Even yet more primeval tech vs. Darwinism.

 How the “Other” ATP Synthase Saves the Planet

David Coppedge

ATP synthase has been featured here many times because of its exquisite rotary mechanism and efficient operation. Viewers of animations like ours on YouTube usually need little convincing that it looks designed. And when they learn more details, like its 6,000-rpm speed, its crankshaft, and three-part ATP manufacturing center, the intuition becomes difficult to dislodge, even when evolutionists insist it emerged by chance. It’s a well-deserved icon of intelligent design.

The one most often referred to is the F-type of ATP synthase shown in the video. But there’s another one — the V-type ATPase — that is no less wondrous. It looks similar to the F-type, but V-type ATPases (let’s call them VHA) work in reverse: instead of using the proton motive force generated by the electron transport chain to manufacture ATP, they spend the ATP “energy currency” molecules to pump protons into organelles, thereby increasing the acidity. They are often found on the membranes of vacuoles that need H+ ions to lower the pH for phagocytosis or other types of digestive or recycling functions. Scientists have now shown they are more widely distributed in the cell than thought.

Our body cells contain both types of ATPase. But why do I say that these VHA rotary engines save the planet? A report by Daniel P. Yee in Current Biology tells the story. 

 It Begins in the Ocean

Diatoms, dinoflagellates, and coccolithophores are dominant groups of marine eukaryotic phytoplankton that are collectively responsible for the majority of primary production in the ocean.

Primary production represents the bottom of the food chain, on which higher organisms depend. Photosynthetic microbes in the ocean are the major players. For present purposes, we can ignore the authors’ evolutionary story about how these marine microbes obtained their VHAs by some “selective advantage.” It suffices to focus on what the molecular machines do: 

Since intracellular digestive vacuoles are ubiquitously acidified by V-type H+-ATPase (VHA), proton pumps were proposed to acidify the microenvironment around secondary chloroplasts to promote the dehydration of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) into CO2, thus enhancing photosynthesis.

We report that VHA is localized around the chloroplasts of centric diatoms and that VHA significantly contributes to their photosynthesis across a wide range of oceanic irradiances.

More photosynthesis means more primary production, and more support for a diverse biosphere.

Based on the contribution of diatoms to ocean biogeochemical cycles, VHA-mediated enhancement of photosynthesis contributes at least 3.5 Gtons of fixed carbon per year (or 7% of primary production in the ocean), providing an example of a symbiosis-derived evolutionary innovation with global environmental implications.

Once again, the evolutionary tale is non-essential for the surprising implication: all life benefits from the enhancement of photosynthesis provided by VHA molecular motors in diatoms. The 7 percent number is undoubtedly much higher if the other dominant groups of marine phytoplankton are factored in. Additional tests showed the research team that similar VHA-mediated enhancement of photosynthesis occurs in coccolithophores, dinoflagellates, and probably in all photosynthetic organisms.

The paper’s diagram of VHA in Figure 2 looks almost identical to the F-type ATP synthase except for the direction of proton (H+ ion) flow. Both types could be described by ID proponents as irreducibly complex molecular engines based on the parts list alone:

The VHA is a holoenzyme protein complex that is composed of 16 subunits, with a membrane spanning V0-domain and cytosolic facing catalytic V1-domain (Figure 2A). Transcriptomic analysis of synchronized cultures of T. pseudonana [a centric diatom] demonstrated constitutive mRNA expression of all VHA subunits, suggesting that VHA is important throughout the cell cycle (Figure 2B). However, the VHA holoenzyme can have multiple subcellular localizations and functions.

While the familiar F-type ATP synthase is localized to the mitochondria (in animals) or chloroplasts (in photosynthetic microbes and plants), V-types are found in other subcellular locations. They perform more functions due to their proton-pumping action that can adjust pH of their surroundings. This has made them difficult to study. A few functions are known.

But How Many Others Are There?

In diatoms, VHA has been reported in the membranes of vacuoles, chloroplast endoplasmic reticulum (cER), and silica deposition vesicles (SDVs), where it is strictly required for biomineralization of the silica cell wall and cell division. The complexity and functional versatility of VHA are challenges for genetic manipulation approaches that would constitutively destabilize multiple physiological functions and confound phenotypic interpretation. They also rule out the use of transcriptomics to infer the physiological role(s) of VHA, as these analyses cannot not provide information about the subcellular localization of the VHA holoenzyme.

The authors were excited about another implication of their discovery: carbon sequestration. Because VHA machines substantially enhance photosynthesis, it means more carbon is converted into CO2 which the chloroplast needs for sugar synthesis. The slight pH decrease provided by the VHA proton pumps changes the chemistry to favor CO2 production, which would be bad; but simultaneously, it creates a gradient that favors moving the CO2 into the chloroplast instead of into the cytoplasm where it would escape into the atmosphere. As a result, more oxygen is released by photosynthesis, less CO2 is released into the atmosphere during photosynthesis, and when the diatoms die and fall to the ocean floor, they take the solid carbon with them. V-type ATPases thus perform another global function for the biosphere: a carbon-concentrating mechanism (CCM).

VHA is a universal feature of eukaryotic cells and is present in a number of organelles, including endosomes, phagosomes, macropinosomes, lysosomes, Golgi, and melanosomes. Since VHA invariably acidifies the lumen of each of these organelles to pH ≤ 6, we deduce that VHA in the cER/PP membranes of T. pseudonana must accomplish a similar effect. This is significant, because at pH ≤ 6.3, the majority of DIC [dissolved inorganic carbon] equilibrates to CO2. Hence, we propose that VHA promotes CO2 accumulation in the microenvironment external to the chloroplast. Consistent with model simulations of DIC fluxes in the diatom CCM, some of the CO2 would diffuse back into the cytoplasm (pH ∼ 7.2). However, the higher pH in the chloroplast stroma (pH ∼ 8.15) establishes a more favorable partial pressure gradient for CO2 diffusion into this compartment (Figure S3B). The next steps follow the established CCM of microalgae. In the stroma, CO2is immediately hydrated into HCO3− under catalysis by carbonic anhydrase, which is shuttled into the thylakoid lumen where pH is ≤ 6 due to H+ pumping associated with photosynthetic electron transport chain. At the acidic pH, HCO3− dehydrates into CO2 and diffuses into the pyrenoid matrix, saturating RuBisCo to maximize carbon fixation rates.

A Remarkable Synergy

This shows a remarkable synergy of molecular machines and chemistry in a highly localized microenvironment. VHAs acidify the chloroplast exterior, helping carbonic anhydrase use the excess CO2 to produce more bicarbonate ions. The pH gradient favors these negative ions to flow toward the proton motive force being generated by the electron transport chain (Complexes I-IV) that are powering the F-type ATP synthase motors (Complex V). As the bicarbonate ions dehydrate back to CO2 where the pH drops inside the chloroplast, they saturate Rubisco enzymes that convert the CO2 into nutrients for life. 

