Why "junk DNA"=junk science.

 In “Junk DNA,” Here Are Benefits of Seeking Function

David Coppedge 

“Junk DNA” is so 1972. Why is it hard to shed worn-out phrases? One bad stain can wear out dozens of wipes. Fortunately, we don’t have to do all the wiping. Science reporters have been getting better at helping clean up this genomic blemish.

An example is a paper in PNAS summarized on Eurekalert!. The paper doesn’t refer to junk DNA, but the news item does. “Punctuating messages encoded in human genome with transposable elements” is the title:

The vast majority of the human genome (~98% of the total genetic information) is not dedicated to encoding proteins, and this non-coding sequence was initially designated as “junk DNA” to underscore its lack of apparent function. Much of the so-called junk DNA in our genomes has accumulated over evolutionary time due to the activity of retrotransposable elements (RTEs), which are capable of moving (transposing) from one location to another in the genome and make copies of themselves when they do so. These elements have been considered as genomic parasites that exist by virtue of their ability to replicate themselves to high numbers within genomes without providing any beneficial function for the hosts in which they reside. However

   , recent studies on RTEs have shown that they can in fact encode important functions, and much of their functional activity turns out to be related to how genomes are regulated. RTEs have been linked to stem cell function, tissue differentiation, cancer progression and ultimately to aging and age-related pathologies. 

                        Although this statement credits evolution with the accumulation of RTEs, the original paper is loaded with the word “function” and says nothing of significance about evolution. It also never claims that “cancer progression” or “aging” constitute functions for RTEs.

A Design Prediction

Instead, the paper offers a design prediction and finds it largely true. Wang et al. predicted that RTEs act as “insulators” that “help to organize eukaryotic chromatin via enhancer-blocking and chromatin barrier activity.” Of the 1,178 mammalian-wide interspersed repeats (MIRs, a form of RTE) they predicted would be functional, they found that 58 percent of them do, indeed, function as insulators (the rest may have so-far-unknown functions). The news item calls them a form of “punctuation”:

                   “We randomly picked a hand full of the MIR sequences predicted to serve as boundary elements by the Jordan lab and experimentally validated their activity in mouse cell lines and, with help of our Spanish collaborators, in Zebrafish upon embryonic development,” Dr. [Victoria] Lunyak said. “This testing revealed that MIR sequences can serve as punctuation markswithin our genome that enable cells to correctly read and comprehend the messagetransmitted by the genomic sequences.”

“One thing that is particularly striking is the fact that these punctuation marks, as Victoria calls them, play a role that is deeply evolutionary conserved,” said Dr. [King] Jordan. “The same exact MIR sequences were able to function as boundaries in human CD4+ lymphocytes, in mouse cell models and in Zebrafish.”

            You wouldn’t toss out all the punctuation in a book as “junk ABC” now, would you? Punctuation has a function — an important one. It came late in human written language (try reading ancient Greek). Human intelligent agents recognized that punctuation could help the understanding of texts. If it took intelligence to design punctuation, why would we credit genetic punctuation to blind processes? The fact that it is deeply conserved in unrelated animals argues against its being randomly accumulated for no purpose.

                 

Another Function

Here’s another function for these MIR sequences: tissue-specific regulation of gene expression. This helps explain why cell types can differ dramatically even though they all contain the same genetic library:

             Boundary elements are epigenetic regulatory sequences that separate transcriptionally active regions of the human genome from transcriptionally silent regions in a cell-type specific manner. In so doing, these critical regulatory elements help to provide distinct identities to different cell types, although they all contain identical sets of information. The regulatory programs that underlie these cell- and tissue-specific functions and identities are based largely on genome packaging. Genes that should not be expressed in a given cell or tissue are located in tightly packaged regions of the genome and inaccessible to the transcription factors that would otherwise turn them on. These boundary elements help to establish the geography of genome packaging by delineating the margins between silent regions in which genes are not expressed and active regions in which they are. In this critical role, boundary elements help to control the timing and extent of gene expression across the entire genome. As a result, defects in the organization of the genome by boundary elements are highly relevant for physiological and pathological processes.

                         Another benefit of looking for design instead of junk lies in gaining knowledge that has positive applications. Dr. Lunyak comments, “This is an important discovery because the understanding of how RTEs punctuate messages encoded in the human genome can help researchers to develop treatments for a wide variety of human diseases, including aging.” You have to understand punctuation in order to fix it. Would the “junk DNA” concept have led to this productive line of inquiry? Incidentally, we can thank the ENCODE Project for motivating Dr. Jordan’s project.

                    

Functional Transfer-RNA “Litter”

Another example is this research from UC Santa Cruz. The announcement doesn’t mention junk DNA, but it shows the benefit of looking for function. All geneticists know the well-characterized functions of transfer RNA (tRNA), but the research team wondered why the nucleus is “littered” with pieces of tRNA. Notice the focus on function:

                Transfer RNA was characterized decades ago and plays a well-defined role, together with messenger RNA and ribosomal RNA, in translating the genetic instructions encoded in DNA into proteins. The discovery of RNA interference and genetic regulation by microRNA, however, revolutionized scientists’ understanding of RNA’s role in gene regulation and other cellular functions. Since then, a bewildering abundance and variety of small RNA molecules has been found in cells, and scientists are still struggling to sort out what they all do.

               One doesn’t struggle to find out what junk does. The search for function is a good motivation for research. It inquires: these pieces must be there for a reason. As for the “Transfer RNA fragments,” the search for function is only in the early stages, but an important one was found:

                          “In the past five years, we’re starting to see that transfer RNAs are not just translatinggenes into proteins, they are being chopped up into fragments that do other things in the cell,” Lowe said. “Just recently, a subset of these fragments was found to suppress breast cancer progression.”

           Many women can be relieved these UCSC researchers didn’t give up on “litter” they didn’t understand.

        

Endogenous Retroviruses

As Casey Luskin has Explained, endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) also have functions and are not junk. Current Biology published a “Quick Guide” to ERVs. The authors seem ambivalent about these former poster children for useless, selfish invaders in our genome. On one hand, they point to examples that appear invasive and parasitic. On the other, they show examples of function, where ERVs are expressed purposefully by the “host”:

                 At each end of the ERV genome are long terminal repeats (LTRs), which contain regulatory sequences that can alter the expression, splicing, and polyadenylation of those host genes located near the ERV insertion site. LTRs regulate the cell type that the virus replicates in by controlling its expression, and so can be co-opted by their hosts as alternative promoters, resulting in tissue-specific expression of host genes. Often, solitary LTRs have been generated by homologous recombination between the two LTRs present in a single ERV, resulting in loss of the internal sequence. Consequently, host genomes are peppered with solo LTRs of potential regulatory significance.

