Primeval tech continues to deconstruct Darwininism.

 

Tricks of the Cell Trade

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Both cables on a suspension bridge snap. It’s going to collapse. If repairmen cannot mend the cables extremely rapidly, the bridge is doomed, and all the cars on it will dump into the water. Time is of the essence. The task looks hopeless. What to do?

Homologous Recombination

Cells face that kind of challenge every day, but they are well equipped to handle it. When both DNA strands break (the “double-stranded break” crisis, or DSB), a cell can die. Molecular machines fly into action as the strands flail about, threatening genomic catastrophe. The repair crew has an additional problem: unlike the bridge cable, the DNA strand is made up of a sequence of code that needs to match what was there before the DSB. In a process called homologous recombination, the machinery searches for a template to rebuild the broken sequence. Researchers at Uppsala University know that this process is mostly “well described in the literature.”

However, the description usually disregards the daunting task of finding the matching template among all the other genome sequences. The chromosome is a complex structure with several million base pairs of genetic code and it is quite clear that simple diffusion in 3D would not be sufficiently fast by a long shot. But then, how is it done? This has been the mystery of homologous recombination for 50 years. From previous studies, it is clear that the molecule RecA is involved and important in the search process, but, up until now, this has been the limit of our understanding of this process. [Emphasis added.]

Even a simple bacterium knows a trick to make the search easier. It reduces the search from a 3D problem to a 2D problem. With that shortcut, the cell reduces the time to repair down to 15 minutes on average. The Uppsala group, using CRISPR and fluorescent tags, watched the RecA proteins in real time. They published their findings in Nature.

“We can see the formation of a thin, flexible structure that protrudes from the break site just after the DNA damage. Since the DNA ends are incorporated into this fiber, it is sufficient that any part of the filament findsthe precious template and thus the search is theoretically reduced from three to two dimensions. Our model suggests that this is the key to fast and successful homology repair,” says Arvid Gynnå, who has worked on the project throughout his PhD studies.

Earth’s Electrical Grid

The world beneath our feet is electrically wired. That’s the surprising announcement from Yale University about bacteria that live in soil and under the seafloor. 

A hair-like protein hidden inside bacteria serves as a sort of on-off switch for nature’s “electric grid,” a global web of bacteria-generated nanowires that permeates all oxygen-less soil and deep ocean beds, Yale researchers report in the journal Nature.

“The ground beneath our feet, the entire globe, is electrically wired,” said Nikhil Malvankar, assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at the Microbial Science Institute at Yale’s West Campus and senior author of the paper. “These previously hidden bacterial hairs are the molecular switch controlling the release of nanowires that make up nature’s electrical grid.”

The Yale team found more about the “pili” which were thought to be made of a surface proteins by that name. Their findings, also published in Nature, we learn, call into question “thousands of publications about pili.” Pili are not the nanowires; they are machines that pump the nanowires out of the cell. Bacteria use these electrical conduits for respiration. Lacking access to oxygen (the primary electron receptor of oxygen-breathing organisms like humans), the bacteria use nanowires like snorkels to “breathe minerals” below the surface. The nanowires push excess electrons up and out of sediments.

A short animation shows how the pili work. They extend and retract repeatedly, pushing the nanowires out a bit at a time. Engineers might watch this trick to solve the problem of how to push a rope! The nanowires from bacteria link up and can extend a considerable distance on a bacterial scale. Because they conduct electrons, are ubiquitous around the earth, and provide global recycling services (see here), the nanowires justify the description of “nature’s electrical grid” under our feet. For fun, consider a new kind of silicon-impregnated wood flooring that generates electricity. Just walking on the floor, invented in Switzerland, can generate enough electricity to power a light bulb, reports Science Daily.

Tunnel Experts

A robot spacecraft, resembling an old Apollo lunar lander, touches down secretly on an enemy cargo ship. Underneath, a powerful drill breaks through the steel exterior. Material flows into the breach, melting the metal casing and building a tunnel through which the craft sends code to infect the enemy ship’s computers. Moments later, the enemy ship explodes, releasing hundreds of copies of the robot to go fight other enemy ships.

