Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 20

At Live Science: Massive tentacled microbe may be direct ancestor of all complex life

Nicoletta Lanese writes:

Ancient microbes whose existence predates the rise of nucleus-carrying cells on Earth may hold the secrets to how such complex cells first came to be. Now, for the first time, scientists have grown a large enough quantity of these microbes in the lab to study their internal structure in detail, Science reported.

Scientists recently captured detailed images of an Asgard archaeon, an evolutionarily ancient microbe that may have been key to the emergence of complex life on Earth. 
(Image credit: © Thiago Rodrigues-Oliveira, Univ. Wien)

Researchers grew an organism called Lokiarchaeum ossiferum, which belongs to a group of microbes known as Asgard archaea, according to a new report, published Wednesday (Dec. 21) in the journal Nature. Named after the abode of the gods in Norse mythology, Asgard archaea are thought by some scientists to be the closest evolutionary relatives of eukaryotes, cells that package their DNA in a protective bubble called a nucleus. 

On the evolutionary tree of life, Asgards often appear as a “sister” of eukaryotes or as their direct ancestor, Jan Löwe, leader of the Bacterial Cytoskeleton and other Molecular Machines research group at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the U.K., wrote in a commentary about the new study. Asgards don’t carry nuclei themselves, but they do contain a suite of genes and proteins that were once thought to be unique to eukaryotes. Researchers have a variety of theories as to how Asgards may have gained primitive nuclei and thus birthed the first complex cells, which later gave rise to plants, animals and humans.  

In 2020, a research group in Japan reported that, after 12 years of work, they’d successfully grown Asgards in the lab. 

“It has taken six long years to obtain a stable and highly enriched culture, but now we can use this experience to perform many biochemical studies and to cultivate other Asgard archaea as well,” co-senior author Christa Schleper, leader of the archaea ecology and evolution lab at the University of Vienna, said in a statement.

Gathered from mud in a canal on the coast of Piran, Slovenia, the L. ossiferum specimens have funky tentacles that extend from the body of each cell; odd bumps and bulges appear along the length of each appendage. These “surface protrusions” may support the idea that, at some point in evolutionary history, an Asgard grabbed a passing bacterium using similar extensions of its membrane and sucked the bacterium into its cell body, and this led to the development of the nucleus, Löwe wrote. The protrusions support the idea that such an interaction could have occurred, he explained. 

L. ossiferum also carries tiny, lollipop-like structures on its surface, which “look like they come from another planet,” Thijs Ettema, an environmental microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who wasn’t involved in the work, told Science. The microbe also contains structural filaments that closely resemble those seen in the cytoskeleton, or supporting scaffold, of eukaryotic cells, Löwe wrote.

Some scientists think the new study strengthens the hypothesis that Asgards are eukaryotes’ direct ancestor, but not everyone is convinced. Read more in Science.

Full article at Live Science.

The following statement by researchers lacks a certain quality of scientific professionalism: “These ‘surface protrusions’ may support the idea that, at some point in evolutionary history, an Asgard grabbed a passing bacterium using similar extensions of its membrane and sucked the bacterium into its cell body, and this led to the development of the nucleus.” Can anybody pinpoint how this statement falls short of scientific expectations, beyond perhaps the elementary school level?

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At Mind Matters News: Are Extra Dimensions of the Universe Real or Imaginary?

The human mind can imagine and work with a world that we cannot physically apprehend, that follows the rules of mathematics.

In a classic 2018 essay, republished recently at Aeon, science writer and artist Margaret Wertheim, author of a number of books, including Physics on the Fringe (Walker Books, 2011), asks us to think about what “extra dimensions” really means:

While on the local level we are trained to think of space as having three dimensions, general relativity paints a picture of a four-dimensional universe, and string theory says it has 10 dimensions – or 11 if you take an extended version known as M-Theory. There are variations of the theory in 26 dimensions, and recently pure mathematicians have been electrified by a version describing spaces of 24 dimensions. But what are these ‘dimensions’? And what does it mean to talk about a 10-dimensional space of being?

MARGARET WERTHEIM, “RADICAL DIMENSIONS” AT AEON (JANUARY 10, 2018)

In the ancient Western world, she tells us, there was no clear idea of space; rather, the ruling concept was of “place.” A cup on the table is in one place and the air surrounding it is in the place surrounding it. The table is in the place underneath it. Everything has its “place. ”That made it difficult, perhaps, to think of space in abstract terms.

