It’s not often that a new functional organ is found in the human body, considering that everything has been dissected and drawn for centuries and photographed in detail for decades. This organ is big and obvious! Ignoring it is like throwing away the wrapping paper and then finding out that the wrapping paper was a major part of the gift.
It’s called fascia — a word from Latin meaning bandage. In anatomy, fascia is defined as “a band or sheath of connective tissue investing, supporting, or binding together internal organs or parts of the body.” Laypersons who have heard the word were probably afflicted with plantar fasciitis, an ailment that inflames the fascia along the bottom of the foot. I’ve had it and know that PF is painful. It can sometimes be relieved by weeks of physical therapy or a shot of cortisone. I reflected on a long hike recently how wonderful it feels to walk again without PF pain. I learned from my podiatrist and his foot model that the plantar fascia holds the heel and toes together.
Types of Fascia
Fascia comes in different types. There is “superficial fascia” found under the skin, and “deep fascia” found around internal organs. An intriguing article in New Scientist by Caroline Williams explains the new interest scientists are taking in fascia since Italian anatomist Carla Stecco began studying it around year 2000. There’s a big story for ID advocates in what Williams relates about this multi-functional “overlooked” connective tissue. Fascia is composed primarily of the proteins collagen (for strength) and elastin (for flexibility). It is now becoming understood to play numerous roles, even to the point of earning the title of a new “organ” in the body.
The 19th-century anatomist Erasmus Wilson called this tissue — now known as fascia — a natural bandage. In dissection, that is exactly what it looks like: sheets of white, fibrous connective tissue that are strong yet flexible and perfect for keeping muscles and organs in place. They are also sticky, gloopy and get in the way of looking at the muscles, bones and organs they cover. Which explains why, for years, anatomists cut this tissue off, chucked it away and thought little more about it.
Recently, though, researchers have begun to take a fresh look at fascia and are finding that it is anything but an inert wrapping. Instead, it is the site of biological activity that explains some of the links between lifestyle and health. It may even be a new type of sensory organ. “There appears to be more going on in the fascia than is commonly appreciated,” says Karl Lewis at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. [Emphasis added.]
What kind of biological activity goes on in fascia? What does this network of tissue do for us?
Here’s a Summary
Cushioning: The main ingredients in “loose” fascia (the “gloopy” kind) are “hyaluronic acid, for lubrication, and proteoglycans, molecules that provide cushioning.” These are secreted by cells in the tissue such as fibroblasts and the “recently discovered fasciacytes.”
Packaging: Fascia surrounds internal organs to offer protection and hold them in place. Think of a simple duffle bag for camera gear; items can shuffle around and become separated or damaged. Newer packs have compartments for lenses, the camera body, memory cards, and other parts that keep them separated and safe. Fascia acts like that. What would happen to a runner or gymnast without it? The thought of organs jostling about in the body cavity is not pretty.
Sensation: Stecco’s father Luigi Stecco, a physiotherapist, “invented a form of physical therapy called fascial manipulation, which he claimed could treat everything from headaches to muscle and joint pain.” He based his now-popular therapy on the belief that fascia could become stiff, and that this painful stiffness could be alleviated by massage. But, as Williams relates, it wasn’t known in 2000 what fascia actually is, or if it contains nerves.
Since then, she and others have shown that fascia is indeed rich in nerves, and that the information that these relay varies throughout the body. Superficial fascia contains nerves that specialise in sensing pressure, temperature and movement. Deep fascia is involved in proprioception, the body’s sense of its position in space, and nociception, the sensing of pain.
Because of this sensory role, some researchers say that fascia should be considered a new organ, one that is specialised for communication about the body’s internal state. Robert Schleip at the Technical University of Munich in Germany recently estimated that an adult’s fascia contains approximately 250 million nerve endings, similar to, or slightly more than the skin. “It is beyond any doubt our richest sensory organ,” he says.
Immune Response: If one takes the broad definition of fascia to include the interstitium (“the fluid-filled connective tissue that lines every organ, muscle fibre and blood vessel,” then fascia can be thought of as “a whole-body network of fluid that could function both as a shock absorber and an immune network relevant to inflammatory disorders, scar formation and the spread of cancer,” Williams says.
Time for a Fresh Look
It’s about time scientists take a fresh look at this “wrapping” that anatomists, since the days of staged public dissections by Andreas Vesalius and others, cut away to get to the interesting stuff. And without question, an organ with so many roles is likely to hold secrets that could lead to major insights about the causes and cures of a variety of ailments. Williams describes some of the new thinking about how fascia relate to joint stiffness, inflammation, cancer, depression, and lower back pain. For instance, Helene Langevin at the NIH says “people with chronic lower back pain had thoracolumbar fascia that was 20 per cent stiffer than those without this pain.”
Other studies by Langevin with pigs showed that stretching the lower back for 5 minutes, twice a day, not only reduced the size of an area of inflammation, but also seemed to induce a series of anti-inflammatory chemical events from the fascia. This is a promising finding because chronic inflammation has been linked to pretty much every modern ailment going, from heart disease and diabetes to cancer and depression.
