Archives - Evolution/Creation: The Truth e-newsletter
6/7/2004 -
A creationist comments
Hello all,
David is part of the Creation Research Society and regularily submits this
review of the science literature - saves a lot of library time for some of us.
The reading can be somewhat heavy scientifically. I thought I would send it to
you... Take special notice of the summary of the article on John Maynard Smith
(in the middle).
Thinking of His garden,
Blessings, Laurence
A Creationist Comments
06/04/04
Evolutionists generally seem to think that creationism is nothing more or less
than substituting a woodenly literal understanding of Genesis 1 in place of all
science, and on the contrary that the theory of evolution is as scientifically
established as the laws of gravity and the heliocentric nature of our Solar
system.
So an amateur creationist commentator should figuratively starve to death when
looking for material in serious scientific journals, right?
Heh, heh, heh.
Picking up where I left off last time in _Nature_ v. 429, 13 May '04, p. 147,
the News and Views In Brief page. Under "Biophysics," "How DNA avoids getting
wound up." As noted in a previous Comments, DNA normally occurs in "chromatin
fibres" where it "is wound around protein discs to form a string of bead-like
nucleosomes." This brief article notes that "This is just one of the levels of
hierarchical sturcture in chromatin." The fibers ("fibres" being the British
spelling) "are typically organized into long loops pinned at each end." To
produce a needed protein, sections of the DNA have to be released, unwound from
the protein bobbins. In a preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio.SC/0404037 ,
researchers "show that there is just a single unwinding pathway that takes a
fibre from a compacted form as dense as that seen in the cell to an open form,
while conserving the linging number." The linking number is a mathematical term
that describes a property of the looping that, as lon g as a wound string isn't
cut, has to be conserved. "Chromatin seems to have evolved precisely the
nucleosome spacing that allows this unfolding pathway to be accessed." Another
amazing property of the complexity of life that is "just right," and we are
supposed to believe that it came about by billions of years of the ordinary
operation of mindless forces of nature.
Same page, under Geochemistry, "Ancient air not a fire hazard" based on a report
in _Geology_ 32, 457-460 (2004). It seems there was a problem (another one that
I don'r recall hearing about until this proposed solution came up) "with
geochemical models that suggest the atmosphere contained up to 35% oxygen about
300 million years ago." That high of an oxygen content, it would seem, would
lead to "natural wildfires, ignited by lightning" to such an extent that it "could
devastate plant life." However, this new report "looked at the effect...on the
burning of wood, foliage and moss chosen to approximate teh vegetation of
Carboniferous forests." Apparently such moist vegetation wouldn't be so prone to
burning out of control as earlier experiments, which "used paper," indicated.
Still, these geochemical models and the actual fossils might profitably be
studied by Flood modelers and other creationary geologists.
Still on p. 147, under Virology, "High-temperature infection," based on _Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0401773101 (2004). It's noted that all
three domains of life (Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya) "can be infected by
specific viruses." The report cited describes a virus that attacks Archaea (once
thought to be primitive bacteria) and the surprising discovery "that the viral
genes are quite different from those of other viruses and other organisms...But
despite the genetic diversity, the structure of the viral 'coat protein'
resembles that of bacterial and eukaryotic viruses." Perhaps the most relevant
thing here is the claim that "The finding hints that some viruses may have a
common ancestor that predated the split into the three domains of life more than
3 billion years ago." A virus, which depends on (other?) forms of life to
reproduce, existing alongside and infecting the earliest, common ancestor of all
life? Hmmmm.
And, as always, there are several articles that demonstrate the marvelous
complexity of living things on the molecular scale, and would fill several more
commentaries ...
I've got so much material to work with, I may not be able to keep up, let alone
review past material I skipped. Here's some interesting things in _Nature_, v.
429, 20 May, 2004.
_Nature_, v. 429, 20 May, 2004 pp. 236-237, "Not so special, after all?" by
Jonathan Knight. This discusses the case of _Giardia intestinalis_ reported in
an earlier Comments. This tiny, relatively simple parasitic organism (it can
give you a very nasty gut infection) was/is "an icon of evolutionary theory" as
"Textbooks have for years held up this single-celled parasite as a living relic
of the very early days in the evolution of plants, animals and other higher life
forms."
It would be quite remarkable for an organism to have survived for perhaps
billions of years and countles generations, eons before our ancestors even had a
gut, and yet not to have evolved into something more complex, nor become
simplified or just changed beyond recognition. In this sense, it is still a
remarkable "living fossil" in its mute testimony contrary to evolution, and now
it's iconic statis is serioiusly threatened, although some scientists "are
fighting to retain" it. Those of you familiar with all this may wish to skim
through the next few paragraphs.
