PaV

Today’s PhysOrg.com site contains this article. To my view, their investigation has important implications for ID. Many critics of ID ask us: “Well, how does your Designer design?” This is their way of saying to us that a Designer who lies outside the physical realm cannot possibly act within it. Of course, this amounts to a theological claim, and not a scientific one; nevertheless, it’s made. What’s new here, though, is that, whereas formerly it was thought that energy was needed to “erase” information (which leaves its own physical residue–that is, it’s measurable), now this is no longer the case. However, if it is true that energy is not needed to “erase” information, contrariwise, wouldn’t it also be true that Read More ›

Yesterday there was an article published online by CNN highlighting the finding by the British journal, BMJ, that Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s sensational study linking autism to childhood vaccinations was a “complete fraud”. Today there’s word that the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology contains an article on ESP. We’re told the article was “peer reviewed”. But it has been “described as ‘pure craziness’ and ‘an embarrassment for the entire field’ by scientists who allege it has serious flaws and that ESP is a myth.” While it appears that Wakefield falsified medical histories of children (and apparently to aid and abet some trial lawyers who paid him nearly $675,000 so that they could go after Big Pharma), Read More ›

In the latest edition of Science, Michael Gray, Julius Lukes, et.al, tackle what they see as a big dilemna for Darwinism: “gratuitous complexity”. The first two sentences of their short piece are these: “Many of the cell’s macromolecular machines appear gratuitously complex, comprising more components thatn their basic functions seem to demand. How can we make sense of this complexity in the light of evolution?” I’ll translate: “Based on directional selection, there’s way more proteins at work in these ‘machines’ that we can possibly explain.” So, ‘adaptionist’ and ‘selectionist’ explanations will not do. How big then is the problem? Well, when it comes to the spliceosome, they tell us: “The spliceosome uses five small nuclear RNAs and hundreds [my emphasis] of proteins to do the same job that some catlytic introns (called ribozymes) can do alone.” That’s some kind of problem: where did the ‘hundreds’ of proteins come from? And how did they become functionally integrated into the spliceosome? Or, as they put it: “For the addition of some of these proteins, selection probbly did drive increased complexity, but there is no basis to assume that this explains all, or even most, of the increased complexity of these machines.”(My emphasis again)[Note the continual use of the word ‘machine’.]

Well, how do the Darwinists get out of this one? The authors begin their journey to the Promised Land by citing the work of Michael Lynch, who invokes the “fixation of neutral or slightly deleterious features as a general and unavoidable source of complexity in taxa with small populations.” Such “non-selective processes” can lead to “neutrally fixed complexities”, but, of course, if selection is not involved, then these ‘complexities’ can be “neutrally ‘unfixed'” through random inversion. So, what is a evo-biologist to do? Here they turn to a “ratchet mechanism” proposed by Maynard Smith and Szathmary in the early nineties termed “contingent irreversibility”, which says “previously independent evolutionary units” can become “interdependent . . . for ‘accidental reasons that have little to do with the selective forces that led to the evolution of the higher entity in the first place” [J. Maynard Smith, E. Szathmary, The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 1995)]

The basic idea is that some kind of evolutionary novelty arises (how? they don’t tell us—see below and TEoE), and then this novelty becomes embedded through subsequent ‘neutral’ mutations that cause the embedded structure to bind more strongly and thus not allowing disassociation (it is a very rough idea). As examples they cite the symbiosis of mitochondria and plastids that become ‘harbored’ to cells, and the presence of tyrosyl tRNA synthetase as a splicer in Neurospora whose mitochondria have “self-splicing” introns. (Notice we come down from “hundreds” of extra proteins to just one.) Well, how might this synthetase have come about, and why is it still there? The authors state that the usual explanation is this: the interaction [with the synthetase] arose “‘to compensate for structural defects acquired’ by the intron sequences.”

