Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 114

Are humans changing evolution? Like tuskless elephants…

Some claim we are causing life forms to evolve in new and unusual ways and attempt to predict a future:

Humans have shaped the bodies of other creatures at least since dogs were domesticated around 30,000 years ago. But the combination of industrialised farming, introduced species, urbanisation, pollution, and climate change are creating unprecedented selective pressures. We have become the world’s greatest evolutionary force.

Evolutionary time – at least for larger, more complex organisms – can be slow. This leaves many animals unable to adapt fast enough to cope with a human-dominated planet, with extinction currently up to 1,000 times greater than the rate at which species might be expected to disappear without human interference.

But rapid change is also possible, via an inbuilt genomic plasticity that allows individual animals to draw on a range of body plans and behaviours best suited to new opportunities and pressures. So-called microevolutions can transpire in the time of just a handful of generations.

David Farrier, “Why we are living in an era of unnatural selection” at BBC Future (January 25, 2022)

Farrier offers some examples, including these:

Today, worker bees in industrial beehives – transported from farm to farm across the United States in convoys of trucks – are one-third larger than their wild cousins, and more docile. In the past 100 years, North American songbirds have modified the shape of their wings to cope with habitats fragmented by deforestation. Under pressure from poaching, Zambian elephants are born without tusks. Since the introduction of cane toads to Australia in 1935, originally to deal with beetle infestations in sugar plantations, the mouths of black snakes have shrunk as succeeding generations learned to avoid toad-sized prey, while the toads themselves have become cannibals, victims of their own success as predators.

David Farrier, “Why we are living in an era of unnatural selection” at BBC Future (January 25, 2022)

In a human-dominated world, things happen faster, for better or worse. Should we still call it “evolution” if we did it?

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Junk design arguments as junk science: The squid eye and the human eye

Cornelius Hunter asks us to consider the convergence of the squid and human eye:

There are dozens of different types of eyes and visions systems in nature but, strangely enough, the squid and the human, for example, share the same camera eye design. This striking similarity in such distant species is problematic for evolution because even if these camera eye designs could have evolved, they otherwise could not have been inherited from the squid-human common ancestor. One of the reasons for this is that the supposed common ancestor of such distant species would not possess a camera eye design. So instead, under evolution this striking and detailed camera eye design would have evolved at least twice, independently.

In other words, this design contradicts evolution’s common descent model. St. George Jackson Mivart was an early observer of this problem with evolutionary theory. He wrote in 1871:

“On this theory [Darwinism] the chances are almost infinitely great against the independent accidental occurrence and preservation of two similar series of minute variations resulting in the independent development of two closely similar forms. – MIVART 1871, PP. 71–72″

Mivart was on the right track, as later science would prove. Today, examples of this so-called “convergent” evolution are ubiquitous, including the camera eye design shared by the squid and human. This example surely would be appreciated by Mivart, given the significant differences between these species and their environments.

Cornelius Hunter, “Why Junk Design Arguments Are Junk Science” at Evolution News and Science Today (January 24, 2022)

Funny that “junk” would develop twice like that, independently and be generally so useful. But people believe what they need to.

You may also wish to read: Nathan Lents argues that the human eye refutes design Cornelius Hunter thinks that Lents’s argument, as set out, is actually a blow to evolutionary theory.

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At Mind Matters News: Dogs understand many more words than we think

They also pick up very readily on human emotions, researchers have found:

Sophie Jacques, Associate Professor, Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, came up with some interesting figures on dogs recognizing words. Starting in 2015, she and a colleague

developed a list of 172 words organized in different categories (for example, toys, food, commands, outdoor places) and gave it to an online sample of 165 owners of family and professional dogs. We asked them to select words that their dogs responded to consistently. We found that, on average, service dogs respond to about 120 words, whereas family pets respond to about 80 words, ranging between 15 to 215 words across all dogs. We also found that certain breed groups, such as herding dogs like border collies and toy dogs like chihuahuas, respond to more words and phrases than other breed types like terriers, retrievers and mixed breeds.

Sophie Jacques, “Yes, Your Dog Can Understand What You’re Saying — to a Point” at The Epoch Times (January 22, 2022)

There is a practical value to Jacques’s work with dogs and language:

… it is very expensive to train puppies for service work and many do not make the final cut. However, if early word-based responding abilities predict later behavioural and cognitive abilities, our measure could become an early and simple tool to help predict which dogs are likely to become good service animals.The Conversation

Sophie Jacques, “Yes, Your Dog Can Understand What You’re Saying — to a Point” at The Epoch Times (January 22, 2022)

Of course, the dog is responding to words as signals, not as components of sentences.