"Advanced" organisms (Hah! everything except bacteria and the bacteria-like
archaea) "contain many types of ... useful sacs, or 'organelles', as well as a
nucleus" and, most relevantly to this case, either chloroplasts (in plants,
where photosynthesis takes place) or mitochondria, "sacs of enzymes that use
oxygen to generate energy for cells." To portray organelles as simple sacs of
chemicals is a gross oversimplification. The membranes of the "sacks" often have
special pores that control which chemicals flow in and out, and at what rate,
and the working chemicals within them include complex structures formed of large
proteins."
The myth which "Biologists now believe" about the origin of mitochondria is that
"sometime between 1.5 billion and 2.2 billion years ago...rising oxygen
levels...were causing problems for organisms adapted to life without the gas.
The theory goes that the ancestor of mitochndria was a prokaryotic [bacteria-like
-- DB] cellular parasite that could process oxygen." They don't say how or why
it could/would develop this ability, or why and how this oxygen-eater came to
live inside organisms adapted to living without oxygen and therefore avoiding it
like the plague. It's just assumed it did get into them and then helped these
single-celled ancestors of ours by "soaking up toxic dissolved oxygen." Thus,
this mitochondria-ancestor/parasite "became an indispensable source of chemical
energy" for our single celled ancestors, stuck with them as they evolved into
all the multi-celled organisms, including humans, and somehow "Most of its genes
relocated to the host's nucleus, sealing the
partnership." Hmmm, and apparently over billions or at least hundreds of
millions of years, mitochondria and their relationship within cells remained
basically the same in all the different forms of eukaryotes, eh? Hmmmm.
So much for the background. _Giardia_ comes in because, although it's relatively
large, has a nucleus, and other traits of eukaryotes, it doesn't have
mitochondria, "so it was thought to be a direct descedent of pre-mitochondrial
eukaryotes." This made it very interesting to evolutionists, and "resources have
been ploughed into" studying it, and "A lot of people's efforts were invested in
the idea that _Gieardia_ was the most primitive eukaryote" according to one
researcher. Thus, the iconic status. _Giardia_ was like a living missing link, a
transitional form between the first life forms and modern eukaryotes.
The first hint that this star of the evolutionary mythology wasn't all it was
cracked up to be acme back in 1998, when it was discovered that _Giardia_ had a
gene that was like one from a bacteria "thought to be the closest living
relatives" to whatever mitochondria came from. This could indicate that _Giardia_
had once had mitochondria, but lost them. But it also could have been due to
some other past parasitic or endosymbiotic bacteria. After all, "hundreds of
examples of such 'endosymbiosis' are known." Without skipping a beat or pausing
to reflect, Knight adds "So far as we know, in billions of years, endosymbiosis
has led to the formation of only two organelles: mitochndria and chloroplasts."
Huh, hundreds of known cases, billions of years of evolution... and yet the only
two "known" cases happened early on and produced the two most vital organelles
for eukaryotes? Astounding.
What should be the final blow to the idea that _Giardia_ is the missing link, "the
real bombshell," came when a team of researchers discovered last year that a
bunch of proteins similar to those that associate with mitochondria bunched up
in _Giardia_ and used an electron microscope to detect "tiny sac at those spots,
which they identified as mitochondrial relics called mitosomes."
Mitosomes had been discovered before, in another organism that had been thought
to be a missing link, and also happens to be a nasty intestinal parasite.
Evolutionists had created a new class, Archezoa, for just the two organisms to
celebrate their transitional status. Then somebody went and analyzed the DNA of
this other critter, _Entamoeba hystolytica_ and got the result that it should be
placed _after_ several organisms that had mitochondria. Then they found the
first known mitosomes in them. Oops, Archezoa was down to one member. Now it
appears it's going to be a defunct class.
Not that all evolutionists are going to take the loss easily. For example, one
researcher points out that a protein that migrates to mitochondria doesn't
migrate to the posited mitosomes in _Giardia_. But if these tiny sacks are
reduced mitochondria, mightn't they be expected to have also lost their affinity
for some proteins?
It's nice to see evolutionists acknowledging the influence of non-scientific
motives on the attitudes of other scientists, even though its only within their
evolutionary paradigm. One argues that "Some people...refuse to accept [that
_Giardia_ had mitochondria] because they have spent too many years working on
the opposite assumption. 'They don't want it to have mitochondria because it
spoils their sou...This thinking is deeply ingrained.'" How much more is this
the case of evolutionary biology in general, where over a hundred years of most
of the scientific establishment has worked (rather fruitlessly) to uphold the
great myth and indoctrinate it into each generation of science students?
