Friday, 13 October 2023
But by JEHOVAH'S Spirit!
Zechariah Ch.4:6ASV"Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of JEHOVAH unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith JEHOVAH of hosts. "
None of the struggles among the contending religiopolitical factions of this present age have anything to do with anybody's freedom.
Words like liberty and Justice are being cleverly weaponised to exploit collective insecurities in service of the acquisition of power.
It's a dangerous game. And those who play this game keep forgetting history's lessons re:the idolising of hard power.
Politics can only bring death and destruction. The last thing humanity needs is more politics. Only JEHOVAH'S Spirit can (as his loyalists can testify) bring peace and life ( even resurrecting the dead).
Interrogating yet another Darwinian Just so story.
Chinks in the Chicxulub Story
Evolutionists have a strange theory of causation. Disasters drive living things to emerge and arise, like Phoenix out of the flames, into greater levels of complexity and beauty. What in the blazes of a conflagration awards regenerative power to survivors?
We have roses, petunias, and orchids, we are told, because a big rock slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago. We also have delicate butterflies and shrews, but none of the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, or ichthyosaurs. Dinosaurs, the fossil record shows, ranged in size from the mighty T. rex and long-necked sauropods down to species the size of chickens. They lived in all parts of the world, even in the Arctic. Some may have been warm blooded. Though they had survived on a dynamic planet for 135 million years, they all perished because of one space rock that landed in the Yucatan, leaving the Chicxulub Crater as a scar.
The event brought the Cretaceous Period to a close and launched the Paleogene, a boundary designated K-Pg. Not a single dinosaur survived, but strangely, the asteroid didn’t discriminate against all the reptiles, because lizards, snakes, and crocodiles are still with us. Delicate butterflies, worms, frogs, flowering plants, tweety birds, and small mammals made it through. All these groups didn’t just survive, we are told, but they catapulted upward into evolutionary glory. Does something sound strange about this scenario? It gets stranger still. Consider flowering plants. From Jamie Thompson at The Conversation:
However, it’s not clear how they did it. Angiosperms, so fragile compared with dinosaurs, cannot fly or run to escape harsh conditions. They rely on sunlight for their existence, which was blotted out.
Fossils in different regions tell different versions of events. It is clear there was high angiosperm turnover (species loss and resurgence) in the Amazon when the asteroid hit, and a decline in plant-eating insects in North America which suggests a loss of food plants. But other regions, such as Patagonia, show no pattern.
Mammals, too, were “not as boring” as thought before the asteroid hit, according to the Field Museum in Chicago. They were already specialized in various groups with distinct lifestyles. This overturns a long-assumed idea that only generic, unspecialized types would be able to diversify after an extinction event.
“The idea of the ‘survival of the unspecialized’ goes back to the 1800s, and the conventional wisdom is that generalized animals are the least likely to go extinct. But we found that the ones that survived more often only seemed generalized in hindsight, when compared with their later descendents. They were actually pretty advanced animals for their time, with new traits that might have helped them survive and provided evolutionary flexibility,” says Ken Angielczyk, the MacArthur Curator of Paleomammalogy at the Field Museum and senior author of the study in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Evolutionary flexibility: yes, Darwin storytellers are quite the contortionists. The curators of the museum call this finding “Survival of the Newest” — “having new and different traits can be the key to succeeding in the aftermath of a catastrophe.” Did this strategy give rise to giraffes, elephants, lions, monkeys, and people? Prior specialization was also true of birds, now that we know that birds resembling modern ducks and shorebirds were living before the K-Pg disaster.
Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
A common theme in the evolutionary accounts of mass extinctions is that geological disasters create opportunities for evolutionary progress. Disasters are healthy for evolution. They clear the land for new ecosystems. Dr. Thompson put it this way in news from the University of Bath:
After most of Earth’s species became extinct at K-Pg, angiosperms took the advantage, similar to the way in which mammals took over after the dinosaurs, and now pretty much all life on Earth depends on flowering plants ecologically.
Looking at the bright side, Peter Wilf at Penn State treats the asteroid like a welcoming maître d’:
The K-Pg extinction ushered in the rise and true dominance of flowering plants and helped establish the planet’s tropical rainforests that hold most of its biodiversity, Wilf said.
We might call this the Homesteader Theory. With the landscape cleared, survivors glanced into the Wild West, dreaming of a better life in the new frontier. Evolution became the world’s homesteading agency, subsidizing the pioneers with land grants, motivating survivors to start over with new resources, like governments distribute after a hurricane or pandemic. But can Evolution (capitalized as if a benevolent Blind Tinkerer) distribute relief checks in the form of beneficial mutations, hoping that organisms will naturally select them to rise out of poverty and enrich the environment? Is Evolution a wealthy benefactor handing a homeless man on the street some hefty cash, hoping he will improve himself and become an entrepreneur, hiring other homeless people, turning a blighted community into a prosperous town?
Whether or not the disaster happened as believed and held the Earth hostage in dark, wintery conditions for a hundred thousand years, we should question the power of natural selection to “take advantage” of a catastrophe and “usher in” a new paradise of diversification. If organisms were engineered to do that, one might believe it to be possible. But can this happen to blind products of blind processes?
If one stops personifying Evolution and organisms, such a vision sounds highly problematic. Disasters witnessed in recent history have had no such effect. The Tunguska explosion of 1908 flattened trees for 830 square miles in Siberia, but no new species evolved to enter the blast zone. The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 blasted mutation-inducing radiation all through the surrounding countryside, but the same species are slowly returning, none of them with new evolutionary traits. Should we accept an excuse that Evolution has just not had enough time in these cases to show her power? (It’s a she, remember.)
Curiuoser and Curiouser
Another odd scenario in Darwinian storytelling appeared recently: an asteroid created agriculture! According to James Kennett at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant.” Modern humans had been laboriously hunting and gathering from their caves for over a hundred thousand years, but then, 12,800 years ago, boom! A Tunguska-like airburst committed climate change and made them consider planting seeds for the first time to plan for a sustainable future.
To be clear, Kennett said, agriculture eventually arose in several places on Earth in the Neolithic Era, but it arose first in the Levant (present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and parts of Turkey) initiated by the severe climate conditions that followed the impact.
