and to hurt President Bush politically.

After the Bush presidency, the issue became quiescent. And now, it turns out that the clinical advances that have been made are not from embryonic stem cells.

Punished by University Administrators

During the debate, David A. Prentice — a stem-cell researcher and my good friend — took a sabbatical from his Indiana State University professorship to tout the great potential of adult stem cells (and to oppose human cloning) around the world. He became quite prominent in the debate — for which he was punished by his university’s administration. For example, despite receiving teaching awards, he was moved from graduate classes and his lab privileges were curtailed.

Prentice eventually headed for The Swamp to continue his advocacy. He is now with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, where he has continued to track and educate about stem-cell science and engage policy controversies.

Prentice just published a major peer-reviewed article in the science journal Circulation Research, in which he details the amazing successes of adult stem-cell research — demonstrating that the ESCR hypers had it wrong and he had it right.

The Hypers Had It Wrong

Prentice outlines the many problems that make embryonic stem cells “ill suited for clinical use,” including the difficulty of  “differentiating and integrating” ES cells into the body, the problem that these cells “have shown evidence of causing arrhythmia,” the potential to cause tumors, and “immunogenicity,” in real people’s language, rejection caused by triggering the body’s immune response.

In contrast, ethical stem cells have had excellent successes. For example, “induced pluripotent stem cells,” which can be made from normal skin cells, are splendid for use in cell modeling and drug testing.

Hopeful Results from Ethical Stem Cells

But Prentice’s primary focus is on adult stem cells, often taken from donor bone marrow or a patient’s own body. They have also not advanced as fast as was hoped, but they are progressing into clinical uses and human studies. From, “Adult Stem Cells”:

Not only do adult stem cells carry no ethical baggage regarding their isolation, their practical advantages over pluripotent stem cells have led to many current clinical trials, as well as some therapies approved through all phases of Food and Drug Administration testing.

Peer-reviewed, published successful results abound, with numerous papers now documenting therapeutic benefit in clinical trials and progress toward fully tested and approved treatments. Phase I/II trials suggest potential cardiovascular benefit from bone marrow–derived adult stem cells and umbilical cord blood–derived cells.

Striking results have been reported using adult stem cells to treat neurological conditions, including chronic stroke. Positive long-term progression-free outcomes have been seen, including some remission, for multiple sclerosis, as well as benefits in early trials for patients with type I diabetes mellitus and spinal cord injury. And adult stem cells are starting to be used as vehicles for genetic therapies, such as for epidermolysis bullosa.

If this progress had been derived from embryonic stem cells, the headlines would have been deafening. The cheering from the media would include anchors dancing with pom-poms!

Favored Ideological Agendas

But the media isn’t much interested in reporting adult stem-cell successes prominently because doing so doesn’t promote favored ideological agendas. That’s not good journalism.

Prentice concludes:

The superiority of adult stem cells in the clinic and the mounting evidence supporting their effectiveness in regeneration and repair make adult stem cells the gold standard of stem cells for patients.

That’s excellent news for everyone, and may it continue.

But as we benefit from these ethical treatments, the next time ideologically driven scientists, bioethicists, and their media water carriers seek to drive public opinion on scientific issues in a partisan direction by deploying the propaganda tools of hype, exaggeration, and castigation of those who espouse heterodox views, remember how the Great Stem Cell Debate turned out.

Nature's tiny titans v. Darwin.

Small Wonders: Scientists Reveal the Secrets of Amazing Little Insects and Crustaceans
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

In biology, the most amazing designs are often found in small things. In fact, it often seems that the closer you need to look, the greater the wonder. It’s as if someone set it there to hide, waiting for us. Here are some little guys worth knowing about, from among the insects and the crustaceans.

Froghoppers

“Froghopper insects can perform explosive jumps with some of the highest accelerations known among animals,” say three scientists in PNAS. The little hemipterans can withstand 400 g’s as they accelerate at 4,000 meters/second squared. They belong in a different suborder and family from the planthoppers that Evolution News wrote about in 2013, whose nymphs have gears on their legs to store elastic energy for their leaps. 

Anything with “hopper” in its name is a good place to look for design. These scientists wanted to know how froghoppers take off from smooth plant surfaces. How do they get a grip on the slippery surface? The researchers discovered a previously unreported mechanism. It got them thinking about potential applications for engineering.