                   The best evolutionary story the authors come up with is that the host learns to “co-opt” its ERVs and turn them into benefits. However, a search for design of ERVs would be more productive. Why must we always view viruses as destructive invaders? Many are neutral or beneficial. Why not look at ERVs as functional at the ecological level, instead of portraying them in the Dawkins selfish-gene way? The latter would motivate scientists to want to eliminate them, overlooking their potential benefits. It certainly is not helpful to ascribe mental planning to evolution, as the authors say in conclusion:

                          Taken together, the evidence suggests that sequences sequestered from ERVs have had a considerable influence on the evolution of their vertebrate hosts. So, not only is evolution a tinkerer, but it is also a conscientious recycler.

                   That word “recycler” represents a tacit admission that there was function there in the first place.

The Future of Genomics

PLOS Biology published a collection of short essays under the title, “Where Next for Genetics and Genomics?” Gil McVean looked back at the revolution in understanding when geneticists turned their attention from junk to gems:

The study of genetic variation has, over the last decade, been turned from a polite discipline focused on the finer points of evolutionary modelling to a fast, exhilarating, and sometimes messy hunt for gems hiding within the mines of genome-wide, population-scale datasets, most of which have been from humans. The coming years will only see the data rush grow: bigger samples, new species, extinct species, data linked to phenotype, temporal data, and so on. What, in this great whirlwind, am I most excited by?

Data are at their most fun when they bring to light things you would never have imagined.

                   Although he thinks the future will revisit “some of those big questions in evolution that never went away,” like “How does adaptation actually work?” (You mean that after 156 years they don’t know?), one thing is clear: focusing on “the finer points of evolutionary modelling” is passé. What’s “exhilarating” now is “the hunt for gems.” Things evolutionists “would never have imagined” — like finding functions in assumed junk — have been the “most fun.”

            

Death of a Meme

The demise of the “junk DNA” meme is a powerful reminder of the positive benefit of design thinking. “Junk DNA” was a science stopper, relegating non-coding sequences in the genome to the trash basket. Many years of fruitful research were lost because of it. Had scientists been focused on design and function back in the 1970s, who knows how much further along we would be?

Here is a challenge to all researchers to look at nature with a different focus. When something in a cell or organism appears useless, learn to think: It must be there for a reason. History has shown that approach often leads to fundamental new insights into the design of life, yielding practical applications for health and understanding.

Uberman v. Unterman: courtesy of Darwin

 When Darwinism Came to Africa, Horrors Ensued

Evolution News 

On a new episode of ID the Future, hear a Nigerian voice-actor reading from the opening pages of Nigerian scholar Olufemi Oluniyi’s new book, Darwin Comes to Africa. In this section from the preface, Oluniyi explores the relationship of Darwinism to Social Darwinism, and some of the ways Social Darwinism fueled and justified horrific ideas and actions among European thinkers and colonizers. Oluniyi tells the story of Russian scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (pictured above), who, guided by Social Darwinist thinking, “sought to produce a race of super-soldiers for Stalin’s army by impregnating French Guinea women with the sperm of a dead chimpanzee — black African women, mind you, who were presumed to be less highly evolved and thus closer to chimpanzees than were white European women.” As Oluniyi further notes, this scientist was far from a “lone gunman…. Colonial authorities approved the plan, and the Russian found support amongst both the French and American scientists.” As horrifying as this plan is, it and other horrors make sense under the false and twisted logic of social Darwinism, Oluniyi explains. Download the podcast or listen to it here . Buy the eye-opening book here

JEHOVAH'S masterclass on supply chain operation.

How the Earth Operates Supply Chains for Life

David Coppedge  

The “supply chain crisis” in the news underscores the need for complex systems to have access to the parts they need in time. Breakdowns in the supply chain for one system can cause ripple effects with other systems.

During World War II, the science of Operations Research, a branch of engineering dealing with time and space efficiency, was founded to optimize interconnected systems. With new diagrams like Pert charts, efficiency experts identified nodes where supply breakdowns could slow or halt production of complex systems like aircraft or ships. Some nodes can be worked on in parallel; others cannot. For instance, if parts for a subsystem are plentiful at the Norfolk shipyard but specific widgets must be shipped from Peoria on unreliable transports, laborers could find themselves being paid for idle time waiting for the parts to arrive. Tracing a project’s critical path through these nodes allows managers to estimate the time required to complete a project, and then look for ways to eliminate showstoppers or inefficiencies. Advances in Operations Research led to innovations like buffering and Just-in-time delivery.

             As with engineering, so with life. For one example, I’ve reported on how toxic heme molecules, essential for many life processes, are synthesized, stored, and buffered for just-in-time delivery without endangering the cell. See here as well for three other examples.

          

Elemental Abundance vs. Availability

The most abundant elements in our bodies (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, comprising 96 percent) are available plentifully in the crust and atmosphere. Proximity, though, does not equate to availability. As we saw here and here, nitrogen is a tough nut to crack despite being the most abundant gas in the atmosphere, and oxygen is highly toxic to cells unless handled carefully. Similarly, carbon and hydrogen come in many molecular forms that are not directly useful to cells. The supply chain problem, therefore, depends not only on proximity but on packaging. Essential ingredients are not helpful if locked in a metal box without a key. 

         The Earth is blessed with a crust and an atmosphere that provide essential elements for life. But it’s no help having the elements in the Earth’s crust if they can’t get where the organisms need them. One of the most fascinating aspects of Michael Denton’s Privileged Species series of books, especially The Miracle of Man (2022), concerns the synergy between geology and biology that satisfies life’s supply chain requirements. Let’s look at some new discoveries about getting chemical elements where they are needed, on time.

The Geological Supply Chain

Denton spoke of the combined benefits of glaciers and the unique properties of water for grinding down rocks to expose minerals. The process works like sandpaper, he says (The Miracle of Man, pp. 37-38), creating “rock flour” that brings elements to soils and clays usable by plants.