One thing we can all learn from the new interest in fascia is that it’s a good investment to keep our fascia network functioning at its best. Williams ends with a story about new imaging techniques by Neil Thiese and colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, that allowed them to observe fascia’s 3-D structure in living tissue. They found it to have “a sponge-like structure filled with fluid that drained into the lymphatic system, part of the body’s immune set-up.”
The team suggested that physical movement may help keep this fluid healthy, whether due to the pumping of the heart, the movement of the digestive tract or physical movement of the body. “It seems that no such spaces are static,” says Thiese. This discovery opens up the possibility that the body is connected in ways that we are only beginning to understand and that movement is required to keep this tissue healthy.
The body is connected in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Isn’t that true of so many past cases of simplistic material explanations in science that failed? Spontaneous generation, featureless protoplasm, vestigial organs, junk DNA — they all have in common the assumption that the stuff of life is simple to imagine having come into being by unguided natural processes. Fascia reminds us that the closer one looks at life, the more wondrous and well-designed it appears. Never count anything as useless. The wrapping is part of the gift.
New York University environmentalism prof Jeff Sebo, co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018), sees human exceptionalism (the idea that there is something unique about human beings) as a danger to humans and other life forms. He does not think that we should necessarily prioritize humans over animals:
Most humans take this idea of human exceptionalism for granted. And it makes sense that we do, since we benefit from the notion that we matter more than other animals. But this statement is still worth critically assessing. Can we really justify the idea that some lives carry more ethical weight than others in general, and that human lives carry more ethical weight than nonhuman lives in particular? And even if so, does it follow that we should prioritise ourselves as much as we currently do? …
My goal is instead to argue against a moderate form of human exceptionalism, according to which humans contingently matter more than nonhumans. If you are among the many who think that we take priority over other animals because of our ‘higher’ capacities and ‘stronger’ relationships, this is wishful thinking. There are too many nonhumans, and our lives are too intertwined with theirs, for that to be plausible. This ‘moderate’ view is not as ethical as you think.
He argues that humans are often not rational and that some animals show human-like qualities:
First, we might not always have a higher capacity for agency than other animals. We all lack the capacity for rational reflection early in life, some of us lose this capacity later in life, and some of us never develop this capacity at all. Meanwhile, many nonhuman animals have the capacity for memory, emotion, self-awareness, social awareness, communication, instrumental reasoning and more. Human and nonhuman agency thus overlap substantially in practice.
Moreover, even when we do have a higher capacity for agency than other animals, this difference might be smaller than we think. Our views about agency are anthropocentric, in that we treat human agency as the standard against which all forms of agency should be compared. But while human agency is certainly impressive, nonhuman agency is impressive too. And if we studied nonhuman agency on its own terms, we might discover forms of self-determination that humans lack.
Of course, lack of immediate rational qualities is a conventional justification for abortion and euthanasia.
He goes on, ending with:
And when we take our thumbs off the scales, we can expect the scales to shift. We should already be treating nonhumans much better and, eventually, we might even need to prioritise their interests and needs over our own. We should start preparing for that possibility now.
Thumbs off the scales? Of course, in the real world, there have been many cultures in which the king’s horse or dog or a sacred animal was worth the lives of several humans. If we don’t have that culture where we live, that is a moral advance, not a decline. Human rights is the thumb on the scale.
Anti-human exceptionalism advocates always manage to avoid the obvious point that we can and do oppose cruelty to animals without claiming that there is nothing special about being human.
Claiming that there is nothing special about being human — given the world we live in — is either a flight from reality or a journey into darker motives.
Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
A new episode of ID the Future brings onto the show Scottish physician David Galloway, author of the recent book Design Dissected. In his conversation with guest host and fellow physician/author Geoffrey Simmons, Galloway describes how he found himself in the evolution/design controversy and eventually presented his doubts about Darwin to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, of which he is former president. In this first half of a two-part conversation, Galloway and Simmons briefly summarize the content of Design Dissected, and Galloway homes in on one section in particular.
There he tells the tragic story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century Hungarian physician who pioneered life-saving antiseptic procedures in hospitals, but whose ideas were long attacked and ignored by leading physicians and scientists despite the clear and mounting evidence that careful handwashing, particularly among labor and delivery physicians, dramatically lowered mortality rates among patients. Galloway says it’s just one of many historical instances of experts clinging to an old paradigm in the face of contrary scientific evidence they don’t like. He says that much the same is occurring today among Darwinists who adamantly refuse to fairly consider the growing evidence against blind evolution and for the theory of intelligent design. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered; Let them also that hate him flee before him.
2As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: As wax melteth before the fire, So let the wicked perish at the presence of God.
3But let the righteous be glad; let them exult before God: Yea, let them rejoice with gladness.
4Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: Cast up a highway for him that rideth through the deserts; His name is JEHOVAH; and exult ye before him.
5A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, Is God in his holy habitation.
6God setteth the solitary in families: He bringeth out the prisoners into prosperity; But the rebellious dwell in a parched land.
7O God, when thou wentest forth before thy people, When thou didst march through the wilderness; Selah
8The earth trembled, The heavens also dropped rain at the presence of God: Yon Sinai trembled at the presence of God, the God of Israel.
9Thou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain, Thou didst confirm thine inheritance, when it was weary.
10Thy congregation dwelt therein: Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor.
11The LORD giveth the word: The women that publish the tidings are a great host.
