Tuesday 25 April 2023
God of the gaps no more?
Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, John Lennox: The Evidence for Design Is Growing
On a new episode of ID the Future, Uncommon Knowledge’s Peter Robinson sits down with Michael Behe, John Lennox, and Stephen Meyer, three of the leading voices in science and academia on the case for an intelligent designer of life and the universe. In this wide-ranging conversation in Fiesole, Italy, they explore the growing problems with modern evolutionary theory and the increasing evidence, uncovered by a rigorous application of the scientific method, that points to intentional design of the physical world.
Download the podcast or listen to it here
Being offended in the climate's behalf
<iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K_fxt9SHH9E" title="The Kids Will See You in Court: Climate on Trial in Montana" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Pseudo no more?
Here’s That Study That Found Pseudo-Pseudogenes.
Evolution is Getting Demolished
It is one of the strongest arguments for evolution: dysteleology, the apparent lack of design in the biological world. And the most obvious and compelling examples of such dysteleology are in the genome. And the most celebrated examples of dysteleology in the genome are the pseudogenes—genes which are broken. They are the long since abandoned junk of the genome. And the most obvious example of such brokenness is a stop codon that has accidentally arisen somewhere in the middle of the gene. These so-called premature termination codons (PTCs) halt the production of proteins in mid-stream. And the most abundant source of pseudogenes is the olfactory receptor families—genes involved in detecting odors. All those pseudogenes are a sure sign that no designer worth his salt would have constructed such a world. Evolution must be true, as evolutionists from Charles Darwin to Jerry Coyne have proclaimed. There’s only one problem—such examples of junk always turn out to be false.
At evolution’s foundation is the claim of lack of function, and that is a terrible argument. First of all, it is metaphysical rather than scientific. It is not a positivist argument—evolutionists have no idea how genes, or anything else for that matter—actually evolved. The argument is that such nonfunctional structures would never have been designed or created. That conclusion does not come from science, and cannot be tested by science. It is a religious argument.
But in addition to the metaphysics, showing that a structure has no function makes no sense to begin with. For one would have to watch the structure, in the organism, for the entire life of the organism. And one would have to be able to measure function—all possible functions. Needless to say, no evolutionist has ever done that.
But it gets worse.
Not only is the dysteleology argument religious and nonsensical, it is also false. At least in the cases that have been investigated. Over and over, the long lists evolutionists make of nonfunctional structures just get shorter and shorter.
That brings us to pseudogenes.
For sometime it has been known that not all pseudogenes are pseudogenes. That is, not all pseudogenes are junk. Some pseudogenes have been found to be performing useful functions. But typically these are onesies, twosies.
Now, a new Study has found something more interesting—a PTC in an olfactory receptor pseudogene that, in certain contexts, is not actually a termination codon after all. The gene has a stop codon, and yet the gene is successfully used to create a protein. The translation process somehow can read-through what normally would be a stop codon. The paper suggests this is accomplished with a near-cognate tRNA, which inserts an amino acid rather than causing a halt:
We suggest that read-through is due to PTC recognition by a near-cognate tRNA that allows insertion of an amino acid instead of translation termination.
What appeared to be a pseudogenes is actually functional. It is a pseudo pseudogene.
Furthermore, and importantly, this is not an isolated case. They found other examples, and conclude this could be a “widespread phenomenon.”
Pseudogenes are generally considered to be non-functional DNA sequences that arise through nonsense or frame-shift mutations of protein-coding genes. … We identify functional PTC-containing loci within different olfactory receptor repertoires and species, suggesting that such “pseudo-pseudogenes” could represent a widespread phenomenon.
Widespread phenomenon? This adds yet more support to the Project Encode suggestion, which evolutionists immediately pushed back on, that most of the genome is functional rather than junk as evolutionists had insisted (for example, see here, here, and here).
Pseudogenes comprise only a small fraction of the genome, but they have served as the poster child of junk DNA, and proof of evolution.
Instead, once again history appears to be reliable guide as pseudogenes appear to be going down the same path as those other supposedly “nonfunctional” structures. Instead of nonfunctional, pseudogenes are beginning to look like they may have a rather sophisticated function that was not apparent to evolutionists.
Of course function is often not apparent to evolutionists because they view biology as an accident. Organisms are built on a vast number of chance events so of course they will be found to be full of mistakes.
But in its inexorable march of progress, science always seems to find function. Evolution seeks lack of function, which makes no sense, and science just keeps on finding more function. Evolution and science, it seems, are in an eternal conflict.
Don’t expect contriteness anytime soon though. For evolutionists, the finding of function was never a problem. It simply is an example of evolution finding function for what was nonfunctional. The junk was repaired and took on some new function. In fact, it remains powerful evidence for evolution because it is obviously so quirky. When the supposedly “backward” retina of the mammalian eye was found to be incredibly sophisticated, evolutionists didn’t miss a beat. After all, it was still a kludge of a design. As Richard Dawkins put it, “it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!”
So it really doesn’t matter how much function is found, and how optimal a design is. For man has found nature to be wanting, and so it must have formed by chance. This, in a nutshell, is Epicureanism.
Monday 24 April 2023
The right question?
Tim Ingold’s Question For Andy Gardner Says It All
A Not So Hidden Agenda
Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s question for Andy Gardner at last week’s “New trends in evolutionary biology” Scientific meeting at The Royal Society should disabuse those who still don’t get it. Gardner had finished his talk, “Anthropomorphism in evolutionary biology,” in which he acknowledged the design in biology. But if Gardner's organisms are actually designed, an agitated Ingold demanded, then how would Gardner’s explanation for their origin be any different from William Paley’s natural theology which invoked design?
Anyone who has interacted with evolutionists knows this moment all too well. The metaphysics and religion are always there for evolutionists, crouching at the door and ready to strike at any moment. Whether in lecture, seminar, or writings, the agenda is painfully obvious. As Eva Jablonka put it, “Not God—we’re excluding God.”
Evolution isn’t about the science—it never was. It doesn’t matter what the science shows, evolution must be true.
Definitions re:the design inference.
Understanding Design Arguments: An Introduction for Catholics
Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt from the new book edited by biologist Ann Gauger, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. You can download a full chapter and purchase the book at God'sgrandeur.org.
In my experience, Catholics face many challenges when it comes to thinking about evolution and intelligent design. Many of us somewhere along the way had a priest or teacher tell us not to trouble ourselves about this issue; whatever “science” says is fine. In addition, there is even some confusion over the very meaning of the terms evolution and intelligent design.