Something clearly happened in the Middle East and perhaps other places around the world, but do disasters cause new bursts of evolution?
Taken together, the evidence presented by these papers, according to the scientists, “implies a novel causative link among extraterrestrial impacts, hemispheric environmental and climatic change, and transformative shifts in human societies and culture, including agricultural development.”
Were intelligent humans incapable of thinking about planting seeds long before an asteroid caused them to do so? Just asking.
Intelligent design theory, with its engineering model, incorporates foresight that can equip organisms for risk management. Evolution has no such ability. In Darwinism, organisms live for the moment. They have neither desire nor power to survive or improve. If they do survive, it is due to sheer dumb luck. Design advocates might agree that those left behind were lucky. But what happened next? Neo-Darwinism would require creatures to wait for a rare beneficial mutation, or an even rarer set of coordinated mutation. Only then could its blind, mindless, impersonal “selector” (by chance) use them to confer some advantage upon the survivors. No government subsidies will follow an asteroid. Only what already exists within the animal or plant, or reshapes their coded instructions, will equip them to thrive.
The neo-Darwinian might respond that previous naturally selected traits had endowed them with tools to survive and diversify. But again, to think consistently as a Darwinian, one must disavow all forms of personification. On Darwin’s view of the world, nobody was around to care. There was no providence, no intervention, no disaster relief program. Whether at K-Pg or long before, organisms could not foresee any need to keep evolving and progressing, nor could they care to. Natural selection could not plan ahead to give an organism a general-purpose survival toolkit with instructions, “In case of asteroid, pull handle.” At best, it could only tinker around with what works in the immediate moment.
The famous line from Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way,” presupposes an inner urge to keep on keeping on. What could be the source of this desire, this unction, this anointing that drives organismal perseverance in the wake of disaster? The interlocutor might retort, “If our shrew-like ancestors at K-Pg didn’t have it, we wouldn’t be here!” So it was caused by chance, then? Wasn’t science supposed to disavow chance explanations and seek necessary and sufficient causes for things? Applying my Mars Rover analogy once more, if Mars were populated with rovers, and some survived after an impact, would it be due to foresight by the designers, or because a few lucky ones had been previously hit with cosmic rays that improved their electronics? Could the proponent of that view say, “Electricity finds a way”?
In the University of Bath news, one of the co-authors ranks groups by adaptability.
Dr Ramírez-Barahona said: “Flowering plants have a remarkable ability to adapt: they use a variety of seed-dispersal and pollination mechanisms, some have duplicated their entire genomes and others have evolved new ways to photosynthesise.
“This ‘flower power’ is what makes them nature’s true survivors.”
A quirky tribute to hippies, perhaps, but it begs the question of why plants survived but dinosaurs did not. One scientific way to evaluate this claim would be to catalog the common traits among all the survivors that provided them with “a remarkable ability to adapt” compared to the losers. It’s hard to imagine all the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and ichthyosaurs from multiple habitats around the globe were so deprived of the special unction to function after one asteroid impact when they had presumably survived numerous other disasters over millions of years. Not even one breeding pair in Russia made it through alive?
Why One Disaster When You Can Have Two?
Not every scientist thinks Chicxulub alone was responsible. A diehard group points to another disaster — the Deccan Traps — as the cause of the dinosaurs’ demise. A team writing in Science Advances gives evidence that repeated “volcanic winters” prior to Chicxulub may have weakened the biosphere:
Independent evidence suggests the Deccan flood basalts erupted in high-flux pulses. Our data suggest that volcanic sulfur degassing from such activity could have caused repeated short-lived global drops in temperature, stressing the ecosystems long before the bolide impact delivered its final blow at the end of the Cretaceous.
Once again, though, whether disasters around K-Pg occurred alone or in combination, we must ask why so many delicate organisms made it through — butterflies, worms, frogs, and birds, as well as other reptile groups. The fact that birds could fly is not an answer. Pterosaurs flew; some were as small as birds. They existed on every continent. All the groups of flying insects survived. Not one dinosaur made it. No extinct reptile on sea, air, or land survived. Why?
Evolutionists have one standard retort: “Birds are dinosaurs!” Well, OK. But true birds were flying around long before Chicxulub. Given the variety of survivors, it seems that a breeding pair of ichthyosaurs in the deep sea could have made it through, or a small pterosaur colony somewhere, or an ankylosaur family in Africa. Given that all the primates derived from the small mammals at K-Pg, it seems a surviving dinosaur colony could have evolved to walk upright by now, like the humanoid reptiles in the cartoons.
Chicxulub was remarkably selective. It brought the Earth a gift of unprecedented evolutionary powers — storytelling powers, I mean.
Thursday, 12 October 2023
Wednesday, 11 October 2023
The Lord JEHOVAH is our Only Hope
Psalm ch.146:3KJV"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help."
Quit looking to politicians for hope (including those claiming the backing of God)
Let the Lord JEHOVAH Alone be your confidence.
File under "well said" C
"Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed— and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors— and they have no comforter."
Ecclesiastes ch.4:1 New International Version
The craftsmanship of a blind watchmaker?
“Astonishing” Clocks Found in Bacteria
Science news from England speaks of the “Astonishing complexity of bacterial circadian clocks.” The astonished scientists hale from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, an “independent, international centre of excellence in plant science, genetics and microbiology.” Why would researchers in the UK and in mainland Europe, predominantly Darwinians, react with astonishment? It was from pondering how evolution could give accurate timepieces to the simplest, most primitive forms of life.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the first to view bacteria with a simple microscope in 1683, was astonished to see life forms this small that were capable of motion and reproduction. William Paley in 1805 would have been astonished to be told that a watch on the heath simply emerged out of the ground. But today’s evolutionists take complexity for granted. Every tissue, organ, and system in biology can be accounted for by the omnipotent hand of natural selection. “Ho-hum” should be the reaction.
Bacteria make up more than 10% of all living things but until recently we had little realization that, as in humans, soil bacteria have internal clocks that synchronize their activities with the 24-hour cycles of day and night on Earth.
New research shows just how complex and sophisticated these bacterial circadian clocks are, clearing the way for an exciting new phase of study….