Notice this careful pH-mediated series of delicate chemical reactions. Within this microenvironment, CO2 gets utilized where needed, but is not released into the atmosphere. The products of Rubisco favor carbon compounds that will get buried in the ocean floor. The result? A carbon-concentrating mechanism that helps the atmosphere gain more oxygen but less carbon dioxide, while enriching the biosphere with nutrients. VHA, the “other” ATP synthase, saves the planet! VHA should be seen as a key player in the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle, the food chain, and the climate. 

Nearly Unrestrained Wonder

The authors can hardly restrain their wonder at all this:

In summary, O2 production, 13C-NanoSIMS, and 14C-P-E measurements demonstrated that VHA significantly contributes to photosynthetic carbon fixation that is retained as biomass. Given that diatoms contribute nearly 50% of carbon fixation in the ocean, the component of photosynthesis that depends on VHA represents between ∼7% and 25% of oceanic primary production, or between 3.5 and 13.5 Gtons of fixed carbon per year (Table S3). These numbers can only increase after accounting for VHA-mediated photosynthesis in other secondary endosymbiotic phytoplankton (Figure 1) and photosymbiotic invertebrates. In addition, diatoms constitute about half of the biomass that sinks into the ocean’s interior. Based on our measurements of the contribution of VHA on both gross and net productivity in diatoms, VHA-mediated carbon fixation is poised to significantly contribute to the biological pump that shuttles organic carbon to the ocean’s interiorand, on a geologic time scale, to the biomass buried in the continental margin that formed fossil fuel deposits. Even by the most conservative estimate, the cooption of VHA for the enhancement of photosynthesis is a symbiosis-derived evolutionary innovation with global environmental implications.

Some future day, when biologists finally admit that evolution is incapable of innovation of complex finely tuned cooperative systems, all scientists will marvel at the intelligent design that gives us air to breathe and edible carbon to ingest under a moderate climate. Some of us are ahead of that time.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: a brief history.

 

A clash of Titans again

 

Yet another clash of Titans.

 

Juneteenth a brief history.

 

Bridget Mason :a brief history.

 

Dale Tuggy on the apostle's Creed

 

Conditionalism: a brief history

 

Gunter Bechly on rightly reading the record

 

David Berlinski continues to deconstruct scientism.

 Blind Ambition — Revisiting Searle’s Chinese Room

David Berlinski

Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome Science After Babel, the latest book from mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski. This article is adapted from Chapter 18.

I believe. I want. I do. What could be simpler? Intelligence is the overflow of the mind in action. In dreaming or desiring, on the other hand, I occupy a world bounded entirely by memory, meaning, and belief: I need do nothing. That overflow is entirely internal. In either case, our intelligence is directed toward specific objects or states of affairs. I believe — what? That Clearasil Starves Pimples or that Pepsi Is the Choice of a New Generation; I desire — what? That the young Sophia Loren might step smoldering from the television set for perhaps an hour or that I might win a MacArthur Fellowship (the academic equivalent of the Irish Sweepstakes). What I believe (or desire) and what is believed (or desired) are connected by something very much like an intentional arrow, a kind of miraculous metaphysical instrument. The relationship between my thoughts and their objects is thus strange from the first. But this relationship between what I think and what I think about is duplicated in language itself: like the thoughts that they express, the sentences of a natural language transcend themselves in meaning.

From the Inside Out

In seeing things from a first-person stance, with the entire world revolving around my own ego — a kind of Ptolemaic system in psychology — I direct the arrow of intentionality from the inside out, infusing the objects and properties of the external world with all of the significance that they ever possess. I assume, of course, that others do as much. Read forward, the arrow of intentionality goes from what I feel to what I do; read backward, from what is done to what is felt. The sense that we are all in this together arises only as the result of a supremely imaginative kind of back-pedaling; the interpenetration of two human souls, when it occurs, is wordless.

There is more. Each of us acts in the world as both subject and object: we do, and things are done to us. In moving away from the lunatic solipsism in which my ego exists in the absence of all others, I endow those human beings in my own perceptual ken with more or less the same cognitive states that I myself enjoy. This is the basis for a sense of sympathy. The endowment itself, I presume, may be reversed, as when I myself figure in someone else’s awareness as an imaginatively constructed subject of experience. But here is a queer, artful point. The inferences that I make about others, others make about me. My inferences about others I cannot verify, but their inferences about me represent something like the backward wash of a familiar wave. A subject acting simultaneously as a psychological object enjoys a unique Archimedean perspective on the system of inferences by which mental life in the large is constructed.

This confluence of circumstance suggested to the American philosopher John Searle a very deft argumentative maneuver, something akin, really, to a movement in judo. His arguments were prompted by work undertaken at Yale by the psychologist Roger Schank. Like many other American theorists, Schank has approached the problem of artificial intelligence with a kind of bluff, no-nonsense sense that getting a machine to understand something is a matter of attending to the details in a patient, straightforward way. In a photograph at the back of his book, The Cognitive Computer, he stands with his arms folded over his ample belly, scowling directly into the camera, an expression of earnest ferocity on his face, as if to suggest that by the time he got through with them, those computers of his would either shape up or ship out. His aim, as he explains things, is to teach the digital computer to comprehend simple stories of the sort that might be told to children. 

The exercise is set out without irony. The education of the digital computer in this regard commences with what Schank calls a script — a kind of running, rambling background account in which the saliencies of various stories are set out and explained. With the scripts in hand, the computers are prepared to make sense of what they read. They are then interrogated with a fine eye directed toward telling whether they have understood what they have absorbed. In fact, Schank’s machines do get quite a bit right; the record of their conversation is admirable, and the unbiased reader often has the feeling that just possibly he is reading something strange and remarkable.

It is against this conclusion that Searle has set his face. It is a simple fact, Searle begins, that he is utterly ignorant of the Chinese language. Suppose that he were to be locked in a room with a large sample of Chinese script — the samples, say, arranged on cardboard sheets. Now imagine that Searle were to be given “a second batch of Chinese script together with a set of rules for correlating the first batch with the second.” The rules are in English. A third collection of scripts is presented Searle. And another set of rules. This makes for three separate sets of Chinese symbols and two sets of English rules.

From Searle’s point of view, the material he confronts is an incomprehensible jumble. From the outside, where sense is made of all this, those Chinese symbols have a specific meaning. The first corresponds to a general script — the sort of thing that a computer would need in Schank’s setup to make sense of a story. The second is actually a story in Chinese. The third represents a list of Chinese questions. From time to time, those questions are presented to Searle with a nudge and a wink and a tacit request that he say something. In answering, Searle consults his set of rules. The two sets enable Searle to match the questions to the story by means of the background script. In this respect, Searle remarks, he is precisely in the position of the digital computer.

How Searle Sees

But (a very excited, explosive but!) under such circumstances would there be any inclination to say that a subject so situated understands the meaning of the symbols he is manipulating? An observer might come to this conclusion. Put a question in Chinese to this character, after all, and he answers in Chinese. Yet this is not at all how Searle himself sees things. Whatever he may be able to say in Chinese, he remains confident that he understands nothing of what he has said and is prepared to champion his ignorance defiantly. Some great notable aspect of what it means to understand a language has simply been overlooked.