From Penn today, we learn that “Biogeochemist Jon Hawkings of the School of Arts & Sciences and his lab study glaciers to understand the cycling of elements through Earth’s waters, soils, and air in its coldest regions, with implications for climate change, ecosystem health, and more.” Collecting freezing water in Greenland without contamination is not glamorous work, Hawkings says, but is leading his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania to appreciate the rivers of ice as habitats for algae and bacteria.

                In addition to harboring life, glaciers also move, albeit fairly slowly, says Hawkings. They are sometimes referred to as “ice rivers.” As they flow, the ice can act like sandpaper, grinding up the bedrock upon which they sit. “Anything that’s in that bedrock can become mobilized and, if it’s reactive, will dissolve into water,” he says.

          The team’s work on “elemental mobilization and global systems” has only been possible in the past decade, Hawkings says. 

The geological supply chain also includes volcanoes, which enrich soils with nutrients. One “striking” non-biological supplier is lightning, which can break N2’s triple bonds and create nitrates usable by organisms. Many planetary scientists, furthermore, believe that other essential elements, like zinc (Imperial College London), and perhaps Earth’s ocean water, were delivered air mail: via meteorites and comets. Micrometeoroids deliver a steady rain of Elements that include biological essentials like manganese, iron, magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, and even chromium. Some of these are also supplied by volcanoes.

                 Chromium (Cr, atomic number 24) is another essential trace Element not just for shiny bicycle handlebars and stainless steel kitchenware but also for insulin utilization. Though it is toxic in excess, our metabolism depends on it. We usually get sufficient chromium in a variety of foods. A paper by Bertinotto and Griffin in PLOS one reported that “A low chromium diet increases body fat, energy intake and circulating triglycerides and insulin in male and female rats fed a moderately high-fat, high-sucrose diet from peripuberty to young adult age.” Without the volcanic and meteoritic supply chains, there might not be sufficient chromium on the surface. That could be true of other trace elements needed by organisms, including rare earth Elements.

                  

The Biological Supply Chain

As stated above, lightning can make atmospheric nitrogen available, but most biologically available nitrogen is “fixed” by microbes containing the nitrogenase enzyme. These biological marvels are located in root nodules of legumes and other plants that have symbiotic relationships with the microbes. It’s more irreducibly complex than a mousetrap, but if you could build a mimic of nitrogenase the world would beat a path to your door.

Another interesting case of microbial delivery concerns cobalt. Many do not think of this shiny metal in their diet, but Co (element 27) is incorporated in the active site of Vitamin b12, essential for the synthesis of nucleic acids and for cellular metabolism. The vitamin is also involved in the synthesis of fatty acids for the myelin sheath that supercharges neurons. Watanabe and Bito (2017) describe how we obtain vitamin B12 with its cobalt ion in the center:

           Vitamin B12 is synthesized only by certain bacteria and archaeon, but not by plants. The synthesized vitamin B12 is transferred and accumulates in animal tissues, which can occur in certain plant and mushroom species through microbial interaction. In particular, the meat and milk of herbivorous ruminant animals (e.g. cattle and sheep) are good sources of vitamin B12 for humans. Ruminants acquire vitamin B12, which is considered an essential nutrient, through a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria present in their stomachs. In aquatic environments, most phytoplankton acquire vitamin B12 through a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, and they become food for larval fish and bivalves. Edible plants and mushrooms rarely contain a considerable amount of vitamin B12, mainly due to concomitant bacteria in soil and/or their aerial surfaces. Thus, humans acquire vitamin B12 formed by microbial interaction via mainly ruminants and fish (or shellfish) as food sources.

                From volcano to ore to microbe to cow to lunchtime hamburger, this unexpected metal makes its appearance through both geological and biological supply chains. (The role of the ruminant forestomach I discussed here. You can listen to the episode on ID the Future.)

         

Limiting Factor?

Of the essential elements for life, phosphorus (P, atomic number 15) may be a limiting factor. See “The Problem of Phosphorous” and “Is There Enough Phosphorus for Us?” Those articles gave circumstantial evidence that P availability has been adequate through the history of life on Earth, and noted that microbes and plants are good recyclers of phosphorus, able to implement pre-programmed remediation measures under P starvation.

Phosphorus shortages have become a global concern (Auburn University). Nature Communications is worried that soil warming may decrease phosphorus availability. There may be better supply chain strategies at work in the biosphere than we realize. The Chinese Academy of Sciences reported via Phys.org that phosphorus availability is enhanced in some cases by — of all things — termites.

           Termites are social insects of the infraorder Isoptera and are widely distributed across tropical and subtropical ecosystems. These insects are the most important soil bioturbators and have been called “soil engineers.”Phosphorus concentrations are usually low in highly weathered tropical acid soils, but termite nests form bioaggregates that serve as carriers for P protection and stabilization.

                 As this is a new finding, it is reasonable to expect other biological processes will be found working to maintain just-in-time delivery of phosphorus in other ecosystems.

A Hidden Hand

One hopes these glimpses into Earth’s “operations research” solutions help give us confidence that life will continue to thrive as it has since the beginning. And maybe the success of the biosphere will point to a hidden hand of engineering that knew all about critical paths and just-in-time delivery.

James Gates on our becoming a spacefaring civilisation.

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The militant vegans are coming.

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David Berlinski has got agreeing to disagree down to a science?

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The fall of college?

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The new Rome? II

 

The gene dethroned?

 New Study: Transgenerational Epigenetics Can Have a Profound Impact

Cornelius G Hunter 

The Third Rail of Evolution

In the spring of 2006 I gave a talk on the campus of Cornell University and afterwards was joined by then Cornell professors Richard Harrison and Kern Reeve for a sort of panel discussion or debate about biological evidences and origins. I presented a dozen or so interesting and important evidences that I felt needed to be recognized in any discussion of origins. The evidences falsified key predictions of evolution and so needed to be acknowledged and reckoned with, one way or another. One of the items on my list was the so-called directed adaptation mechanisms which, broadly construed, can include everything from non random, directed, mutations to transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. But I was in for a big surprise when Harrison and Reeve gave their response.