An international collaboration from Ludwig Maximillian University Munich (LMU Munich), The John Innes Centre, The Technical University of Denmark, and Leiden University, made the discovery by probing gene expression as evidence of clock activity in the widespread soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis.
“Pervasive” Clock Activity
The authors published a paper about this in Science Advances, announcing that the bacterial clock “evokes properties of complex, multicellular circadian systems.” The lead author, Francesca Sartor, noted that the clock activity is “pervasive” in this tiny microbe. It regulates multiple genes and behaviors.
Professor Antony Dodd from the John Innes Centre added, “It is astonishing that a unicellular organism with such a small genome has a circadian clock with some properties that evoke clocks in more complex organisms.”
Moreover, the researchers believe that clocks are widespread in bacteria. What happened to the notion of simple to complex evolution by gradual steps? Would a “blind watchmaker” start with a Rolex?
Professor Ákos T. Kovács, from Leiden University and Technical University of Denmark said… “it is amazing that the circadian clock in Bacillus subtilis — a bacterium with just four thousand genes — has a complex circadian system that is reminiscent of circadian clocks in complex organisms such as flies, mammals, and plants”.
“Just four thousand genes” sounds flippant. Try counting to four thousand out loud; it will take over two hours at two seconds per integer. As you count, think of a molecular machine, regulatory element, or purposeful role represented by every one of those digits. Each bacterial gene, moreover, is composed of 900 base pairs on average. That’s a lot of functional information packed into an organism a micron in diameter. Even so, evolutionary biologists did not expect to find circadian clocks in bacteria that match the functional sophistication of those in flies, mammals, and plants.
Are Genes Blind Watchmakers?
Audrey Mat, a marine biologist at the University of Vienna, says that genes are “The Great Clockmakers.” Writing in The Conversation, she gives the ho-hum response to the existence of timekeepers in living organisms. “The rotations of the Earth, Moon and Sun generate environmental cycles that have favoured the selection of biological clocks.” Under this reasoning, pressure waves favor the selection of ears. Photons favor the selection of eyes. Planet rotations and orbits favor the selection of clocks. Environments can favor things all they can, but complex sensors to detect and use them do not logically follow.
The circadian clock mechanism was first discovered in the fruit fly, also known as Drosophila, in the 1970s. It is based on feedback loops in the transcription and translation of several genes — gene A promotes the expression of gene B, which in turn inhibits the expression of gene A — creating an oscillation. During the day, light induces the diminution of specific factors of the loop via a photoreceptor called cryptochrome. Interestingly, the key factors in the mechanism essentially only comprise a few genes named period, timeless, clock and cycle. However, the fine-tuning and regulation of the clock is based on a complex molecular and neuronal network that ensures its timing and precision.
According to Mat, physical forces not only drive the emergence of devices to sense them; they also tune them and maintain them. They even adjust their responses to the changing seasons. How does Darwinism explain this? It doesn’t:
The circadian clock is not the only clock mechanism that exists in nature. Many biological processes are seasonal, such as the migration of a host of birds and insects, the reproduction and hibernation of many animal species and the flowering of plants. This seasonality is generally dictated by several factors, including by what is known as a circannual clock in the case of many species. The mechanism of this clock has not yet been determined.
Can Clocks Be Darwinized?
The paper in Science Advances makes no claim for Darwinism, either. The authors put evolutionary explanations in future tense:
Discovering mechanisms by which this memory of entrainment conditions during development of a circadian system occurs, in diverse systems, will inform on convergent and divergent evolutionary processes.
That’s all they say about evolution. Don’t hold your breath, though, for answers. Faced with complex functional timekeeping in the most primitive organisms, evolutionary biologists have their storytelling work cut out for them.
Circadian clocks are pervasive throughout nature, yet only recently has this adaptive regulatory program been described in nonphotosynthetic bacteria. Here, we describe an inherent complexity in the Bacillus subtilis circadian clock…. We report that circadian rhythms occur in wild isolates of this prokaryote, thus establishing them as a general property of this species, and that its circadian system responds to the environment in a complex fashion that is consistent with multicellular eukaryotic circadian systems.
The complex abilities of the bacterial species included entrainment, or the following of cues. Like catching a train, entrainment requires sensing environmental cues, called zeitgebers, and getting on board to go somewhere on purpose. This also presupposes a memory of the cues.
Starting Expectations and Startling Conclusions
One doesn’t always see “surprised” in a stodgy scientific paper, but the word stood out in this one:
Entrainment leads to the establishment of a stable phase relationship between the external (environmental) and the internal (circadian) time. Circadian systems use zeitgebers for entrainment, leading to a set of remarkable phenomena. We were surprised to observe that a prokaryote challenged with chronobiological protocols exhibits a variety of highly complex entrainment properties…. The presence of aftereffects (see table S1) suggests that information regarding zeitgeber exposure is stored, much like a memory.
They didn’t expect this. “It would be naïve to assume that a prokaryotic circadian clock shares these properties with multicellular organisms,” they initially thought, but the observations proved otherwise. Using red and blue light as zeitgebers, and watching responses with fluorescent cues, they were able to entrain the microbes and alter their behaviors by modifying the free-running period (FRP) of the light. The results demonstrated that “this organism shares many circadian characteristics occurring in eukaryotic organisms, some of which have yet to be documented in established clock models in cyanobacteria or fungi.”
Our observations also underscore that a combination of zeitgebers is used by B. subtilis, which is analogous to the situation for fungal, mammalian, and plant cells. The task of the circadian clock is to “read” the local environment and, for many systems, this means harvesting not just one but many cues. We suggest that by using both blue and red light and temperature as zeitgebers, B. subtilis can fine-tune clock-regulated processes to a greater range of situations.
For this to be true of tiny microbes that live in the soil is indeed surprising. How do they do it without eyes? The “light-sensing mechanisms used by B. subtilis for the purpose of entrainment remain unknown.” Perhaps the microbes respond to the energy levels of different wavelengths of light penetrating the soil. Whatever is involved in the bacterium’s clock led to a second use of the word “remarkable” in the conclusion:
In conclusion, we find it remarkable that a relatively simple prokaryote, which lacks the obvious hierarchy of organization of multicellular organisms, evokes properties of complex circadian systems.