For the most part, computer scientists have tended to ignore Searle’s argument and the point of view that it represents. It had long been known in science that you cannot beat something (a research grant) with nothing (a destructive argument), and what Searle had to offer them was nothing at all. Analytic philosophers responded promptly to Searle. The results are confusing. A great many superbly confident rebuttals appear to contradict one another. As for myself? When pressed on the point, I tend to run my hands through my hair or tug mournfully at my ears, gestures I am convinced that suggest that I have something tack-sharp to say were I willing only to say it.

Making EVs practical?

 

On Yorktown 1781

 

The king of titans defends his throne

 

Sounds about right.

 

Mathematics: mother or daughter of creativity?

Is Mathematics Discovered or Invented?

Robert J Marks jr. 

Some think math is invented. (See an article by Peter Biles.) Evidence, though, points towards discovery. Simultaneous mathematical discovery supports this viewpoint. Many mathematical breakthroughs are sometimes independently reported by two or more mathematicians at roughly the same time. The most famous is the simultaneous discovery of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Newton was secretive about his discovery and shared his results with only a few members of the Royal Society. When Leibnitz published his discovery of the calculus, Newton charged him with Plagiarism. Today, historians agree that the discoveries were independent of each other.

Some Other Examples

Here are some other lesser-known examples of simultaneous discovery.

The Papoulis-Gerchberg Algorithm (PGA). The PGA is an ingenious method for recovering lost sections of functions that are bandlimited. (I describe the PGA in detail in my Handbook of Fourier Analysis.) The PGA was first reported by Athanasios Papoulis1 but was first published in an archival journal, independently, by Gerchberg2. The discoveries occurred independently of each other.

The Karhunen–Loève Theorem, independently discovered by Kari Karhunen3 and Michel Loève4, showed that certain random processes could be represented as an infinite linear combination of orthogonal functions, analogous to a Fourier series.  

Non-Euclidean Geometry. Euclid published Elements circa 300 BC. His work wonderfully established Euclidean geometry. It was only in the first half of the 19th century that three men — J´anos Bolyai, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Nikolai Lobachevsky, independently discovered non-Euclidean geometry. Jenkovszky et al.5 note: “The striking coincidence of independent discoveries… after more than two thousand years of stagnation, may seem almost miraculous.”

Space-Variant Processing. Here’s a personal example. During my graduate work, I developed a method for performing general space-variant processing. My advisor, John F. Walkup, found out that the same method was simultaneously discovered at Stanford by his PhD advisor’s research group. Rather than competing, we agreed to publish all of our findings in the same issue of the journal Applied Optics.6-7

Einstein’s Shoulders

In the context of the argument for discovery, some inventions can curiously be considered discovered rather than invented. Isaac Newton famously said that “if I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Einstein built on Newton’s discoveries in classic physics and, in turn, stood on Newton’s shoulders with the formulation of relativity. Modern physicists stand on Einstein’s shoulders. The advancement in technology can likewise be considered standing on an ever-increasing stack of shoulders. This is certainly the case in artificial intelligence. Rosenblatt and Widrow’s early work on AI led to discovery of error backpropagation neural network training that led to deep convolution neural networks, deep learning, and the generative AI we use today.

Inventions can be discovered. An example of an invention being discovered by two men is the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone. But according to the Library of Congress:

Elisha Gray, a professor at Oberlin College, applied for a caveat of the telephone on the same day Bell applied for his patent of the telephone … Bell’s lawyer got to the patent office first. The date was February 14, 1876. He was the fifth entry of that day, while Gray’s lawyer was 39th. Therefore, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Bell with the first patent for a telephone, US Patent Number 174,465 rather than honor Gray’s caveat.

If true, both Gray and Bell were standing on the shoulders of those who proposed the telegraph and glimpsed the possibility of the telephone.

Philosophers might contemplate the similarity of the discovery of invention with the debate between predestination and free will. If inventions and advancements in mathematics are discovered, the future is, in a sense, predestined by our discoveries. The pros and cons of the debate will continue well beyond the arguments presented here.

References

A. Papoulis. A new method of image restoration. Joint Services Technical Activity Report, 39, 1973–74

R.W. Gerchberg. Super-resolution through error energy reduction. Optica Acta, Vol. 21, pp. 709–720, 1974.

Kari Karhunen ‘Zur Spektraltheorie Stochastischer Prozesse’, Ann. Acad. Sci. Fennicae, (1946), 37

Michel Loève ‘Probability Theory’, Princeton, N.J.: VanNostrand, 1955

László Jenkovszky, Matthew J. Lake, and Vladimir Soloviev. “János Bolyai, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Nikolai Lobachevsky and the New Geometry: Foreword.” Symmetry 15, no. 3 (2023): 707.

R.J. Marks II, J.F. Walkup, M.O. Hagler and T.F. Krile “Space-variant processing of one-dimensional signals,” Applied Optics, vol. 16, pp.739-745 (1977).

Joseph W. Goodman, Peter Kellman, and E. W. Hansen. “Linear space-variant optical processing of 1-D signals.” Applied Optics 16, no. 3 (1977): 733-738.

A battle royale of titans?

 

Dale Tuggy on how to make the gospel Trinitarian.

 

On honor among politicians.

 

China 2.0? Cons.

 

Phoebe : the Watchtower Society's Commentary.

 PHOEBE

Insight on the scriptures

(Phoeʹbe) [Pure; Bright; Radiant].

A Christian sister of the first-century congregation in Cenchreae. Paul, in his letter to the Christians at Rome, ‘recommends’ this sister to them and calls on them to render her any needed assistance as one who “proved to be a defender of many, yes, of me myself.” (Ro 16:1, 2) It may be that Phoebe delivered Paul’s letter in Rome or else accompanied the one who did.

Paul refers to Phoebe as “a minister of the congregation that is in Cenchreae.” This raises the question as to the sense in which the term di·aʹko·nos (minister) is here used. Some translators view the term in an official sense and hence render it “deaconess” (RS, JB). But the Scriptures make no provision for female ministerial servants. Goodspeed’s translation views the term in a general sense and translates it “helper.” However, Paul’s reference is evidently to something having to do with the spreading of the good news, the Christian ministry, and he was speaking of Phoebe as a female minister who was associated with the congregation in Cenchreae.—Compare Ac 2:17, 18.

Phoebe served as “a defender of many.” The term translated “defender” (pro·staʹtis) has the basic sense of “protectress” or “succorer,” so that it implies not mere cordiality but a coming to the aid of others who are in need. It may also be rendered “patroness.” Phoebe’s freedom to travel and to render notable service in the congregation may indicate that she was a widow and possibly a woman of some material wealth. So, she may have been in position to use influence in the community in behalf of Christians who were being wrongly accused, defending them in this way; or she may have provided refuge for them in time of danger, serving as a protectress. The record gives no details.