Now, quite interestingly, the authors go on to make this observation: “But this order of events puts the cart before the horse: Introns bearing such defects would be at an immediate selective disadvantage and would not likely be fixed in populations before they TyrRS (synthetase) binding evolved to suppress their deleterious effects.” Well, join the club. This is exactly what critics of neo-Darwinian say all the time. This has now become obvious to the Darwinists (that is, they’re willing to state it out loud!) only because they now think they have a solution. And what is that solution: “If the order of events is reversed, then there would be no deleterious intermediate. Specifically, if the binding interaction arose first—fortuitously or for some reason unrelated to splicing—its existence could allow the accumultation of mutations in the intron that would have inactiviated splicing, were the protein not bound. Because the compensatory or suppressive activity of the protein is imagined to exist fortuitously before any intron mutation, this might be called “presuppression,” and the acquisition of protein dependence by the intron could be selectively neutral ( or, even slightly disadvantageous), and yet also inevitable, in finite populations.”

I like the phrase they use for how this protein function came about: “fortuitously or for some reason unrelated to splicing”. When was the last time you read an article that contained both the words “gratuitous” and “fortuitous”? I “imagine” it’s been a while. Well, this is where the Designer comes in handy. You see, I, too, can imagine that the Designer has “fortuitously” inserted this new function, and that later mutations were just neutral accretions. So I propose that we heretoforward respond to Darwinists as to “how” the Designer designs by answering that the Designer uses “contingent irreversibility”!

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The word “borked” has entered our lexicon as a result of the treatment Judge Robert Bork received during Confirmation Hearings for Supreme Court Justice of the U.S. To put it mildly, he was not treated very well. When Stephen J. Gould came out with his theory of Punctuated Equilibria, he, too, was not treated well by the Darwinian establishment until such time as he made clear that his theory was firmly a part of Darwinian thought. Now another geologist, Michael Rampino, has just set himself up for equal treatment. In a PhysOrg entry, Rampino points out what has been so obvious for so long a time: evolution is NOT gradual! It is episodic. He also seeks to go further back Read More ›

There’s an item today at PhysOrg concerning an article in this week’s Science magazine. According to the study conducted on a bacterial population using a technique wherein mutations could be inserted anywhere along the length of the genome, each and every bacterial mutation had the same small effect on fitness of 0.5%, no matter if the mutation took place in a protein sequence or in a so-called non-coding section. I’m just bringing your attention to it. It would seem that for those who wish to use the RM + NS motif of Darwinian evolution, this study pretty much spells this motif’s deathknell. If the average mutation reduces fitness, how does any living organism improve? And, how can NS distinguish between Read More ›

This article here recounts the now documented ability of bees to solve the “traveling salesman problem” faster than computers. And to imagine that evolution has done this! My, what a wonderful thing it is!—-(he says with sarcasm dripping). By just doing something over and over again, with little changes accumulating, a ‘computer,’ better than any we have, somehow comes into existence. And, of course, this ‘computer’ is the size of a grass seed (!!). One of the experimentalists said this: “Despite their tiny brains bees are capable of extraordinary feats of behaviour. . . We need to understand how they can solve the travelling salesman problem without a computer.” I agree with his statement. I would only suggest that RM+NS Read More ›

I’m including some quotes from a Science magazine feature that is just out. I just posted the other day about results that conflict with Darwinian expectations/predictions. We’ll just add this to the list. You know, you really have to be a true believer to keep insisting that your idea is correct when almost invariably every true prediction made using your idea turns out to be wrong. I’m beyond even being surprised any more. Here goes:

“It was the most radical of a flurry of recent discoveries of human genes that evolution has strongly favored, a process called positive selection. Four years ago, researchers thought that they would find hundreds of examples in which an advantageous mutation spread rapidly in a particular population. That prediction, based on the first scans of human genome sequence data, did not pan out, and by last year, some researchers were ready to give up.

A growing number of researchers now think it is rare for a particular mutation to spread rapidly to most people within a population, as was the case with the EPAS1 gene.”

The bottom line to all of this is that population genetics is dead. (Have I said that before?!) Notice, though, how the Darwinists talk about it amongst themselves:
‘”In only a handful has there been much progress in identifying the causal mutations and extracting these biological insights about their function,” Sabeti wrote in the 12 February issue of Science (p. 883). Says McVean: “That’s why the whole field—the program of trying to find selective sweeps—kind of ground to a halt.”‘

Never able to admit that they might be wrong, they had to begin all over again in a new and different way.