Design advocates would certainly find it remarkable, too. But surprising? For those committed to explaining biology by unguided material causes, surprise is understandable. Those who recognize the hand behind the superb engineering all around us in life are delighted but not surprised.
File under "well said" XCIX
"“Put away your sword,” Jesus told him. “Those who use the sword will die by the sword."
Matthew ch.26:52 New Living Translation
Tuesday, 10 October 2023
An interlude VII
All praise an honor to JEHOVAH God for the blessed global brotherhood of JEHOVAH'S Dedicated servants.
The war on human exceptionalism continues apace.
Not Enough Evidence: Casey Luskin on Recent Homo naledi Claims
A recent ABC News article says the latest research about the hominid species Homo naledi “erases the idea of human exceptionalism.” A new Netflix documentary suggests that humans are not that special after all. Should we believe the media hype? Or is there more to the story? On a new episode of ID the Future, I talked with Dr. Casey Luskin to get an update on the Homo naledi controversy.
In June 2023, three new preprint papers were posted from the team that discovered Homo naledi in 2015. They claim that the small-brained species had high intelligence and engaged in activities like burying their dead, using fire, and engaging in cave wall art. At the time of publication the papers had not been peer reviewed. This didn’t stop the scientists from embarking on a massive media marketing campaign to promote their findings. A few months later, though, the critical reviews from other scientists in the field came in. Their colleagues didn’t buy it. “There just wasn’t any science in the paper ultimately,” said one paleoarchaeologist. Another reviewer called the preprints “incomplete and inadequate, and should not be viewed as finalized scholarship.”
In this episode, Dr. Luskin reviews each of the three main claims about Homo naledi made by Dr. Lee Berger and his team and gives us a summary of the strongest counterarguments. He also gives his thoughts on the recent Netflix film. “It’s very important to communicate scientific ideas to the public,” says Luskin. “And I think it’s great when scientists do that, when they do it carefully and responsibly and they’re making sure that the evidence has been thoroughly worked out…in this case, there was a sense that they had sort of put the cart before the horse.”
Luskin credits Berger and his team as respected professionals who did some amazing physical feats in their recent discoveries. But he also notes that in this case, the standards of evidence were just not met. “I think it’s important not to hype your claims. To make sure that you’re being careful with your science. And this is a lesson for everybody in science…for all of us who do science, let’s be careful with our arguments and careful with our claims.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Monday, 9 October 2023
File under "well said" XCVIII
"Accept the way God does things,
for who can straighten what he has made crooked?"
Ecclesiastes Ch.7:13 New Living Translation.
Psalm ch.72 American Standard Version.
Psalms Ch.72 American Standard version.
Give the king thy judgments, O God, And thy righteousness unto the king's son.
2He will judge thy people with righteousness, And thy poor with justice.
3The mountains shall bring peace to the people, And the hills, in righteousness.
4He will judge the poor of the people, He will save the children of the needy, And will break in pieces the oppressor.
5They shall fear thee while the sun endureth, And so long as the moon, throughout all generations.
6He will come down like rain upon the mown grass, As showers that water the earth.
7In his days shall the righteous flourish, And abundance of peace, till the moon be no more.
8He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, And from the River unto the ends of the earth.
9They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; And his enemies shall lick the dust.
10The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall render tribute: The kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.
11Yea, all kings shall fall down before him; All nations shall serve him.
12For he will deliver the needy when he crieth, And the poor, that hath no helper.
13He will have pity on the poor and needy, And the souls of the needy he will save.
14He will redeem their soul from oppression and violence; And precious will their blood be in his sight:
15And they shall live; and to him shall be given of the gold of Sheba: And men shall pray for him continually; They shall bless him all the day long.
16There shall be abundance of grain in the earth upon the top of the mountains; The fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon: And they of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth.
17His name shall endure for ever; His name shall be continued as long as the sun: And men shall be blessed in him; All nations shall call him happy.
18Blessed be JEHOVAH God, the God of Israel, Who only doeth wondrous things:
19And blessed be his glorious name for ever; And let the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen, and Amen.
JEHOVAH'S Reminders keep us from the ranks of the insane.
John ch.4:20,21ESV"If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother."
Luke Ch.10:25-37KJV", behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? 26He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? 27And he answering said, Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. 28And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. 29But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
30And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. 31And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. 33But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, 34And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. 36Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? 37And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise."
There are no good guys.
It is the third millennium and there is only war.
No good guys.
No just causes.
Only winners and losers.
And of course the victors write the narrative.
Sunday, 8 October 2023
On Darwinism of the gaps re:plant evolution.
Plant Evolution: All Gaps and Miracles
130,000 observations. 548 traits. 400 species of living and fossil plants. This is what a team of 10 evolutionary biologists investigated in a major project to look for patterns of evolution in the plant kingdom. Publishing in Nature Plants, they reproduced their morphospace map of the major groups of plants. If described in words, it would go:
Bang! Algae
Bang! Bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts)
Bang! Lycophytes (vascular plants including clubmosses)
Bang! Ferns (spore-bearing vascular plants)
Bang! Gymnosperms (seed-bearing cycads, ginkgoes, and conifers)
Bang! Angiosperms (flowering plants)
Subsequent to each bang, there were rapid variations, like the sparkly after-effects of complex fireworks. But the disparity between each bang is huge. Lead author Philip C. J. Donoghue, with colleagues James Clark and Sandy Hetherington, describe their work in The Conversation. They knew that animals showed explosive appearance and rapid radiation in the Cambrian explosion. “Is the same true of the plant kingdom?” they asked.
We then analysed all this data, grouping plants based on their overall similarities and differences, all plotted within what can be thought of as a “design space”. Since we know the evolutionary relationships between the species, we can also predict the traits of their extinct shared ancestors and include these hypothetical ancestorswithin the design space, too.
Interesting term: design space. Plants look designed, but the team “knows” they evolved. As Francis Crick taught, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” And so, this team dutifully sought to uncover how “plant life has navigated design space through evolutionary history and over geological time.” They would get the data to fit Darwin’s tree, even if they had to invent “hypothetical ancestors” to do it. Even so, the result resembles Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, gussied up with tinsel to help the Peanuts gang celebrate anyhow.