Denyse O’Leary, “Dogs understand many more words than we think” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: The dog living in a human environment depends on his human friends for clues as to what’s happening — whether as emotional expressions or simple words.

You may also wish to read:

In what ways are dogs intelligent? There is no human counterpart to some types of dog intelligence.

and

Study: Cats DO They recognize them as sound cues, rather than recognizing the human language as such.

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Whitefly steals genes from plants; perhaps to detoxify plant defenses

The horizontal gene transfer was far more extensive than expected:

A major crop pest has 50 genes that appear to originate from plants, and it might use them to detoxify plants’ chemical defences

Whiteflies appear to have taken the saying “you are what you eat” somewhat literally. New research suggests the tiny, herbivorous insects have incorporated dozens of genes from plants into their own genome.

Jake Buehler, “Whiteflies have acquired dozens of genes from plants they eat” at New Scientist (January 27, 2022) (paywall)

Some think that at least one gene got transferred between 35 and 80 million years ago:

Tens of millions of years ago, a tiny, milky-white bug known as a whitefly snatched a gene from its host, an ancient plant. Dubbed BtPMaT1, the gene renders a common plant toxin harmless — allowing the pesky insect to become one of today’s most insidious agricultural pests.

The discovery of BtPMaT1 in whiteflies marks the first time scientists have identified a gene that’s crossed from a plant to an animal, researchers from China and Europe reported in Cell last March. Horizontal gene transfer, or HGT, occurs when a gene moves from one species into another. It’s common between many species of bacteria, and even occurs between bacteria and plants, or bacteria and animals. Finding a gene from a plant inside an insect, though, was unprecedented.

Nathaniel Scharping, “This Insect Stole a Protective Gene from Ancient Plants” at Discover Magazine (Jan 13, 2022)

Fasten yer seatbelts. It could turn out to be common.

Here’s a thought: If horizontal gene transfer turns out to be widespread, it will confound carefully worked out Darwinian claims about how “evolution” did this and that via natural selection acting on random mutation. With the whitefly, things didn’t happen that way at all.

You may also wish to read: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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Lizards “evolve” in just a few months?

This one is a few years old but the “evolution” of the lizard icicle is still worth recounting for what it shows about what the word is often taken to mean:

We may complain about freezing temperatures, but most cold snaps leave us little worse for the wear. That’s not the case for a common lizard living on the Texas-Mexico border, which, in just the span of a few months, underwent a dramatic genetic transformation in response to cold weather. In fact—in one of the most detailed examples of rapid evolution to date—a new study shows that just one cold snap can change the way green anoles’ muscular and nervous systems respond to temperature.

“It’s a very conclusive instance of rapid evolution,” says Charles Brown, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, who was not involved with the work. The study, he says, is “one of the only real examples in which the genetic mechanisms behind these rapid evolutionary events have been shown.” And Michael Logan, an evolutionary ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, calls the work “the most comprehensive demonstration of natural selection to date” on how body temperature is regulated…

But as Butch Brodie, director of the University of Virginia Mountain Lake Biological Station in Pembroke points out, it’s not clear whether evolution will continue to push the lizards to be ever more cold tolerant. “The temptation from results like these is to assume extreme events drive much of evolutionary change, but it may not be that simple,” he says. It could be that cold tolerance comes at a cost to the lizard, he notes, so that in normal or warm winters, the cold-resistant lizards would be at a disadvantage. “I hope they will follow these populations over time to see if the cold tolerance stays at this new level,” Huey says.

Elizabeth Pennisi, “Cold snap makes lizards evolve in just a few months” at Science (August 3, 2017)

Why should we believe that this change is a form of evolution at all, as opposed to an existing capacity to adapt to unusual conditions that occur now and then? If the lizard is a common species, it probably has such capabilities.

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At Medium: Six scientific paradoxes on offer that will “blow your mind”

Here’s one:

1— The Bootstrap Paradox

Time traveling is a popular concept not only in science fiction like Interstellar but also in fantasies like Harry Potter. But, after reading this, you will realize that the time-traveling parts in those time travel movies are always a paradox.

Imagine you are a time traveler. You decide to meet the great greek philosopher, Pythagoras of Samos, and introduce him to the fantastic relation among the three sides of the right-angled triangle. You introduce and you leave.

Time goes by and he publishes it as ‘The Pythagorean theorem’ and you realize you were a part of the discovery of the legendary pythogorean theorem.

But this leads to an paradox. Who is the founder of the Pythagorean theorem in the first place? Because you helped him, but with a theorem by his past self. But his past self also has someone (your past self) helping!

Dinelka, “6 Scientific Paradoxes That Will Blow Your Mind” at Medium (December 28, 2021)

Don’t miss the other five.