12Kings of armies flee, they flee; And she that tarrieth at home divideth the spoil.
13When ye lie among the sheepfolds, It is as the wings of a dove covered with silver, And her pinions with yellow gold.
14When the Almighty scattered kings therein, It was as when it snoweth in Zalmon.
15A mountain of God is the mountain of Bashan; A high mountain is the mountain of Bashan.
16Why look ye askance, ye high mountains, At the mountain which God hath desired for his abode? Yea, JEHOVAH will dwell in it for ever.
17The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands upon thousands; The LORD is among them, as in'sinai, in the sanctuary.
18Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led away captives; Thou hast received gifts among men, Yea, among the rebellious also, that JEHOVAH God might dwell with them .
19Blessed be the LORD, who daily beareth our burden, Even the God who is our salvation. Selah
20God is unto us a God of deliverances; And unto JEHOVAH the Lord belongeth escape from death.
21But God will smite through the head of his enemies, The hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his guiltiness.
22The LORD said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring them again from the depths of the sea;
23That thou mayest crush them , dipping thy foot in blood, That the tongue of thy dogs may have its portion from thine enemies.
24They have seen thy goings, O God, Even the goings of my God, my King, into the sanctuary.
25The singers went before, the minstrels followed after, In the midst of the damsels playing with timbrels.
26Bless ye God in the congregations, Even the LORD, ye that are of the fountain of Israel.
27There is little Benjamin their ruler, The princes of Judah and their council, The princes of Zebulun, the princes of Naphtali.
28Thy God hath commanded thy strength: Strengthen, O God, that which thou hast wrought for us.
29Because of thy temple at Jerusalem Kings shall bring presents unto thee.
30Rebuke the wild beast of the reeds, The multitude of the bulls, with the calves of the peoples, Trampling under foot the pieces of silver: He hath scattered the peoples that delight in war.
31Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall haste to stretch out her hands unto God.
32Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; Oh sing praises unto the LORD; Selah
33To him that rideth upon the heaven of heavens, which are of old; Lo, he uttereth his voice, a mighty voice.
34Ascribe ye strength unto God: His excellency is over Israel, And his strength is in the skies.
35O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places: The God of Israel, he giveth strength and power unto his people. Blessed be GOD
William Paley once quipped that observation of the complexity of the
human eye (which, it will be recalled, was wont to give Darwin
uncomfortable doubts about the efficacy of natural selection) supplied
an assured “cure for atheism.” Extending Paley’s quip, I would add that
if the eye doesn’t do it for you, the brain with its quadrillions of synchronizedelectro-chemical operations almost
certainly will. There seems to be little exaggeration in claiming that
cytology, the microscopic study of cells enabled by the ultra-high
magnifications of the electron microscope, has led to a wholly
unexpected revival of the fortunes of Paley’s once derided natural
theology.
Recent advances in biological science, a subject formerly proclaimed to be corrosive of metaphysical beliefs1,
have somewhat unexpectedly become a stimulus to the emergence of new
advances which endorse many of the older observations of natural
theology. As astronomer Paul Davies remarked some four decades ago, “It
may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God
than religion.”2 Supporting this contention — that science
itself leads the charge toward a fresh theistic turn — Michael Denton
makes the firm observation in his new book, The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence,
that recent studies of the way the terrestrial environment appears to
be fine-tuned for humankind are “not based on the Judeo-Christian
scriptures or classical philosophy but on evidence derived from advances
in our scientific understanding of nature.” (p. 208)
Turning to human physiology, Denton points out how such organs as the
heart and lungs appear to have been optimized with “extraordinary
prescience” and he does not hesitate to call them and other human organs
“miracles of bioengineering.” Such fitness for human purpose, he
emphasizes, cannot be ascribed to Darwinian natural selection since
human-friendly features must have been built into nature long before
natural selection could have had time to act. (p. 149) Fully embracing
Darwin’s proscribed “t” word (teleology), Denton does not shrink from
referencing the “teleological details” of nature’s shaping.
Denton is particularly strong on what he terms “the post-Copernican
delusion of mankind’s cosmic irrelevance.” (p. 149) This is a fallacy
which he traces back to Darwinism’s having triggered a form of
philosophical regression towards an unregenerate form of ancient
materialism:
With the acceptance of Darwinism
by the biological mainstream, western civilization took the final step
back to the atomism, materialism and many-worlds doctrine of Democritus
and other pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. (p. 21)
The notion that we are simply an “epiphenomenon” of mindless
processes cast adrift in a cosmos configured by pure chance has in the
last half century or so been challenged by a new scientific landscape,
Denton argues — with some understatement. For as Michael Behe comments
in his advance praise of Denton’s work, the philosopher Bertrand
Russell’s notorious contention that “Man is the product of causes which
had no prevision of the end they were achieving” has turned out to be
“the most spectacularly wrong-headed pronouncement of the 20th century.”
(p. ii)
No Respecters of Compartmentalization
Questions about the nature and origin of mankind are clearly no
respecters of traditional academic compartmentalization, and Darwinism
has clear cosmological as well as biological implications. It
is at this point of intersection that Denton’s work makes common cause
with the idea put forth by modern astronomers that planet Earth itself
must have in some sense been, to use Denton’s term, “pre-planned.”