“Yet McVean and others were convinced that positive selection had shaped much of the genome but lay beneath the radar of methods used to detect it. . . . “It’s very likely that many traits that are different between populations are coded by different alleles; any one may not be so strong,” says population geneticist Pleuni Pennings of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.

Detecting such polygenic selection is one of the new frontiers. . . .”

Notice that they are “convinced”. They just know. Isn’t this wonderful?
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In this Nature Alert article, we find out that sponges, present as early as 635 million years ago in the fossil record, have 18,000 genes, among which are genes for apoptosis, that is, cell death. Now here is a creature that has “a simple body plan lacking organs, muscles and nerve cells.” Let’s remember that the number of human genes, prior to whole genome analysis, was thought to be at least 100,000. With early genomic results in, this number was revised downward. Today it stands at 25,000—and shrinking! (There are arguments for lowering it still) So the lowly sponge—no nerves, no muscles, simple as you can get—has around 65% the number of genes as humans. Well, all of this presents Read More ›

In the latest issue of Nature, a definitive role for pseudogenes is established. In the last sentence of the Abstract the authors conclude: These findings attribute a novel biological role to expressed pseudogenes, as they can regulate coding gene expression, and reveal a non-coding function for mRNAs. Haven’t read the full article* (no time at present), but there’s a related link at PhysOrg.com that gives an overview. Yes, “junk” DNA now “communicates” with itself. A new “language”, an RNA language, is discovered. Another 30,000 pieces of functional information (over and above proteins) are part of cell architecture. And even more for Darwinists to explain per RM+NS. And the old standard explanation, of gene duplication and pseudogenes ‘evolving’ new function, takes Read More ›

Here is a story today about a “second” rise in oceanic oxygenation, a rise that allowed, the authors tell us, the ‘evolution’ of higher life forms. Here’s a portion of the link:

These widespread sulphidic conditions close to the continents, coupled with deeper waters that remained oxygen-free and iron-rich, would have placed major restrictions on both the timing and pace of biological evolution.

Dr Poulton, who led the research, explained: “It has traditionally been assumed that the first rise in atmospheric oxygen eventually led to oxygenation of the deep ocean around 1.8 billion years ago.

“This assumption has been called into question over recent years, and here we show that the ocean remained oxygen-free but became rich in toxic hydrogen-sulphide over an area that extended more than 100 km from the continents. It took a second major rise in atmospheric oxygen around 580 million years ago to oxygenate the deep ocean.

“This has major implications as it would have potentially restricted the evolution of higher life forms that require oxygen, explaining why animals appear so suddenly, relatively late in the geological record.”

Two points come to mind:

First, the authors are so much as saying that natural selection had a billion years to do something with life forms that can use hydrogen sulfide, and it couldn’t. Why not? I thought organisms that replicate can solve any old kind of problem thrown at them.

Second, and as a corollary to the first, ONLY when the oceans became oxygenated did life emerge. When did that happen? 580 million years ago. That’s right…..the Cambrian Explosion. This completely demolishes Darwin’s notion of gradualism, a tenet of his ‘theory’ that he steadfastly refused to give up.

Thus, Darwin was wrong. He was outrageously wrong. Why? Because, per Darwin, the ONLY explanation for the intracacies of the Cambrian fossils (e.g., the trilobite eye) presuming gradualism was at work, would have been a very long period of time PRIOR to the Cambrian in which more primitive forms ‘gradually’, via NS agency, developed their complexity. To maintain this position, Darwin had to ARGUE AGAINST the fossil record, which showed, even in his days, that there were no significant fossil layers prior to the Cambrian (yes, we know all about Epicarean, but they, too, are primitive, and they, too, are but 30 million years prior to the Cambrian). The data the authors present as much as stipulates that there were no prior “primitive life forms”, and that there was a ‘triggering event’ in the Cambrian time frame.

So, Darwin is wrong about gradualism. Darwin is wrong about the fossil record. But, of course, his theory is nevertheless correct. Huh…??!?