Viruses do things like that. A good one, the T7 bacteriophage, protects us from E. coli infections. Scientists in Spain, publishing in PNAS, learned more about how T7 builds its export tunnel through which it sends DNA into the harmful bacterial cell. 

Bacteriophage T7 infects Escherichia coli bacteria, and its genomic DNA traverses the bacterial cell envelope,but the precise mechanism used by the virus remains unknown. Previous studies suggested that proteins found inside the viral capsid (core proteins) disassemble and reassemble in the bacterial periplasm to form a DNA translocation channel. In this article, we have solved the structure of two different assemblies of the core proteins gp15 and gp16. These findings confirm the ability of core proteins to form tubes compatible with the periplasmic space and show the location of the transglycosylase enzyme involved in peptidoglycan degradation. Our results reveal key structural details of the assembly of the core translocation complex involved in the DNA transport through the bacterial wall.

The paper mentions an interesting fact: “Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that infect bacteria and are considered to be the most abundant entities on Earth.” 

Windows on the Unseen

In each of these discoveries, cryo-electron microscopy opened windows to unseen realities. This revolutionary tool and other methods of super-resolution microscopy are enabling scientists to see biological wonders that have existed as far back as the first bacterial cells, but have been hidden from our eyes till now. Step by step, molecule by molecule, the evidence for intelligent design at the tiniest levels of life is coming into focus. With more academicians taking leave of Darwin, how can the scientific community deny a seat at the table to design proponents who have the necessary and sufficient causes to explain these things? 

Neil Thomas, calling the materialist paradigm a “flawed hypothesis” that is “squandering public trust,” concludes that it’s time to open the doors to alternatives:

Faced with the sheer unfeasibility of a purely natural explanation, logic leaves us with little other choice. Extending the old adage that nothing comes of nothing, it might be contended that real life, in contradistinction to the magician’s claim of a rabbit magically emerging from the hat, nothing can “magically emerge” or “naturally evolve” without a supporting agency — little though we may know of that originating agency. In default of a better explanation than that offered by the Darwinian paradigm and its various materialistic descendants and kissing cousins, however, this hypothesis surely cannot be discounted out of hand. 

NEIL THOMAS, TAKING LEAVE OF DARWIN, P. 143

More on evolution by design vs. Design by evolution.

 

The Design Connection in Biological Tracking Systems

Brian Miller

In my last article, I summarized a lecture presented at CELS (Conference on Engineering in Living Systems) that presented a model for adaptation based on the engineering principles employed in human engineered tracking systems. Now I will address the connection between these principles and the design inference.  

As a review, biological adaptation is often driven by systems that employ three subsystems:

• Sensors that monitor specific environmental conditions.
• Logic-based analyzers such as switches that trigger responses when certain conditions occur. 
• Mechanisms that drive targeted output responses.

Irreducible Complexity and Timescales 

To say that such tracking systems could not have evolved gradually almost goes without saying. Many examples of NGE do not even directly help an individual organism but only an entire population acting in concert. For instance, increasing the mutation rate to rapidly generate targeted genetic variation will often assist only a few lucky individuals to survive extreme threats such as an antibiotic.  

More generally, not only are all tracking systems irreducibly complex, but they require the subsystems to be meticulously integrated. And the integrating components, such as switches (here, here), correspond to far greater amounts of information than what could have been generated in the available timeframes. This challenge is highlighted by the fact that timescales (waiting times) grow exponentially with the amount of required new information (here, here).

The Design Connection

The presence of highly controlled adaptive mechanisms directly correlates to life employing top-down design that must meet numerous tight engineering constraints. If organisms resulted from haphazard undirected processes, their design constraints would be few and highly flexible. Altering anatomy and/or physiology should then be relatively easy, and the same undirected processes could potentially drive the changes. In contrast, the presence of numerous tight constraints correlates with altering the system being far more difficult. Significant changes would typically require highly specified and coordinated modifications. 