In my introductory chapter to the new book God’s Grandeur, I aim to help readers think more carefully and critically about these ideas. Without worrying yet about whether design arguments are sound, we must first figure out what these arguments claim — and, just as importantly, what they do not claim. To this end, I provide some background, attempt to define our terms, discuss the form of such arguments, and consider common Catholic misconceptions. My hope is that we will then be in a better place to evaluate the success of such arguments in the chapters that follow.
An Ancient Dialectic
For many American Catholics, discussions of evolution and intelligent design dredge up images of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” or Fundamentalist Christians attempting to have literal six-day creationism taught in public schools. While most of us Catholics are uncomfortable with the aggressive evolutionary atheism of Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists, we don’t feel that we have much of a dog in such fights. Yet we can be too hasty in this regard. The fundamental debate is not of recent vintage. The West has long had two dominant narratives about where our world’s astonishing and beautiful creatures come from: accidental events or intelligent foresight. These narratives predate not only Fundamentalist Christianity but Christianity itself. This issue pushes all the way down to fundamental metaphysics: What is the self-existent ultimate reality — impersonal matter or a personal Creator?
As far back as Socrates in the fifth century BC, we see the father of Western philosophy making an explicit design argument. His student Xenophon records Socrates’s view that we have been most favored by the supreme deity. We are uniquely arranged in body and mind. All other things appear to be here for our benefit. And nature itself seems consistently arranged in the best or finest way. All of this, Socrates argues, bears witness to divine providence. Variations on this basic theme appear in his successors Plato and Aristotle and beyond.
The opposing narrative came from the Greek atomists like Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus. Humans, they claimed, are intelligent of course. But this intelligence is a late arrival on the scene. Ultimate reality isn’t intelligent. What fundamentally exists are atoms and empty space in which the atoms collide. Just as you hear many today saying silly things like, “Love is just a chemical reaction in the brain,” so too did the atomists believe that all phenomena really reduce down to the properties of material bodies. For the atomists, highly organized beings like ourselves self-organize by accident. There are an infinite number of worlds. So with an infinite amount of time, every combination of atoms must manifest itself somewhere! Sure, organisms look intelligently designed, but poor accidental designs disappeared while good accidental designs survived.
There is truly nothing new under the sun. There are differences, to be sure, but the atomist narrative clearly anticipates not only Darwin’s theory but multiverse scenarios as well. The fundamental issue, all the way back, is whether the apparently designed features of our world are truly intelligently designed or whether they can be accounted for by lucky accidents with no intelligence involved. As even Richard Dawkins recognizes, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Like the atomists before him, of course, he thinks this design is only apparent and not real.
What Intelligent Design Is
With this classical dialectic in view, intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.
Design proponents have made arguments for real rather than apparent design at different levels. For instance, they’ve argued that the beginning of the universe requires an intelligent cause (William Lane Craig and James Sinclair), that the laws of physics are designed (Robin Collins), that our planet is uniquely designed (Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards), that chemistry as we know it is designed for life (Michael Denton; Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt), that the building blocks of living things cannot be found by blind searches but must be designed (Douglas Axe), that the first living creature and the fossil record give evidence of design (Stephen Meyer), and that both macro- and micro-features of living things give evidence of intelligent design (Michael Denton; Michael Behe).
Note three quick things about these arguments. First, contrary to stereotypes, these arguments are not “god-of-the-gaps” arguments. None of these arguments claims, “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” Rather, the standard mode of argumentation for design proponents is an inference to the best explanation — a common form of reasoning in general and in the historical sciences (like evolutionary biology) in particular. They argue that there are positive signs of intentional design in nature and that non-intentional explanations are weak by comparison. This is highly consonant with the Catholic faith. The Scriptures (e.g., Ps. 19 and Rom. 1), the Church Fathers (e.g., St. Gregory of Nazianzen), and the councils (e.g., Vatican I) all declare that God’s handiwork in nature is detectable by human reason and not just by faith.
Second, detecting design does not entail that we have detected divine “intervention” in nature. Design can be detected whether or not there was any direct action. One can tell that a field of corn was intentionally planted even if intermediate causes such as drones were used to plant the seeds. Similarly, design arguments need not imply unmediated divine action.
Third, these arguments have clear theological implications, but ID proponents attempt to stick to the publicly available scientific evidence and do not argue from religious texts. Most intelligent design proponents are Christians, but an argument that the designer is the Christian God would require more than just the scientific evidence. ID proponents are not being coy about their belief in God but being careful about their conclusions. Aquinas does the same thing.
What Intelligent Design Isn’t
Many Catholic intellectuals labor under the false impression that intelligent design theorists propose a false dilemma: either there is an intelligent designer or else natural laws are responsible for these designed looking features of our world — as though God cannot be responsible for the natural laws themselves or that natural causes cannot be instruments of God (i.e., secondary causes). This would indeed be an unfortunate dilemma. Fortunately, this is a misunderstanding. ID does not imply a zero-sum game where if God is responsible for something then He must act directly and nature cannot be a true cause as well. Rather, the minimal claim is only that some features of our world give very good evidence of having been intelligently designed somewhere in their origin story. What ID denies is that every feature of nature is the product of natural forces all the way down. Given that this commitment is necessarily shared by Catholics, Catholic hostility to ID on this point is surprising, to put it mildly.
The fossil record's bombardment of Darwinian gradualism continues apace.
Fossil Friday: The Explosive Origin of Complex Eyes in Trilobites
This Fossil Friday features a fossil from my own collection, a phacopid trilobite from the Devonian of Morocco. Note the remarkable preservation of the prominent compound eyes.
A recent work by Schoenemann (2021) provided a “comprehensive overview about what is known about trilobite eyes and their functioning after more than 120 years of intense research on this topic.” The author mentioned that trilobites “appeared close to the very beginning of the Cambrian Explosion” and “formed an important component of the Great Ordovician Diversification Event,” two events that have both been called ‘Big Bangs‘ of life. Schoenemann found that “the trilobite has no physical predecessor here” and “they are equipped from the very beginning of their appearance in the fossil record with elaborate compound eyes.” This confirms exactly what ID proponents like Stephen Meyer and myself have emphasized all the time. Schoenemann also describes how “the diversity of the morphology of trilobite eyes ‘explodes’ with the Ordovician”, which does not really sound like a gradual development in a Darwinian way. While some of the different types of trilobite eyes could at least theoretically be “achieved by modifications of the common principle of an original holochroal eyes,” the highly specialized schizochroal eyes of phacopids “show up as not being apposition eyes,” which requires a major re-engineering that certainly involved multiple coordinated mutations that imply a waiting time problem. Therefore, the abrupt origin of such biological innovations defies a Darwinian explanation, because the numbers do not add up. Another new study by Schoenemann et al. (2021) even reinforced this problem. They could show that phacopid eyes indeed represent a unique type of hyper compound eyes, where tens to hundreds of small compound eyes are each covered with a single lens. Nothing remotely similar is found among any of the other millions of arthropods or anywhere else in the animal realm.