Dale Tuggy challenges the Jesus=God hypothesis.

 

Dale Tuggy on the Athanasian creed

 

Even more on why the skilled trades are not a consolation prize.

 

King of titans?

 

The stones continue to cry out.

 

Dating methods get the third degree

 Fossil Friday: Alleged Precambrian Fossil Unmasked as Rotten Beehive

Gunter Bechly

When the Covid pandemic struck in 2020 a scientific conference in India was cancelled, and some stranded scientists used their unexpected free time as an opportunity for a field trip to the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in central India, a famous UNESCO World Heritage site of ancient rock art. One of these scientists was paleontologist Gregory Retallack, a retired professor from the University of Oregon and expert on Ediacaran fossils. The Maihar Sandstone rocks of the cave have been attributed to the Upper Vindhyan strata, which are of contentious Precambrian age between 1,600 to 541 million years old (Nature 2021, Kwafo et al. 2023). Retallack noticed strange impressions high up on the walls of the cave, which he identified as three specimens of the fossil Ediacaran organism Dickinsonia. Retallack found that “the fossils are identical with Dickinsonia tenuis from the Ediacara Member of the Rawnsley Quartzite in South Australia.”

This would have represented not just the first record of Dickinsonia in India, but would have also confirmed the younger Ediacaran age of the Bhimbetka rocks and rewritten our understanding of the plate tectonic history of the Indian subcontinent. Retallack published his remarkble discovery with a team of five co-authors in the high-impact journal Gondwana Research (Retallack et al. 2021). The prestigious

       journal Nature commented that the “fossil from dawn of animal life found in India’s famous caves … offers insights into the range of emerging complex life” (Nature 2021). Of course, the sensational discovery attracted worldwide media coverage from the New York Times to the Weather Channel.

                 

Isn’t Science Cool?!

Well, earlier this year a new study by a team of scientists from the University of Florida and from India turned the cool science into a real bummer. The scientists revisited the site and discovered that the assumed Ediacaran fossils are neither of Ediacaran age nor represent fossils at all, but are just the recent remains of decayed and fallen beehives. The patterns of remaining wax, where the beehives were attached to the cave wall and fell off, just accidently happened to resemble the shape of Dickinsonia fossils at first glance. That’s a big oopsie. The debunking evidence was so overwhelming (Meert et al. 2023, also see Kwafo et al. 2023 and Pandey et al. 2023) that even the original authors publicly admitted their mistaken identification (Retallack et al. 2023), for which they have even been praised as a kind of heroes of science (University of Florida 2023). Of course, this retraction renders all the grandiose conclusions about the age of the rocks and the paleogeography of India moot as well (University of Florida 2023, Kwafo et al. 2023).

There is another point I would like to mention: It is a common creationist meme often repeated on social media that paleontologists engage in circular reasoning because they date the rocks with fossils and the fossils with the rocks they are found in. This is simply not true in many cases, where different dating techniques like radiometric datings and paleomagnetography supplement biostratigraphic evidence. But the present case also illustrates that the trope is not totally off. Here is what the scientists commented (University of Florida 2023): “Correcting the fossil record puts the age of the rocks back into contention. Because the rock formation doesn’t have any fossils from a known time period, dating it can be difficult.” Read the last sentence again and let it sink in.

Hard Rocks, Soft Science

It is also interesting to note that an old dating of 900 million years and a younger dating of 550 million years are both supported by the same radiometric U-Pb dating technique of Upper Vindhyan zircon crystals (Lan et al. 2020, Nature 2021). So, radiometric methods clearly are not as reliable and precise as many scientists love to think. This does not mean that the consensus geological timeline is totally wrong, but it at least shows that questioning such datings is not irrational either. That renowned scientists can engage in Rorschach play with accidental patterns on rock walls and produce peer-reviewed scientific papers with far-reaching evolutionary conclusions from such pseudoscientific endeavours will likely raise further justified doubts in paleontological evidence for evolution in general. Even though the fossil rocks are hard, the interpreting science often seems to be very soft!

References

Kwafo S, Singha A, Pandit M & Meert J 2023. Reply to the comment by Retallack et al. (2023) on “Stinging News: ‘Dickinsonia’ discovered in the Upper Vindhyan of India not worth the buzz”. Gondwana Research 118, 160–162. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2023.02.016

Lan Z, Zhang S, Li X-H, Pandey SK, Sharma M, Shukla Y, Ahmad S, Sarkar S & Zhai M 2020. Towards resolving the ‘jigsaw puzzle’ and age-fossil inconsistency within East Gondwana. Precambrian Research 345:105775. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.precamres.2020.105775

Meert JG, Pandit MK, Kwafo S & Singha A 2023. Stinging News: ‘Dickinsonia’ discovered in the Upper Vindhyan of India not worth the buzz. Gondwana Research 117, 1–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2023.01.003

Nature 2021. Fossil from dawn of animal life found in India’s famous cave. Nature India February 17, 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/nindia.2021.30

Pandey SK, Ahmad S & Sharma M 2023. Dickinsonia tenuis reported by Retallack et al. 2021 is not a fossil, instead an impression of an extant ‘fallen beehive’. Journal of the Geological Society of India 99, 311–316. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12594-023-2312-2

Retallack GJ, Matthews NA, Master S, Khangar RG & Khan M 2021. Dickinsonia discovered in India and late Ediacaran biogeography. Gondwana Research 90, 165–170. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2

Retallack GJ, Master S, Khangar RG & Khan M 2023. Discussion on “Stinging News: ‘Dickinsonia’ discovered in the Upper Vindhyan of India not worth the buzz” by Meert, et al. (2023). Gondwana Research 118, 163–164. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gr.2023.02.006

University of Florida 2023. Mistaken fossil rewrites history of Indian subcontinent for second time. ScienceDaily February 1, 2023. https://www.sciencedaily.co

Michael Denton on why there must first be light.

 Denton Explains How Light Sustains Human Life

Michael Denton

On a classic episode of ID the Future, biochemist and medical doctor Michael Denton explores a “miraculous convergence of properties” for life. The topic is Denton’s book Children of Light: The Astonishing Properties of Sunlight That Make Us Possible, part of his Privileged Species book series that also includes The Miracle of Man, The Miracle of the Cell, The Wonder of Water, and Fire-Maker. Here, Denton lets his astonishment flow freely in an interview with host Sarah Chaffee, with topics ranging from the light of the sun to key chemicals here on Earth. “The atmosphere lets through just the light we need,” says Denton, “and the sun puts out just the light we need. It’s a remarkable coincidence…The atmosphere does just what is needed for life on Earth.” Taken together, it’s an astonishing array of evidence showing how finely tuned Earth is for human life. And the common-sense conclusion, Denton says, is that a designing intelligence is the most adequate explanation for the properties on our planet that make life like us possible. This is Part 1 of a two-part discussion. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

A big little house?