Szallasi et al. in Systems Modeling in Cellular Biology tacitly came to this same conclusion:

An often noted reservation against the type of analogies between biological and engineered systems we brought forward states that these two types of complex systems arise in fundamentally different ways, namely through evolution versus purpose-driven, top-down design (see, for example, Bosl and Li (2005)). Clearly, evolvability is of paramount importance for living systems (Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998). Here, we think of evolvability simply (maybe naively) in the sense of controlled and structured change in lineages, rather than cells, on long time scales in response to perhaps large variations in the environment. At the population level (of all engineered systems of one type), evidently progress in engineering fulfills similar criteria. [Emphasis added.]

P. 32

Note how the authors do not describe evolution using such traditional terms as “random” and “undirected.” Instead, they describe change as “controlled” and “structured.” Their description of evolvability sounds less like neo-Darwinian evolution than like technological innovation. 

Evolution by design vs. Design by evolution.

 

Nearly All of Evolution Is Best Explained by Engineering

Brian Miller

In recent articles, I have summarized lectures at CELS (Conference on Engineering in Living Systems) that described an engineering model for adaptation and explained how adaptation derives from organisms’ internal capacities (here, link). Now I will summarize another CELS lecture that expanded upon these themes by outlining a second complementary engineering model for adaptation. 

Comparing Models

Standard evolutionary theory assumes that genetic variation expands through DNA mutating or otherwise altering randomly. Concurrently, natural selection and other processes transform species over time gradually through numerous, successive, slight modifications. The results are unpredictable, and in different subpopulations they can vary greatly. 

In stark contrast, the presented engineering-based model assumes that organisms adapt to the environment using the same engineering principles seen in human tracking systems (here, here). More specifically, they continuously monitor the environment and track pre-specified environmental conditions. When the right conditions occur, internal mechanisms induce pre-determined responses such as targeted genetic changes, physiological adjustments, and/or anatomical alterations. These adaptive processes are directed by irreducibly complex systems that consistently include three components:

• Sensors to detect pre-specified environmental conditions such as temperature.
• Logic-based analyzers that determine if specific criteria are met such as the temperature exceeding a set point. When criteria are met, the analyzers send signals to trigger the appropriate responses. 
• Processes that generate predetermined output responses when triggered, such as growing thinner hair.

The resulting changes are targeted, rapid, and often reversible. They are also predictable and repeatable. And their magnitude can range from minor alterations to dramatic transformations, but changes are bounded and predefined. 

Over the past few decades, every facet of the engineering model has been increasingly affirmed by everyone from mainstream biologists to third-wave evolutionists to leading creationists (here, here, here, here). The strongest supportive evidence comes from studies of what have been termed natural genetic engineering (NGE) and phenotypic plasticity. 

Natural Genetic Engineering

NGE refers to genetic alterations that are not random. Instead, they result from cells employing highly complex machinery to direct targeted DNA modifications. Leading researcher James Shapiro describes the processes in a 2016 review article:

Combinatorial coding, plus the biochemical abilities cells possess to rearrange DNA molecules, constitute a powerful toolbox for adaptive genome rewriting. That is, cells possess “Read–Write Genomes” they alter by numerous biochemical processes capable of rapidly restructuring cellular DNA molecules. Rather than viewing genome evolution as a series of accidental modifications, we can now study it as a complex biological process of active self-modification.

He further elaborates on the editing systems in a 2017 review article:

Like all classes of cellular biochemistry, NGE DNA transport and restructuring functions are subject to control by regulatory circuits and respond to changing conditions…NGE activities typically affect multiple characters of the variant cell and organism. Consequently, major phenotypic transformations can occur in a single evolutionary episode and are not restricted to a gradual accumulation of ‘numerous, successive, slight modifications.’

One could contest Shapiro’s claims about what NGE accomplished in the past, but his general description clearly matches the engineering model’s central features. The regulatory circuits that respond to environmental conditions correspond to sensors integrated with logic mechanisms. And the transport and restructuring functions correspond to specified output responses. In addition, the DNA modifications are targeted, rapid, and bounded as the engineering model expects.