Directed adaptation is reminiscent of Lamarckism. Rather than natural selection acting over long time periods on biological variation which is random with respect to need, directed adaptation mechanisms provide rapid biological change in response to environmental challenges. Like physiological responses, directed adaptation can help an organism adjust to shifts in the environment. But those adaptations can then be inherited by later generations. Stresses which your grandparents were subjected to may be playing out in your own cells.

In the twentieth century evolutionists had strongly rejected any such capability. Lamarckism was the third rail in evolutionary circles. And for good reason, for it would falsify evolutionary theory. But empirical evidence had long since pointed toward the unthinkable, and by the twenty first century the evidence was rapidly mounting.

While there was of course still much to learn in 2006 about directed adaptation (as there still is today for that matter), it could no longer be denied, and needed to be addressed. At least, that is what I thought.

I was shocked when Harrison and Reeve flatly denied the whole story. Rick waved it off as nothing more than some overblown and essentially discredited work done by Barry Hall and John Cairns, back in the 1970s and 80s (for example here).

But there was a body of work that had gone far beyond the work of Hall and Cairns. Incredulously I responded that entire books had been written on the subject. Rick was quick to respond that “entire books are written about all kinds of discredited things.”

True enough. It was me versus two professors on their home turf with a sympathetic audience, and there was no way that I was going to disabuse them of what they were convinced of.

Confirmation testing and theory-laden evidence are not merely philosophical notions. They are very real problems. I’m reminded of all this every time a new study adds yet more confirmation to the directed adaptation story, such as the recent Paper out of Nicola Iovino’s lab on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in house flies, which states:

Gametes carry parental genetic material to the next generation. Stress-induced epigenetic changes in the germ line can be inherited and can have a profound impact on offspring development.

The Press release gives little indication of the controversy as it admits that these findings were once considered impossible:

It has long been thought that these epigenetic modifications never cross the border of generations. Scientists assumed that epigenetic memory accumulated throughout life is entirely cleared during the development of sperms and egg cells

It is hard enough to see how organisms can respond intra-lifetime to environmental challenges, but how can it be inherited as well? For epigenetic changes that occur in somatic cells, that information must also enter into the germ line as well. Somehow it must be incorporated into the sperm and/or egg cells.

It is an enormous problem to explain how such capabilities evolved. Not only are a large number of mutations required to make this capability work, it would not be selected for until the particular environmental condition occurred. That means that, under evolution, it would be not preserved, even if it could somehow arise by chance.

Prophet of the master race and his apostles.

 Cambridge UP Book Airbrushes Darwin’s Contribution to Scientific Racism

Evolution News 

On a new episode of ID the future historian Richard Weikart (Cal State Stanislaus) dissects a recent Cambridge University Press book on Social Darwinism by Jeffrey O’Connell and Michael Ruse. Weikart, author of Hitler’s Ethic, From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler’s Religion, and The death of humanity, says a major shortcoming of the book is the authors’ attempt to put as much distance as possible between Darwin and eugenics thinking, and between Darwin and Hitler. The new book paints Darwin follower Herbert Spencer as the eugenics-championing bad guy and contends that Darwin and Darwinism had little or no influence on Hitler’s warped master-race ethic. Weikart patiently highlights some key evidence to the contrary, including statements front and center in Hitler’s writing. Did Darwin cause Hitler? No. Would Darwin have approved of Hitler? Almost certainly not. But according to Weikart, Darwin’s own racist and pro-eugenics thinking, combined with some implications of his theory that he himself explicitly expressed, manifestly did lay the groundwork for Hitler’s diabolical outlook on war, “the master race,” “the struggle for life,” and eugenics.

More on why no rise of the machines.

Are you tired of hearing about ChatGPT yet — “basically high-tech plagiarism,” as Noam Chomsky has said? Dr. Robert J. Marks, director of Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center, appeared on a segment of The Agenda recently to examine the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and ChatGPT. He was joined by Melanie Mitchell of the Sante Fe Institute and MIT’s Max Tegmark. Hosted by Steve Paikin, the three discussed the benefits and drawbacks of artificial intelligence and what it means to be human in a technological age, as well as the perennial question of consciousness. You can watch the entire conversation on YouTube:

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Dr. Marks had the opportunity to talk about some of the key themes he discusses in his book Non-computable you: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will, contending that AI, while it has benefits, does not, and never will, have the creativity, empathy, and personal consciousness unique to human beings. 

 

On distinguishing between natural and artificial selection.

 Robot Evolution? How the Trick Is Done

David Coppedge 

It’s been decades since Richard Dawkins committed the Weasel Blunder and since Tim Berra committed Berra’s Blunder, but some evolutionists still don’t get it. You can’t design something for a purpose and call it Darwinism. Even if some randomness is thrown in, once a goal is specified in advance, that’s not evolution; it’s intelligent design.

An example comes from PLOS ONE: “Morphological Evolution of Physical Robots through Model-Free Phenotype Development,” by Brodbeck, Hauser, and Iida. Look for the evidence of guidance by the investigators:

Artificial evolution of physical systems is a stochastic optimization method in which physical machines are iteratively adapted to a target function. The key for a meaningful design optimization is the capability to build variations of physical machines through the course of the evolutionary process. The optimization in turn no longer relies on complex physics models that are prone to the reality gap, a mismatch between simulated and real-world behavior. We report model-free development and evaluation of phenotypes in the artificial evolution of physical systems, in which a mother robot autonomously designs and assembles locomotion agents. The locomotion agents are automatically placed in the testing environment and their locomotion behavior is analyzed in the real world.This feedback is used for the design of the next iteration. Through experiments with a total of 500 autonomously built locomotion agents, this article shows diversification of morphology and behavior of physical robots for the improvement of functionality with limited resources. 

Stamped by Design

These researchers from Switzerland carefully crafted a “mother robot” that could assemble pre-fab parts into blocks that could perform some simplified locomotion. The algorithm was set to reward “offspring” that performed faster. Despite employing Darwinian words like “fitness” and “selection,” their work has “design” stamped all over it. Reporters, though, went ape attributing this to Darwinian evolution. 

At Phys.Org, Sarah Collins titled her report, “On the origin of (robot) species” in tribute to the Great Bearded Guru. She’s like a viewer of a magic show unaware of how the trick is done:

For each robot child, there is a unique ‘genome’ made up of a combination of between one and five different genes, which contains all of the information about the child’s shape, construction and motor commands. As in nature, evolution in robots takes place through ‘mutation’, where components of one gene are modified or single genes are added or deleted, and ‘crossover’, where a new genome is formed by merging genes from two individuals.