 

David Berlinski deconstructs scientism

 Ovid in His Exile

David Berlinski

Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome Science After Babel, the latest book from mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski. This article is adapted from Chapter 14.

Schermerhorn Hall at Columbia University was the scene of many strange experiments. One day, a very young chimpanzee escaped from the building and, flushed with its freedom, began to gambol and frolic on the pathetic square of shabby and well-worn grass that served as a lawn in front of the building. A crowd quickly collected. The mathematician Lipman Bers joined me. A scruffy puppy noticed the commotion and scooted into the square where the chimpanzee was playing. The two animals promptly became friends, but the puppy, it soon became apparent, was less intelligent than the chimpanzee. Again and again he would find himself maneuvered into absurd and humiliating positions. “So stupid,” snorted Bers, referring to the dog. Pleased and flattered by the attention, the chimpanzee began to refine his act and play to the crowd, using gestures, and even facial expressions — the universal rictus of triumph, for example — that everyone recognized. After a while, the chimpanzee’s frantic owner, a rather dishy young woman, I recall, collared him in the courtyard and the game was over. As the chimpanzee was led away, he waved to the crowd, a true sportsman. The puppy sat on its haunches and panted assiduously.

The Incompetent and the Indifferent

I learned later from Bers that research biologists were trying to teach the chimpanzee American Sign Language. They had been working with an older animal, but evidently the beast, while learning some signs, grew unsurprisingly to detest his owners, who finally shipped him to a zoo in San Diego. There he occupied himself unprofitably in attempting to teach the other animals to sign, a splendid case of the incompetent endeavoring to instruct the indifferent.

“A vast tragedy,” Bers remarked sentimentally, “like Ovid in his exile.”

I mention this sad little story only to remark on its ironic conclusion. For a time during the 1970s, a number of biologists were actually convinced that they had taught chimpanzees and great apes to talk; many of them reported long conversations, chiefly about bananas (Me: More!), that they held with their charges. Their research was no sooner published than it was accepted and believed, largely, I think, because a crude Darwinian theory — there is no other — made it difficult to imagine that profound and ineradicable differences exist between human beings and the rest of the animal world. Penny Peterson at Stanford, Herbert Terrace at MIT, and David Premack at the University of Pennsylvania all convinced themselves that somehow the great apes had sat in stony silence throughout the vast reaches of biological time only because they lacked human conversational companionship.

Nothing to Say

The inevitable, skeptical reaction soon set in. Videotapes taken of chimpanzees revealed, when carefully analyzed, that what had passed for chimpanzee conversation was nothing more than prompted signings in the best of cases — a record of the beast’s pathetic endeavor to say whatever it was that his trainer wished him to say; in the worst of cases, the beast simply babbled (More Me More More!), his signs utterly devoid of meaning. Herbert Terrace, who had wasted years in browbeating the poor creatures, examined videotapes of his own encounters with his animals and came away shaken. Some work, of course, continues, but to little effect. Ever credulous, scientists now report that they have engaged the dolphin in stimulating conversation. Next year, no doubt, it will be the turkey.

Seventeenth-century Jesuits wondered why dogs do not talk. Their conclusion bears repeating. They have nothing to say.

Yet another clash of titans

 

It evolved because it survived/it survived because it evolved.

 Andrew Xiao Confirms Adenine Methylation in Mammals—Thinks it Evolved

Cornelius G Hunter

Evolutionists are going to need a bigger rug as Yale professor Andrew Xiao now has a new pile of stuff he is absurdly trying to ascribe to evolution. Xiao’s team has confirmed that in mammals the fundamental epigenetic signal—the methyl group—is sometimes attached to a second type of DNA base. DNA is made up of four types of bases (cytosine [C], guanine [G], adenine [A] and thymine [T]) and, as in the lower species, methyl groups are sometimes attached to adenine in mammals as well.

Such epigenetic signals help to cause directed adaptation in organisms—the ability to rapidly respond to new environmental challenges. And this new finding means that not just with cytosine, but with adenine as well, random mutations must have created the proteins (i) to attach the methyl groups and (ii) to remove them.

Both types of proteins are needed to make the epigenetic response work. With either protein alone, you just have chaos.

You also need the network of signals and regulation to set these proteins in action at the proper times, and only at the proper times. And of course these epigenetic signals must somehow influence the transcription process.

This isn’t going to happen with random mutations. And, no, natural selection doesn’t help.

But this is only the beginning.

In the lower species, attaching the methyl group to adenine caused gene activation. But in the mammals studied, the new research found that adenine methylation caused gene inactivation. In other words, the exact same methylation signal attached to the same nitrogen atom in the same base, somehow reversed polarity.

That makes no sense. Any change in polarity in the circuitry logic would throw the system into chaos. Imagine your thermostat now works in reverse. When you adjust the temperature lower, the heater rather than the air conditioner, turns on. You wanted it to be cooler, but instead it got even hotter.

Such a change in polarity in the circuitry would have to take place simultaneously, at several functions throughout the logic. This isn’t going to happen with random mutations. And, no, natural selection doesn’t help.

This is all a bad joke. The science makes no sense on evolution, and like the drunk at the party, evolutionists are the only ones who don’t get it.

Posted by Cornelius Hunter

Continuing to rethink the unrethinkable

 

The origin of life : the state of the science

 

Child prostitution: a brief history.

Child prostitution

Wikipedia 

Child prostitution is prostitution involving a child, and it is a form of commercial sexual exploitation of children. The term normally refers to prostitution of a minor, or person under the legal age of consent. In most jurisdictions, child prostitution is illegal as part of general prohibition on prostitution.

Child prostitution usually manifests in the form of sex trafficking, in which a child is kidnapped or tricked into becoming involved in the sex trade, or survival sex, in which the child engages in sexual activities to procure basic essentials such as food and shelter. Prostitution of children is commonly associated with child pornography, and they often overlap. Some people travel to foreign countries to engage in child sex tourism. Research suggests that there may be as many as 10 million children involved in prostitution worldwide.[1] The practice is most widespread in South America and Asia, but prostitution of children exists globally,[2] in undeveloped countries as well as developed.[3] Most of the children involved with prostitution are girls, despite an increase in the number of young boys in the trade.

All member countries of the United Nations have committed to prohibiting child prostitution, either under the Convention on the Rights of the Child or the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. Various campaigns and organizations have been created to try to stop the practice.