NGE has been identified in all domains of life from the simplest to the most complex. Yeast cells respond to nutrient starvation by increasing the mutation rates at specific locations referred to as mutational hot spots. And the remarkable diversity in dog breeds is not the result of completely random mutations, but it also results from mutational hot spots that allow for increases in targeted genetic variation that can drive rapid adaptation. Biophysicists John Fondon and Harold Garner noted:

The high frequency and incremental effects of repeat length mutations provide molecular explanations for swift, yet topologically conservative morphological evolution…We hypothesize that gene-associated tandem repeats function as facilitators of evolution, providing abundant, robust variation and thus enabling extremely rapid evolution of new forms.

Equally striking, plant genomes contain DNA segments known as transposable elements (TEs) that can move to new locations, allowing them to alter the activity of local genes. Specific environmental stimuli can initiate relocation to target locations (here, here), and stimuli can activate the TEs, resulting in adaptive benefits. For instance, TEs modify gene regulation in maize to confer drought tolerance, alter flowering time, and enable plants to grow in toxic aluminum soils (here, here).

Phenotypic Plasticity

Phenotypic plasticity refers to an organism’s ability to transform its anatomy and physiology in response to environmental stimuli. The changes do not result from genetic alterations but from internal adaptive mechanisms. Developmental biologist Ralf Sommer enumerated these mechanisms’ essential components in a 2020 review article:

…plasticity requires developmental reprogramming in the form of developmental switches that can incorporate environmental information. However, the associated molecular mechanisms are complicated, involving complex loci, such as eud-1, that function as switches and GRNs. While still early, it is likely that switch genes point to a general principle of plasticity because other examples of plasticity also involve complex switch mechanisms.

The “incorporation of environmental information” tacitly implies the presence of sensors and signal transmission pathways. The switch incorporating the sensory output equates to a logic-based analyzer, and the gene regulatory network (GRN) activity corresponds to the output response. In summary, the core components perfectly match those of the engineering model for adaptation. 

Phenotypic plasticity has been observed in numerous species in diverse taxa. Gulls of the family Laridae track the sodium level in their blood with sensors in heart vessels. When the level reaches a threshold, gulls generate a specialized gland that extracts excess sodium from the blood and excretes it through the beak. If the gull migrates to a freshwater environment, the gland disappears. 

Cichlid fish demonstrate phenotypic plasticity for multiple traits. Muschick et al. in a 2011 study raised Midas cichlids on food with different hardnesses. The different diet groups developed significantly different pharyngeal jawbones, and the differences resembled qualitatively the differences in jawbones found in specialized species. Härer et al. in a 2019 study exposed Midas cichlids to light of different frequencies. In response to a change in frequency, the cichlids switched the expression of cone opsin genes crucial for color vision in only a few days. Other such mechanisms likely exist, based on the observation that cichlids rapidly converge to the same basic forms repeatedly. 

As a final example, fish residing in cave environments display distinctive traits such as reduced eyes and pigmentation. The standard evolutionary story is that these traits gradually developed through natural selection. But experiments over the past decade on the effects of exposing fish to cave-like conditions are changing the narrative. 

Rohner et al. in a 2013 study raised A. mexicanus embryos in water with low conductivity mimicking cave conditions. The embryos developed into adults with significantly smaller eyes. Corral and Aguirre in a 2019 study raised A. mexicanus in different temperatures and different levels of water turbulence. The variant conditions resulted in adult fish differing in vertebral number and body shape. For instance, fish raised in more turbulent water displayed more streamlined bodies and extended dorsal and anal fin bases that improved their mobility in that environmental condition. And Bilandžija et al. in a 2020 study raised the same species in darkness, and the fish developed many cave-related traits such as resistance to starvation and altered metabolism and hormone levels. Future research will likely uncover even more examples where cave-specific adaptations result not from random mutations but from internal mechanisms. 