It wasn’t until the early 17th century that Galileo and Descartes (1596– 1650) incorporates Euclidean geometry, with its dimensions, into physics. An interesting side note is that artists, not scientists, led the way in this area:

During the late Middle Ages… a view began to percolate in Europe that God had created the world according to the laws of Euclidean geometry. Hence, if artists wished to portray it truly, they should emulate the Creator in their representational strategies. From the 14th to the 16th centuries, artists such as Giotto, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca developed the techniques of what came to be known as perspective – a style originally termed ‘geometric figuring’.- By consciously exploring geometric principles, these painters gradually learned how to construct images of objects in three-dimensional space. In the process, they reprogrammed European minds to see space in a Euclidean fashion.

MARGARET WERTHEIM, “RADICAL DIMENSIONS” AT AEON (JANUARY 10, 2018)

In 1905, Albert Einstein added time as a fourth dimension, hence spacetime. It wasn’t just a concept, Wertheim tells us: “Only in a 4D model of the world can electromagnetism be fully and accurately described.”

There is also the concept of a fourth spatial dimension, often pictured as a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube.

Just as the sides of a cube are squares, the sides of a tesseract are cubes. No instances are currently known in nature.

Now, what about, say, a fifth dimension?

Euclidean geometry, unlike the teacup on the table, is an abstract approach to space. We can add a fifth and sixth dimension in mathematics and work with them as with the others. We cannot easily picture them, of course. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist. We can’t picture infrared or ultraviolet light either because we can’t see those parts of the light spectrum.

When the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force were discovered in the mid-20th century, some physicists wondered if they could be regarded as the fifth and sixth dimensions. Gradually, controversial string theory began to take shape:

It turns out that in order to encompass both of these two forces, we have to add another five dimensions to our mathematical description. There’s no a priori reason it should be five; and, again, none of these additional dimensions relates directly to our sensory experience. They are just there in the mathematics. So this gets us to the 10 dimensions of string theory. Here there are the four large-scale dimensions of spacetime (described by general relativity), plus an extra six ‘compact’ dimensions (one for electromagnetism and five for the nuclear forces), all curled up in some fiendishly complex, scrunched-up, geometric structure.

MARGARET WERTHEIM, “RADICAL DIMENSIONS” AT AEON (JANUARY 10, 2018)

Do all these dimensions really exist? Well, that depends on whether the premises of much-disputed string theory, a form of post-modern physics are accepted. Wertheim’s comment could serve equally well as a warning:

So far, we have no evidence for any of these additional dimensions – we are still in the land of swimming physicists dreaming of a miniature landscape we cannot yet access – but string theory has turned out to have powerful implications for mathematics itself. Recently, developments in a version of the theory that has 24 dimensions has shown unexpected interconnections between several major branches of mathematics, which means that, even if string theory doesn’t pan out in physics, it will have proven a richly rewarding source of purely theoretical insight.

MARGARET WERTHEIM, “RADICAL DIMENSIONS” AT AEON (JANUARY 10, 2018)

This short 2021 interview with theoretical physicist Brian Greene makes clear that, while purely theoretical insight may be richly rewarded, so far, hard evidence is lacking.

That doesn’t stop some hopeful travelers from anticipating a portal to an extra time dimension and or an extra space dimension that will solve the Hard Problem of consciousness.

What all these extra, mathematical space dimensions really show is that the human mind can imagine and work with a world that we cannot physically apprehend. That world is not a free-form fantasy; it follows the rules of mathematics. But it originates in our minds and most of its dimensions may exist there only in theory. Those who seek a simple, reductive explanation for human consciousness should take heed.

Mind Matters News

Although definite proof of the existence of higher spatial dimension has not yet been obtained, the mathematical sensibility of their existence is compelling. Could our three dimensions of space be embedded within a higher-dimensional reality? Possibly. Could we ever enter into and explore this higher dimensional reality? Not likely, unless we cease to be physical, since physical matter appears to be tied to the fabric of our spacetime. In the context of ID, could the Designer God exist in higher dimensions than the three dimensions of space we can perceive? Something along this line seems reasonable.