So now there is a lot of resistance to the idea of giving _Giardia_ the boot
from its pedestal. It was "the grandaddy, having branched off on its own before
any other eukaryote." It was the star of the Archezoa... oh, I guess there were
more than two members at one point, "But one by one, the Archezoa all proved to
have either a set of mitochondrial genes in their nuclei, or relics of
mitochondria." NOW, it seems "this isn't entirely surprising" since, after all,
"many of these organisms are parasites" and parasites do tend to get along
without organs used for things they can get from their hosts. Now some DNA
analyses have even called into question _Giardia_'s spot nearest the base of the
eukaryotic branch of the tree of life.
I wish everyone who has seen the popular evolutionary depictions of the tree of
life could see one of these modern, technical versions such as the example in
the figure with this article. It makes me think of a scrawny fungus sprouting in
three directions, a couple for bacteria and archaea and one for eukaryotes --
plants and animals? Oh, they're just two of three tiny twigs at the very tip of
the latter, along with fungi.
_Nature_, v. 429, 20 May, 2004 p.247, essay concepts article "Last hideout of
the unknown?" by Peter A. Lawrence starts with "the mystery surrounding animal
development is diminishing," but the subject is not how much we've learned. "But
there is one feature of animals for which we still have no explanation of any
kind -- yet it is so common that we pay it little attention. This is the
characteristic and finely determined shape of animals..." Most of the article
presents Lawrence's "conjecture, with only a little evidence" about how this
might come about. It's a bit too advanced and subtle for me, but this looks like
another area a real expert creationist might profitably look into. However much
we may learn about this process, it seems we are already confirming the
psalmist's declaration, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
_Nature_, v. 429, 20 May, 2004 pp. 258-259, the obituary for John Maynard Smith
(1920-2004). I didn't think I'd find much here, but I couldn't skip over the
obituary of "one of the greatest thinkers in evolutionary biology" who was born
before the Scopes trial and died just this 19th of April. What great insights
did he provide to evolutionary theory? What problems and mysteries did he solve?
What made him so great in this field of "science"?
Well, as I was surprised to discover, he made a lot of important contributions,
but none of them seem to have actually _advanced_ evolutionary theory so much as
fleshed it out a bit and brought to light problems that people hadn't thought of
before. Honestly.
His "upper-class family" wanted him "to become a stockbroker." Seeking a
respectable compromise, he got a degree in engineering and helped design
aircraft during WWII. When his bad eyesight prevented him from getting into a
career of flying airplanes, he took up studying evolution under J.B.S. Haldane,
"a towering figure in British science at that time." Okay, enough background.
Smith's "most important theoretical insight into ageing was that natural
selection would be expected to synchronize the ageing processes of the various
subsystems of an organism." That is, organisms that evolved parts that lasted
longer than necessary would be selected against compared to those that didn't
develop such wasteful variations. This might sound impressive as an insight into
biology provided by an evolutionary viewpoint, but ironically the obituary
itself provides us with an illustration of the intelligent design view
equivalent: "A similar consideration must have guided Henry Ford to the junk
yard of old automobiles, to decide which parts to produce in lower quality in
the future, so as to synchronize the expected time at which different parts
would wear out."
So much for major evolutionary insight number one. What next? It mentions that "he
was not a champion chemist, but he was comfortable with molecular biology, where
the processing of information plays a central role." This lead him to the
"formulation of the concept of 'sequence space' in the late 1960s" in which he
was "about 20 years ahead of his time." Sequence space is apparently the
mathematical description of all the possible combinations of amino acids,
requiring many dimensions. A typical graph has two dimensions, the X and Y axes
-- "highly multidimensional" mathematical "spaces" are required when there are
so many possibilities that they're beyond graphing and only the pure math will
serve. Smith "wanted to know how natural selcection could guide proteins"
through all these inconceivable possibilities to the relatively tiny "islands"
of amino acid sequences that would actually do something useful. That's not
quite how the article puts it, but it doesn't say that he o r any of his
followers since ever succeded in puzzling it out, only that such considerations
"are now widely applied in molecular evolution both at the protein and the RNA
level." Sounds like they're still working on that one. No real help for the
theory of evolution here.
Here's a third insight: "In 1971, he formulated a basic problem in evolutionary
biology known as the 'twofold cost of sex'." Hang on... a problem? Well, that
just helps advance the theory by lightyears, doesn't it? The problem is not
twofold because there's two parts, but because a population where all the
individual can reproduce should increase at twice the rate as one that wastes
half its population on males. Once again, there's no mention of Smith or anyone
else actually solving this problem, only that "The characteristically lucid
posing of the problem has stimulated much research..."