Future Research

The engineering model not only best fits the latest experimental and observational data, but it can help guide future research. Whenever a species rapidly and predictably adapts to a specific environmental condition (here, here, here), investigators can expect that changes are directed by sensors, logic-based analyzers, and output response mechanisms. They can then focus research on identifying and understanding these components. 

Traditional evolutionary processes do play a part in biological adaptation, but mounting evidence demonstrates that their role is relatively minor in the drama of life (here, here). Instead, engineered adaptive mechanisms that direct targeted modifications perform on center stage. 

Marcus Garvey: a brief history.

 Marcus Mosiah Garvey Sr. ONH (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940) was a Jamaican political activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL, commonly known as UNIA), through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, his ideas came to be known as Garveyism.

Garvey was born to a moderately prosperous Afro-Jamaican family in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica, and apprenticed into the print trade as a teenager. Working in Kingston, he became involved in trade unionism before living briefly in Costa Rica, Panama, and England. Returning to Jamaica, he founded UNIA in 1914. In 1916, he moved to the United States and established a UNIA branch in New York City's Harlem district. Emphasising unity between Africans and the African diaspora, he campaigned for an end to European colonial rule across Africa and the political unification of the continent. He envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure black racial purity. Although he never visited the continent, he was committed to the Back-to-Africa movement, arguing that some people of African descent should migrate there. Garveyist ideas became increasingly popular and UNIA grew in membership. However, his black separatist views—and his relations with white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to advance their shared interest in racial separatism—divided Garvey from other prominent African-American civil rights activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois who promoted racial integration.

Committed to the belief that black people needed to secure financial independence from white-dominant society, Garvey launched various businesses in the U.S., including the Negro Factories Corporation and Negro World newspaper. In 1919, he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to forge a link between North America and Africa and facilitate African-American migration to Liberia. In 1923 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud for selling the company's stock and imprisoned in the United States Penitentiary Atlanta for nearly two years. Many commentators have argued that the trial was politically motivated; Garvey blamed Jewish people, claiming that they were prejudiced against him because of his links to the KKK. Deported to Jamaica in 1927, where he settled in Kingston with his wife Amy Jacques, Garvey continued his activism and established the People's Political Party in 1929, briefly serving as a city councillor. With UNIA in increasing financial difficulty, in 1935 he relocated to London, where his anti-socialist stance distanced him from many of the city's black activists. He died there in 1940, although in 1964 his body was returned to Jamaica for reburial in Kingston's National Heroes Park.

Garvey was a controversial figure. Some in the African diasporic community regarded him as a pretentious demagogue and were highly critical of his collaboration with white supremacists, his violent rhetoric, and his prejudice against mixed-race people and Jews. He nevertheless received praise for encouraging a sense of pride and self-worth among Africans and the African diaspora amid widespread poverty, discrimination, and colonialism. In Jamaica he is widely regarded as a national hero. His ideas exerted a considerable influence on such movements as Rastafari, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement.

Neopaganism: a brief history.

 Modern Paganism, also known as Contemporary Paganism and Neopaganism, is a collective term for religious movements influenced by or derived from the various historical pagan beliefs of pre-modern peoples. Although they share similarities, contemporary Pagan religious movements are diverse, and do not share a single set of beliefs, practices, or texts. Most academics who study the phenomenon treat it as a movement that is divided into different religions; others characterize it as a single religion of which different Pagan faiths are denominations.

Adherents rely on pre-Christian, folkloric, and ethnographic sources to a variety of degrees; many follow a spirituality that they accept as entirely modern, while others claim prehistoric beliefs, or else attempt to revive indigenous, ethnic religions as accurately as possible. Academic research has placed the Pagan movement along a spectrum, with eclecticism on one end and polytheistic reconstructionism on the other. Polytheism, animism, and pantheism are common features of Pagan theology.

Contemporary Paganism has sometimes been associated with the New Age movement, with scholars highlighting both their similarities and differences. The academic field of Pagan studies began to coalesce in the 1990s, emerging from disparate scholarship in the preceding two decades.