About 10 years ago, I published a couple of articles exploring the physical ramifications of five spatial dimension for quantum particles. An amazing number of physical phenomena “fell out” of this theory, including a possible explanation of the central potential of the strong force. Here are the references to the two articles (accessible on arxiv.org):

E. R. Hedin, “Extra-dimensional confinement of quantum particles,”  Physics Essays, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 177-190, June, 2012. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04249)

E. R. Hedin, “A higher-dimensional model of the nucleon-nucleon central potential,” Frontiers of Physics, 9(2), 234-239 (2014), DOI 10.1007/s11467-013-0393-x. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05260)

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Tufts biologist asks, where is anatomy coded in living systems?

Philip Cunningham writes to say (and quote),

Michael Levin, a Distinguished Professor in the Biology department at Tufts, after giving several examples of top-down ‘biological form’, not bottom-up ’emergence’, being the ruling factor in embryological development, states that…

“OK, so one very canonical example of this that we discovered a few years ago is this. So here’s a tadpole, the gut, the brain, the nostrils, and the eyes here. This tadpole needs to become a frog. In order for a tadpole face to become a frog face, things have to move. So the jaw has to move, the eyes have to move forward, everything has to move. And it used to be thought that this process was hardwired because if you are a standard tadpole and you want to be a standard frog, all you have to remember is which direction and by how much every piece of the face moves. We suspected that there was more intelligence to this process than that, and so we did an experiment. We created so-called “Picasso’ frogs. So these are tadpoles in which everything is messed up. The eyes are on the side of the head, the jaws are off to the side, the nostrils are too far back. I mean everything is in the wrong position. And we found that these animals still, largely, make pretty normal frogs. Because all of these pieces will move in novel paths, sometimes they go too far and have to double back, to give you a normal frog.

“So what the genetics give you is not some hardwired system that always moves in the same way. What it specifies is a really interesting error minimization machine that, however you start it off, obviously within some limits, will try to minimize the error and get to the correct final shape. If we had a robotic swarm, a collection of robots that was able to do this we would call this a prize winning example of collective intelligence, but we don’t have such technology yet.

“So we started trying to understand this process. How does all this work? And so to this standard feed-forward, kind of open, process of developmental biology that you would read about in class, where there are genes, they make proteins… there’s some physics and chemistry, and then there is this ’emergent’ outcome (i.e. of the ‘anatomy’). Add to these feedback loops, whereby this is actually a homeostatic system. If that anatomy is disrupted in some way, by injury, by mutations, by teratogens, by parasites, whatever, then these feedback loops will kick in and try to minimize error. The cells will do what they can to try to get back to the correct shape. It’s a thing about your thermostat. It is a basic homeostatic circuit. Now, on the one hand, this is pretty expected. Biologists know all about feedback loops and so on. On the other hand, there are two kinds of weird and unusual things here. The first is that every homeostatic process has to have a set point. So, if you are going to try to get back to where you need to be, you need to remember where the right position is. You have to store a set point. We are used to thinking about scalars, single numbers, as set points, temperature, PH, things like that, but in this case the set point is some sort of a large scale geometry, It is a coarse grain descriptor of some kind of anatomy. A complex data structure. And, in general, biologists don’t love to think about goal directed processes. The idea is that there is supposed to be emergence (of anatomy), and that kind of emergent complexity, but this idea that things are working towards a goal, as any navigational system fundamentally does, is not something that is very comfortable, certainly for molecular biology.

“So how would something like this work? How could we have a navigating system that can have goals in anatomical space?” — Michael Levin – Where is Anatomy Encoded in Living Systems? – 11:33 minute mark

Well, when science is not comfortable with the evidence, either something is wrong with the science or something is wrong with the evidence. One solution is to ignore — or deprecate — the evidence. There is another solution but it’s controversial just now…

Merry Christmas to all, especially those stranded by bad weather! This is for you:

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Excerpt from: “There is a God, How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind”

Anthony Flew writes:

I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this Universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God.  I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source.

Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than half a century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.  Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God.  The first is the fact that nature obeys laws.  The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.

When I finally came to recognize the existence of a God, it was not a paradigm shift, because my paradigm remains, as Plato in his Republic scripted his Socrates to insist: “We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”

The leaders of science over the last hundred years, along with some of today’s most influential scientists, have built a philosophically compelling vision of a rational universe that sprang from a divine Mind.  As it happens, this is the particular view of the world that I now find to be the soundest philosophical explanation….

Anthony Flew, “There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” (New York: Harper One, 2007).