Before the beginning of the 1970s many people might have accepted that
the universe was a jumble of material forces churning away mindlessly
over the eons with the unaccountable exception of the unplanned anomaly
of human life. Yet that idea was challenged once astrophysicists came
to realize that planet Earth was being constantly ministered to by a
group of forces dubbed the cosmological constants, all precisely
calibrated to promote and sustain life.3 Such factors give
the Earth its uniquely privileged position and run counter to the older
opinion that it arose through purely aleatory processes of cosmic
vicissitude. These modern findings stand in implicit but conspicuous
opposition to that “de-centering” of the Earth brought about by the
Copernican Revolution, and Denton points to many points of contact
linking modern cosmology and biology with the distinctly anthropocentric
medieval view of the human estate as it has been articulated by the
Judeo-Christian tradition.
Surrounded by an infinity of purposeless nullity on all sides, our
Earth stands out as a cosmic beacon pulsating with life and purpose.4 Cosmologists
make no bones about the fact they can see no logical pathway to how we
all came to be here on this planet. The cosmological constants which
create conditions favorable to life are on any statistical reckoning
improbable to an extreme, even prohibitive degree. The same goes for the
genesis and proliferation of life forms: the whole phenomenon remains
stubbornly unamenable to rational decipherment. There cannot even be any
sensible talk of an inference to the best explanation when there are no
helpful indices pointing in any direction on the naturalistic continuum of understanding.
A Singular Cosmic Exception
Planet Earth would therefore appear to represent a cosmic exception
so singular as to require a separate form of explanation altogether from
the rest of a dead universe. In fact, the absolute disparity in
existential status between our living cosmos and its surrounding chaos
of jostling corpse planets prompts the inference that sentient life
could not have developed without a form of foresight and an accompanying
instrumental power to realize some originary vision through a selective
abrogation of the otherwise universal laws of chaos dominating the rest
of the universe. Hence, despite the undeniable fact of
the sun’s geometrically central position, Earth, as the single locus of
habitability amidst the lifeless chaos of our extraterrestrial
surroundings, can with some justice lay claim to a form of moral and
symbolic centrality within the cosmic scheme of things.
Earth’s Accumulated Intricacies
Denton has gone further than this in earlier writings and argued that
the new discoveries in astrophysics point to a form of providential
dispensation. For that reasonhe has taken exception with
modern liberal theologians who have apparently resigned themselves to
seeing science and theology occupying discrete epistemological realms
where science acts as the “senior partner,” so to speak. Support for
Denton’s position has also been amply hinted at in the work of Paul
Davies who concludes that it would be a considerable stretch to suppose
that the temperate zone cocooning the Earth might be the result of pure
accident. He therefore feels himself unable to subscribe to the belief
that the accumulated intricacies of our planet could have come about by
pure chance.5
Even Denis Diderot, it will be recalled, one of the free-thinking French philosophes who
was speculating on evolutionary matters in the same century as
Charles’s free-thinking grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was ready to accept
the Argument from Design. It seemed self-evident to Diderot that the
readily observable and palpable “works of nature” were more convincing
of a divine hand then any amount of philosophizing or theologizing.6 Diderot’s somewhat inchoate intuitions certainly receive weighty and scientifically corroborated support in Michael Denton’s The Miracle of Man.
Notes
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (London; Penguin, 1996).
Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (London: Penguin, 1983), Preface, p. ix.
These
constants include the protective electromagnetic force issuing from the
Earth’s still molten core and the force of gravity, which turns out to
be neither too strong nor too weak, neither crushing us nor causing us
to levitate into the skies. From being just the right distance from the
sun we derive warmth and energy without being burned to a cinder and
remain protected by the solar shield from the bane of astronauts,
harmful cosmic rays. See Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery (Washington: Regnery, 2020).
See Jonathan Witt and Benjamin Wiker, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature (Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2006).
See Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (London: Penguin, 1992).
For discussion of this point see Mitchell Stevens, How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World (London: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 118-21.
After the supermarket shooting in Buffalo, NY, a woke church in my
neighborhood quickly posted on its marquee sign, “WHITE SUPREMACY:
AMERICA’S ORIGINAL SIN.” According to some, white supremacy is of
pandemic proportions in the U.S. It takes surprising shapes — even
people of color can be white supremacists, we’re told. It is not only widespread, but growing rapidly. Evangelical Christianity is tainted by it. Political conservatives “enable” it, or worse. Apparently it’s so on the march as to be a “harsh reality” in, of all places, our politically correct neighbor Canada.
President Biden this week said
it is “running through our body politic.” If so, it’s strange that I’m
not sure I’ve ever met a genuine white supremacist. But we know they are
out there. Even if in reality they are only a minuscule minority, one
mentally ill young man with such ideas in his mind can perform an act of
shocking evil, as happened last weekend in Buffalo. It’s worth
understanding why, not simply assuming that we know.
Reading the Manifesto
Historian Richard Weikart is among the few analysts who have troubled
themselves to read the gunman’s manifesto. When he did, Weikart found
that the mental profile of this shooter, like others before him, defies
almost every stereotype about white supremacy currently being
circulated. The accused killer, while upholding the vilest racism and
anti-Semitism, disdains Christianity and conservatism. In the
individual’s own telling, he took inspiration from what Professor
Weikart in his recent book calls Darwinian Racism. The killer explains that he is only following the science — the very best evolutionary science.