Miracle Talk
Forcing the uncooperative data into an “evolutionary pattern” of ancestors and descendants branching into a treelike pattern of universal common ancestry required some imagination. This was easily accomplished using miracle words. Plants emerged. They expanded. They occupied design space. And sometimes, they reversed direction and converged.
The evolutionary relationships conveyed by the branching genealogy in the above plot show that there is, generally, a structure to the occupation of design space — as new groups have emerged, they have expanded into new regions. However, there is some evidence for convergence, too, with some groups like the living gymnosperms (conifers and allies) and flowering plants plotting closer together than they do to their common ancestor.
The next question is, “How did plant body plan diversity evolve?” or, what triggered the emergence, expansion, occupation, and convergence seen in the morphospace diagram? Well now that miracles are allowed in the story, other miracles can be called on to generate them.
Overall, the broad pattern is one of progressive exploration of new designs as a result of innovations that are usually associated with reproduction, like the embryo, spore, seed and flower. These represent the evolutionary solutions to the environmental challenges faced by plants in their progressive occupation of increasingly dry and challenging niches on the land surface. For example, the innovation of seeds allowed the plants that bear them to reproduce even in the absence of water.
So how did a pine tree emerge? It innovated. On its exploration of design space, it found a solution to an environmental challenge. By design? Oh, no! It found an evolutionary solution. Once upon a time, a seed emerged. “Aha!” said the pine tree. “Now I can reproduce in the absence of water.” Nature selected it. (We know the sex of Nature; it’s a female)
Evolutionary Juice: A Magic Potion
Once an innovation emerges, it can expand. Just wait; evolution is not done with miracles yet!
So does that make plants different from animals, studies of which are the basis for the expectation of early evolutionary innovation and exhaustion? Not at all. Comparable studies that we have done on animals and fungi show that, when you study these multicellular kingdoms in their entirety, they all exhibit a pattern of episodically increasing anatomically variety. Individual lineages may soon exhaust themselves but, overall, the kingdoms keep on innovating.
This suggests a general pattern for evolutionary innovation in multicellular kingdoms and also that animals, fungi and plants still have plenty of evolutionary juice in their tanks. Let’s hope we’re still around to see what innovation arises next.
What Was the Innovation Mechanism?
The researchers offer only one mechanism for innovation: whole gene duplication, or polyploidy. The paper explains,
Whole-genome duplication has often been invoked as a causal factor in plant macroevolution and, indeed, palaeopolyploidy has been associated with some of the lineages that exhibit the greatest expansions in morphospace occupation, such as spermatophyte and angiosperm stems. Although comparable expansions are also associated with the embryophyte and tracheophyte stems, on which no ploidy events have been inferred, these branches are associated with pulses in gene family innovation that, arguably, have much the same effect in creating redundant genes available for neofunctionalization or the rewiring of gene regulatory networks.
Can redundancy be a cause of innovation? Will duplicating a chapter in a novel help the protagonist solve a new problem? That seems a stretch. Some branches in the plant kingdom can’t call on that mechanism anyway. Instead, they use “gene family innovation” to get their innovations to emerge and develop. All this makes perfect sense in Darwin fantasyland.
Filling Gaps with Imagination
The paper speaks often about disparity, which in general means the lack of similarity. In the paper, the authors take disparity to mean “phenotypic differentiation” — e.g., a Cambrian trilobite looks different from a worm, and a moss looks different from a fern. There’s disparity all over the morphospace diagram, both within major groups and between them. These are drawn as straight connecting lines. Do the authors supply any data to fill in those gaps?
In part, the clumpy nature of plant morphospace occupation is a result of the extinction of phylogenetic intermediates that once bridged clade-based clusters, as evidenced by our phylomorphospace analysis and the inclusion of fossil species. In effect, extant plant lineages have contracted from areas occupied by their forebears. However, the clustered occupation of morphospace also results from the divergence of these clades within morphospace, from their shared ancestors and from one another.
The intermediates were there, we are told. They just went extinct. But with imagination, you can visualize what they might have looked like. Remember those “hypothetical ancestors” spoken of earlier?
The authors included some fossil species to try to fill in the gaps. They populate some of the lines within groups, notably within lycophytes, but the longest gaps between groups are “depauperate” of fossil evidence for the intermediates Darwinism requires.
Fossil taxa populate many of the branches on the phylogeny within morphospace, but some branches remain conspicuously depauperate, including stem-angiosperms, stem-conifers and stem-embryophytes (fossil species are known that might occupy some of these branches, but there are few credible candidates for the embryophyte stem).
The new work, therefore, did not clear up “Darwin’s abominable mystery” on the origin of angiosperms — all those hugely varied flowering plants that comprise most of our gardens and urban trees. With imagination and a few miracles, though, everything can be tidied up.
Overall, the phylomorphospace demonstrates exploration of new regions of morphospace throughout the evolutionary history of plants. This is seen at the level of all characters but is mostly strongly associated with the evolution of reproductive novelties, such as those associated with the origin of embryophytes, seed plants and angiosperms, but also with realization of the ecological opportunities that those reproductive novelties afforded.
Those plants wanted to evolve. The environment was driving them to explore! Chance gave them raw material by duplicating chapters of their novel, so that they could write new plot lines by neofunctionalization. With so many emergent novelties at their disposal, plants could afford to realize their evolutionary potential. What could prevent them from going forth and conquering the planet?
It’s instructive that the more Darwinians boast of disavowing miracles as inimical to the spirit of science, the more they find them useful.
Saturday, 7 October 2023
On Russel's separation from Darwin.
“Prepared Mind” for Alfred Russel Wallace
Editor’s note: This year, 2023, marks the bicentennial of the birth of Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Unlike Darwin, Wallace thought that biology, chemistry, and cosmology proclaimed clear evidence of intelligent design. This fall we are celebrating the life and achievements of Wallace, who can be regarded as one of the godfathers of intelligent design. To find out more about him, we are featuring two special offers: You can download a free short book about Wallace by historian Michael Flannery; and you can get a hard copy of Flannery’s in-depth academic book about Wallace, Nature’s Prophet, at a large discount.
I was born forty years after Alfred Russel Wallace died. So obviously my life never intersected with the life of the man who, with Charles Darwin, discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection. But the beauty of reading is that figures from the past can still speak to us, and happily, by the time I was a young college student Wallace spoke to me.