Yet more on natures engineers vs. Darwin.

 

Insects and Design: Ant and Honeybee Engineers

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Yesterday we began looking at arthropods that engineer things. Another arthropod family displays enviable skill at architecture. If you’ve ever watched ants busily tunneling in an ant farm, you may have noticed that the intricate finished product rarely collapses. Why is that? Engineers would like to know, since cave-ins pose a serious threat to miners’ safety. It turns out that ants, with no foreman or architect, instinctively build on the principle of natural arches as they remove sand grains one by one. This was found by scientists at Caltech, who wrote about “The Science of Underground Kingdoms.” A short video in the article notes that ant colonies can extend down 25 feet, host millions of inhabitants, and last for decades. 

Jose Andrade, a Caltech mechanical engineer, was impressed with the intricate casts of ant tunnels that have been made by pouring molten metal into them and retrieving the architecture (see photo in the article). He asked, “What are ants thinking (if anything)?” Do they dig blindly, or just “know” what to do? He teamed up with biologist Joe Parker to investigate. What they figured is that the know-how is not in the individual ant, but in the colony. They call it a “behavioral algorithm.” 

“That algorithm does not exist within a single ant,” he says. “It’s this emergent colony behavior of all these workers acting like a superorganism. How that behavioral program is spread across the tiny brains of all these ants is a wonder of the natural world we have no explanation for.” 

To survive, ants have to build according to the laws of physics. It might be that ants have sensors that help them avoid removing particles that provide load bearing, much as Jenga players pull out sticks that keep the pile from collapsing. The remaining sticks create a “force chain” that stabilizes the pile.

As ants remove grains of soil they are subtly causing a rearrangement in the force chains around the tunnel. Those chains, somewhat randomized before the ants begin digging, rearrange themselves around the outside of the tunnel, sort of like a cocoon or liner. As they do so, two things happen: 1.) the force chains strengthen the existing walls of the tunnel and 2.) the force chains relieve pressure from the grains at end of the tunnel where the ants are working, making it easier for the ants to safely remove them.

The research was published in the PNAS by de Macedo et al., “Unearthing real-time 3D ant tunneling mechanics.” The Abstract says that natural arches form as the ants instinctively know which grains to remove.

We discover that intergranular forces decrease significantly around ant tunnels due to arches forming within the soil. Due to this force relaxation, any grain the ants pick from the tunnel surface will likely be under low stress. Thus, ants avoid removing grains compressed under high forces without needing to be aware of the force network in the surrounding material. Even more, such arches shield tunnels from high forces, providing tunnel robustness.

Honeybee Engineering

One more example of arthropod architecture is the honeycomb. Everyone is familiar with the hexagonal cells that honeybees build, but bees (and engineers using fabricated honeycomb material) face a problem building the hexagons around corners and curves. A photo in the Cornell Chronicle shows the problem: the growing honeycombs start in different locations and will eventually merge. One cannot use perfect hexagons at the junctions, but prefab materials, used in “everything from airplane wings, boats, and cars, to skis, snowboards, packaging and acoustic dampening materials,” tend to be manufactured in straight lines, not curves. Because bees are good at solving this interface problem, “Engineers may learn from bees for optimal honeycomb designs.”

Challenges arise when space constraints or repairs require engineers to keep a structure mechanically strong when linking together industrial honeycomb panels that each have cells of different sizes. High performance computers used with 3-D printers may solve this problem in the future, but could bees provide a more efficient and adaptable strategy?

A new study finds they can. It turns out that honey bees are skilled architects who plan ahead and create irregular-shaped cells and a variety of angles to bridge together uniform lattices when limited space constrains them.

By careful observation, Cornell engineer Kirsten Petersen noticed that bees are as frugal as possible with their “expensive” material, beeswax.

As a result, the bees employ other shapes — pentagons or heptagons — in order to link together panels of perfectly hexagonal drone and worker cells. Along with building cells of different shapes, the bees also build irregular-sized cells, and sometimes even combine multiple types of irregular cells. The authors refer to these pairs and triplets of irregular cells as “motifs” and show that particular combinations occur more often than expected by chance.