A Phylogenetic Scenario
In a supplementary file the authors suggested a phylogenetic scenario for the origin of the different eyes in arthropods, but their figure rather emphasizes the anatomical gulf between the different constructions. The authors can offer no plausible explanation how such transitions could have been achieved, beyond embarrassingly superficial speculations that there could be genetic programs that “simply produced” these structures. It is a general pattern in evolutionary biology that so-called explanations follow the pattern ‘because evolution is true there may have been an imagined process X that made it happen’. That‘s hardly better than explaining the phenomenon that opium makes sleepy with an imagined dormitive power, which was already ridiculed by French playwright Molière (1673). Exercises in begging the question and fancy just-so storytelling dominate the field of evolutionary biology, while any rigorous hypotheses are conspicuously lacking, which is why I as a former evolutionary biologist have come to the conclusion that this discipline does not qualify as true science.
Another Interesting Fact
But there is another interesting fact that is worth mentioning: Even though there are gazillions of perfectly preserved trilobite fossils, which provide detailed information about their complete anatomy, including soft tissues and the intricate internal construction of their compound eyes, Schoenemann (2021) admitted that “still today the phylogenetic position is vigorously debated” with hardly any consensus beyond the trivial fact that they are (eu)arthropods. Darwinists should expect that with sufficient anatomical information any organism can be easily placed in the tree of life because homologous similarities should be a reliable guide to reconstruct common ancestry and phylogenetic relationship. The enormous controversies among biologists about conflicting phylogenetic evidence and incompatible tree reconstructions show that the Darwinian expectation commonly fails the litmus test of reality. Luckily the theory has been made immune to empirical falsification because it is simply assumed to be true by default as the only viable option for materialists. This kind of immunization against falsification combined with the demonization of any skeptics is another hallmark of pseudoscience.
When the abyss stares back?
NYT Pushes Suicide for the Mentally Ill
The phony argument that legalized assisted suicide will permanently be limited to the terminally ill took a big hit with a New York Times op-ed in which an oft-suicidal Canadian philosophy professor, Clancy Martin, argues that mentally ill people who are suicidal should receive help from doctors to die.
Martin’s first paragraph makes clear why his thesis should be rejected out of hand:
My first attempt to kill myself was when I was a child. I tried again as a teenager; as an adult, I’ve attempted suicide repeatedly and in a variety of ways. And yet, as a 55-year-old white man (a member of one of the groups at the highest risk for suicide in America) and the happily married father of five children, I am thankful that I am incompetent at killing myself.
If a doctor had helped Martin, he wouldn’t be alive today to be happily married, a father of five, and published in the “newspaper of record.” When a doctor helps a patient die, either by prescription or lethal injection, the job gets done.
The Gift of Life
Rather than appreciate the gift of life he received as a result of doctors’ being prohibited from helping him die, Martin wants mentally ill patients to qualify for lethal overdoses — an act that doctors foreswear in the Hippocratic Oath:
One might expect that as someone who has repeatedly attempted suicide and yet is happy to be alive, I am opposed to euthanasia on psychiatric grounds. But it is because of my intimacy with suicide that I believe people must have this right.
It’s true that policymakers, psychiatrists and medical ethicists must treat requests for euthanasia on psychiatric grounds with particular care, because we don’t understand mental illness as well as we do physical illness. However, the difficulty of understanding extreme psychological suffering is in fact a reason to endorse a prudent policy of assisted suicide for at least some psychiatric cases. When people are desperate for relief from torment that we do not understand well enough to effectively treat, giving them the right and the expert medical assistance to end that misery is caring for them.
Between the Patient and the Grave
But that’s precisely when a compassionate psychiatrist may be able to stand between the despairing patient and the grave. And, as he apparently did, these despairing people often rally and find the strength to go on.
<iframe width="460" height="259" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gbDhTKxLq_Y" title="825. Clancy Martin" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Martin does the “strict-guidelines-can-prevent-abuse” soft-shoe, but as we have seen over and over — in Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even the U.S. — guidelines offer a veneer of assurance and are liberalized and expanded as soon as the political paradigm allows. Indeed, in recent weeks, that is precisely what happened in Vermont, Oregon, Canada, and the Netherlands.
He concludes:
Suicidal people suffering from psychological torture should have the right to consult a medical expert about medical assistance in taking their own lives and be given that assistance if their need is justified. Having terrified or anguished people in acute mental suffering ending their pain by the many means available to them, often resulting not in death but terrible physical injury, is much worse, and it’s happening every day.
Who will be the “expert” to judge whether someone else has suffered enough? The patient’s doctor? If the doctor refuses, a suicidal person can go doctor-shopping with the help of euthanasia-advocacy organizations to find one who will say yes. Indeed, wherever euthanasia is legal, doctors participate in the assisted-suicide deaths of patients outside their own medical specialties.
Anything Else Is Abandonment
We should never make suicide easy — the West is experiencing a suicide crisis, after all — and we should always strive to engage in interventions, whether the patient is suicidal because of cancer, a mental illness, or a calamity such as the death of a child. To do anything else is abandonment.
The question is whether we still care enough about each other for that to matter. At least Martin’s advocacy has the virtue of being an honest recitation of what euthanasia advocacy is really about.
Ps. The difference between JEHOVAH'S approach to addressing these types of issues and the approaches preferred by the thought leaders of the present age, is that JEHOVAH is addressing the disease and thought leaders on both sides of this issue are dealing with the symptoms.
Saturday 22 April 2023
In search of Darwinism's "simple beginning"
<iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Eefw0Dnv_Ic" title="The Mystery of Life's Origin -- Dr. Stephen Meyer" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
On the boundaries of science
Physicist Eric Hedin Probes the Limits of Science
Are we free to look beyond materialism for answers to important scientific questions? On a classic episode of ID the Future, Canceled Science author and physicist Eric Hedin sits down with host Eric Anderson to discuss what does and doesn’t constitute science, what nature can and can’t accomplish, and the use and abuse of consensus claims in determining scientific truth. It’s all material explored in Hedin’s book, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See. This is Part 1 of a conversation. Download the podcast or listen to it Here. And be sure to read Dr. Hedin’s latest at Evolution News, “Evolutionist Claims ChatGPT ‘Lies About Junk DNA.’”
The technology of breathing vs. Darwinism.
In Breath-Holding, Kate Winslet and a Croc Are Champions
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kate Winslet, and other actors, for the sake of “the newest frontier in blockbuster moviemaking” are learning how to hold their breath underwater for several minutes.