The “Edge of History”
Wallace went on to challenge and break with Darwin over what I’ve called “intelligent evolution,” a forerunner of modern intelligent design, as readers of my book, Intelligent Evolution: How Alfred Russel Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism, will be aware. He came to me indirectly, through William Irwin Thompson’s At the Edge of History. When I was a freshman in 1972 that book was hot off the presses, and making its impression upon those of us who were avid readers and interested in thinking outside the box.
Thompson’s book certainly exposed me to new ideas, and Darwin’s reigning paradigm at the time found itself in his crosshairs. I thought (like Thompson once did) that only backwater hicks and assorted religious extremists seriously questioned Darwinian evolution. But Thompson shook my presumptions and certainties:
And, in fact, this kind of snobbery seems to have been one of the historical conditions which enabled the theory to triumph: the Victorian liberals were quick to champion the new theory because it helped them put the staid, port-sipping, fox-hunting, Tory clergy in its place. Loren Eiseley has recalled how vehemently Darwin reacted to Wallace’s questioning of their joint theory. Even at the time of its formulation Wallace wondered why, if survival of the fittest was the mechanism of natural selection, man ever evolved a brain a hundred times more complex than that needed for survival. “‘No adequate explanation,’ they [Eiseley quoting M. R. A. Chance and A. P. Mead] confess over eight years after Darwin scrawled his vigorous ‘No’ upon Wallace’s paper, ‘has been put forward to account for so large a cerebrum in man’.” Five hundred thousand years ago, Pithecanthropus “evolved” with an explosion of brain size and frontal development. Since there are more primitive man-apes farther back, in the few remains of bones we have, it is tempting to connect the dots in a line that cuts across all the dimensions of plentiful space. It is all the more tempting to connect the dots in this way if one is living in an empire that places the white race at the end of a long line of progress in which the darker races are but bestial prefigurings of the Englishman. And if one lives in an economic system in which the market is red in tooth and claw, it is tempting to think that laissez faire and survival of the fittest are part of nature’s way.
Purpose and Meaning
I never looked at Darwinian evolution in quite the same way after that, and although Wallace receded into the deep recesses of my memory, I had what Pasteur called “the prepared mind” to take in what Wallace had to tell me in The World of Life when I was happily reacquainted with him. That was some 15 years ago.
I invite you to join me on my intellectual journey. My carefully edited and introduced abridgment of that work will bring you into Wallace’s rich world of purpose and meaning. Get Intelligent Evolution today!
Friday, 6 October 2023
Fossil record shoots down origin of flight just so story.
Fossil Friday: A Popular Just-So Story on the Origin of Bird Flight Bites the Dust
This Fossil Friday features the early bird Confuciusornis from the Lower Cretaceous of Liaoning in China. Last week I reported for Fossil Friday on a just-so story about ichthyosaur evolution and how it fell apart (Bechly 2023). This week I want use the opportunity to report yet another case of a popular evolutionist just-so story that recently was put to rest for good. It is about the origin of avian flight.
An Old Debate About Birds
There is a long-running debate in evolutionary biology, asking whether birds took off by running and flapping from the ground up (cursorial hypothesis), or whether they jumped as gliders from the tree down (arboreal hypothesis). About twenty years ago there was a modification of the cursorial hypothesis suggested by Dial (2003), based on the observation in chicks of living Chukar partridge: it is the so-called wing-assisted incline running (WAIR) hypothesis, which suggested that wing flapping lifts the body during uphill running. This was also claimed to answer the old question “What use is half a wing?” (Dial et al. 2006), which obviously is not just an iconic question Darwin skeptics came up with.
The WAIR hypothesis quickly became more and more popular, with dozens of studies published on various aspects, such as aerodynamics (Tobalske & Dial 2007, Dial et al. 2008), mechanics (Bundle & Dial 2003), kinematics (Baier et al. 2013), and computer modelling (Heers et al. 2018). “According to the proponents of the WAIR hypothesis, adaptation to WAIR in avian ancestors prepared their locomotor apparatus for the subsequent evolution of forward flapping flight. In other words, WAIR is proposed as a preadaptation to full-fledged avian flapping flight.” (Kuznetsov & Panyutina 2022)
The Function of Wing Flapping
However, last year a new study by Kuznetsov & Panyutina (2022) showed that, contrary to earlier beliefs, the function of the wing flapping during uphill running is not to lift the body, but to push it towards a steep slope. This is the opposite adaptation to powered flight and requires very different muscles. Actually, “it follows that the action of the forelimb during WAIR cannot preadapt the musculature in a non-flying ancestor to free flapping flight. Furthermore, the wing action during WAIR [already] requires highly developed avian flight musculature.”
Therefore, the authors concluded that “Wing-assisted incline running should be regarded as a crown locomotor specialization of birds and is not an appropriate model for locomotion in avian ancestors.” Unsurprisingly, there was not a shred of paleontological evidence for the WAIR hypothesis (Nudds & Dyke 2009), and non-avian feathered dinosaurs as well as early birds arguably were incapable of WAIR (Senter 2006), which is the opposite of the model’s prediction. It looks like yet another evolutionist just-so story bites the dust after empirical data failed to support the imaginative storytelling.