[H]e continually claims that he is
a man of reason and logic, and he tries to demonstrate that his racist
views are actually scientific, not based on religion or emotion.
He
also appeals to science to explain why races are unequal. According to
this young man — and most white nationalists today — races arose through
biological evolution. He argues that races are subspecies that have
diverged, not only in physical traits, but also in their mental and
moral characteristics. He believes that the white race has evolved to
have higher intelligence and that blacks have evolved with greater
biological tendencies to crime, rape, and other immoral behavior.
Built
upon this Darwinian framework, he became obsessed with what he
considers the on-going competition between races in the struggle for
existence. To be sure, he does not actually use the term “struggle for
existence,” but he does use the term “struggle” a number of times. He
also describes the Darwinian struggle for existence, which is
competition between organisms to out-reproduce other organisms. Darwin
stated that this struggle was most intense within a species, and he also
proclaimed in The Descent of Man that some indigenous races were being
driven to extinction by other races (primarily the Europeans) in the
human struggle for existence.
White supremacists, including the
Buffalo mass murderer, are obsessed with the differential reproductive
rates between the races, believing that this will result in the defeat
of the white race in the Darwinian struggle. Their “replacement theory”
is intended as a warning that the white race will be replaced by other
races.
In His Own Words
This fits a pattern with recent mass killers, as political scientist John West has
also noted. You would need to peer into the shooter’s soul really to
understand the origins of his madness and hatred. No one can do that.
All we have to go on are his own words. For all the denunciations of
opponents from political partisans, cynically using this terrible crime
to tar competing views, isn’t it strange that so few media folks or
politicians appear to be interested in the young man’s own account of
himself.
On a new episode of ID the Future, host Eric Anderson sits down with Australian biologist and MD Michael Denton to discuss his new book, The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence.
As Denton notes, throughout the Middle Ages, humans were viewed as
central to the cosmic scheme of things. But this anthropocentric view
began to fall out of favor in the 16th century, and few if any
scientific discoveries in the subsequent two centuries offered any
apparent aid or comfort to the view.
That, however, isn’t the end of the story. According to Denton, even
as Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection
seemed to be draining from the idea what little life remained in it,
discoveries in chemistry, physiology, and physics were emerging. Playing
on the title of Stephen Meyer’s recent book, it was the return of the man hypothesis — revitalizing the outlook that placed man at the center of the cosmos, not in a physical way, as before, but in a far more important metaphysical sense.
Denton says that the case that nature is fine tuned for intelligent
creatures such as ourselves — land-going, air-breathing bipeds capable
of controlling fire and developing new technologies — is today stronger
than ever, and getting stronger. The Miracle of Man brings together the key lines of evidence as never before. Find the book, and advance praise for this capstone work, here. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Summary: Our planet’s atmosphere provides a
beautiful example of the parsimony and elegance of nature’s fine-tuning
for aerobic life. This extraordinarily improbable degree of
environmental fitness was woven in the order of things.
In my book The Miracle of Man,
I review a stunning range of coincidences in nature that should inspire
both awe and wonder. One striking illustration may be found in our
planet’s atmosphere, which provides compelling evidence of a very
special fitness for the generation of oxygen for oxygen-hungry beings
such as ourselves.
For photosynthesis to proceed on a planet like Earth, sunlight
(visual light) must penetrate the atmosphere all the way to the ground,
and part of the sun’s infrared radiation needs to be absorbed by the
atmosphere so as to warm the planet into the ambient temperature range,
where the chemistry of life, including the chemistry of photosynthesis,
can work its magic.
Happily, our atmosphere obliges. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a
significant fraction of the infrared radiation — warming the atmosphere
into the ambient range — and lets through nearly all of the radiation in
the visual region to empower the process of photosynthesis.
Some infrared radiation does reach the Earth’s surface, felt as
warmth on the skin, and some penetrates a little way into water, as is
commonly experienced in a swimming pool. But there are several major
atmospheric absorption bands in the near infrared region that capture
and retain the sun’s heat, raising our planet’s surface temperature by
33°C over what it would be without them, a chilly −18°C.
If our atmosphere didn’t absorb at least a significant fraction of
the infrared radiation when the sun was shining, the atmosphere would be
intolerably hot during the day, and when night fell the temperature
would plunge below zero. We would experience wild temperature swings
like those on the moon. There temperatures spike in the daytime to more
than 100°C (the boiling point of water at sea level) and plunge
to −178°C at night, a temperature far, far colder than any experienced
on Earth today. This wide variation is because the moon has no
atmosphere to retain heat at night or prevent the surface from getting
so hot during the day. No type of carbon-based plant life based in a
water matrix could survive such massive temperature fluctuations.
On the other hand, if our atmosphere absorbed too much in the
infrared region, that too would be disastrous. And this highlights
another intriguing element of fitness in the absorption pattern of
electromagnetic radiation in the infrared region. The windows between
the absorption peaks are as crucial as the peaks. Why? Because without
some spectral windows, all the infrared radiation would be absorbed by
the atmosphere, none could be radiated back out into space, and Earth
would suffer a runaway greenhouse effect, ending up a hellish hothouse
like Venus.