Around the same time the website Science Daily highlighted an article from Current Biology that expounded on “how crocs can go hours without air,” thus blowing Miss Winslet’s impressive feat — seven and a quarter minutes holding her breath — right out of the water. The article attributes this croc ability to evolution.
But things are not as simple as they look. This is especially true once you understand how life works to survive, and the causal hurdles that would have had to have been surmounted to build life from the ground up.
That’s what my recent book, co-authored with Steve Laufmann, Your Designed Body, accomplishes for the reader. Read the book and you’ll be prepared to analyze the validity of Darwinism, ask evolutionists better questions, and expect better answers rather than just accepting their “just so” stories.
As Steve and I demonstrate, with each lesson learned about the complexity of life and survival and the built-in engineering that makes that possible, the explanatory power of Darwinism fades away until all that is left is the narrative gloss.
Reviewing the Basics
The fundamental building block for all life is the cell. One of the cell’s most important needs is energy. The cell, whether it lives and works in Kate or the croc, mostly gets this energy from cellular respiration. Cellular respiration involves the cell, in the presence of oxygen, releasing the energy from within the glucose molecule (while producing carbon dioxide) and storing it as ATP (the cell’s energy currency). The cell does also have a much less efficient way of getting a lot less energy from glucose, called glycolysis, a process that is anaerobic in that it does not require oxygen.
A one-celled organism, such as an amoeba, is like an “island of life.” That’s because it can get what it needs from its watery environment, while getting rid of what it doesn’t need as well. When it comes to energy, the amoeba gets its glucose and oxygen from its surroundings and releases carbon dioxide.
In contrast, a multi-cellular organism, like Kate or the croc, is like “a deep dark continent of life” since almost all of its trillions of cells are not near its surroundings. That’s why the organism needs to have a respiratory system to bring in oxygen (and release carbon dioxide), a gastrointestinal system to bring in glucose, and a cardiovascular system to carry these chemicals in the blood to or from all of the cells.
Not having enough oxygen (or for that matter, glucose) for your cells, especially the ones in the brain, which affords consciousness and controls breathing and the cardiovascular system, is a quick path to death. So, understanding how a creature can perform these breath-holding feats, while staying alive, is not an exercise in abstraction.
Physicians and engineers, unlike evolutionary theorists, work in the real world of science. The end point that proves any of their thought or practical experiments to be wrong is death — whether it’s that of the body or of a machine. That’s why understanding why an organism has to have enough oxygen (and anything else it needs to survive) and what happens when it doesn’t (death) must be plugged into any theory of life. Without this grounding in real “life and death” science, evolutionists are just letting their imaginations run wild.
Trillions of Cells
By hyperventilating beforehand, Kate Winslet maximized her blood level of oxygen and minimized her blood level of carbon dioxide. While holding her breath, as her carbon dioxide level rose and her oxygen level dropped, she would have had to resist the urge to breathe and also deal with symptoms like “tingling limbs, impaired vision, feelings of freakout” while being at risk of becoming unconscious and drowning. That’s why she always did this under the supervision of a trainer. Do not try this at home or alone!
The Cardiovascular System
Besides her respiratory system, putting oxygen into her blood to get it to all the cells in her body, Kate has a cardiovascular system. This consists of the heart with its right and left sides, and the pulmonary and systemic circulations. The right ventricle pumps deoxygenated blood through the pulmonary arteries to the lungs where it enters the capillaries surrounding the alveoli to pick up oxygen and then returns to the left side of the heart through the pulmonary veins. The left ventricle pumps oxygenated blood through the systemic arteries to the capillaries in the tissues. There, the cells get the oxygen (and glucose) they need and download the carbon dioxide. The blood then returns to the right side of the heart through the systemic veins.
One final problem remains, though. It turns out that oxygen doesn’t dissolve well in water. That’s why Kate Winslet has hemoglobin that’s made in her red blood cells, which are made in her bone marrow. Hemoglobin is a complex molecule, containing iron, that locks onto oxygen when it enters the blood from the lungs and so allows the blood in the body to have enough oxygen-carrying capacity.
With maximum exercise, Kate’s body needs a 14-fold increase in oxygen consumption compared to when she’s at rest. This means that her blood has to have enough red blood cells with enough hemoglobin to carry enough oxygen to meet the metabolic needs of her body, no matter what she’s doing. So, that means that her body has to control her hemoglobin.
As noted, every control system needs at least three parts and the one that controls the hemoglobin is no different. Kate has specialized cells in her kidneys that sense her blood level of oxygen and in response, the cell as the integrator sends out a certain amount of a hormone called erythropoietin. Erythropoietin travels in the blood and attaches to specific receptors on immature
stem cells in the bone marrow and tells them to develop into red blood cells, which produce hemoglobin. So, if the oxygen level goes down the kidney cells send out more erythropoietin which tells the bone marrow to make more red blood cells which gives the body more hemoglobin.
Given her impressive feat, it’s safe to say that Kate Winslet’s respiratory, cardiovascular, and hematological systems were all working at maximum efficiency. But the croc can easily beat her. Now, remember, the croc needs this functional capacity for survival. He’s not worrying about performing well enough to meet the needs of “the newest frontier in blockbuster moviemaking.” Nor is he trying to impress his friends by showing them how long he can hold his breath underwater while risking death by drowning. No, when the croc grabs the hindquarters of an antelope, he instinctively dives down deep into the water, where he knows he can survive for an hour or two without drowning, but the antelope can’t.
Since this involves the respiratory, cardiovascular, and hematological systems, they would seem to be the right places to start in comparing Kate and the croc. But before we do, we have to take into account that Kate is warm-blooded, while the croc is cold-blooded.
Hot and Cold
This difference means that Kate has to use a lot more energy (oxygen) than the croc to maintain her core temperature, which is between 97o and 99o F. She needs to do this so that all of her organ systems, especially her brain, can work properly. Remember, the croc only has to worry about surviving and reproducing. It would seem that being cold-blooded doesn’t bother his self-esteem one bit. However, being warm-blooded allows us to have the biggest brains in the animal kingdom, a fact that affords us numerous abilities, like intelligence, reasoning, creativity, self-reflection, and free will, going far beyond mere survival and reproduction.
In contrast to Kate Winslet, the croc can usually maintain its core temperature, between 82o and 92o F, with little effort simply by making sure it lives in a warm climate. In fact, at rest the croc only uses about 15 percent of the energy that a human does. And when it dives down deeper where the temperature is lower, because it is cold-blooded, it is able to reduce its metabolic rate even further.