References
Baier DB, Gatesy SM & Dial KP 2013. Three-dimensional, high-resolution skeletal kinematics of the avian wing and shoulder during ascending flapping flight and uphill flap- running. PLoS One 8(5): e63982, 1–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0063982
Bechly G 2023. Fossil Friday: Ichthyosaur Birth, Another Evolutionist Just-So Story Falls Apart. Evolution News September 29, 2003. https://evolutionnews.org/2023/09/fossil-friday-ichthyosaur-birth-another-evolutionist-just-so-story-falls-apart/
Bundle MW & Dial KP 2003. Mechanics of wing-assisted incline running (WAIR). Journal of Experimental Biology 206(24), 4553–4564. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.00673
Kuznetsov AN & Panyutina AA 2022. Where was WAIR in avian flight evolution? Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 137(1), 145–156. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blac019
Dial KP 2003. Wing-Assisted Incline Running and the Evolution of Flight. Science 299(5605), 402–404. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1078237
Dial KP, Randall RJ & Dial TR 2006. What use is half a wing in the ecology and evolution of birds? BioScience 56(5), 437–445. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2006)056[0437:WUIHAW]2.0.CO;2
Dial KP, Jackson BE & Segre P 2008. A fundamental avian wing-stroke provides a new perspective on the evolution of flight. Nature 451(7181), 985–989. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06517
Heers AM, Rankin JW & Hutchinson JR 2018. Building a Bird: Musculoskeletal Modeling and Simulation of Wing-Assisted Incline Running During Avian Ontogeny. Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology 6: 140, 1–25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2018.00140
Nudds RL & Dyke GJ 2009. Forelimb posture in dinosaurs and the evolution of the avian flapping flight-stroke. Evolution 63(4), 994–1002. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00613.x
Senter P 2006. Scapular orientation in theropods and basal birds, and the origin of flapping flight. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 51(2), 305–313. https://www.app.pan.pl/article/item/app51-305.html
Tobalske BW & Dial KP 2007. Aerodynamics of wing-assisted incline running in birds. The Journal of Experimental Biology 210(10), 1742–1751. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.001701
Humankind: Evolving with a little help from our friends?
Intelligent Design in Human-Animal Friendships
Our experiences suggest strongly that many animals — mostly but not exclusively mammalian — possess an innate quality that enables them to relate to and connect with humans. Cats and dogs, our most common domesticated pets (estimated at 135 million in the U.S.)1, provide countless examples of the relationships that can develop across the human-animal divide. If the number of pets alone isn’t enough evidence of their importance to our lives, consider how much Americans spend on their pets — estimated at $136.8 billion in 2022.2
Considering the importance we place on our relationship with pets, what is our point of connection with them? A reasonable answer would be our shared qualities of mind, will, and emotions, or what could be termed “soulish” qualities.
Not Merely Animals
By drawing attention to the shared attributes between humans and animals that enhance our interactions, I am not suggesting that this supports any contention that humans are merely animals. Animals can relate to us by sharing certain aspects of a subset of our characteristics, but the overlap is far from complete. While animals share with us the quality of intelligence, we transcend them in significant ways, including our abstract reasoning, language and mathematical abilities, our unlimited creativity, and our ability to visualize and instantiate novel outcomes. Another notably unique human trait is our ubiquitous spiritual nature.
Spirituality is a significant and universal aspect of human experience. The specific content of spiritual belief, practice, and experience varies, but all cultures have a concept of an ultimate, transcendent, sacred, or divine force.3
Worship of the divine is not an observable behavior among animals.
“Winning” the Competition
Does our ability to relate to animals and their responsiveness to human interactions indicate intelligent design in the order of things on Earth? From an evolutionary point of view, human dominance among all species on Earth resulted from our “winning” the competition for survival of the fittest. In this view, an innate animosity could be expected to persist between humans and other animal species.
Now, some Darwinian aficionados might object to this conclusion by appealing to the genealogical distance between humans and animals, arguing that “time heals all wounds.” If this is so, the soothing of ancient animosities has occurred so effectively that it has been replaced with a distinct inclination to relationship found between humans and many animal species. Interestingly, animals that are conducive to domestication by humans are those that support a mutually beneficial relationship with humans.
But once domestication got rolling, we didn’t just change the animals we brought into our lives; they changed us, too. Humanity would look very different today — and possibly not have thrived to the extent that it has — without the assistance and support of domesticated animals to help us hunt, bear burdens, provide food and materials for clothing and tools, and so much more.4
Earliest domestication occurred with dogs (approximately 15,000 years ago)5, used in assisting humans with hunting; goats, pigs, and sheep probably came next (9,500 BCE), followed by cattle and horses, with their well-known, mutually beneficial relationships with humans.6 Other domesticated animals include some that might not immediately come to mind, including, chickens, guinea pigs, water buffaloes, pigeons, rabbits, and fancy rats.
Aside from the more utilitarian examples of domesticated animals used for food, bearing burdens, or transportation, the breadth of therapeutic human-animal interactions is profound.
The variety of possible types of interactions that occur between humans and animals results in an equally rich variety of effects on human health and well-being, including behavioral, educational, physiological, and/or psychological effects.7
Our pets provide us what is termed an affiliative relationship, and its benefits are familiar to most people. Even when I was in grade school, I can vividly remember the feelings of contentment and joy that I experienced when two little black kittens my family had recently acquired fell asleep in a purring huddle on my lap as I sat in the sunshine on the milk box on the back porch.
Pets entail a strong emotional attachment that facilitates the exchange of physical and psychological benefits. Pet ownership correlates with a number of health benefits, such as increased physical activity and lower baseline blood pressure (McCune et al., 2014).8
More targeted human-animal interactions have become popular in recent years:
Human-Animal Interaction encompasses many relationships with animals, including companion animals, emotional support animals, working animals, and any Animal-Assisted Intervention.9
An Extremely Wide Scope
The scope of human physical, emotional, and mental needs that are benefited by animal interactions is extremely wide.
Animals have been used in therapies for children with autism, adults with spinal cord dysfunction, older adults with dementia, and prison inmates.
Service animals are individually trained to help disabled persons overcome specific disabilities. They promote a more independent livelihood, facilitating, for example, mobility for the visually impaired, low blood sugar detection for diabetics, or support for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Human-animal interactions of all types elicit positive psychological effects in clinical and nonclinical populations across the lifespan.11
Futuristic depictions of human societies in science fiction movies and many books often portray a world without pets. Star Wars seems to have replaced animal pets with functional robotic companions — for example, the resourceful and intuitive R2-D2. Pets were conspicuously absent in the original Star Trek shows, but the crew shows the effects of their deprivation when tribbles pullulate aboard the Enterprise and the crew absolutely luxuriates in their company.
What is it about animals that gives us the positive benefits from our interactions with them? While human-to-human relationships are vital to our lives, sometimes our human relationships can get complicated. Animals relate to us in a refreshingly uncomplicated manner. We don’t feel judged by animals. They are rarely in a hurry. While they certainly have their own needs, they often seem to be able to sense when we have particular physical or emotional needs and their calming presence with the affection they give helps us towards well-being.