The evidence that convinced “the world’s most notorious atheist” that God’s creative activity gave rise to the universe and life is the same evidence that Uncommon Descent has repeatedly presented from ongoing research findings across the scientific disciplines. What more could be said?

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At The Debrief: The Case for Alien Life Elevated By the Exciting First-Ever Confirmation of Two Exoplanet Water Worlds

CHRISTOPHER PLAIN writes:

University of Montreal (UdeM) researchers have found the first confirmed exoplanets categorized as water worlds. Dubbed Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d, the two ‘super-Earths’ are essentially identical twins, with both about 1.9 times the size of the Earth. Astronomers had previously found an exoplanet they thought may be a water world, but that find still needs to be confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sometime next year.

A cross-section rendering of Earth and Kepler-138 d show the comparative compositions of both worlds. CREDIT: BENOIT GOUGEON, UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL

Researchers tell The Debrief that more work is needed to fully understand the composition of Kepler-128c and Kepler-138d, and both exoplanets may only contain water vapor and no surface water. However, given that water is the fundamental building block for all life as we know it, the exciting first-ever confirmation of two exoplanet water worlds still dramatically increases the likelihood that alien life exists in the universe. 

Note: Water is probably the most common triatomic molecule in the universe; its presence in the composition of planets is not surprising. The claim that the discovery of “two exoplanet water worlds…dramatically increases the likelihood that alien life exists in the universe” is little more than media bait.

WATER WORLDS PREVIOUSLY THEORIZED BUT NOT CONFIRMED

Located in the Lyra constellation, which is about 218 light-years from Earth, the two new planets orbit an M-class (aka red dwarf) star called Kepler-138 or KOL-314. As a result, Kepler-138c and Kepler 138-d are much closer to their host star, with full orbits taking mere days (13.8 and 23.1, respectively) as opposed to the 365.25 days Earth takes to orbit the sun.

“We previously thought that planets that were a bit larger than Earth were big balls of metal and rock, like scaled-up versions of Earth, and that’s why we called them super-Earths,” explained Benneke in a press release announcing the find. “However, we have now shown that these two planets, Kepler-138c, and d, are quite different in nature: a big fraction of their entire volume is likely composed of water.”

In their published paper, which appears in the December 15 edition of Nature Astronomy, the researchers note that Hubble and Spitzer did not directly observe water on the two planets. Instead, their compositions were calculated based on the way they interact with the gravity of the other bodies in the Kepler-138 system. These calculations showed that the twin super-Earths were not as dense as rocky worlds but were denser than helium/hydrogen gas giants like Jupiter. As a result, the best (and likeliest) answer was that both planets contained a significant amount of water, classifying them as water worlds.

BOTH PLANETS MAY CONTAIN A LOT OF VAPOR AND LITTLE TO NO LIQUID WATER

While both Kepler-138c and d are likely swimming in water, so to speak, the researchers caution that most, if not all, of the water on these worlds may not be in liquid form on the surface.

“The water layer is so thick that it extends from the atmosphere all the way into the deep high-pressure interior of the planet,” Paulet told The Debrief. “Therefore, some of the water is in vapor form in the atmosphere while some is in high-pressure water phases such as the “supercritical” phase of water.”

Piaulet told The Debrief that some of the water could theoretically be in liquid form if clouds reflect away enough of the star’s light to cool down the planet a bit, but they’re more likely to expect a “supercritical water ocean” right below the vapor atmosphere. She also noted that pressure typically increases as you move below the surface, so the presence of underground water is even less likely.

“We have reason to believe that there may be more than these two “water worlds” out there, and still have yet to confirm whether what makes for their small density is indeed water or also involves methane or ammonia, which have similar densities as water,” she explained. “This question can only be solved by probing the atmospheres of these planets, indeed using space-based observatories such as JWST!”

Full article at The Debrief.

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At Phys.org: Experimentalists: Sorry, no oxygen required to make these minerals on Mars

When NASA’s Mars rovers found manganese oxides in rocks in the Gale and Endeavor craters on Mars in 2014, the discovery sparked some scientists to suggest that the red planet might have once had more oxygen in its atmosphere billions of years ago.

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The minerals probably required abundant water and strongly oxidizing conditions to form, the scientists said. Using lessons learned from Earth’s geologic record, scientists concluded that the presence of manganese oxides indicated that Mars had experienced periodic increases in atmospheric oxygen in its past—before declining to today’s low levels.