Several definitions have been proposed for prostitution of children. The United Nations defines it as "the act of engaging or offering the services of a child to perform sexual acts for money or other consideration with that person or any other person".[4] The Convention on the Rights of the Child's Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution, and Child Pornography defines the practice as "the act of obtaining, procuring or offering the services of a child or inducing a child to perform sexual acts for any form of compensation or reward". Both emphasize that the child is a victim of exploitation, even if apparent consent is given.[5] The Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999, (Convention No 182) of the International Labour Organization (ILO) describes it as the "use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution".[6]

According to the International Labour Office in Geneva, prostitution of children and child pornography are two primary forms of child sexual exploitation, which often overlap.[2] The former is sometimes used to describe the wider concept of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). It excludes other identifiable manifestations of CSEC, such as commercial sexual exploitation through child marriage, domestic child labor, and the trafficking of children for sexual purposes.[7]

The terminology applied to the practice is a subject of dispute. The United States Department of Justice states, "The term itself implies the idea of choice, when in fact that is not the case."[8] Groups that oppose the practice believe that the terms child prostitution and child prostitute carry problematic connotations because children are generally not expected to be able to make informed decisions about prostitution. As an alternative, they use the terms prostituted children and the commercial sexual exploitation of children.[9] Other groups use the term child sex worker to imply that the children are not always "passive victims".[9]

Prostitution of children exists in every country, though the problem is most severe in South America and Asia.[27] The number of prostituted children is rising in other parts of the world, including North America, Africa, and Europe.[27] Exact statistics are difficult to obtain,[60] and in some cases, such as that of Argentina, child prostitution is considered to be on the rise but without reliable statistics.[61][62] However, it is estimated that there are around 10 million children involved in prostitution worldwide.[1]

The missing mass is still missing?

 

More on Abraham's divided house.

 

Professor Dave :Darwinism's LVP Has got the argument by insult and assertion down to a science.

 My “Debate” with Professor Dave

Jonathan McLatchie

Editor’s note: A YouTuber, angry atheist, and self-styled science educator, “Professor Dave” Farina came to our attention for the sole reason that his YouTube channel, “Professor Dave Explains,” has a significant following. With this in mind, Günter Bechly, Jonathan McLatchie, and others have responded to his videos about intelligent design. On Twitter, Dr. McLatchie took some time to engage in an exchange with Farina, which reflects the quality of the latter’s thinking, such as it is. The following has been edited mostly for clarity.

McLatchie: Here is part 3 of my ongoing Series responding to Mr. Dave Farina’s criticisms of Professor Mike Behe’s work.

Farina: Get ready for the top search result for your name on both Google and YouTube being me taking a big steamy dump all over your dumb science denying apologist face.

McLatchie: I’m quaking in my boots…

McLatchie: Are you willing to acknowledge any of your mistakes and misrepresentations in your video response to Behe?

Farina: I didn’t make any mistakes, and I didn’t read your dog**t blog posts. But don’t worry, later I’ll make a video going through your lies and humiliating you just like I did your other idiot colleagues. Enjoy!

McLatchie: I’m curious how you know that I’m wrong if you haven’t even read my blog posts yet? 

Farina: Um, you’re a sh**bag apologist who works for a disgusting propaganda mill. You’re always wrong. All of you are always wrong. That’s literally your purpose in life. Just stop talking, dumba**.

McLatchie: In case anyone needed any further justification of why we don’t take @daveexplains very seriously…

Farina: This is why nobody takes YOU seriously, f***tard. You just whine about how mean I am instead of being able to refute anything I say. Enjoy continuing to be the laughing stock of the scientific community, dumba**.

McLatchie: I am happy to list several items that I take to be evidence for evolution and surprising on my perspective of ID. How many cases can you list of data points that tend to confirm ID and are surprising on evolution?

Farina: Nothing confirms ID, dumbass. It isn’t science. Get your life together.

McLatchie: Now what does that say about who of the two of us is adopting more of a scientific mindset and is persuadable by the evidence?

Farina: It says that I’m someone who acknowledges science and you’re a brainwashed loser upholding religious propaganda in the face of overwhelming evidence proving you wrong. How long do you wanna keep humiliating yourself here, moron?

McLatchie: A major red flag that confirmation bias plays a significant role in your reasoning is when you cannot concede the presence of any weaknesses in, or evidence against, your own position.

Farina: There is no evidence against evolution. You’re just brainwashed and stupid. Pretending that you aren’t a stooge for an anti-science propaganda organization is a major red flag. And you whine about confirmation bias. 

McLatchie: You contend that you didn’t make any mistakes. Are you sure about that? E.g., you claim in your video that Behe asserts that malaria cannot achieve resistance to chloroquine. But in The Edge of Evolution, Behe states precisely the opposite. Would you like to correct yourself?

McLatchie: Do I hear crickets?

[CRICKETS]

McLatchie: I shall take the silence as a tacit admission that you made an error here. Let’s take another example. You cited a paper that you claimed showed the evolution of a flagellum under experimental conditions. But the paper doesn’t say this, as I show in my Article.

McLatchie: All that the researchers deleted was the flagellar master switch protein, FleQ, in Pseudomonas fluorescens. After a few days of incubating the bacterial cells on Petri dishes, they reacquired their ability to grow flagella.

McLatchie: Basically, another master switch protein, NtrC, that is a structurally similar homolog of FleQ already had the ability to cross-bind to the promoter usually bound by FleQ. When produced in excess, as a result of a broken regulator, NtrC was thus able to drive flagellar synthesis.

McLatchie: I was wondering whether you would be happy to concede that you misrepresented this paper?

[CRICKETS]

McLatchie: Unfortunately, @daveexplains doesn’t seem willing to respond when others, such as myself, document undisputable mistakes in his work. This is a really bad trait to have, particularly as one who promotes himself as a science educator.

[CRICKETS]

McLatchie: I am going to take your silence, again, as a tacit admission that you were in error on the above two points.

McLatchie: Here is the fourth and final installment of my Series responding to Mr. Dave Farina’s criticisms of Professor Mike Behe’s work.

Farina: I’m glad you got your little tantrum out! I look forward to the tenth DI errand boy pretending to debunk my video where I hand you’re a** to you. Gotta dunk on Bechly again first though, so sit tight for that, dumba**.

The physics of design?

 Physics, Information Loss, and Intelligent Design

Eric Hedin

In an earlier article, I showed that information ratchets do not exist in nature. The most that any mechanistic system can do is to reproduce the information already available within the system. Printing presses reproduce the typeset information placed in the mechanism by human operators. ChatGPT simply accesses and rearranges information originated by humans and uploaded on the Internet. No new information is produced in either case.

In a recent article, I introduced the physical concept of the generalized second law of thermodynamics, as a governing principle consistent with the Law of Conservation of Information, which William Dembski formulated with the claim that natural causes cannot increase complex specified information in a closed system over time. Here, I’ll seek to provide an explanation of the physics behind the generalized second law — a rationale for why natural processes destroy information.

A Starting Point

First, let’s consider something that may be more easily visualized than information flow. Imagine a system where heat flows from a hot region to a cold region under the constraint of the traditional second law of thermodynamics. The Clausius statement of the traditional second law of thermodynamics tells us that nature works in such a way that heat never flows the other way around. When I add cold cream to my hot coffee, heat flows from the coffee into the cream, until the mixture comes to an equilibrium temperature. The one-way flow of heat is irreversible by natural causes, and the reason is based in the physics of how nature works.