Many people whose lives have been enhanced by their interactions with animals (myself included) could hardly imagine a life devoid of such human-animal companionship. As evidence for intelligent design, the provision of animals that assist our lives in so many ways stands out as not merely fortunate, but profoundly caring.
Thursday, 5 October 2023
David Berlinski on the descent of man.
Are Humans Progressing Toward Evolutionary Perfection?
Are humans progressing morally as well as materially? What does it mean to be human in the cosmos? On a new episode of ID the Future, we bring you the second half of a stimulating conversation between Dr. David Berlinski and host Eric Metaxas on the subject of Berlinski’s book Human Nature.
In Human Nature, Berlinski argues that the utopian view that humans are progressing toward evolutionary and technological perfection is wishful thinking. Men are not about to become like gods. “I’m a strong believer in original sin,” quips Berlinski in his discussion with Metaxas. In other words, he believes not only that humans are fundamentally distinct from the rest of the biological world, but also that humans are prone to ignorance and depravity as well as wisdom and nobility. During this second half of their discussion, Berlinski and Metaxas compare and contrast the ideas of thinkers like psychologist Steven Pinker, author Christopher Hitchens, and physicist Steven Weinberg. The pair also spar gracefully over the implications of human uniqueness. Berlinski, though candid and self-critical, is unwilling to be pigeonholed. Metaxas, drawing his own conclusions about the role of mind in the universe, challenges Berlinski into moments of clarity with his usual charm. The result is an honest, probing, and wide-ranging conversation about the nature of science and the human condition. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Rocks are resisting the decarbon agenda?
Geological Surprise: Ancient Rocks Release As Much CO2 As All the World’s Volcanoes
A University of Oxford study reveals rock weathering can be a major CO2 source, rivaling volcanic emissions. This insight is crucial for future carbon budget predictions.
New research has overturned the traditional view that natural rock weathering acts as a CO2 sink that removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Instead, this can also act as a large CO2 source, rivaling that of volcanoes.
The results have important implications for modeling climate change scenarios but at the moment, CO2 release from rock weathering is not captured in climate modeling.
Future work will focus on whether human activities may be increasing CO2 release from rock weathering, and how this could be managed.
A Paradigm Shift in Understanding Carbon Cycle
A new study led by the University of Oxford has overturned the view that natural rock weathering acts as a CO2 sink, indicating instead that this can also act as a large CO2 source, rivaling that of volcanoes. The results, published on October 4 in the journal Nature, have important implications for modeling climate change scenarios.
Rocks and the Carbon Cycle
Rocks contain an enormous store of carbon in the ancient remains of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. This means that the “geological carbon cycle” acts as a thermostat that helps to regulate the Earth’s temperature. For instance, during chemical weathering rocks can suck up CO2 when certain minerals are attacked by the weak acid found in rainwater. This process helps to counteract the continuous CO2 released by volcanoes around the world, and forms part of Earth’s natural carbon cycle that has helped keep the surface habitable to life for a billion years or more.
Discovery of a New CO2 Release Mechanism
However, for the first time, this new study measured an additional natural process of CO2 release from rocks to the atmosphere, finding that it is as significant as the CO2 released from volcanoes around the world. Currently, this process is not included in most models of the natural carbon cycle.
The process occurs when rocks that formed on ancient seafloors (where plants and animals were buried in sediments) are pushed back up to Earth’s surface, for example, when mountains like the Himalayas or Andes form. This exposes the organic carbon in the rocks to oxygen in the air and water, which can react and release CO2. This means that weathering rocks could be a source of CO2, rather than the commonly assumed sink.
Methodology and Findings
Up to now, measuring the release of this CO2 from weathering organic carbon in rocks has proved difficult. In the new study, the researchers used a tracer element (rhenium) which is released into water when rock organic carbon reacts with oxygen. Sampling river water to measure rhenium levels makes it possible to quantify CO2 release. However, sampling all river water in the world to get a global estimate would be a significant challenge.
To upscale over Earth’s surface, the researchers did two things. First, they worked out how much organic carbon is present in rocks near the surface. Second, they worked out where these were being exposed most rapidly, by erosion in steep, mountain locations.
Dr. Jesse Zondervan, the researcher who led the study at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, said: “The challenge was then how to combine these global maps with the river data, while considering uncertainties. We fed all of our data into a supercomputer at Oxford, simulating the complex interplay of physical, chemical, and hydrological processes. By piecing together this vast planetary jigsaw, we could finally estimate the total carbon dioxide emitted as these rocks weather and exhale their ancient carbon into the air.”
This could then be compared to how much CO2 could be drawn down by natural rock weathering of silicate minerals. The results identified many large areas where weathering was a CO2 source, challenging the current view about how weathering impacts the carbon cycle. Hotspots of CO2 release were concentrated in mountain ranges with high uplift rates that cause sedimentary rocks to be exposed, such as the eastern Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains, and the Andes. The global CO2 release from rock organic carbon weathering was found to be 68 megatons of carbon per year.
Professor Robert Hilton (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford), who leads the ROC-CO2 research project that funded the study, said: “This is about 100 times less than present-day human CO2 emissions by burning fossil fuels, but it is similar to how much CO2 is released by volcanoes around the world, meaning it is a key player in Earth’s natural carbon cycle.”
Implications and Future Directions
These fluxes could have changed during Earth’s past. For instance, during periods of mountain building that bring up many rocks containing organic matter, the CO2 release may have been higher, influencing global climate in the past.
Ongoing and future work is looking into how changes in erosion due to human activities, alongside the increased warming of rocks due to anthropogenic climate changes, could increase this natural carbon leak. A question the team is now asking is if this natural CO2 release will increase over the coming century. “Currently we don’t know – our methods allow us to provide a robust global estimate, but not yet assess how it could change’’ says Hilton.
“While the carbon dioxide release from rock weathering is small compared to present-day human emissions, the improved understanding of these natural fluxes will help us better predict our carbon budget” concluded Dr. Zondervan.
Reference: “Rock organic carbon oxidation CO2 release offsets silicate weathering sink” by Jesse R. Zondervan, Robert G. Hilton, Mathieu Dellinger, Fiona J. Clubb, Tobias Roylands and Mateja Ogrič, 4 October 2023, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06581-9
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