The bees even seem to be “thinking ahead” as they construct “intermediate cells” to link dissimilar combs together. All the while, they keep the structure strong and robust around curves and corners. As part of the study, 

Coauthor Nils Napp, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering, developed a theoretical computer model that allowed them to analyze configurations, and test optimal ways cells might fit together in a continuous manner under the space constraints. They used the model to ask, how much better could the bees do? “And it turns out, not that much better,” Petersen said.

Petersen attributes this engineering know-how to evolution, but those in the design community know to expect that kind of narrative gloss added like whitewash on the engineered structure. Is any gloss needed? Not really. One can observe these ingenious arthropod engineers, understand what they do, and apply it. The whitewash can be sandblasted off without damaging the structure.

Nevertheless, the origin of these capabilities in arthropods must be addressed at some level. If the arthropod body plan mystically “emerged” by evolution, did the engineering expertise of a spider, ant, or honeybee also emerge by unguided natural processes? The same answer applies that Stephen Meyer gave in Darwin’s Doubt: complex specified information is a hallmark of design. Only an intelligent cause provides the best explanation for it, wherever it is encountered. Chance never does. By default, then, intelligent causes should be preferred for the origin of engineering expertise in arthropods.

Yet another look at the thumb print of JEHOVAH.

 

Oxford’s John Lennox: Why Science and the Universe Itself Call for a Creator

David Klinghoffer

Oxford mathematician John Lennox is a star of the new Science Uprising episode, “Big Bang: Something from Nothing?” He’s also priceless as a character: brilliant scientist, the Irish grandfather you wish you had, amiably listing off fact after fact about the universe to confound any scientific atheist. In bonus material from the episode, Professor Lennox discusses problems including that the universe has a beginning, that it was wonderfully fine-tuned for our existence from the start, or indeed before the start. Also that there is something at all rather than nothing, a truth that atheists Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and others have sought to smooth other. Lennox tells here why they fail. None of this is what you would expect given a materialist picture of reality. But a Biblical one? That’s a different story.

 Watch Episode 7 of Science Uprising, if you haven’t already, and then enjoy more from Dr. Lennox as he explains why science and the universe call for a creating deity:

Barbarians at the gate?

 

In Science — But Not Just in Science — Who Can Still Believe the “Elites”?

David Klinghoffer

Mark Tapscott at Instapundit enjoyed the new Science Uprising episode, “Big Bang: Something from Nothing?”:

‘SCIENCE UPRISING’ AND THE ELITES: Just as there is a gathering revolt against the political elites in this country, so there are a growing number of smart folks with lots of PhDs on their walls who have had it with being blackballed, denied tenure, kicked out of research granting because they dissent from the current secular materialist orthodoxy.

Discovery Institute’s latest episode of “Science Uprising” provides an introductory summary of Intelligent Design evidence, but more importantly, it also makes clear that this debate isn’t going away any time soon. If anything, like the Flat Earthers of the past, the secular materialists could be in for some surprises. And don’t miss those ‘Chicken and Egg’ dilemmas, either.

That is a smart connection to draw. Whether in science, medicine, politics, or other areas, the comforting old assumption — how elites can be trusted to tell the truth and look out for our best interests — seems more hollow by the day. Who can really believe that anymore? Watch Episode 7 now:

Natures engineers vs. Darwin.

 

Arthropod Architects Amaze Engineers

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Arthropods are often described as the most diverse phylum of animals, and the most numerous, too. There are well over a million species of arthropods known today, and other extinct ones in the fossil record. 