You may also wish to read: Has a 243 year-old puzzle been solved via a “quantum solution”? At Quanta: In a paper posted online and submitted to Physical Review Letters, a group of quantum physicists in India and Poland demonstrates that it is possible to arrange 36 officers in a way that fulfills Euler’s criteria — so long as the officers can have a quantum mixture of ranks and regiments.

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At Mind Matters News: Chimps who can’t crack nuts prove they are more like humans? Huh?

The lengths to which some researchers will go to attempt to discredit human exceptionalism are an assault on reason and common sense:

In a recent experiment, researchers determined that chimpanzees need to be taught how to use stones to crack nuts; individuals don’t grasp the idea for themselves. In a series of four experiments, 35 parties of chimps were given oil palm nuts and stones but “on no occasion did the chimpanzees crack or eat either oil palm or Coula nuts,” presumably because they did not know how.

Then the primatologists go on to draw an amazing conclusion:

“Their culture is therefore more similar to human culture than often assumed…

News, “Chimps who can’t crack nuts prove they are more like humans? Huh?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: The fact that no chimpanzee figured out on its own how to crack a nut using a stone does NOT make them more like humans, rather less.

You may also wish to read: But, in the end, did the chimpanzee really talk? A recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine sheds light on the motivations behind the need to see bonobos as something like an oppressed people, rather than apes in need of protection.

and

A philosopher simply invents animals’ concept of death. She demands that we accept her invention so we can “rethink” human exceptionalism, and the “disrespect for the natural world that comes with it.” Susana Monsóis’s beliefs about how predators think are a work of the imagination. Like it or not, we are stuck with human exceptionalism. It’s who we are.

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It just so happens that essential genes are protected from mutations

Keep moving, folks:

Conventional wisdom suggests that evolution is driven by mutations that randomly occur throughout an organism’s genome, and that those that make the organism better at surviving or reproducing are then propagated thanks to natural selection. However, a new study cements the countering idea that the process of mutation isn’t evenly distributed across genomes. The work, published in Nature on January 12, finds that there’s a discrepancy in the rates of mutations among genes in model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Specifically, genes playing a crucial role in survival and reproduction mutate far less often than those that are less important…

Monroe and his colleagues found evidence of specific epigenetic characteristics such as cytosine methylation that prevent mutations from occurring in those regions, not unlike protective barriers. These structures and the variability in mutation rates within a single organism’s genome, Monroe says, suggest that “evolution created mechanisms that changed how evolution works.”

Dan Robitzski, “Essential Genes Protected from Mutations” at The Scientist (January 2, 2022)

The paper is open access.

As noted earlier, it was easier to be a Darwinist when the cell was just a blob of jelly.

You may also wish to read: Another layer of protection for DNA that just happened to evolve… Darwinism was easier back when cells were just blobs of protoplasm.

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Michael Levin on the Engineering Approach to Biology

Michael Levin puts into words the general understanding of the ID community regarding the relevance of design/engineering understandings of the cell, and how intuitions from computer science and other engineering disciplines relate to biology. Starting around 8:30 in the clip below:

Computer science is all about understanding how to build things… You don’t really understand something until you can build one yourself. At the same time, one of the most powerful concepts in computer science is device independence – the idea that you can carry out an algorithm and it’s the same computation whether it’s made of microchips or beer cans and string or living cells or whatever it’s going to be. This is an important concept and it’s a tough one for a lot of biologists to think about it this way. Biologists are really used to thinking that everything is in the details, you have to know exactly which protein it is, which gene it is, the details are what matters. Computer scientists take a slightly different approach, which is “let’s look at all the stuff we could swap out and still have the heart of the process.” If that’s true, we can look for invariants in all these deep ideas.

This one quote helps make sense of about half of the conversations I’ve had with biologists about information theory principles regarding the cell.

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Present day Martian groundwater a mirage, researchers say

Unfortunately. Water would make a base there much more practical. But unfortunately…

Liquid water previously detected under Mars’ ice-covered south pole is probably just a dusty mirage, according to a new study of the red planet led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Scientists in 2018 had thought they were looking at liquid water when they saw bright radar reflections under the polar cap. However, the new study published Jan. 24 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the reflections matched those of volcanic plains found all over the red planet’s surface.

The researchers think their conclusion — volcanic rock buried under ice — is a more plausible explanation for the 2018 discovery, which was already in question after scientists calculated the unlikely conditions needed to keep water in a liquid state at Mars’ cold, arid south pole.

University of Texas at Austin, “Hope for present-day Martian groundwater dries up in new study” at ScienceDaily (January 24, 2022)

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: Light carbon another faint hope for past life on Mars? At Science: On Earth the signal would be seen as strong evidence for ancient microbial life.

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