Attachment mechanisms of climbing animals provide inspiration for biomimetics, but many natural adaptations are still unexplored. Animals are known to grip by interlocking claws with rough surfaces, or engaging adhesive pads on smooth substrates. Here we report that insects can use a third, fundamentally different attachment mechanism on plant surfaces. When accelerating for jumps, froghoppers produce traction by piercing plant surfaces with sharp metal-enriched spines on their hind legs, deforming the cuticle plastically and leaving behind microscopic holes, like a biological nanoindenter. This mechanism depends on the substrate’s hardness, and requires special adaptations of the cuticle at the spine tips. Piercing may represent a widespread attachment strategy among plant-living insects, promising inspiration for novel robotic grippers and climbers. 

The researchers wanted to know why froghoppers use a different mechanism than leafhoppers, which are members of a different family of hemipterans. Leafhoppers use soft pads, but they have shorter legs, which might make piercing leaf surfaces more difficult. Froghopper spines, enriched with zinc in the cuticle to make them strong, are very effective at piercing without deforming the leaf. Yet they are also finely tuned not to pierce too deep, which would inhibit rapid removal from the surface during takeoff.  This track has potential payoffs in the grocery store:

Generally, gripping smooth and plastic materials is an engineering challenge with many potential applications. Needle grippers have been used for handling soft foodstuff such as meat and cakes, but could also be adapted for handling of plastic and cardboard packaging. Studying the detailed biomechanics of penetration-based grip in natural systems and the relevant adaptations in plants and insects may provide information for the design of new biomimetic grippers.

Click Beetles

Another remarkable insect is the click beetle, able to quickly right itself without using its limbs if it falls upside down. In a class project at the University of Illinois College of Engineering , students went into the woods to collect four species of click beetles and study this unusual mechanism, thinking the trick might help robot designers create self-righting robots. Watch the video clip of their class project (but turn off the mismatched epic music; just watch the text). One student is clearly fascinated watching the bug flip high into the air and back down onto its feet. How does it work?

The beetles have a unique hinge-like mechanism between their heads and abdomens that makes a clicking sound when initiated and allows them to flip into the air and back onto their feet when they are knocked over, Alleyne said.

The students made a robotic prototype based on the hinge-snapping design. It won second place at “the international BIOMinnovate Challenge, in Paris, France — a research expo that showcases biologically-inspired design in engineering, medicine and architecture.” 

Termites

Another paper in  PNAS about the “Morphogenesis of termite mounds” finds inspiration for architectural design. Termites exhibit impressive social organization, acting almost like a distributed organism. There’s an uncanny feedback between animal and environment

Termite mounds are the result of the collective behavior of termites working to modify their physical environment, which in turn affects their behavior. During mound construction, environmental factors such as heat flow and gas exchange affect the building behavior of termites, and the resulting change in mound geometry in turn modifies the response of the internal mound environment to external thermal oscillations. Our study highlights the principles of self-organized animal architecture driven by the coupling of environmental physics to organismal behavior and might serve as a natural inspiration for the design of sustainable human architectures.

The mounds of different species “display varied yet distinctive morphologies that range widely in size and shape,” possibly due to adaptation to different environments. All of them, however, excel in the ability to “regulate mound temperature, humidity, and gas concentrations” — and they do it using natural resources, without electric thermostats or sensors. 

So-called “compass termites” always orient their mounds north/south, indicating a magnetic sense as found in salmon, sea turtles, and other very different animals. “Termite mounds are one of the most remarkable examples of self-organized animal architectures,” the authors say, “and the range of shapes and sizes that they exhibit have excited the imagination of scientists for a long time.”

Krill

These tiny crustaceans control the world, in a way. Found in all the world’s oceans, they migrate upward at night to feed, and downward in the daytime. A video by the National Science Foundation, posted by Phys.org, shows how vast numbers of krill add up to a mighty force to mix up ocean water, perhaps as significant as winds and tides. 

Stanford researcher John Dabiri and team studied them in the lab. Because krill are phototactic (moving toward light), the team could control the direction of their motions, and measure the forces they produce in a water column. The individual swimmers generate eddies that are much larger than their body sizes, and those currents add up. They concluded that millions “or trillions” of these tiny organisms, swimming together, “are playing a significant role in ocean mixing, that should impact future calculations about ocean circulation and the global climate.” 

ID proponents might look into this, and consider whether a watery exoplanet would be less habitable without this living stirring machine.

Ostracods

You could call them “sea fireflies.” Scientists at UC Santa Barbara, wanting to understand the “dazzling light displays” of ostracods, found two mechanisms at work.

Ostracods are peculiar animals. No larger than a sesame seed, these crustaceans have a clam-like shell and often lack gills. Like many sea creatures, a number of ostracods take advantage of bioluminescence to avoid predation and to attract mates….