But a new experimental study from Washington University in St. Louis upends this view.

Scientists discovered that under Mars-like conditions, manganese oxides can be readily formed without atmospheric oxygen. Using kinetic modeling, the scientists also showed that manganese oxidation is not possible in the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere expected on ancient Mars.

Catalano and Mitra conducted laboratory experiments using chlorate and bromate—dominant forms of these elements on Mars—to oxidize manganese in water samples that they made to replicate fluids on the Mars surface in the ancient past.

The scientists found that halogens converted manganese dissolved in water into manganese oxide minerals thousands to millions of times faster than by oxygen. Further, under the weakly acidic conditions that scientists believe were found on the surface of early Mars, bromate produces manganese oxide minerals more quickly than any other available oxidant. Under many of these conditions, oxygen is altogether incapable of forming manganese oxides.

The new results alter foundational interpretations of the habitability of early Mars, which is an important driver of ongoing research by NASA and the European Space Agency.

But just because there was likely no atmospheric oxygen in the past, there’s no particular reason to believe that there was no life, the scientists said.

“There are several life forms even on Earth that do not require oxygen to survive,” Mitra said. “I don’t think of it as a ‘setback’ to habitability—only that there was probably no oxygen-based lifeforms.”

Extremophile organisms that can survive in a halogen-rich environment—like the salt-loving single-celled organisms and bacteria that thrive in the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea on Earth—might also do well on Mars.

“We need more experiments conducted in diverse geochemical conditions that are more relevant to specific planets like Mars, Venus, and ‘ocean worlds’ like Europa and Enceladus in order to have the correct and full understanding of the geochemical and geological environments on these planetary bodies,” Mitra said. “Every planet is unique in its own right, and we cannot extrapolate the observations made on one planet to exactly understand a different planet.”

Complete article at Phys.org.

The quote from the article, “But just because there was likely no atmospheric oxygen in the past, there’s no particular reason to believe that there was no life,” correctly suggests that not all bacteria require oxygen to live. However, saying, “there’s no particular reason to believe that there was no life,” ignores the mountain of scientific research into the unresolved difficulties of abiogenesis under any conceivable planetary conditions. Unless life on Mars was divinely created, or seeded there from Earth, there are many particular reasons to believe that there was no life in Mars’ history.

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At SciTech Daily: Hubble Space Telescope Captures Festive and Free-Floating Scene

Festive Hubble Space Telescope image showing a small region of the well-known nebula Westerhout 5, which lies around 7,000 light years away. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Sahai

Just in time for Christmas, this new Picture of the Week from the Hubble Space Telescope features a glistening scene in holiday red. This festive image shows a small region of the well-known nebula Westerhout 5, which is located approximately 7,000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG). The frEGG in this image is the small tadpole-shaped dark region in the upper center-left. 

FrEGGs are a particular class of Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGs). Both frEGGs and EGGs are regions of gas that are sufficiently dense that they photoevaporate less easily than the less compact gas surrounding them. Photoevaporation occurs when gas is ionized and dispersed away by an intense source of radiation — typically young, hot stars releasing vast amounts of ultraviolet light. EGGs were only identified fairly recently, most notably at the tips of the Pillars of Creation (see image below), which were captured by Hubble in iconic images released in 1995.

FrEGGs were classified even more recently, and are distinguished from EGGs by being detached and having a distinct ‘head-tail’ shape. FrEGGs and EGGs are of particular interest because their density makes it more difficult for intense UV radiation, found in regions rich in young stars, to penetrate them. Their relative opacity means that the gas within them is protected from ionization and photoevaporation. This is thought to be important for the formation of protostars, and it is predicted that many FrEGGs and EGGs will play host to the birth of new stars. 

These towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas sit at the heart of M16, or the Eagle Nebula. The aptly named Pillars of Creation, featured in this stunning Hubble image, are part of an active star-forming region within the nebula and hide newborn stars in their wispy columns. These columns that resemble stalagmites protruding from the floor of a cavern are in fact cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that act as incubators for new stars. Inside them and on their surface astronomers have found knots or globules of denser gas. These are called EGGs (acronym for “Evaporating Gaseous Globules”). Inside at least some of the EGGs stars are being formed. Credit NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (ASU)

The frEGG in this image (at the top of the page) is a dark spot in the sea of red light. The red color is caused by a particular type of light emission known as H-alpha emission. This happens when an extremely energetic electron within a hydrogen atom loses a specific amount of energy, leading to the electron becoming less energetic and releasing this recognizable red light.