So, for a given ambient temperature and level of activity, the croc requires much less oxygen (energy) than a human does to survive. This is so even if the human and the croc have the same amount of oxygen available for use. In fact, it means that as compared with Kate, the croc can get by on the anaerobic process of glycolysis to obtain the limited amount of extra energy it provides because he only needs 15 percent of what Kate needs.
From the start we can see that since the croc uses much less oxygen per minute than does Kate, this would at least partially explain why it is able to hold its breath under water so much longer. But there’s more. On Monday we’ll ask, “How Does the Crocodile Hold His Breath So Long?” Stay tuned.
Friday 21 April 2023
Common sense re:Darwinism
Uncommon Descent — A Farewell and Remembrance
Editor’s note: As of April 2023, the news and commentary site Uncommon Descent has been archived Here for historical and research purposes. To stay informed about the latest news and research in the sciences and about intelligent design, stay tuned for coverage here at Evolution News.
Uncommon Descent began in the summer of 2005 as my personal blog. Before that, I had a personal website, Designinference.com. The latter site began in 2002 and was a place for my longer writings. But by 2005, blogging was the rage, and I jumped in with both feet at Uncommon Descent.
The very name was at once a play on Darwin’s idea of common descent, but also a play on descent being a homophone of dissent. In 2004, I had edited an anthology for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute titled Uncommon Dissent, so the name Uncommon Descent tied in with my then current interests and activities. And it clearly called to mind that living organisms have an origin beyond the naturalistic causes of Darwinism, indeed, an origin stemming from a higher intelligence.
A Forum and Springboard
I didn’t know what to expect from the blog when it started, but it quickly developed a following that was gratifying to see, both from commenters and from contributors. In the first months, I seem to recall publishing around four blog posts a day. Soon enough, however, I tired of excessive posting (which is also why I never took to Twitter). I’ve always thought that my best contributions would be in sustained pieces of writing, so it was good to see others using UD as a forum and springboard.
Around 2008, Barry Arrington came on board to lead UD, organizing it as a non-profit corporation. This allowed it to take donations, and donations (along with a lot of free volunteer labor) kept it afloat from then to the present. Barry was not just an administrator. With a keen mind about the law and the role of evidence, he had many insightful posts of his own about ID to share with UD’s readers.
For the first few years of its existence, UD was the premier blog for ID. Eventually, it would be overtaken by Evolution News. But it was a place where key members of the ID community could go to post their views. It was also a prime target against which critics of ID would respond with criticisms, such as at Panda’s Thumb.
Even to this day, I’ll search UD for posts that I remember. For instance, in responding to ID critic Jason Rosenhouse in the summer of 2022 at Evolution News, I vaguely recalled a post by Mike Behe responding to Ken Miller. Sure enough, a Google search located Behe’s post at UD (from 2007).
The ID Blog to Beat
Over the years, UD provided valuable news and insights to the ID movement. The indefatigable Denyse O’Leary was crucial in this regard. Yet over time, the center of mass for ID blogging shifted elsewhere. Evolution News became the ID blog to beat. Also, YouTube videos and social media became much more influential.
Even so, UD provides a crucial window into the history of the ID movement. It therefore seemed important to archive it. So I was delighted when Discovery Institute agreed to fold an archived version of UD into its web properties, keeping as well as repurposing valuable content created on the UD site. In saying farewell to UD, we are thus not saying that we’ll never see UD again. It will be there, in archival form, ready to be accessed.
In closing this farewell, I want to say special thanks to Jack Cole, who was the webmaster all these years and put in so many unremunerated hours; to Denyse O’Leary, whose quick pen and sharp insights supplied a never-ending stream of fruitful content; and to Barry Arrington, whose work in administering the site and writing for it kept the trains running. And finally, thanks to all the contributors and commenters over the years who, in supporting ID, have been on the right side of truth and will ultimately be vindicated for being on the right side of history.
Budding AI overlord stumbles over "junk DNA"?
Evolutionist Claims ChatGPT “Lies About Junk DNA”
Biochemist Laurence Moran has related his frustrating interaction with ChatGPT, claiming that the responses included fabrications and misquotes about “junk DNA.” Does the AI bot “lie,” as Moran maintains? Let’s take a look.
He begins, “We have finally restored the Junk DNA article on Wikipedia. (It was deleted about ten years ago when Wikipedians decided that junk DNA doesn’t exist.)” So now you know his own perspective on the subject, if you didn’t already. Moran says that he’s been trying to figure out how far the misunderstandings of junk DNA have spread, so he’s been querying ChatGPT about this. His findings reveal ChatGPT’s ability to cite “quotes” that don’t really exist (referring to Francis Crick’s 1970 article, “Central Dogma of Molecular Biology”), but the irony is that Moran’s criticism of ChatGPT for misunderstanding junk DNA seems to be rooted in his own opinions on the issue.
In Search of Function
Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson notes that Moran has become entrenched in his assertion that the majority of other biologists misunderstand the finding that what used to be called junk DNA has increasingly shown regulatory function. After all, evolution is blind and driven by random events, isn’t it? Consistent with this idea, Moran complains about geneticists including John Mattick who are curious about possible function in what was previously thought to be junk DNA. They keep looking for function and refuse to stop at what Moran thinks is the obvious “null hypothesis.”
A null or default hypothesis, such as expecting the absence of function in non-coding segments of DNA, reveals a presupposition that biases one’s interpretation of available scientific evidence.
That Moran’s views are steeped in evolutionary thinking is clear. “[W]hat the heck,” he says, “nothing in all of biology makes sense if you don’t know about evolution.” I would amend his assertion to clarify the role of his worldview, as follows: Indeed, “nothing in all of biology makes sense if you don’t know about evolution,” and if you presuppose a closed, materialistic universe. On the other hand, most everything in biology makes sense if you accept an open universe in which a purposeful intellect designed living organisms in a manner consistent with maintaining Earth’s habitability over the past 3.8 billion years or so and culminating in a thriving humanity on the leading edge of Earth’s history.
Moran’s Notably Isolated Thoughts
Moran contends that “ChatGPT is probably spewing back the common misunderstanding of junk DNA.” Is the arguable “misunderstanding” real, or is it just that ChatGPT presented a summary of web content that failed to align with Moran’s notably isolated thoughts on junk DNA? Indeed, Moran’s latest book title claims that “90% of Your Genome Is Junk.”
Moran’s singular views are at odds with the progression of scientific investigation on the human genome, including results of the ENCODE project, as Casey Luskin reported in a 2013 Evolution News article:
A groundbreaking paper in Nature reports the results of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, which has detected evidence of function for the “vast majority” of the human genome. Titled “An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome,” the paper finds an “unprecedented number of functional elements,” where “a surprisingly large amount of the human genome” appears functional.