I’m not going to write too much. Just read this article and thump your head. If this isn’t an all-out admission of the validity of Dembski’s approach, then what is? I wonder if the Royal Society knew these authors were creationists? The article itself is open. Here it is. BTW, the authors determine the Pictet symbols to be a language. As to the title of this thread, I consider languages to be designed. If you have a differing opinion, I would love to hear what it is!

In this week’s New Scientist, there is an article about gravity that deals with a string theorist’s reformulation of gravity as an entropic force. This reformulation describes gravity as an emergent property of space, time and matter, and NOT as a physical force itself. Here’s a quote from the actual article: Of course, Einstein’s geometric description of gravity is beatiful, and in a certain way compelling. Geometry appeals to the visual part of our minds, and is amazingly powerful in summarizing many aspects of a physical problem. Presumably this explains why we, as a community, have been so reluctant to give up the geometric formulation of gravity as being fundamental. But it is inevitable we do so. If gravity is Read More ›

Playing off the title of Dr. Dembski’s new book, I’m going to cite three articles that are summarized at PhysOrg.com just this past week. I don’t have access to any of them, but let’s just take a look at what these summaries report. I think it’s quite interesting.

First, there is this article, DNA study sheds new light on horse evolution, that informs us that ancient species of zebras and horses are actually much more related to the modern day versions than previously thought. Here’s what they say:

The study used bones from caves to identify new horse species in Eurasia and South America, and reveal that the Cape zebra, an extinct giant species from South Africa, were simply large variants of the modern Plains zebra. The Cape zebra weighed up to 400 kilograms and stood up to 150 centimetres at the shoulder blades.

“The Plains zebra group once included the famous extinct quagga, so our results confirm that this group was highly variable in both coat colour and size.”

while concluding that:

“Overall, the new genetic results suggest that we have under-estimated how much a single species can vary over time and space, and mistakenly assumed more diversity among extinct species of megafauna,” Professor Cooper says.

This now means that the already tiny portion of “intermediate forms” that RM + NS produces in reduced in size. And perhaps greatly. This weakens what Darwin would call the “principle of divergence” and weakens the notion of gradualism that is implicit in his theory.

Next, there is this article: Introns: A mystery renewed.

Here we read:

“Remarkably, we have found many cases of parallel intron gains at essentially the same sites in independent genotypes,” Lynch said. “This strongly argues against the common assumption that when two species share introns at the same site, it is always due to inheritance from a common ancestor.”

which now calls into question prior notions of “proof” of common descent, and, I would think, requires a new look at how transposons operate.

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There’s breaking news today about the Hadley CRU in England which had its emails and data banks hacked into. CRU is the acronym for ‘Climate Research Unit’. Seems that some of the emails show some possible collusion when it came to producing and supporting data that didn’t fit into GW science. Some interesting quotes. How about this one: “This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit Read More ›

I just finished reading a rather fascinating article by Bruno Maddox over at Discover Magazine on Charles Darwin’s first paper, a paper he presented to the Royal Society around 1836 and which gained him entrance into the Society as a Fellow. The paper dealt with the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy, found in the “remote Highlands of Scotland”. Glen Roy had captured the attention of geologists everywhere at the time, and what made it difficult to explain is that these flat “roads” presumably had formed at the bottom of a lake; but there were three “roads” at three different levels, and, looking to the east these supposed lakes had nothing to contain them, instead seeming to empty out into a valley (‘glen’ in Scottish). Based on his experiences in South America, including experiencing an earthquake firsthand, Darwin theorized that instead of having been formed by lakes, this area had actually been uplifted from the ocean at three different times inthe past. Four years later, Louis Agassiz, the highly regarded Swiss geologist, rightly explained that it had been glaciers that had sealed off the eastern end of the valley, thus forming the lakes during glacial times, and, ultimately the Parallel Roads.

How did Darwin react to the critique his paper underwent as a result of Agassiz’ new interpretation? Not very well. In fact, that’s the very point the author makes. Darwin would later say, “My paper was one long gigantic blunder from beginning to end.” But this admission came in 1861, after his Origins had gone through several printings and a new edition was on its way; i.e., while Darwin felt comfortable with all the plaudits coming his way, at a time when he could admit such a “gigantic blunder”.

Here is what Bruno Maddox writes: Read More ›