A Sizable Absorption Window
In this context an intriguing feature of our atmosphere’s absorption
spectrum is a sizable absorption window between eight and fourteen
microns. It’s intriguing because the sun is not the only body that emits
infrared radiation. The Earth also does, since all bodies at a given
temperature emit radiation with a characteristic range of wavelengths.
In Earth’s case, the emission peak is in the infrared region near 10
microns. And our atmosphere’s absorption gap allows a significant
fraction of Earth’s infrared emission to escape into space through the
eight-to-fourteen micron window. Around a fourth of the outgoing
infrared emission from Earth escapes through this window, which
consequently plays a major role in preventing our planet from going the
way of Venus. If all radiation in the infrared between 0.80 and 100
microns had been absorbed by the atmospheric gases, if there were no
windows, a runaway greenhouse would have been inevitable. The Earth
would be a hot, Venus-like planet. Upon these windows, including the
eight-to-fourteen-micron window, all advanced life on the surface of the
Earth, including of course Homo sapiens, depends.
It is no exaggeration to say even with all the other elements of
fitness that make possible our existence, without this eight-to-fourteen
micron window — but one small detail in the atmosphere’s overall
absorption spectrum — we wouldn’t exist. This represents yet another
stunning instance of the biocentric fine tuning of nature.
Some Additional Fortuities
Before turning to the role of specific atmospheric gases in the
fine-tuning of our atmosphere for advanced terrestrial life, a few quick
notes on some additional fortuities regarding Earth’s relationship to
light.
The light that passes through our atmosphere must penetrate water,
not just to gift the sun’s energy to aquatic plants but because water is
the matrix of life, and to reach the chloroplasts in any green plant,
aquatic or terrestrial light must traverse the water in the cell. Again
nature obliges as water is transparent to radiation in the visual
band as a liquid, as a vapor in the atmosphere, and as ice. If liquid
water or water vapor in the atmosphere absorbed visual light — the right
light for photosynthesis — then photosynthesis would not be possible,
and Earth would be devoid of aerobic life forms.
Also fortuitous is the transparency of our atmosphere to visible
light, which made important scientific advances possible, as Carl Sagan
underscored in his 1980 book Cosmos. There he asked us to
imagine intelligent life evolving on a cloud-covered planet such as
Venus. “Would it then invent science?” he asked. “The development of
science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the
regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely
cloud-covered… nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if
you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the sun would be
invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over
the whole sky — just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping
radiance beneath the sea.”
Finally, it is not just that our atmosphere lets through the right
light. It also strongly absorbs radiation from the dangerous or
potentially dangerous regions of the electromagnetic spectrum on either
side of the visual and near infrared regions.
The Atmospheric Gases
Another remarkable aspect of the absorption characteristics of
Earth’s atmosphere is that it arises from the combined absorption
spectra of the atmospheric gases, five of which — nitrogen (N2), oxygen (O2), ozone (O3), carbon dioxide (CO2), and water vapor (H2O)
— are bound to be present in the atmosphere of any planet hosting
complex carbon-based biological life. It is their combined absorption
characteristics which lets through just the right light for
photosynthesis while at the same time absorbing just the right amount of
heat, as well as most of the harmful radiation outside of the visual
and infrared regions.
Oxygen
Oxygen (O2) is indispensable to complex organisms such as ourselves. We need a lot of it (250 ml every minute,even
at rest). Indeed, the metabolic rates needed to sustain the most
advanced biological life depend on taking oxygen directly from an
atmosphere. Atmospheres sustaining complex aerobic life will inevitably
contain substantial quantities of oxygen.
Ozone
Where there is O2 in an atmosphere there is bound also to be ozone (O3),
since it’s formed in the stratosphere by the reaction of individual
oxygen atoms with molecules of dioxygen, catalyzed by the action of UV
light.
O2 + O = O3
Ozone is important to life because it absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Carbon Dioxide
Breathing involves taking in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide (CO2),
which is a major product of aerobic metabolism (the process which
provides us with 90 percent of our energy needs). Consequently CO2 will
be found in the atmosphere of any planet where organisms use the
oxidation of reduced carbon to generate energy. Carbon dioxide is also
essential to plants, which require it for photosynthesis. Moreover, CO2 is the only feasible carrier of the carbon atom to all parts of any carbon-based biosphere.
CO2 is also delivered to the atmosphere on Earth by volcanic activity and is recycled via silicate weathering.
Water Vapor
Atmospheric water vapor will be found in the atmosphere of any planet
harboring abundant carbon-based life because water is the essential
physical matrix of all carbon-based cells and it is the necessary medium
of the circulatory system in all complex multicellular organisms. Only
worlds that possess water can harbor carbon-based life, hence the NASA
adage “follow the water” in searching for extraterrestrial life. And
since water evaporates at temperatures fit for biochemistry, some water
vapor is bound to be present in the atmosphere of any world bearing
carbon-based life.