The authors of this obit, from personal discussions with Smith, feel his
contributions were based on "the application of rigorous evolutionary reasoning
to phenomena that at first sight seem to contradict darwinian theory." They cite
the example of a problem with some behaviors related to sexual reproduction --
why do males of many different kinds go through "ritualized encounters rather
than serious fights." Why don't the fittest simply trounce the lesser and be
done with it? Smith supported the idea that avoiding actual fights allowed the
weak to survive until another day, and also protected the strong from whatever
injuries they might get in a close fight. Makes sense...but...how did that
develop naturally? One can always make up stories, but if something "makes sense"
then the real question is just how it arose out of (or within) a world without
any sense -- and we don't have any home movies of a past where animals once
fought to the death for mates but "learned" through mutations to dance around
each other instead.
I'd also like to point out that while there are some rather weak proposed
solutions to the problem of "why are there males?" such as providing more
variation via recombinations, there are also more problems involved -- with two
different sexes, the reproductive cells need some special way to get together.
With animals, this is complicated by the fact that a female may see other
animals -- even of her own species -- as either a threat or food. This then
requires more "ritual" or special behavior, and there are many different,
fascinating examples of courtship behaviors. With plants and some sessile
animals such as sponges and sea anemones, it's complicated by the fact that the
parents can't move to bring their reproductive cells together. This requires
them to put a lot of effort into producing vast numbers of the cells and casting
or allowing them to be carried at random on winds or water currents, or
producing flowers to attract animals like birds and bees to assist them. An d
it's not as if there's any practical considerations absolutely preventing
self-fertilization or parthenogenesis, as these are found in some species of
plants and animals all the way up to some tetrapod vertebrates.
But back to what Smith did, not what he apparently missed. With another
scientist, he "laid the foundation for the new field of evolutionary game theory."
Game theory was created to describe (in simplified terms, it seems to me) how
humans decide how to behave toward one another in situations where there's some
risk and some possible reward involved. "The new branch of game theory was one
in which natural selection acts instead as teh decision maker." Doesn't that
make it hard to avoid anthropomorphizing evolutionary problems? That does seem
to happen quite a lot. I seem to often read that natural selection "solved" a
problem "because" the solution worked so well -- rather like that "answer" to
the problem of "ritualized" contests for mates. My nephew recently asked if any
creationists were working on game theory, and I don't know of any -- this may be
another area where a creationist may find we have more advantage than the
evolutionists.
Yet again (!) it appears that Smith never produced any real advancements for
evolutionary theory with his contribution. He did see clearly that "there can be
a problem with overemphasizing" individual competition in evolutionary theory (yet
another problem?!). Of course, the first life forms would have been
single-celled organisms simply getting all they could and doing whatever it took
to survive, so their natural behavior would have to be "suppressed somehow," or
else "the higher-level units would have been disrupted" before they could evolve.
There are a number of similar problems or unexplained transitions. Did Smith's
clear sight of them help him or his followers solve how they came about? "We
have yet to reach a full understanding of any of the major transitions, but many
scientists have been stimulated to enter this field." I don't know if I should
laugh or cry.
A couple things to Smith's credit: he "observed succinctly that
twentieth-century biology is more about the role of information in biology than
about anything else." This is one of the important points of intelligent design
theory -- where does information come from? Smith also "was convinced that
science must be deeply grounded in empiricism." Now, philosophical naturalism is
rather like empiricism carried too far: "If I can't see or otherwise physically
detect it or describe it in terms of my experience, it doesn't exist." On the
other hand, properly applied to science, a sound empiricism would keep "science"
to practical research on phenomena we can confirm with repeated observations and
controlled experiments. Ironically, such an approach to scientific endeavor
would have ruled out much if not all of Smith's own contributions to the
"science" of evolution. He might have better applied his engineering training to
studying observable aspects of biology rather than wonderin g about the problems
of a mythical past.
My goodness, I wonder what a professional creation scientist with the
opportunity to delve deeper into such things could come up with? Well, we do get
some samples in the Creation Research Society Quarterly and publications from
AiG and ICR. I especially appreciate the work of Jerry Bergman and John
Woodmorappe in the area of digging up lots of good information by literature
research, and also that of Colin Brown and Ashby Camp. I could name several
others whom I appreciate for other reasons or whose names just didn't come to
mind this instant.