We say an object is “hot” when the average kinetic energy of its component atoms is high. My hot coffee has molecules with higher kinetic energy, on average, than the molecules of the cold cream. When they are mixed in the cup, collisions between atoms occur. First-year physics students will be familiar with a problem asking for the final velocities of two colliding objects, in terms of their initial velocities. For head-on elastic collisions, using the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, the result is always that the slower object ends up moving faster and the faster object ends up moving slower. Cream added to hot coffee unavoidably gives a mixture in which the coffee has lost heat to the cream.

What about the less physical concept of information? How can we physically explain the relentless loss of information by natural processes? Information seems to be a nonphysical concept, but in our universe, it is stored in specific arrangements of physical states of matter. An intelligent mind can recognize specific arrangements of matter (such as molecules of ink that form letters on a page) that convey a meaningful message. In a different context, biochemists can recognize particular sequences of nucleotide bases in a genome that code for a functional protein. 

Linking Information and Observer

All the information that can be known by an observer about a system of any kind is contained within the quantum mechanical wavefunction of the system. My apologies for bringing up quantum mechanics, but its relevance here is that it serves as the link between the information of a system (anything from a single atom to a complex biomolecule to a macroscopic object) and an observer. Unless the wave function of the system is completely isolated from any environmental influence, it will suffer decoherence (loss of information) with the passage of time. In one sense, the wavefunction spreads out into the environment, meaning that the observer will have greater and greater uncertainty as to the state of the system as time goes on. The physical interaction of atoms or photons uncompromisingly causes this effect, with its resulting loss of information.

Some might argue that “luck” could result in an opposite outcome, with interactions causing an increase in information (in biochemistry, this would correlate with increased functional complexity). Why couldn’t this happen? Simply because there are always more ways to go wrong than to go right, when considering whether interactions will result in chaos or increased complex specified information. 

An increase in information requires not just one right choice (or lucky draw), but a long sequence of correct choices. Luck might happen once, but any gambler knows that if “lucky outcomes” keep happening against the odds, then the game is rigged. A “rigged game” in nature corresponds to a law of physics — in this case, a law causing information to increase over time by natural causes. Such a law cannot really exist, however, since we already have a law of nature that says the opposite. As I mentioned in a recent article, “Theistic Cosmology and Theistic Evolution — Understanding the Difference”: 

In our study of science, we have found that the laws of nature do not contradict one another. We don’t have laws of nature that only apply piecemeal.

Imagination and Freedom

Only by the action of non-physical intelligence can the natural process of decoherence and information loss be overcome. Information is meaningless apart from a rational mind, meaning the creation of new information requires more than knowledge. Increased information requires imagination and the freedom to creatively design complex outcomes that convey meaning or exhibit function. (See, “Intelligence Is Unnatural, and Why That Matters.”)

The non-physical aspect of our intelligent minds can succeed in producing information because an intelligent mind can imagine a meaningful outcome and act to separate the components of a complex system from their natural mixed state into specific arrangements that actualize that outcome. This takes work, meaning it requires energy, but not energy alone, since without the guidance of a non-physical mind, energy cannot succeed in increasing information in a closed system. Intelligent design remains the only explanation consistent with the laws of physics for the increasing information content of living systems throughout life’s history on Earth.

Peace on earth : the real final frontier?

 William Shatner and Our Privileged Planet

Gunter Bechly

William Shatner wrote about the experience of space flight, back in December in The Guardian:

Last year, at the age of 90, I had a life-changing experience. I went to space, after decades of playing a science-fiction character who was exploring the universe and building connections with many diverse life forms and cultures. I thought I would experience a similar feeling: a feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration. A call to indeed boldly go where no one had gone before.

I was absolutely wrong. As I explained in my latest book, what I felt was totally different. I knew that many before me had experienced a greater sense of care while contemplating our planet from above, because they were struck by the apparent fragility of this suspended blue marble. I felt that too. But the strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

I worry about the world my grandchildren will be living in when they are my age

This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I played my part in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.

Shatner‘s surprising revelation may be interpreted by some as an environmentalist creed, but I rather see it as a poetical formulation of the fine-tuning of Earth for life. It shows that atheists like Bill Nye are wrong when they say we are just an insignificant speck of dust in an average galaxy. We clearly are special and significant and certainly not an accident.

On a related subject, I was asked recently, “Why would a God create such an enormous universe and only give life to one tiny speck of dust?” Well, imagine you would like to teach two important lessons to your creatures: 1) you are very special; 2) but don‘t become a megalomaniac because God is infinitely greater than you. The universe would get both points across pretty well.

Privatize everything?

 

Titans in the arena.

 

Darwin cross examined?

 

The Americas: a brief history.

 

On propaganda and propagandists?

 

Return of the soldier of fortune?

 

The future of aviation?

 

Another clash of Titans.

 

The ins and outs of black holes?

 

SETI And the elephant in the room.

 The Search for ET Artifacts Misses the Elephant.

Jonathan Witt

Now that NASA’s freakishly powerful James Webb Space Telescope is fully operational, there is renewed chatter about the possibility of discovering extra-terrestrial life. Our galaxy alone is filled with hundreds of billions of stars, and the thinking among many space geeks is that some of these are bound to support living planets, and some of those are bound to have fostered intelligent creatures who have developed technology capable of sending radio signals and even spaceships to distant star systems, including our own.

An Elusive Mediocrity

Then there are the skeptics. In the summer of 1950, four top physicists were discussing the possibility that the universe is teaming with advanced extra-terrestrials. Later, when they sat down to lunch, one of them blurted, “But where is everybody?” In other words, if the universe is chock full of extra-terrestrial space cowboys, why aren’t we overrun with them? Instead, at the time there was not one verified piece of evidence of any extra-terrestrials, the various dodgy UFO reports in the popular media of the day notwithstanding. 

The man who posed the question was Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, and his puzzler has come to be known as “Fermi’s Paradox.” The paradox persists because there still isn’t a single verified piece of evidence for extraterrestrials, and this despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent searching for them.

Of course, the situation is only puzzling if we assume nature burps up living planets and intelligent life as effortlessly as Michigan highways breed potholes in spring. Fermi’s Paradox dissolves if one assumes that a living planet like ours is extraordinarily rare, perhaps even unique. The problem is that such an explanation runs afoul of a principle cherished by many cosmologists, known as the mediocrity principle. According to this idea, not only are we not the center of the universe, we aren’t special in any way, and to think otherwise is egotistical superstitious benighted Medieval nonsense.

Many opponents of Christianity cherish the mediocrity principle because it undercuts the Judeo-Christian belief that humans are special, the crown of God’s creation. But even some anti-religious materialists have nevertheless abandoned the mediocrity principle, for one or both of two reasons. 

First, there is mounting evidence planets like Earth may be highly unusual, requiring as they do a long list of fortuitously fine-tuned parameters to support life. Second, even with a habitable planet to work with, nature faces the daunting challenge of conjuring a planet’s first life from non-life. Before you can invoke a Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection, you first need a self-reproducing biological entity, and it’s increasingly clear that even the simplest such cell is extraordinarily sophisticated. How does a lifeless mix of chemicals in a primordial ocean toss together something like that? If it is even possible, it is a freak occurrence, like winning a multi-million-dollar lottery forty years in a row without anyone gaming the system. 