In order for the mother to determine which children were the fittest, each child was tested on how far it travelled from its starting position in a given amount of time. The most successful individuals in each generation remained unchanged in the next generation in order to preserve their abilities, while mutation and crossover were introduced in the less successful children.

In all fairness, Collins points out some differences between robots and natural organisms. Still, nowhere does she explain how the experiment clearly requires design instead of natural selection. She thinks the “mother” robot did the designing. And she takes on faith the opinion of one of the authors that they were watching Darwinian evolution happen before their eyes:

“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,” said lead researcher Dr Fumiya Iida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who worked in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich. “That’s essentially what this robot is doing — we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species.“

“Learning to Evolve”

At the BBC News, evolution reporter Pallab Ghosh titled his coverage, “Robots learn to evolve and improve.” It’s not clear how one could “learn to evolve” if evolution is an unguided natural process, but that’s not the only conundrum in his article. Like Collins, he fails to make any distinction between intelligently designed robots and natural processes. 

Engineers have developed a robotic system that can evolve and improve its performance.

A robot arm builds “babies” that get progressively better at moving without any human intervention.

The ultimate aim of the research project is to develop robots that adapt to their surroundings.

There’s a second conundrum: if human minds are developing robots that evolve, isn’t Ghosh making a case for intelligent design?

What the designers and reporters all seem to be missing is the fact that goals were determined from the outset. “Improvement” was defined as the ability to move faster. Yet in nature, not every successful animal is the speediest (consider the sloth, or the fabled tortoise and hare). Darwinian evolution cannot work toward a distant target. As Paul Nelson remarks in the film Living Waters, “Any evolutionary process you consider, any materialistic process you can consider has no foresight. It can’t see five years, five seconds, five milliseconds into the future. For that, you need a mind.”

An Aim and an Approach

The paper actually makes a powerful if unintended case for intelligent design when you think about it. Ghosh reports that Dr. Iida got into robotics because the ones he saw in real life were not as good as the ones he enjoyed in movies like Star Trek and Star Wars. “His aim was to change that,” Ghosh says, “and his approach was to draw lessons from the natural world to improve the efficiency and flexibility of traditional robotic systems.” He had an aim. He had an approach. He wanted to gain knowledge, or information. So he looked at the efficiency and flexibility of natural solutions, where he found efficient designs worth copying. In other words, he was motivated by biomimicry — an approach saturated with design thinking.

But he used an evolutionary algorithm, someone might complain. True, but it wasn’t evolutionary in the Darwinian sense. There’s no such thing as a Darwinian “algorithm” despite the use of familiar lingo like mutation, selection, and fitness in the paper. Algorithms are intelligently designed for function. Once an algorithm is defined, a mindless mechanism like a computer program or robot can use it, applying inputs and monitoring outputs, as in this case. But those mechanisms were also predesigned to implement the predetermined goal.

Animal and plant breeders use “evolutionary algorithms” of a sort; they know what they want; they use algorithms of sexual reproduction, and they monitor the output to decide what offspring get to breed in the next iteration. All this is under the guiding hand of the intelligent agent (the breeder). Artificial selection is intelligent design, not Darwinism.

                  If the authors and reporters really wanted to see materialistic Darwinian processes in action, they should have taken their hands off the equipment, shut the door, and let nature take its course. Most likely, nothing more interesting would happen than rust.

Two Blunders in One

Dawkins set a goal of generating Shakespeare’s phrase “Methinks it is like a weasel.” Berra watched cars “evolve” but missed the role of designers. The designers of these robots (and their Darwin-friendly reporters) committed both blunders. They had a target, designed a way to reach it, yet presumed after the fact that their carefully engineered “mother robot” resembled a mindless, material entity working by Darwinian natural selection. We can at least thank them for providing another opportunity to show why they really made the case for design.

The Fossil record's trolling of Darwinism continues .

 Fossil Friday: A Strange Dragonfly Larva

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday features Nothomacromia sensibilis, a strange type of dragonfly larva from the Early Cretaceous (ca. 115 mya) Crato limestones of northeast Brazil. I photographed this specimen at a German trader collection in April 2010, before it was acquired by the famous private collector Burkhard Pohl, who also runs the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

These nothomacromiid larvae are not uncommon at this fossil locality and are found in different sizes corresponding to different instars. The largest ones are about three inches long, which implies very large adults.

In a monograph in 2007, I suggested that these larvae may not be genuine dragonflies of the suborder Anisoptera, but could instead represent the larval stages of the anisozygopteroid Cratostenophlebia. Another possibility is that these larvae correspond to the larval stages of the extinct family Aeschnidiidae that I featured last Fossil Friday. Whatever these enigmatic larvae were, they look highly unusual with their spidery legs, lyra-shaped antennae, and forcep-like anal appendages that do not form the typical anal pyramid of anisopteran larvae.

On the dark art of building a master race?

The politics of making the master race.

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The future of clean energy?

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A window on the history of Uruguay.

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Finally the truth?

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The thumb print of JEHOVAH within

 Scientists Discover a “New” Fourth (Meningeal) Membrane Surrounding the Brain

Howard Glicksman

Stop the presses, at least the ones for medical, physiology, and neuroscience textbooks! It looks like Science has done it again. It’s discovered something our bodies have but we didn’t know it! 

How Life Works (Not Just How It Looks)

As New Scientist reports, the newly discovered layer of the meninges is called the subarachnoid lymphatic-like membrane (SLYM). With a width of only a few cells, the SLYM is now considered to be the fourth layer of the meninges, the connective tissue surrounding the brain that gives it support and protection. 

The first layer of the meninges is the thick and tough dura mater which is attached to the inner surface of the skull. The second layer is the fibrous web-like arachnoid mater that sits just below and lines the dura mater separated from it by the subdural space. The third meningeal layer is the thin and very delicate pia mater which covers and is in direct contact with the brain tissue.

Between the arachnoid and pia maters is the subarachnoid space, which is filled with a clear, colorless liquid called the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Except for having a lot less protein, the chemical content of CSF is similar to plasma and is constantly being produced and recycled so there are about four to five ounces present in the brain. Propelled mostly by the pulsation of the heart, CSF circulates through the ventricular system within the brain and over its surface.