Based upon current knowledge, the paper concludes that at least 80% of the human genome is now known to be functional.
How does Moran defend his view that most of DNA is junk? The first in a list of five arguments that he gives for junk DNA is referred to as genetic load:
Every newborn human baby has about 100 mutations not found in either parent. If most of our genome contained functional sequence information, then this would be an intolerable genetic load. Only a small percentage of our genome can contain important sequence information suggesting strongly that most of our genome is junk.
A comment on a post at Uncommon Descent regarding Moran’s new book and his argument about junk DNA offers this response: “First off, it is important to note that Moran’s claim that 90% of our genome must be junk is not derived from any direct empirical observation, but [rather] Moran’s belief that 90% of the genome must be junk is forced upon Moran because of the mathematics of population genetics.”
Though not a geneticist, I would suggest that within the design paradigm, the “100 mutations not found in either parent” might not accumulate to “an intolerable genetic load” if the genome was designed to include a sufficient level of redundancy and flexibility. Not much would be needed, when considering the mutations as a fraction of the entire genome (100/3.5×109 base pairs = 2.9×10-8), or 1 part in 35 million. An intelligent designer would recognize the probability of mutations in the genome and would with foresight incorporate coding principles to ameliorate their effects. It seems rather unimaginative to contend that the only way to handle natural mutations is to front-load the genome with 90 percent junk. But dogmatic assertions based on stubborn presuppositions have a way of making their adherents stumble over the obvious.
So, Does ChatGPT “Lie” About Junk DNA?
Moran’s post on his interaction with ChatGPT drew some comments contending that ChatGPT, though sophisticated compared to past technology, still suffers from “GIGO,” or “garbage in, garbage out.” Or, as Moran laments, “ChatGPT is probably spewing back the common misunderstanding of junk DNA.” Whether the common view is true or false, it’s probably just what a web-based AI chatbot will give you. Real knowledge can only derive from reality, and a summary majority view from online sources remains a poor substitute.
In reading about ChatGPT on Digital Trends, we learn that the public version has “limited knowledge of world events after 2021.” Can we conclude that AI chatbots are “going to make everyone stupid”? To me as a university professor, it’s obvious that the temptation students face to find a way to quickly complete an assignment such as writing a research paper or essay, without doing original work, has just exploded. At what cost? Most likely the outcome will be a reduced ability for critical thinking and for effective writing, and in the end, greater apathy about why it all even matters.
Thursday 20 April 2023
On the posthuman Christ
1Peter1:18NIV"For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And it was not paid with mere gold or silver, which lose their value."
For the analog to a commercial transaction to be precise the exchange of cost price and merchandise must be permanent. Neither the buyer nor the seller has any right to even part of what they traded away.
Thus Christ once he had paid his human existence ,as represented by the blood that once sustained it,as the purchase price of our redeemed souls, could not legally reclaim said human existence if our atonement was to have a solid legal foundation.
Thus we are to understand the meaning of this prayer at John as a plea for the restoration of his prehuman/superhuman glory.
John ch.17:5NIV"And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I HAD(but do not presently do) with you before the world began."
This scripture(quoted below) at Hebrews suggest that the Lord JEHOVAH did indeed hear this plea favorably.
Hebrews ch.5:7,8NASB"In the days(Permanently gone) of [c]His humanity, [d]He offered up both prayers and pleas with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him [e]from death, and He [f]was heard because of His devout behavior."
The expression "days of his humanity" suggest a past state of affairs.
Galatians ch.1:1NIV"Paul, an apostle (not sent from men nor through human agency, but through Jesus Christ..."
Having seen the post human Christ first hand our brother Paul knew that Christ was no longer human. Indeed to inherit the heavenly kingdom he needed to be divested of his humanity the heavenly hope is a post human hope.
1Corinthians15:50NIV"Now I say this, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood(the human) cannot inherit the (superhuman)kingdom of God; nor does [u]the perishable inherit [v]the imperishable."
Recognising the thumb print of JEHOVAH.
Tutorial: Melissa Cain Travis on Kepler and Cosmic Comprehensibility
Dr. Melissa Cain Travis is the author of Thinking God’s Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility. She hosted a Zoom video tutorial on the subject that you can purchase here for just $4.99. The presentation is followed by an interactive discussion with the participants.
A host of philosophers, theologians, scientists, and mathematicians have been struck by the uncanny interconnection between three fundamentally distinct domains of reality: nature, mathematics, and the human mind. This resonance has been discussed since antiquity and often attributed to a transcendent rational source of both material and immaterial aspects of reality. Johannes Kepler, a devout Christian who was greatly influenced by this intellectual tradition, was convinced that a tripartite harmony of archetype, copy, and image explained the interconnections that made his natural philosophy possible. This harmony, he believed, allowed him to share in God’s own thoughts.
Dr. Travis demonstrates that Keplerian natural theology is a more robust explanation of cosmic comprehensibility than ever before. In her words, “For more than two millennia, great thinkers of the Western tradition have marveled at the rational order of the cosmos and humankind’s ability to discern it. Kepler, a giant of the scientific revolution, understood the powerful theistic implications of the mathematics-nature-mind resonance that makes the natural sciences possible.”
On balance ,I.D is the better explanation?
Balance: Bipeds Need It; Where Did It Come From?
As upright walkers, human beings are subject to damage from falls. Our center of gravity, near the navel, is much higher than that of a dog or rat that is balanced on four feet. Howard Glicksman and Steve Laufmann note in Your designed Body that you have only a half second from losing your balance to hitting the ground.
Many of us know loved ones who have fallen and incurred major injuries to the head, hips, spine, or other body parts. The commercial line “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” reminds us of the danger of falls for the elderly who have lost their youthful balance and reaction time. The young would be at the same risk were it not for intricately designed mechanisms for rapid correction from loss of balance. Before there were ambulances and emergency rooms, this would have likely ended the human race, because in Darwinian thinking, individuals must reach reproductive age to achieve the mystical property called “fitness.” How many falls would it take for the young to each earn a “Darwin award” for eliminating themselves from the gene pool?
“We All Fall Down”
Without a suite of protective systems for preventing serious injuries from falls, would any human ancestors survive to puberty? Babies fall, as parents know, but they live closer to the ground and retain a good deal of cushioning body fat till they master the art of walking on two legs. Pre-pubertal adolescents are already at risk of falling; plus, they tend to be foolhardier and more energetic. The simplistic just-so story of apes descending from the trees and learning to walk upright on the ground (the Savannah hypothesis) should end with the nursery rhyme, “We all fall down.”