The ET Enlightenment Myth

So, then, maybe we are the only intelligent creatures in the universe, a freak one-off in the history of the cosmos. Some conclude this and go even further to insist that we are utterly alone, without even a God in heaven to fill the void of cosmic loneliness. 

Yes, pretty dark, and I would guess, a pretty unpopular position, perhaps because humans are strongly attracted to the idea that some sort of wise savior figure is out there — if not, God, then ancestral spirits or pagan gods or, in a contemporary incarnation, superhumanly wise and powerful ETs. The films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Contact (1997) are just two of the many science fiction stories that trade on this theme. 

In Unbelievable: 7 Myths about the History and Future of Science and Religion, historian of science Michael Keas dedicates a chapter to what he calls the “ET enlightenment myth.” He says the cultural loss of faith in a creator God has left a void, and “the ET enlightenment myth now fills that void for many people.”

The Search for Alien Artifacts

Between those animated by this ET salvation myth and those who are simply curious about what is out there among all the billions of stars in the universe, there is a lot of interest in seeing if we have the means and the ingenuity to uncover evidence of extra-terrestrials. To that end, Space.com recently published a piece by Paul Sutter, “If Aliens Have Visited the Solar System, Here’s How to Find Clues They Left.” Sutter shifts the focus from the longstanding Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) to a companion strategy: 

So far, all searches for extraterrestrial life have come up empty. But there is another avenue that is relatively unexplored: the search for extraterrestrial artifacts (SETA). The idea behind this approach is that if aliens become advanced enough, they might want to explore the galaxy.… In the roughly 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system, these aliens would have had plenty of time to swing by our neighborhood and maybe leave a mark.

Sutter then distills a recent paper in which astronomers describe various types of alien remnants we might be able to discover, including “spacecraft, probes and even just trash,” either in space or on the surface of a planet or moon.

How would we tell a piece of ET tech from a natural space object? In many cases it might be a no-brainer, but not necessarily. For instance, it could be a fragment of advanced technology so foreign to ours that we wouldn’t immediately recognize it as technology. And we might have to decide from only a grainy telescopic photograph of the object. 

Nevertheless, Sutter is confident there are many ways we might detect ET artifacts or their aftermath. For instance, any spacecraft able to travel from a distant star system would possess an extraordinarily powerful propulsion system, potentially rendering its exhaust trail visible to the James Webb Space Telescope or the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Alternately, “If aliens opened up a strip mine on Mercury, for example, we would still be able to see it today.” “Or… we may be able to find geochemical anomalies — the result of tinkering with chemical processes on a world (or just outright pollution).”

Hunting for ET artifacts may sound fringe, but it’s being pursued by mainstream astronomers.

SETI, SETA, and Design Detection

Set aside the question of whether such pursuits are money well spent. Consider instead a significant feature of both SETA and SETI. SETI got a major PR boost from the movie Contact, based on a novel by astronomer Carl Sagan. SETI employs radio telescopes to search the heavens for signals from extra-terrestrial civilizations. 

In Contact, a scientist detects a curious signal from the star system Vega, one that repeats a sequence of prime numbers. While the scenario is fictional, it conveys how SETI could readily determine if a signal was indeed from an alien intelligence rather than purely natural, such as the regular radio wave pulses emitted by a neutron star. A signal that embedded a long series of prime numbers isn’t something natural processes can generate. It’s an instance of complex specified information. If the signal embedded the same number over and over, it wouldn’t be complex — e.g., 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, etc. If it embedded a random series of numbers, it wouldn’t be specified. That is, it wouldn’t match an obvious purpose or preexisting pattern. The series of prime numbers embedded in the signal in Contact, however, does. It’s both specified and complex. In our experience, the creation of specified complexity — also known as complex specified information — is strictly the purview of intelligent agents, who, unlike natural processes, routinely generate such information in the form of novels, poems, text messages, software programs, and other artifacts. 

There is much to explore in the logical steps involved in reasoning to intelligent design as the best explanation in such cases, but the gist of it runs like this: both reason and our uniform experience strongly suggest that natural processes do not and cannot produce specified complexity. The one type of cause we have ever witnessed doing so is creative intelligence. So creative intelligence is the best explanation when we find examples of it. 

Strategies for differentiating extra-terrestrial artifacts from natural objects involve similar reasoning. Recall that Sutter says we might discover an ET artifact by looking for “geochemical anomalies — the result of tinkering with chemical processes on a world.” How would we know if a geochemical anomaly was the result of ET activity? Presumably by considering various explanations for the anomalies, both natural and artificial. If the anomalies are beyond the reach of natural processes to produce and possess the signature of intelligent design — that is, specified complexity — the researchers could reasonably infer that the geochemical anomalies were the product of intelligent design.

The Elephant in the Room 

Both SETA and SETI share something in common with the theory of intelligent design (ID). They are searching for evidence of the past creative activity of extra-terrestrial intelligence. The principal difference is that ID researchers do so without question-begging constraints on their search. If nature itself possesses the signature of intelligent activity, so be it. Follow the evidence. Contemporary microscopic technology has uncovered molecular biological machines of astonishing sophistication, far beyond our most advanced technologies. Even the simplest cell capable of self-reproduction is a nanotech factory that puts our most advanced factories to shame, and it requires reams of precisely sequenced biological information, much of it found in the four-character alphabet of DNA.

Physicist and engineer Brian Miller points out that mainstream systems biology operates on the working assumption that biological systems are optimally engineered systems. Many systems biologists, he says, pay lip service to evolutionary theory, but they don’t approach the biological systems they study as contraptions thrown together by mindless natural forces. They approach them as masterpieces of engineering, an approach that is proving extraordinarily fruitful. 

Miller offers an analogy. Imagine that what appears to be a highly advanced alien spacecraft is discovered abandoned in the desert. It’s quite different from our spaceships, right down to the materials used in it. Half the scientists who arrive to study it refuse to believe it’s an alien spacecraft and insist instead that it originated through purely natural processes — rain, wind, erosion, perhaps an odd volcanic eruption. The other half decides that, no, it really is an alien spacecraft, and they set about trying to understand how the various parts are meant to contribute to its overall function. Which group, Miller asks, do you think will make better progress toward understanding the alien craft? The group, of course, who recognize that it’s the work of intelligent and purposive design

The same goes for biology. Those practicing systems biology are making much more progress than those committed to the old, reductionist Darwinian approach. 

Intelligent design biologists are in the camp of the systems biologists, but where they stand out from rank-and-file systems biologists is in adapting the design rubric frankly and wholeheartedly. That is, they are convinced that treating biological systems as works of high-tech engineering is proving fruitful precisely because the biological systems really are the work of high-tech engineering, in this case, an extra-terrestrial intelligence far beyond any depicted in Contact or 2001: A Space Odyssey.