To create their entrancing light displays, cypridinid ostracods expel a bit of mucus injected with an enzyme and a reactant, and then swim away from the glowing orb to repeat the act again. The result is a trail of fading ellipses, or will-o’-the-wisps hanging in the water column. And the length of each of these pulses is a major component of the courtship display. Some are quick like an old-fashioned flashbulb, said Hensley, while others linger in the water.

Reporter Harrison Tasoff remarks, “Evolution is a rich and dynamic process.” Yes, indeed. Since Darwin Devolves, as Michael Behe shows in his new book with that title, the ancestors of these animals must have been even better designed!

Conclusions

These are just a few among hundreds of examples of biological designs that are inspiring research at labs and universities. Complex, efficient design is found throughout the biosphere, from the tallest mammals and largest whales down to these miniature insects and crustaceans, and all the way down to the molecules in cellular nanomachines. Biomimetics is a cross-disciplinary windfall of an opportunity for mammalogists, marine biologists, botanists, entomologists, ornithologists, cell biologists, and engineers, to name a few.

As usual, evolutionary speculation in these reports varied inversely with detailed analysis into the mechanisms behind these little animals’ capabilities. Biomimetic research is also attracting funding and winning awards. So is design thinking good for science? It seems so.

Flat tires notwithstanding, OOL science's clown car rolls on?

Error Catastrophe: Manfred Eigen’s Show-Stopper Is Still Stopping the Origin-of-Life Show
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

NASA recently put out another over-hyped announcement that makes it sound like they have actually solved the riddle of life’s origin by unguided natural processes. Actually, Manfred Eigen (1927-2019) pointed out a hurdle that shouts, like Gandalf, “You shall not pass!”

A leading physical chemist and Nobel laureate, Manfred Eigen died last month. He often had evolution on his mind. An obituary in  Nature honored him as “a creator of the new field of evolutionary biotechnology.”

From the early 1980s, he developed these concepts into evolutionary biotechnology at the MPI. His colleagues built ‘evolution reactors’ that drove the evolution of viruses and other replicating molecules under controlled conditions to investigate how pathogens evade the immune system, or to search for new drugs. Eigen helped to found two companies to exploit this technology.

What Molecules Wish For

Controlled conditions, needless to say, were not available to molecules on the early Earth before life. Molecules are incapable of wishing to evolve into living organisms, and nothing will “drive” their chemical evolution toward that lofty goal. It appears that Eigen was a staunch believer in chemical evolution anyway, having written popular books about how it might have happened. The summary of his book Steps Toward Life (1992) on Amazon says:

This fascinating work, co-authored by a Nobel Prize winning scientist, extends Darwin’s ideas on natural selection back into evolutionary time and applies them to the molecular “fossil record” that preceded the origin of life. Using the techniques of molecular biology, the book demonstrates that life on Earth is the inevitable result of certain chance events that took place in the unique history of our planet. Furthermore, researchers can not only precisely formulate the laws governing the emergence of life, but also test them under controlled laboratory conditions. In fact, the authors show how it is perfectly possible to construct evolutionary accelerators that optimize the conditions for certain events and which can be used to demonstrate their theoretical conclusions in laboratory experiments.

The Problem of “Error Catastrophe”

We are nearing a half-century since Eigen wrote about that paradox, and it “still challenges theoretical biologists.” Often called the problem of “error catastrophe,” it’s the show-stopper that stops the Evolution Show before it starts. Stated succinctly above, molecules cannot gain enough information by chance until accurate replication starts. The reason is that errors inevitably creep in, destroying whatever genetic information an emerging replicator stores. You can grant a chemical evolutionist all the RNA molecules he or she wants, but error catastrophe will stop the show. Darwin’s house of cards collapses before it’s built

Natural selection is no help, because natural selection presupposes accurate replication. Before you have error-correcting enzymes, there is no natural selection. It’s all chance. Illustra Media’s film Origin, co-narrated by Discovery Institute biologist Ann Gauger, shows what chance is like.Eigen was certainly aware of the “paradox” but concocted theoretical schemes, like “hypercycles,” to dodge it. He claimed that feedback loops between interacting RNA molecules might accelerate the production of information by chance. Meyer holds his feet to the fire of his own paradox, though, showing that without “an error-free mechanism of self-replication,” all such models are doomed. “As a result, his proposed mechanism would succumb to various ‘error catastrophes’ that would diminish, rather than increase, the specified information content of the system over time.” 