Nitrogen
Atmospheric nitrogen provides most of the nitrogen atoms incorporated
into organic compounds by life on Earth. It’s one of the four core
atoms of organic chemistry alongside carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. It
provides necessary density to the atmosphere, keeps our oceans from
evaporating, and serves as a fire retardant, slowing the speed that fire
spreads, rendering it controllable. Nitrogen is the only viable
candidate for these roles and thus appears to be an essential ingredient
in the atmosphere of any planet hosting carbon-based life.
All this suggests that oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide,
as well as ozone are bound to be present in the atmosphere of any world
inhabited by oxygen-utilizing, advanced carbon-based life, for reasons
over and above their life-friendly atmospheric transparency for the
right kinds of electromagnetic radiation.
The Right Proportions
Our atmosphere not only has the right components for complex aerobic
life, it also has them in the right proportions. Only an oxygen
concentration of about 20 percent, at a partial pressure of more than 80
mm Hg, provides the requisite oxygen for the active metabolism of
organisms like ourselves. If the concentration were substantially
higher, fires would be a far greater danger. In the case of nitrogen,
only a considerable quantity of nitrogen provides the density and
pressure needed to keep fires from raging uncontrollably in oxygen-rich
atmospheres such as Earth’s, and to prevent the oceans from evaporating.
CO2 levels have varied throughout geological time,
although over the past 400 million years — since advanced life colonized
the land — they have almost certainly never reached levels ten times
those of today and probably never more than about four to five times
present levels. A recent study provided evidence of this. It found that
raising CO2 levels in controlled atmospheres up to four times
present levels diminished cognitive function in human subjects. This
gives some indication of a CO2 ceiling, beyond which advanced life may no longer viable.
The Greenhouse Gases
Diatomic molecules with the same two atoms, such as O2 or N2,
do not absorb infrared radiation. This is quite fortunate for life on
Earth, since if either of these two gases, which make up most of our
atmosphere, were strong absorbers of infrared radiation, Earth likely
would have become a boiling cauldron like Venus, with temperatures hot
enough to melt lead.
Also fortuitous: the major greenhouse gases CO2 and H2O are both stable in the presence of O2.
This is enormously important. If they were unstable in the presence of
oxygen, the whole atmospheric system and global heat balance would
collapse. Aerobic life, our sort of life, would be impossible. However,
in keeping with nature’s profound fitness for advanced life as it exists
on Earth, H2O and CO2 are fully oxidized and
stable in the presence of oxygen. Nitrogen, the major component of the
atmosphere, is also stable in the presence of oxygen, because the
nitrogen atoms in N2 bond strongly with each other and resist
combining with oxygen. The stability of water, carbon dioxide, and
nitrogen in the presence of oxygen is a point worth underscoring, since
most other substances (apart from the noble gases) react strongly with
oxygen — in some cases, explosively.
A fascinating further teleological aspect to all this concerns the
quantity of ozone in the atmosphere. Because of the vast amounts of O2 in the atmosphere, inevitably there will also be some ozone (O3).
Although ozone is indispensable for blocking harmful ultraviolet
radiation, it is also a powerful greenhouse gas that absorbs strongly in
the infrared region — one thousand times more strongly than CO2.
Because of this, anything beyond trace amounts of ozone would
contribute dangerously to the greenhouse effect. This means that its
life-giving fitness in absorbing the dangerous ultraviolet radiation
between 0.20 and 0.30 micronswould be negated entirely if
more than trace amounts were necessary for that vital task, or if it
were produced in excess amounts by the action of ultraviolet radiation
on O2 in the stratosphere. Happily, only trace amounts are
needed to effectively block harmful ultraviolet radiation, and the rate
of breakdown of ozone in the stratosphere almost equals its rate of
synthesis, guaranteeing that it is indeed only present in trace amounts.
Finally, an intriguing aspect of ozone’s synthesis in the atmosphere is that ozone (O3) and diatomic oxygen (O2)
indirectly promote their own formation by absorbing dangerous
ultraviolet radiation and thereby protecting plant life, both aquatic
and terrestrial, which synthesize the oxygen from which ozone is formed.
This is yet another beautiful example of the parsimony and elegance of
nature’s stunning fitness for aerobic life.
Vital Coincidences
The absorption properties of our atmosphere are not vital for all
carbon-based life on Earth, but particularly for plants and
energy-hungry aerobes like ourselves. Our atmosphere’s fortuitous mix of
gases enables photosynthesis and the manufacture of oxygen, warms Earth
into the ambient temperature range, and shields life from harmful
radiation. Even slight differences in our atmospheric gases’ absorption
properties, or in their relative concentration, and Earth would be
uninhabitable, particularly for aerobic life. And note, these gases
exist in our atmosphere, and in the proportions they do, because of
factors quite distinct from the life-essential absorption properties
described above.
There is a final twist to this teleology: Three of the key
atmospheric gases whose physical absorption properties are indispensable
to the process of photosynthesis are also central players in the
process of photosynthesis itself.
6CO2 + 6H2O +light +heat —> C6H12O6 + 6O2
Indeed, they are the major reactants in the process. It is as if CO2, H2O, and O2 were deliberately colluding to incorporate themselves into the stuff of living matter.
Light and Air
Let’s review. The laws of nature, which determine the absorption
properties of the atmospheric gases, have no logically necessary
connection with their chemical properties or the chemical properties of
their constituent atoms, which are of such utility to life. This is a
striking fortuity in the nature of things.