SciTech Daily

Nothing controversial here, just an opportunity to “look up” and appreciate the vast grandeur and beauty of the heavens. Note that the “Pillars of Creation” shown in the Hubble image are about 5000 times larger than the diameter of our solar system.

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At Evolution News: “Why Life?”: A Question Atheist Scientists Never Ask

Stephen J. Iacoboni‘s article contains a profound question…

One cannot understand organisms — that is, life itself — without incorporating the concept of purpose within biology, the science of organisms. Such purpose is observable and measurable, and therefore well within the bounds of scientific inquiry.

In order to understand life, it is not sufficient to simply observe what is happening. The real question is why things are the way they are.

However, did we not just decide that animals eat because they are hungry and avoid danger to eschew harm? Yes, these are clearly purpose-driven activities, and they all have a biochemical or physiologic basis.

True enough. But the deeper question is, why are these physiologic stimuli there in the first place? Answer: to allow for life. But then… why life?

“Why life?” is the ultimate question. 

If, as the atheist scientists endlessly insist, we exist merely as an accidental collocation of molecules strewn together on some small planet in the backwater of an insignificant galaxy, then again, “Why life?”

Time, Energy, and Matter

The answer, finally, comes all the way back to where we started: purpose. Time, energy, and inanimate matter carry on ceaselessly with no apparent purpose. But arising out of the inorganic are living creatures, utterly purpose-driven. There is absolutely no reason for purpose-driven life to exist within this milieu, unless purpose itself exists at the fundamental core of reality itself.

Every religion has taught this, always. It is not a new revelation, however forgotten in modern times. 

Let us return to the wisdom of our elders.

Full article at Evolution News.

Humans have a tendency to want to keep living. Why? If we are an undirected, purposeless outcome of the forces of nature acting on various atoms, how could such an organism want anything?

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At Big Think: What sort of ethics would aliens practice?

If aliens are driven mostly by biological imperatives, humanity could be in big trouble if we ever meet technologically advanced beings.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Ethics derived from biological evolution can be harsh — parasitism, invasiveness, and survival at all costs. Ethics derived from human culture is far more benevolent.  Would alien ethics be based more on biology or culture? Let’s hope the latter.

In this season of religious holidays, when we cherish peace and goodwill, those of us who think about our place in the Universe might wonder what ethical standards aliens — particularly technologically advanced aliens — might follow if we someday encounter them. Would they be similar to the ethical standards of humans?

Credit: Henrique Alvim Corrêa

Before you scream “I HOPE NOT!” consider that society’s values have changed quite a bit over the last 10,000 years or so of human history. Even today, ethical standards vary a lot from culture to culture. But let’s use as a modern reference point the values enshrined in the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 1 of the Declaration states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” while Article 2 adds that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.”

Evolutionary ethics

Thinking beyond just our current civilization on Earth, we can distinguish between ethical standards derived from biological evolution and those derived from cultural evolution. Let’s start with biology. Nature prioritizes survival and reproduction above all, and in the high-stakes game of evolutionary competition, everything is allowed. Parasites even use other life forms to get the resources they need, with little regard for whether the host organism dies as a result. One particularly cruel example (from a human perspective) is parasitoid wasps, which lay their eggs inside their victims, after which the offspring devour their way out. Parasitic life forms are common on our planet; by some estimates they outnumber the non-parasites.

On the other hand, nature offers plenty of examples of cooperation. In extreme cases, one species literally cannot live without the other. Lichens, in fact, are a symbiotic partnership, a long-term biological relationship of cyanobacteria or algae with fungal species.

When it comes to survival, the species is more important than the individual organism. Mutations are nearly always bad news for individuals, but for a species they’re advantageous, because they are a key means by which the species adapts to changing environmental conditions. Seen from a species survival perspective, the individual has no real purpose after it procreates. Aging reduces its fitness to such a large degree that the organism generally dies quickly after reproducing.

Seen from a cultural context, however, older individuals still have a purpose, as they pass on expertise from one generation to the next, and can help care for their offspring’s offspring — the so-called grandmother effect. This has proven evolutionarily beneficial for humans. In this case biology and culture move in the same direction: to enhance the survival of the human species.