Stephen Meyer discussed this problem on pages 279-280 of Signature in the Cell (2009). Eigen was certainly aware of the “paradox” but concocted theoretical schemes, like “hypercycles,” to dodge it. He claimed that feedback loops between interacting RNA molecules might accelerate the production of information by chance. Meyer holds his feet to the fire of his own paradox, though, showing that without “an error-free mechanism of self-replication,” all such models are doomed. “As a result, his proposed mechanism would succumb to various ‘error catastrophes’ that would diminish, rather than increase, the specified information content of the system over time.” 

Meyer Wasn’t the First

Meyer was not the first to point this out. He shows that notable scientists like Freeman Dyson, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Shapiro have also criticized Eigen’s model, pointing out that his theoretical cycles “are more likely to lose or degrade information over time” (p. 280). William Dembski also dealt with this paradox at length in No Free Lunch (2002), as had A.E. Wilder-Smith in The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution (1981, ten years after Eigen proposed the paradox). Now Eigen has passed on, never seeing a resolution to the show-stopping chasm he found. His “paradox still challenges theoretical biologists,” Nature admitted after his death. (Note: Leslie Orgel, Stanley Miller’s colleague, had also thought about the problem; sometimes it is called “Orgel’s Paradox.”)

You wouldn’t know this by reading the effervescent announcements bubbling over in NASA press releases and popular media. Reporters leap over the Error Catastrophe Chasm with flights of fancy, like magicians in

The Origin of Life Circus (Susan Mazur’s book title). How do they leap over it? Well, actually, they don’t. They ignore it. They imagine ways across, because “After all, we’re here, aren’t we?” Somehow, life must have found a way. Case in point is NASA/JPL’s press release, “NASA Study Reproduces Origins of Life on Ocean Floor.” A casual reader might think, “It’s not only possible; it’s been done in the lab!” Not only that, “It must be happening all over the universe!”

Scientists have reproduced in the lab how the ingredients for life could have formed deep in the ocean 4 billion years ago. The results of the new study offer clues to how life started on Earth and where else in the cosmos we might find it.

Cooking Up “Green Rust”

Basically, they created an artificial hydrothermal vent, and cooked up “green rust” that contained some alanine and lactate. That’s it. Alanine is one of the simplest of the amino acids. But researcher Laura Barge boasted, “We’ve shown that in geological conditions similar to early Earth, and maybe to other planets, we can form amino acids and alpha hydroxy acids from a simple reaction under mild conditions that would have existed on the seafloor.” The show resembles Stanley Miller’s spark-discharge play. Maybe even red-rusty Mars has some green rust!

Readers will look in vain for the important concepts that collapse all their hopes: complex specified information, accurate replication, and error catastrophe. Nor will they find these concepts in the PNAS paper on which the hype is based: “Redox and pH gradients drive amino acid synthesis in iron oxyhydroxide mineral systems.” Lead author Laura Barge is a follower of Michael Russell, one of the leading proponents of chemical evolution in hydrothermal vents. He doesn’t talk about error correction, either. But does ignoring the problem make it go away? Only in one’s imagination.

Barge, Russell and the other chemical-evolution magicians who fly over the chasm of error catastrophe get rewarded by funds from NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Affirming the impossible is a ticket to stardom at JPL. Michael Russell occasionally speaks to the employees at the famous NASA lab, making life look easy. All you need is energy flow, he says, and life happens. But if promoting the show is a ticket to stardom, critiquing the show is a ticket to expulsion. Anyone pointing out the show-stopper is likely to get frowned on. And anyone arguing that complex specified information and error correction provide evidence of intelligent design is at risk of a career-ending move, as indicated by the fate of David Coppedge. 

The show must go on! And it does — in the Theater of the Imagination.

To save the planet:Who you gonna call?

Darwinsplainin'? II

Insect Evolution: Another Illustration of How Darwinism “Explains Away”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

As Evolution News put it concisely the other day, “Where Design Explains, Darwinism Explains Away.” An illustration from paleontologist Günter Bechly: the evolution of insects, which he describes in a fascinating new ID the Future episode with host Andrew McDiarmid.

Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Dr. Bechly notes three contradictions at odds with Darwinian gradualism: Insects pop into existence at one blow, as do insect wings, as does the phenomenon of metamorphosis. None of these is led up to by the expected gradual evolutionary process. As with the Cambrian explosion, Darwinians have theories to explain away the problems.

Meanwhile the completeness of the fossil record grows more evident, and so the reliance on theories and excuses grows with it. But only a design inference explains such abrupt transitions. That’s how new ideas, in our own daily experience, get instantiated in physical reality — abruptly.