_Nature_, v. 429, 20 May, 2004 pp. 263-267, "Regional climate shifts caused by
gradual global cooling in the Pliocene epoch." Something for our geologists to
look into, perhaps. Here's a few "dates" to add to the pile waiting to go into
my timeline file. I again encourage others to start and maintain an organized
list of evolutionary "events" and the dates assigned to them and to important
fossils. According to the abstract of this article (and you can access abstracts
by going to the Nature Publishing Group website and signing up for a free online
subscription), "The Earth's climate has undergone a global transition over the
past four million years, from...about 3 [degrees Celsius] warmer than today."
Apparently, "global warming" is actually a return to a past (normal?) condition,
if these scientists are interpreting the evidence correctly. If the globe really
is warming, the "rapid" rate chalked up to human interference may only seem to
be unusually fast because of the inco rrect dating of the past condition. [from
the body of the article...] This past cooling at "the end of the early Pliocene
warm period (5-3 Myr ago)" is related to the "significant intensification of
Northern Hemisphere glaciation... ~2.75 Myr ago."
_Nature_, v. 429, 20 May, 2004 pp. 288-291, "Articulated Palaeozoic fossil with
17 plates greatly expands disparity of early chitons." I believe I mentioned
this case before, based on an early news report. It seems to be another case in
which the evolutionary tree has been "pruned" -- the fossil forms are more
varied and include more complex members than are alive today. For those who
haven't seen a living chiton nor this or any other fossil multiplacophoran, I
would describe them as looking like a cross between a clam and a trilobyte. They
have a soft body underneath a set of plates (technical term: "valves") arranged
in a long oval or lozenge shape, with two rounded end plates with a "backbone"
of narrow plates flanked by matched wide plates in between. This new fossil also
has a pretty impressive set of spines running all around the edge. Living
chitons have tiny spines or spicules for a fringe, but "the large, hollow,
lateral spines of multiplacophorans are probably not h omologous with the small,
solid, girdle spicules of chitons."
Chitons have been considered "evolutionarily static" (i.e., they haven't evolved)
since their fossils show these critters have undergone "little change since"
their "origin in the Cambrian." Since the earliest fossils look pretty much like
the current ones, and now very "early" fossils show there were once more kinds,
with more complexity, wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the evolutionary
tree in this case is upside-down rather than just "pruned"? This also may be
another case of a "missing link" going missing again, as "a recent cladistic
analysis of molluscs...portrays chitons as gradational between aplacophorans and
conchiferans (shelled molluscs)," but the cladistic analysis for this report,
using a narrower range of morphological characters but including fossils (the
earlier study didn't include any fossils) "suggests" that chitons are off to one
side, on a separate branch and not transitional.
_Nature_, v. 429, 20 May, 2004 pp. 294-297, "Evidence for ecology's role in
speciation." If you've stayed with me this long, here's your reward. You may
recall a recent Comment about a study trying to say that crossbreeding
stickleback fish demonstrated something (maybe a major something) about
evolution, when really it just shows they haven't really evolved at all. This
study is practically its twin. It purports to show what the major factor is that
lead to these different stickleback "species," but what is that factor? Mere
body size! Just as in the earlier report, sticklebacks were gathered from all
around the northern hemisphere -- Japan, Alaska, British Columbia, Iceland,
Scotland, and Norway -- and both those that migrate between stream and marine
environments (anadromous) and those that stay in the streams. In the lab, it
didn't matter where they were from -- the major factor in mating preference was
ecotype. But even this was just a "preference," as about half as many
matings were between anadromous and stream-dwelling fish. Whatever differences
there were between them, didn't prevent them from mating. Even the preference
was due to the tendency of anadromous fish to be larger. This was demonstrated
by artificially altering the growing period, producing small anadromous females,
which preferred to pair with the (relatively) small stream males.
This study didn't address the case of lake stickleback, which have bright red
breeding coloration that might also be a factor in mating. Still, "The
comparative patterns documented here were obtained with populations separated,
in some cases, for hundreds of thousands of years..." How can they believe that
these fish have been spreading over the globe for all that time, and all those
generations, in a world where fish might possible evolve into amphibians or who
knows what, and not be absolutely stunned that they can still interbreed?
The concluding paragraph quite rightly raises the possibility that the
differences seen aren't even due to differences in genetics, but are due to an
adaptability common to all these "species."
"The malleability of body size raises the possibility that multiple mechanisms
underlie reproductive isolation between poulations differing in
size...phenotypic platicity may contribute to the large size of anadromous
fish...In the extreme case, this mechanism might provide an alternative
explanation for our results, if it were the main cause of size differences..."
And once again I regretfully refrain from commenting on a number of articles
showing how marvelously complex living things are, simply because they are so
common.
--
David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.
http://home.att.net/~david.bump