Fortunately, we have such a suite of protective equipment. Glicksman discusses one fine-tuning specialization, the myelin sheath encasing many neurons in the central nervous system. Myelin speeds up neural transmission by a factor of a hundred, giving us time to respond to a loss of balance. Another remarkable specialization is found in the middle ear: the vestibular apparatus, consisting of the utricle, saccule, and semicircular canals. These balance organs inform the brain rapidly, giving us precious fractions of a second to try to catch ourselves. With that extra time, we can move our feet, knees, arms, and hands to avoid hitting the ground, grab onto something with our hands, or if we cannot stop, we can roll onto our side to absorb the shock. The success of these protections can be seen in gymnasts, teens on skateboards, specialists in parkour, or experts in any high-velocity sport who make rapid adjustments in moves that would otherwise be debilitating or fatal.
Fastest Signals in the Body
Physiologists have marveled at the rapidity of the neurons in the vestibular organs — the fastest in the body — but did not understand how they work. A new paper in Current Biology notes that these neurons are arranged by “birthdate” in an orderly manner, giving them a “previously hidden functional topography.” This means that “directional selectivity to body tilts followed soma position and birthdate.”
Taken together, we find that development reveals organization within the vestibular brainstem, its peripheral inputs, and its motor outputs (Figure 7). We propose that time plays a causal role in fate determination, topographic organization, and, by extension, vestibular circuit formation. Our data suggest mechanisms for projection neuron fate specification. More broadly, our findings offer insights into how time shapes vertebrate sensorimotor circuits.
A team of researchers from Rice, Yale, and the University of Chicago, publishing in PNAS, looked further at the synapses in vestibular neurons and found them to be uniquely designed for rapid response. Most neurons transfer electrical signals across synapses with neurotransmitters in what’s called “quantal transmission” (QT). QT has an inherent delay as the information crosses a synaptic gap. Vestibular neurons, by contrast, operate with “a mysterious form of electrical transmission that does not involve gap junctions, termed nonquantal transmission (NQT")
The ability of the vestibular system to drive the fastest reflexes in the nervous system depends on rapid transmission of mechanosensory signals at vestibular hair cell synapses. In mammals and other amniotes, afferent neurons form unusually large calyx terminals on certain hair cells, and communication at these synapses includes nonquantal transmission (NQT), which avoids the synaptic delay of quantal transmission. We present a quantitative model that shows how NQT depends on the extent of the calyx covering the hair cell and attributes the short latency of NQT to changes in synaptic cleft electrical potential caused by current flowing through open potassium channels in the hair cell. This mechanism of electrical transmission between cells may act at other synapses.
Hair cells perform mechanotransduction — the transfer of mechanical energy to electrical energy. When the tiny hairs are deflected, they trigger the flow of ions from the surrounding fluid, called endolymph, into the adjacent cell, triggering an ionic train that travels down the neurons. The hair cells in the cochlea perform mechanotransduction for hearing. The hair cells in the utricle “drive neural circuits controlling gaze, balance, and orientation.”
What’s unique about a vestibular hair cell is the large goblet-shaped calyx surrounding its base. This is where the rapid “nonquantal” mechanotransduction was understood to occur, but the mechanism was unknown.
How it Works
Unlike normal synapses between neurons, vestibular hair cells do not need to traverse a gap junction, where the electrical energy must be converted to chemical energy and back again. In a synapse, signal “quanta” are packetized by exocytosis of vesicles containing neurotransmitters. Each packet must cross the synapse and be re-absorbed by endocytosis into the neuron. In vestibular hair cells, by contrast, the calyx structure has a very narrow “synaptic cleft” between the hair cell body and the neuron that “involves neither exocytosis of packets (vesicles or quanta) of neurotransmitter nor gap junctions.” This reduces the latency of gap junctions and speeds the electrical impulse on its way to the brain.
A deflection of only 1 micrometer (one millionth of a meter) in the hair cell is sufficient to trigger a response. Because the synaptic cleft is lined with potassium and sodium channels, multiple channels in the cup-shaped calyx can respond simultaneously to the change in electrical potential.
The synaptic cleft is a dynamic system where electric potentials, ion concentrations, and ionic currents interact. The changes in cleft electrical potential and ion concentrations shown in Fig. 2 are driven by currents through voltage-sensitive ion channels … on the hair cell basolateral membrane and on the calyx inner face, and in turn modulate these currents (Fig. 3). NQT is bidirectional: we first describe the roles of key channels during anterograde (hair cell to calyx) NQT and later discuss retrograde (calyx to hair cell) NQT.
The description gets correspondingly “hairy” at this part of the paper. The authors discuss signal gain, frequency response, electrical potentials, voltage, resistance, capacitance, and other terms that make the paper seem like it belongs under electrical engineering instead of biology. Suffice it to say that a great deal happens quickly, with forward and backward feedback.
These results indicate that fast retrograde events seen in electrophysiological recordings of the hair cell and calyx are caused by changes in electrical potential in the synaptic cleft. It has been suggested that the bidirectional nature of NQT, which our VHCC model captures, could be used to modulate the sensitivity of both the calyx and the hair cell.
A key point is that NQT depends on the morphology of the calyx. One other thing to keep in mind is that the “large number” of ion channels that line the synaptic cleft in the calyx are wonderfully complex in themselves: K+ channels, Na+channels, and Ca2+ channels. Each type includes a selectivity filter that can discriminate the nanoscopic ions allowed through. Their placement in both number and orientation along the synaptic cleft, furthermore, are additional functional requirements to achieve the rapid response, so that the organism doesn’t break its skull when suddenly shifted off balance. The rapidity of the system can be appreciated by watching an ice skater breaking a dizzying spin or sticking the landing of a triple lutz.
A Question of Origins
It is true that all amniotes, including fish, amphibians, and mammals, contain the calyx structure in their vestibular organs. It is not unique to bipeds like humans. An evolutionist would have to consider this a “pre-design” for the bipeds and figure skaters to come hundreds of millions of years later. Rob Raphael, the lead author at Rice for the paper, speculated that the calyx
is an example of how evolution drives morphological specialization. A compelling argument can be made that once animals emerged from the sea and began to move on land, swing in trees and fly, there were increased demands on the vestibular system to rapidly inform the brain about the position of the head in space. And at this point the calyx appeared.
“The calyx appeared”! A more magical explanation could hardly be fabricated. The argument may be compelling to Dr. Raphael, but can it be believed that needs create solutions on their own? Fish are not at risk of falling, so where was the selective pressure to evolve NQT? Did an amphibian summon cosmic rays to hit its germ cells just right to start the evolution of nonquantal transmission in its offspring? Human engineers can observe needs and build solutions, but to expect a multi-part, irreducibly complex piece of supremely efficient electrical engineering to “evolve” by sheer dumb luck simply because an animal might benefit from it stretches credulity. If anything, what the authors describe represents over-design — a concept foreign to Darwinism, which lacks foresight.