Similarly, there is no connection between the laws of nature which
determine the tiny size of the biologically useful region in the
electromagnetic spectrum, and those laws which determine the radiant
output of the sun. And there is no connection between the radiant output
of the sun and the laws determining the absorption properties of the
atmospheric gases and liquid water.
So here we have several coincidences on which the existence of
oxygen-hungry aerobic organisms like ourselves depends. In the 15th
edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in the article
entitled “Electromagnetic Radiation,” the authors comment, “Considering
the importance of visible sunlight for all aspects of terrestrial life,
one cannot help being awed by the dramatically narrow window in the
atmospheric absorption… and in the absorption spectrum of water.”
Coincidences — the narrow windows in the EM spectrum that facilitate photosynthesis.
And it isn’t just the “dramatically narrow window.” We should be in
awe of the entire ensemble of prior environmental fitness, an ensemble
that enables photosynthesis and, by extension, our own existence as
oxygen-hungry “light-eaters.”
Simply put, our existence, inhabiting the surface of a planet like
Earth, deriving energy generated by the oxidation of the reduced carbon
compounds manufactured during the process of photosynthesis, depends on
what can only be described as an extraordinarily improbable degree of
environmental fitness in the order of things. Note, too, that
the improbable coincidences reviewed above, and much more fully treated
in The Miracle of Man,
are largely irrelevant to the other major domain of carbon-based life
on our planet — the great biomass of “rock-eating” anaerobic denizens of
the dark. Nature’s awe-inspiring fitness for photosynthesis is a
fitness for our type of life, for life in the light, for life on a
planetary surface, for creatures such as ourselves.
A new episode of ID the Future continues physicist Brian Miller’s exploration of a recent report from
the University of Tokyo claiming a big breakthrough in origin-of-life
research. As Miller and host Eric Anderson make clear, the university’s
laboratory work on RNA, detailed in a recent Nature Communications article,
involved the intelligent interference of the lab scientists and,
despite this intelligent interference, the devolution of RNA rather than
the evolution of increasing RNA sophistication.
Miller says that it’s ironic that Steven Novella, a scientist
committed to puncturing science hype, seems to have fallen for the hype
surrounding this laboratory work. Miller and Anderson go on to discuss
critiques of origin-of-life tall-tale claims, critiques coming from
Robert Shapiro, James Tour, and others. Life, Miller says, requires
organizational blueprints and design logics already in place to battle
against nature’s relentless tendency toward entropy. Without those
sophisticated organizational blueprints already instantiated in living
cells and sophisticated molecular machinery, natural forces appear
utterly powerless to pull off the kind of creative design work required
to move from non-life to life. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
At the recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, Discovery
Institute physicist Brian Miller gave a great talk on the convergence of
biology and engineering. It’s up now on YouTube and eminently worthy of
being shared. Miller’s theme is that “you see the same engineering
principles in human engineering as you see in life.” Funny that that
should be the case when you consider engineering is obviously all
intelligent design.
The point about engineering is not merely Dr. Miller’s personal view —
it’s the insight behind an emerging scientific field, systems biology,
that analyzes how living systems work with their “very clear design
logic,” including “pre-programmed or pre-engineered responses” to the
environment. Systems biology is quickly displacing impatient dismissals
of supposed “poor design” in life — “how cr*ppy our shoulders are,” for
example, in the phrase of one journalist who took instruction from biologist Nathan Lents. (See Jonathan Wells’s post on that here.)
Miller examines a number of interesting specific illustrations
including the celebrated eyeless cavefish, which he “used to think was
an absolute win for microevolution.” He refers at the end to a famous
paper by physicist Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of
Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Brian would like to write a
follow-up, he quips, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Engineering in
the Biological Sciences.” Watch the whole lecture now:
After the horrific Buffalo, NY, shooting of last weekend,
“replacement theory” is suddenly on everyone’s lips. Unlike agitators in
the media and politics, John West actually took the time to read the shooter’s manifesto to
see what drove him. West found that the latter’s racism derived from
online study of mainstream evolutionary theory. What the cynical
manipulators don’t tell you is that “the Buffalo shooter’s evolutionary
racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. Arguments drawn from
evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters
in recent years.” But recognizing this reality would do nothing to
advance political agendas, so the partisans ignore it.
Now a new podcast by Hank Hanegraaff with historian Richard Weikart
provides some very relevant historical background, drawing on Weikart’s
recent book Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.
The interview was conducted before the event in Buffalo unfolded,
though Weikart and Hanegraaff discuss a similar crime, a 2019 shooting
at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, also fueled by the killer’s reading about evolution.
What I found particularly interesting is that Darwinism and eugenics,
going back to the 19th century, were haunted by ideas of “replacement.”
Darwin in The Descent of Man predicted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace
throughout the world the savage races” (emphasis added). But
replacement could work in the reverse direction: Francis Galton,
Darwin’s cousin who first advanced the idea of eugenic theory, worried
that people of what he regarded as inferior stock would “swamp”
(Weikart’s word) their betters by out-reproducing them. The question of
who would replace or swamp whom has been a preoccupation of
pseudo-scientific racists ever since. Listen to the excellent conversation here.