Three traits define arthropods: an exoskeleton, paired jointed appendages, and a body plan segmented into head, thorax, and abdomen (but sometimes the thorax and abdomen are fused). Arthropods (phylum Euarthropoda, or true arthropods) are subdivided into in five subphyla: Trilobites (extinct), Chelicerates (horseshoe crabs, spiders, mites and scorpions), Myriapods (millipedes and centipedes), Crustaceans (lobsters, crabs, crayfish, shrimp), and Hexapods (insects). Children are most familiar with chelicerates and hexapods; they learn early that spiders have eight legs and insects have six legs (generally speaking). An occasional centipede or millipede or “pill bug” arouses their fascination, too. They soon recognize spiders, but may have trouble realizing that flies, beetles, butterflies, praying mantises, honeybees, crickets, gnats, and aphids are all classified as insects. Today and tomorrow we’ll offer some news about insects and spiders whose architectural skills fascinate scientists.

The earliest arthropod body plan “explodes” onto the scene in early Cambrian strata, meaning that by their first appearance, arthropods had brains, nerves, muscles, a gut, locomotion, sensory equipment, and the ability to reproduce. The most famous of the Cambrian arthropods, the trilobites, with their complex eyes and coordinated legs, inhabited every part of the world. Other Cambrian arthropods, known from Canada’s Burgess Shale and from China, include Marrella, Anomalocaris, and some bivalve forms, although classification of extinct species is sometimes contentious. Some of these are “brought to life” in Illustra’s film Darwin’s Dilemma and further scrutinized in Stephen Meyer’s work, Darwin’s Doubt). Except in some details, the Cambrian species look familiar and would appear at home in the world today. If their complex body plans could emerge in a geological instant, why stop there? Did some of these extinct arthropods also possess complex behaviors and engineering know-how? We may never know, but we know what we can observe today.

Chelicerata: Spider Engineers

Bioengineers already envy spider silk for its exceptional strength and flexibility. A lesser-known but enviable quality is web architecture. Orb webs are admirable for their symmetry, but what about the irregular “tangle webs” that look chaotic, with silk strands going every which way? The tangle web, it turns out, is functionally beautiful; “it filters in prey and protects the spider from predators.” It is also well-built to be strong and resilient.

Seven researchers at MIT and one from Berlin investigated “In situ three-dimensional spider web construction and mechanics” and wrote up their findings in PNAS. Calling spiders an “evolutionary success” but also “nature’s engineers,” they say,

Learning how spiders used their silks and webs to adapt to environmental pressures have fascinated many fields of research such as biomedicine, biology, and engineering. Because of silk’s nanoscale size and the complex web architecture, little is known about the architecture and mechanics of three-dimensional (3D) spider websduring construction. This work comprehensively investigates the structure, mechanics, and functionality of a 3D spider web under construction, using consistent imaging and computational simulations methods. This work could inspire efficient spider-inspired fabrication sequences or fiber geometries in engineered materials, as demonstrated here for 3D-printed prototype materials. [Emphasis added.]

Of interest to them was a spider’s ability to build “lightweight and high-performance web architectures often several times their size and with very few supports.” This ability would be helpful for spacecraft, for instance, where light weight is a priority. Human construction often takes advance planning, collection of materials and a large team of workers to put a structure together. A spider does all the work herself.

The MIT research team took careful photographs of a 3D web under construction from different angles, and then 3D-printed the parts and put them together. What they found is that the spider first builds an escape route, and then keeps the growing web architecturally sound throughout construction. The spider continues to reinforce the original plan. A tangle web also must withstand the force of a prey hitting it. Because stress is localized at all times, the web is robust against failure. If a fiber breaks, 

the load is transferred to its connecting fibers. Because of redundancy in the structure and the nonlinear behavior of dragline silk, the spider web does not fail catastrophically at any stage of construction.

The paper waxes eloquent about the web-building spider’s skill set, too much so to quote it all here. Suffice it to say they were excited at what they observed and how the information might be used by engineers.

Expanding our knowledge of spiders’ web construction, silk recycling, web monitoring, and repair methods could inspire novel self-sufficient, self-repairable, and self-monitored smart structures. This knowledge can also inspire artistic, design, and architectural interventions — such as complex and large-scale tensile structures — via creative collaborations that both engage and inform materials and engineering sciences.