The common implementation of calyx NQT among different animals is not evidence of common ancestry. Each animal could, instead, enjoy the shared design tailored to its particular lifestyle. The authors note that larger calyces reduce delay and observe that “calyces vary in their shape in different regions of amniote vestibular epithelia.” Not every animal needs the human specification. ID advocates might want to investigate the tailoring of calyces to lifestyle.
For those of us not beholden to evolutionary explanations, NQT is another lifesaving wonder that most of us probably never heard of before. Glicksman says that neural reflexes travel at 200 miles per hour in the spine, allowing us to react in 0.01 seconds — 50 times faster than a fall. Awareness of a loss of balance begins with nonquantal transmission in the utricle.
Our vestibular organs are tiny marvels inside our heads that keep us on balance and oriented in 3-D space and time. They work flawlessly most of the time for up to a century or more. How many times have you put your vestibular organs to the test: swimming, riding roller coasters, leaping, rock-hopping across a stream, doing handstands, or engaging in sports? One episode of vertigo accompanied by a painful fall is enough to shudder at what would be the norm without these tiny organs working properly. The astonishing thing is not that these systems begin to slow down in old age, but that they ever worked in the first place.
Need for speed: reality edition.
<iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/q4-2O8diL70" title="The Evolution of Land Speed Records" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Wednesday 19 April 2023
Yet another rant against the brain eating idiocy of the trinity dogma.
Galatians ch.3:20NIV"A mediator, however, implies more than one party; but God is one."
Just as no man can mediate between himself and (the) God so to (the) God cannot be his own mediator
The dictionary definition of mediate is:to settle (disputes, strikes, etc.) as an intermediary between parties; reconcile.
So as always to embrace Christendom's absurdities we must throw away our dictionaries. We choose to hold on to our dictionaries(and our capacity for clear thinking) and instead cast aside Christendom's stupidity.
Serendipity squared?
The DNA Code and Evolution
The DNA code is used in cells to translate a sequence of nucleotides into a sequence of amino acids, which then make up a protein. In the past fifty years we have learned four important things about the code:
1. The DNA code is universal. There are minor variations scattered about, but the same canonical code is found across the species.
2. The DNA code is special. The DNA is not just some random, off the shelf, code. It has unique properties, for example that make the translation process more robust to mutations. The code has been called “one in a million,” but it probably is even more special than that. For instance, one study found that the code optimizes “a combination of several different functions simultaneously.”
3. Some of the special properties of the DNA code only rarely confer benefit. Many of the code’s special properties deal with rare mutation events. If such properties could arise via random mutation in an individual organism, their benefit would not be common.
4. The DNA code’s fitness landscape has dependencies on the DNA coding sequences and so favors stasis. Changes in the DNA code may well wreak havoc as the DNA coding sequences are suddenly not interpreted correctly. So the fitness landscape, at any given location in the code design space, is not only rugged but often is a local minimum, thus freezing evolution at that code.
Observation #1 above, according to evolutionary theory, means that the code is the ultimate homology and must have been present in the last universal common ancestor (LUCA). There was essentially zero evolution of the code allowed over the course of billions of years.
This code stasis can be understood, from an evolutionary perspective, using Observation #4. Given the many dependencies on the DNA coding sequences, the code can be understood to be at a local minimum and so impossible to evolve.
Hence Francis Crick’s characterization, and subsequent promotion by later evolutionists, of the code as a “frozen accident.” Somehow the code arose, but was then strongly maintained and unevolvable.
But then there is Observation #2.
The code has been found not to be mundane, but special. This falsified the “frozen accident” characterization, as the code is clearly not an accident. It also caused a monumental problem. While evolutionists could understand Observation #1, the universality of the code, as a consequence of the code being at a fitness local minimum, Observation #2 tells us that the code would not have just luckily been constructed at its present design.
If evolution somehow created a code to begin with, it would be at some random starting point. Evolution would have no a priori knowledge of the fitness landscape. There is a large number of possible codes, so it would be incredibly lucky for evolution’s starting point to be anywhere near the special, canonical code we observe today. There would be an enormous evolutionary distance to travel between an initial random starting point, and the code we observe.
And yet there is not even so much as a trace of such a monumental evolutionary process. This would be an incredible convergence. In biology, when we see convergence, we usually also see variety. The mammalian and cephalopod eyes are considered to be convergent, but they also have fundamental differences. And in other species, there are all kinds of different vision systems. The idea that the universal DNA code is the result of convergence would be very suspect. Why are there no other canonical codes found? Why are there not more variants of the code? To have that much evolutionary distance covered, and converge with that level of precision would very strange.
And of course, in addition to this strange absence of any evidence of such a monumental evolutionary process, there is the problem described above with evolving the code to begin with. The code’s fitness landscape is rugged and loaded with many local minima. Making much progress at all in evolving the code would be difficult.
But then there is Observation #3.
Not only do we not see traces of the required monumental process of evolving the code across a great distance, and not only would this process be almost immediately halted by the many local minima in the fitness landscape, but what fitness improvements could actually be realized would not likely be selected for because said improvements rarely actually confer there benefit.
While these problems obviously are daunting, we have so far taken yet another tremendous problem for granted: the creation of the initial code, as a starting point.
We have discussed above the many problems with evolving today’s canonical code from some starting point, all the while allowing for such a starting point simply to magically appear. But that, alone, is a big problem for evolution. The evolution of any code, even a simple code, from no code, is a tremendous problem.
Finally, a possible explanation for these several and significant problems to the evolution of the DNA code is the hypothesis that the code did not actually evolve so much as construct. Just as the right sequence of amino acids will inevitably fold into a functional protein, so too perhaps the DNA code simply is the consequence of biochemical interactions and reactions. In this sense the code would not evolve from random mutations, but rather would be inevitable. In that case, there would be no lengthy evolutionary pathway to traverse.
Now I don’t want to give the impression that this hypothesis is mature or fleshed out. It is extremely speculative.
But there is another, more significant, problem with this hypothesis: It is not evolution.
If true this hypothesis would confirm design. In other words, a chemically determined pathway, which as such is written into the very fabric of matter and nature’s laws, would not only be profound but teleological. The DNA code would be built into biochemistry.
And given Observation #2, it is a very special, unique, detailed, code that would be built into biochemistry. It would not merely be a mundane code that happened to be enabled or determined by biochemistry, but essentially an optimized code.
Long live Aristotle.
The problem is there simply is no free lunch. Evolutionists can try to avoid the science, but there it is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)