The SLYM is located within the subarachnoid space separating the CSF within it into inner and outer compartments. The SLYM is so delicate that the standard technique for removing the brain at autopsy causes it to disintegrate and so up until now has been unnoticed. Nuclear scanning of the brains of mice recently allowed for the detection of the SLYM and by changing post-mortem procedures, it has now become microscopically detectable in humans.

A Puzzle for Scientists

Due to the brain’s unique structure, for many years scientists have been puzzled by how it manages certain important physiological functions. The meninges, CSF, and the fluid between the brain cells, the interstitial fluid (ISF), have also been thought to play a role in these functions.

First, in contrast to most of the body, the brain seems to lack a normal lymphatic system to help manage the control of excess fluid and toxic chemicals while providing access for immune cells. Scientists have wondered how the brain compensates for this apparent lack. In the last decade the discovery of the glymphatics (drainage microtubules next to the arterioles in the subarachnoid space) and lymphatic vessels associated with the meninges seems to have at least partially answered this question. Now, it would seem that the SLYM is involved in this function too.

Second, in contrast to most of the body, which only has to deal with the ISF, the brain has two fluid compartments, the ISF and the CSF in the subarachnoid space. Scientists have always wondered if, or to what degree, the fluid in the ISF and CSF communicate. Studies in the last several years show that there is significant communication between the ISF and CSF through the glympathics, other pathways, and now it would seem the SLYM as well. 

Third, in contrast to most of the body, the structure of the brain’s capillaries results in it having unique blood-brain and blood-CSF barriers which affects which molecules can pass through. Further analysis shows that the SLYM, which separates the CSF in the inner subarachnoid space from the CSF in the outer subarachnoid space, only allows very small molecules to pass through, thereby excluding most proteins. This means that the SLYM seems to act as yet another barrier within the brain that has to be taken into account when considering neurological function.           

         So far scientists think that the SLYM seems to be involved in the management of fluid along with various chemicals and molecules within the brain and the prevention of the build-up of toxic metabolic waste products. In addition, the SLYM seems to provide access to immune cells to protect the brain from microbes and toxins. 

A better understanding of the microscopic and molecular structure of the SLYM and how it works to keep the brain healthy and functioning properly will afford medical science the ability to better understand brain malfunction and help in the development of more effective treatments. 

It is thought that malfunction of the SLYM may be linked to many neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and delayed healing after traumatic brain injury.

          

The Question of Causation

One has to wonder from where the SLYM came? After all, it’s been present and working in the brains of all humans since they came into being. But we didn’t even know about it until recently. The answer on offer to the question of causation is likely to be the standard narrative gloss that the SLYM “evolved.”

But such a simplistic knee-jerk response, especially when so little is known about the molecular and microscopic structure of the SLYM and its function within the brain, seems a tad premature. To say this would mean that, a priori, before Science knows anything about how any component of life works, and what it would have taken to build it from the ground up, one must assume to know how it was caused — evolution. This sounds more like ideology than anything else.

That being said, when considering the SLYM (and any other component of life) let’s see how my recent book, co-authored with Steve Laufmann, Your Designed Body, can help you to determine for yourself which of the only two possible explanatory options for causation (materialism or intelligent design) is more likely at work.    

              In the book we explain that the body consists of trillions of cells working together and that there are four basic types of tissues: epithelial, nerve, muscle, and connective tissue. Connective tissue consists of cells that secrete, and are embedded within, a clear, colorless, gel-like material (ground substance) and the supportive protein fibers crisscrossing within it. 

The ground substance and the different types of protein fibers within it make up what is called the extracellular matrix (ECM). Different types of connective tissue, made up of various types of ECMs, provide the different tissues and organs of the body with the specific structural and chemical support they need to live and function properly. 

As noted above, the meninges are specialized layers of connective tissue which surround and protect the brain. The dura mater is “thick and tough,” the arachnoid mater is “fibrous and web-like,” and the pia mater is “very thin and delicate.” Scientists are still working on categorizing the qualities of the SLYM. 

           Like types of connective tissues, each meningeal layer has a different ECM that affords it the ability to perform its specific functions. Our book delves into many of the different types of functions performed by the different tissues and organs of the body. Some of these as they apply to the meninges include protection, waste recycling, and fluid dynamics. 

         Only Two Possibilities

When it comes to causation, there are only two classes of causal forces; those are material causes and intelligent causes. In addition, one of the main causal hurdles that would have applied for the SLYM (and the other three layers of the meninges) is that there must have been a body plan somewhere to designate how to make, and where to place, each of them. 

In other words, there must be information in the body that instructs it about how to make the right types of cells, secreting the right types of ECM, resulting in the four different types of meningeal membranes each with the right specifications, while placing each of them in the right order and position around the brain to provide it with the right amount of support and protection. But from where could this information have come?

Your Designed Body analyzes the causal factors of neo-Darwinism and concludes that neo-Darwinism lacks any power to generate non-trivial innovations, tends to select for death, and is counterintuitive. The increase in understanding of the true complexities of living systems over the last few decades has steadily eroded the plausibility of Darwin’s causal explanations.

As famed Brazilian chemist Marcos Eberlin wrote in his book Foresight, “If Nobel-caliber intelligence was required to figure out how this existing engineering marvel works, what was required to invent it in the first place?” With so many systems in the body, that is indeed the question.

When the slippery slope is behind you?

 Canadian Lawmakers Support Euthanasia for Minors without Parental Consent

Wesley J Smith

Euthanasia advocates tend to advance their cause by requesting that panels of “experts” or lawmakers conduct oh, so careful studies to recommend policies that, invariably, would legalize assisted suicide or expand it where already allowed. These are stacked decks; activities choreographed to reach a particular conclusion.

Such a bit of theater was just performed in Canada, where a report was published by the Canadian Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD). Surprise! It calls for even further expansion of the already permissive law that allows terminally ill and chronically ill adults, people with disabilities, and the frail elderly to opt to be killed by doctors or nurse practitioners. The mentally ill are scheduled to be included in this dismal list next month under existing law, but that may be put off for a year because of domestic and international agitation around the issue. But, mark my words, they too will eventually become eligible for the lethal jab.