Cultural ethics

At other times, biological and cultural evolution point in different directions. A prime example is colonization. From a biological viewpoint, it’s completely normal. Every species practices some kind of colonization as it seeks out new habitats and resources. Those species that don’t go extinct. Of course, biological colonization often means that whatever indigenous species was there first is replaced by invaders. From a biological viewpoint, there’s nothing wrong with that. Whichever species is better suited to the environment will survive, and if both species are equally well-adapted, they both may thrive, but at lower numbers.

And yet, from a human cultural perspective, colonization has gotten a bad rap, particularly in the last centuries, when European nations’ aggressiveness often resulted in the suppression and sometimes even eradication of indigenous human populations.

In our latest meeting of the Einstein Forum, hosted at the Technical University Berlin, we considered some of these questions in discussing the possible colonization of the Moon and Mars. It became clear that our group’s eagerness to colonize the Red Planet with humans depends on whether we find indigenous life there or not. Cultural evolution has brought us to believe that indigenous life on a planet should be protected. This might not categorically rule out a human Mars colony but would strongly affect how it’s done. Think of the Prime Directive in Star Trek, which prohibits interference in another society’s evolution.

Alien ethics

Would an alien civilization have such qualms? If they’re highly evolved, they would probably realize that remaining stuck forever on their home planet poses a high risk of eventual extinction, a risk that can be mitigated by colonizing other habitable planets and moons. Would they be ruthless in pursuing their biological imperative, like the aliens in the movie Independence Day? Or would they follow a more culturally advanced strategy, respecting indigenous life, especially if that life is complex and possibly intelligent? If the latter, they might choose to colonize only planets and moons that are habitable but uninhabited. But if the aliens badly needed another planet’s resources, they might abandon these lofty principles and pivot back to biology to prioritize their own survival. 

The tension between biological and cultural imperatives may become more pronounced if conflict arises between a planet’s indigenous species and the new arrivals. On Earth, conflicts between different individuals of the same species or different species don’t necessarily result in violence or even death. But in predator-prey relationships, it’s typically “eat or be eaten.” Modern human society claims to favor non-violent conflict resolution, whether prompted by the UN Charter or the teachings of Jesus. The Russia-Ukraine war, though, reminds us that violence is too often still used to resolve a conflict.  

Would technologically advanced aliens, even “hungry” aliens, see us as a fellow intelligent species that deserves respect? That might lead them to settle disputes between us in a non-violent way. Or would they follow the cruel mandates of biology and take what they need — or, worse, see us a food source, or even pets?

The ethical standards of aliens could therefore vary tremendously, depending on whether culture or biology rules. We have a better chance of settling things peaceably if it’s the former. This is not to vilify the biological imperative, however. That’s what helped shape us into the species we are today.

Big Think

“Modern human society claims to favor non-violent conflict resolution, whether prompted by the UN Charter or the teachings of Jesus.” Most people agree on fundamental standards of morality, even if individually or corporately we fail to always live up to them. The biblical story says that we possess a conscience as part of how God made us. We also have a sin nature that can cause do what we know is wrong and even what we don’t want to do. The teachings of Jesus call us to “love our neighbor as our self.” Thank God for this counterpull to the evolutionary ethics of survival of the fittest.

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At Evolution News: Salt of the Earth Regulates Habitability

David Coppedge writes:

NASA’s astrobiology program leans heavily on the assumption that any location where liquid water can persist is a potential place for life to emerge and evolve. Consequently, those interested in the question of life beyond the Earth have typically limited their searches to watery places. Usually those were planets orbiting within their particular “continuously habitable zone” (CHZ), defined as the distance from the host star where H2O could remain in the liquid state for long periods of time. The CHZ has inner and outer radii with temperatures between 0 and 100°C, the freezing and boiling points for H2O. If a planet stays within the CHZ throughout its orbit, it is deemed “habitable” whether or not it has inhabitants.

Photo source: Illustra Media.Faint Young Sun

Our own sun is thought to have been 20 percent cooler in its early history. As Earth could not have migrated inward to adjust, this creates a “faint young sun paradox” that astrobiologists must address in their models of life’s history on Earth. If a faint sun resulted in Earth orbiting outside the CHZ for a time, it could have become a giant “Snowball Earth” that could only melt back to normal with difficulty. A Snowball Earth could be a dead end; the high albedo of water ice would reflect more solar warmth back out to space. Some doubt it could ever recover. It’s best, therefore, to avoid snowball scenarios in models of Earth history.