Death for “Mature Minors”

The committee has now recommended that “mature minors” whose deaths are “reasonably foreseeable” be allowed to access death — perhaps even without parental consent. From, the AMAD report’s Recommendations:

Recommendation 14: That the Government of Canada undertake consultations with minors on the topic of MAID, including minors with terminal illnesses, minors with disabilities, minors in the child welfare system and Indigenous minors, within five years of the tabling of this report.

Recommendation 15: That the Government of Canada provide funding through Health Canada and other relevant departments for research into the views and experiences of minors with respect to MAID, including minors with terminal illnesses, minors with disabilities, minors in the child welfare system and Indigenous minors, to be completed within five years of the tabling of this report.

These two provisions loosen the foreseeable-death requirement listed below, as it already has been for adults:

Recommendation 16: That the Government of Canada amend the eligibility criteria for MAID set out in the Criminal Code to include minors deemed to have the requisite decision-making capacity upon assessment.

Recommendation 17: That the Government of Canada restrict MAID for mature minors to those whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable. . . .

Recommendation 19: That the Government of Canada establish a requirement that, where appropriate, the parents or guardians of a mature minor be consulted in the course of the assessment process for MAID, but that the will of a minor who is found to have the requisite decision-making capacity ultimately take priority.

Parental Objection Notwithstanding

In other words, children would be able to choose to die even over the objections of their parents. (It’s worth noting that a similar recommendation was previously made in a medical-journal article by Canadian pediatricians, which I wrote about Here)

The committee also wants people who have been diagnosed with dementia to be allowed to order themselves killed in an advance directive:

Recommendation 21: That the Government of Canada amend the Criminal Code to allow for advance requests following a diagnosis of a serious and incurable medical condition disease, or disorder leading to incapacity.

Recommendation 22: That the Government of Canada work with provinces and territories, regulatory authorities, provincial and territorial law societies and stakeholders to adopt the necessary safeguards for advance requests.

My editorial comment: What a joke.

Recommendation 23: That the Government of Canada work with the provinces and territories and regulatory authorities to develop a framework for interprovincial recognition of advance requests.

Why Should We Care?

This practice is already allowed in the Netherlands and Belgium — and yes, there have been abuses of these laws that haven’t matter a whit.

Will these recommendations be followed in Canada? Almost surely, in part or in full. That’s why the committee was asked to file a report in the first place. Why should we, in the U.S., care? Canada, being our closest (and, according to many progressives, a far more enlightened) cultural cousin, exerts a substantial influence on our own country’s social policies.

Beyond that, the same process of broadening access to death is happening here, too, albeit more slowly. Already most states that previously legalized assisted suicide have loosened their eligibility guidelines by, for example, reducing waiting times, allowing virtual assisted-suicide requests, and/or ending residency requirements. The more Americans generally support euthanasia, the speedier that process will occur, which is why adamant opposition in places where the practice remains illegal is a moral imperative — as is doctors’ total noncooperation wherever it has already been legalized.

Ps. At its root this is a spiritual/culutural problem and simply will not yield to the kind of blunt force interventions that lawfare types favour.  The world needs JEHOVAH more than ever.

A window on Mesoamerican history.

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A window on African history.

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The art of conversation is on its deathbed?

 

A case study in Darwinism's contribution to the rise of the master race.

John West Introduces Darwin Comes to Africa

Evolution News  

On a new episode of ID the Future, political scientist John West introduces Darwin Comes to Africa, the new book by Nigerian pastor, theologian, journalist, scholar, and human rights activist Olufemi Oluniyi. The work explores the poisonous influence of Social Darwinism on British rule in Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an influence felt in Oluniyi’s home country down to the present, he argues. The book project grew out of Oluniyi’s intimate knowledge of Nigerian culture as well as his attendance at the 2017 Center for Science & Culture Summer Seminar program in Seattle. By the end of that nine-day gathering, he had resolved to write a book about the impact of Social Darwinism on his home country and announced that intention to his fellow attendees. He died of Covid-19 four years later, but not before completing in-depth research on the subject of the book and sending Discovery Institute Press his manuscript. Learn more about what Oluniyi discovered. Download the podcast or listen to it here

The case for empire?

Superheroes by design?

 Meet the Ghostly Organisms that Rescue the Planet

David Coppedge 

A man was paddleboarding last month when he came across a mysterious creature three miles off the shoreline of California. He was startled by the sight, and then filled with wonder. What was this “see-through floating spine” in front of his paddleboard? If it could talk, it might have said, “Fear not. I am here to rescue your world from global warming.” 

The story is told on Phys.org by Amanda Lee Myers. On the other side of the world, another man had a similar revelation. David Malmquist, writing for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, tells about a swimmer who was snorkeling through waters off the coast of New Zealand when he found himself enveloped in a fog of translucent beings. If these angelic creatures could talk, they might have said, “We mean you no harm. We are your servants. Our work is to remove the gases with which your species has polluted the atmosphere and send them to the bottom of the sea.”

We should get to know these friendly servants. Who are they? What are they? They are called sea salps. They look a bit like jellyfish with their transparent bodies, but they are not jellyfish. Scientists classify them as tunicates: animals with see-through “shirts” of gelatin. Sea squirts are more familiar examples of tunicates. A tunicate is an odd kind of invertebrate because, though it looks like jellyfish, it has the key characteristic of phylum chordata: a notochord. A notochord is believed by evolutionists to be a precursor to a spinal cord, then a backbone. This gives Darwin-loving reporters the chance to amuse their readers with claims that sea salps are our “distant relatives” — closer to us than they are to jellyfish, which outwardly they more closely resemble. Phylogeny acquaints a species with strange bedfellows. 

How Salps Sequester Carbon

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science reports on a study led by Dr. Deborah Steinberg of William and Mary. Her team found that “salps play [an] outsize role in damping global warming.” How? The salps, also called jelly plankton, are good at absorbing carbon dioxide and “pumping” it down to the ocean bottom. Their numbers, furthermore, can multiply into huge “blooms” when CO2 is plentiful.

Jelly plankton blooms can offset as much CO2 as emitted by millions of cars. Humans continue to amplify global warming by emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. A new study reveals that a distant human relative plays an outsize role in damping the impacts of this greenhouse gas by pumping large amounts of carbon from the ocean surface to the deep sea, where it contributes nothing to current warming. 

A NASA-funded multidisciplinary project called EXPORTS is combining satellite data with shipboard measurements to understand a global phenomenon: the “biological pump.”

The goal of EXPORTS, for EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing, is to combine shipboard and satellite observations to more accurately quantify the global impact of the “biological pump.” This is a suite of biological processes that transport carbon and other organic matter from sunlit surface waters to the deep sea, effectively removing carbon dioxide from the surface ocean and atmosphere. Tiny drifting animals called zooplankton play a key role in the pump by eating phytoplankton — which incorporate carbon from carbon dioxide into their tissues during photosynthesis — then exporting that carbon to depth. 

These “jelly barrels” with their notochords are like “transparent whales,” Malmquist writes, taking in the carbon dioxide from their meals and pumping it down to the ocean floor in their fast-sinking fecal pellets. But wait, there’s more: the salps, like Salpa aspera, also take the stored carbon down in person. Sea salps take part in the “diel vertical migration” habit of many plankton: a daily ritual of swimming to the surface during the night to feed, then swimming to the depths during the day to avoid predators. Since these asexual organisms can multiply rapidly, the combined influence of their biological pumping can be huge. Do the math:

To put things in perspective, the observed salp bloom covered more than 4,000 square miles (~11,000 km2), about the size of Connecticut. With onboard experiments showing salps capable of exporting a daily average of 9 milligrams of carbon through each square meter at 100 meters below the bloom, the amount of carbon exported to the deep sea was about 100 metric tons per day. For comparison, a typical passenger car emits 4.6 metric tons per year. Comparing these values shows the carbon removed from the climate system each day of the bloom is equal to taking 7,500 cars off the road. Adjusting these values using the team’s highest measured rate of salp-mediated export (34 mg of C per day) increases the carbon offset to more than 28,000 vehicles. 

There’s still more. Steinberg says that many salp blooms go undetected. A global model that estimates their effects leads to a startling conclusion: these tunicates transport a whopping “700 million metric tons of carbon to the deep sea each year, equal to emissions from more than 150 million cars.” Thank you, sea salps!

Steinberg’s research was published open access in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Global Biological Pump

Another study was published in Nature’s open-access journal Nature Communications by Decima et al., “Salp blooms drive strong increases in passive carbon export in the Southern Ocean.” A 14-member team from New Zealand and from Southern California’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied another salp species in the Southern Ocean, Salpa thompsoni. Like its cousin, this species takes part in the diel migration and drops its solidified carbon load in fast-sinking fecal pellets.

zooplankton grazers, and their changing abundance and distribution patterns as a consequence of global warming, have the potential to not only alter marine food webs, but also biogeochemistry. if the increasing trend in salp abundance in the southern ocean persists at comparable rates, we can expect important changes in areas where salp blooms are recurrent: in the dynamics of phytoplankton bloom formation and termination, in the absorption and sequestration of carbon dioxide by the ocean, and in the composition of exported plankton affecting both organic and inorganic carbon flux to the deep ocean.

More Ways to Appreciate Jelly Plankton

Myers’s article at Phys.org includes “six wild facts about sea salps” to increase our appreciation of our global servants. Some of those have been mentioned above. The first two are newsworthy:

They move by pumping water through their bodies in what’s considered one of the most efficient examples of jet propulsion among animals, according to the Journal of Zoology.

Sea salps also eat using jet propulsion, consuming microscopic plants known as phytoplankton as they pump water through their bodies, the journal says.

They are also among the fastest-growing animals known, Myers continues, able to increase their body length by as much as 10 percent per hour. So while salps share jet propulsion finesse with jellyfish, they are more closely related to humans, evolutionists say. 

Now for Something Completely Different: A Geological Carbon Pump

Adding to salps’ outsized role in carbon sequestration, a non-biological process also participates in saving the planet. Brantley et al., writing in Science, relate “How temperature-dependent silicate weathering acts as Earth’s geological thermostat.” Silicate weathering “is an important way that carbon dioxide is regulated over geological time scales.” News from Penn State says that it must have been in operation throughout the history of life:

“Life has been on this planet for billions of years, so we know Earth’s temperature has remained consistent enough for there to be liquid water and to support life,” said Susan Brantley, Evan Pugh University Professor and Barnes Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. “The idea is that silicate rock weathering is this thermostat, but no one has ever really agreed on its temperature sensitivity.”

Measurements in the paper indicate that, indeed, chemical weathering responds to earth temperature automatically: hotter temperatures increase carbon sequestration by weathering, and lower temperatures reduce it. The paper says this explicitly:

Over multimillion-year time scales, the balance between weathering of silicate rocks and volcanic degassing may control the atmospheric concentration of CO2, one of the most important greenhouse gases that regulate Earth’s climate. Silicate weathering accelerates with temperature, acting as a negative feedback that buffers Earth’s climate and maintains its habitability.

The earth, therefore, seems to come with built-in regulators for climate and temperature. Are climate modelers who warn us of impending catastrophe incorporating these “poorly understood” processes into their dire predictions?

Evidence of Providence?

We have learned about another class of amazing little animals — sea salps — that many of us probably never heard of but depend on. These studies add to growing knowledge about the roles of plankton, including polychaetes, diatoms, and other small ocean creatures, whose benefits to the planet are as elegant as their well-engineered designs.

Are sea salps living only for their own fitness, or do we see evidence of providence here? Their outsized role gives the earth a biological feedback mechanism, somewhat like a thermostat, to regulate carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Maybe the planet needs biology as much as biology needs the planet. And to discover that biological and geological processes work together automatically to regulate greenhouse gases and keep global temperatures optimized for habitability seems uncanny. That would seem to require foresight and wisdom on a grander scale than Darwin’s theory can handle.

All primates are not created equal?

 Chimp and Human Genomes: An Evolution Myth Unravels

Evolution news 

On a new episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin rebuts the oft-repeated claim that the human and chimp genomes are 98-99 percent similar as surely resulted from Darwinian common descent. Luskin cites an article in the journal Science which describes the 98-99 percent claim as a myth. The original figure was derived from a single protein-to-protein comparison, but once you compare the entire genomes, and use more rigorous methods, the similarity drops several percentage points, and on one account, down into the mid 80s. Additionally, the chimp genomes used in the original comparison studies borrowed the human genome for scaffolding, thus artificially boosting the degree of similarity. Download the podcast or listen to it Here