A deeper dive into requirements for habitability shows that it is too simplistic to assume that being “in the zone” (CHZ) qualifies a planet for habitability. The right atmosphere, crustal composition, inclination, obliquity, rotation period, and other factors bear strongly on the question. Books such as The Privileged Planet, Rare Earth, and A Fortunate Universe have added to the list of requirements, including factors like stellar class, the avoidance of tidal locking, and presence of a stabilizing large moon. Most recently, Denton’s The Miracle of Man and the earlier books in his Privileged Species series have focused attention on essential chemical elements for life — over a dozen of them — that must be available near the surface of putative habitable planets. His book The Wonder of Water (see the video below) explains H2O’s many properties that benefit life.

Climate Consequences

And yet one property of water — its ion content — has been largely neglected by astrobiologists. Table salt (NaCl) is the most common ionic compound in sea water. Its ease of dissolving in water sets up electrical properties between its positive sodium (Na+) and negative chlorine (Cl–) ions. As a paper discussed below says, “Salt affects seawater density and ocean dynamics via direct mass effects and through its influence on charge density and ionic interactions with polar water molecules.” One effect of salinity is lowering the freezing point of water; this is the reason for salting roads in winter.

Sea water on Earth presently contains about 35g/kg of NaCl. Has this value remained constant throughout the history of the Earth? And does the concentration of salt in a planet’s oceans have any effect on its habitability? Surprisingly, the relationship between salinity and habitability has received scant attention till now. News from Purdue University announced that “salt may be the key to life on Earth and beyond.”

The composition of the atmosphere, especially the abundance of greenhouse gases, influences Earth’s climate. Researchers at Purdue University, led by Stephanie Olson, assistant professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, have recently found that the presence of salt in seawater can also have a major impact on the habitability of Earth and other planets. [Emphasis added.]

The Purdue team modeled the effects of salinity and found that increases or decreases in ocean salt concentration have profound effects on habitability. Their paper, by Olson et al., “The Effect of Ocean Salinity on Climate and Its Implications for Earth’s Habitability,” was published open access in Geophysical Research Letters.

The influence of atmospheric composition on the climates of present-day and early Earth has been studied extensively, but the role of ocean composition has received less attention.

A major finding in the paper is that high salinity warms the climate by affecting ocean currents. This may answer, the authors believe, the faint young sun paradox: i.e., how our planet avoided the Snowball Earth scenario when the solar luminosity (solar energy per unit area, in watts per square meter) was 20 percent lower, according to theories of stellar evolution for G2 main sequence stars like our sun.

Ecological Consequences

Too much salt, on the other hand, can be hostile to life. Watch plant roots bend to avoid salt in a news item from the University of Copenhagen. The Purdue authors did not consider the effects on organisms with 50g/kg NaCl (their highest model value). Some organisms are remarkably salt-tolerant now, but evolutionists do not think they began that way. The Dead Sea, with over 340 g/kg, is dead for a reason. Rising salinity in California’s Salton Sea has killed most of the fish that once attracted anglers to its shores (Desert Sun). On Mars, the pervasive concentration of perchlorate salts worries some astrobiologists about the possibility of life there. 

The authors point out that salinity also affects the concentration of atmospheric CO2. This becomes another complication not previously considered in climate models. Notice the word “coincidence” in this eye-opening statement:

The salinity evolution of Earth’s ocean is not yet well constrained, but constant salinity through time would be a notable coincidence or imply some currently unknown feedback. Climate models that implicitly assume present-day salinity may thus yield misleading views of Earth’s climate history.

A Critical Role

That’s enough quotation to point out the criticality of salt to habitability. Those interested in the details can follow the authors’ arguments in the paper. Suffice it to say that a planet designer would have had to regulate an additional factor — salt — to make it livable. Liquid water alone is not enough to maintain a CHZ. One cannot tinker recklessly with salt concentration without knocking a planet out of the Goldilocks zone. If the models require beginning with a cooler sun, was it a lucky coincidence to start with higher salinity to keep the Earth warm, then decrease it steadily as the sun brightened?

The Purdue research adds two factors to the list of requirements for habitability that Denton, Gonzalez, Richards and others have compiled: (1) fine tuning of salt concentrations for a stable climate, and (2) fine timing of salt dynamics under a changing solar constant. Maybe there is something new under the sun after all: the salt of the Earth.

Full article at Evolution News

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