Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 216

New origin of life thesis: Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) wasn’t actually a single cell

Or not exactly. Charles Marshall, in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley:

From the Big Bang to the emergence of humans… we’re asking the age-old question: what is the origin of life? While this question has fascinated humans for centuries, recent breakthroughs have been made that bear remarkable implications. Join us for this special Science at Cal Lecture celebrating the UC Museum of Paleontology’s 100th year anniversary and featuring the Director of the Museum, Professor Charles Marshall. We will learn about the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), the unexpected similarities between prebiotic and human innovation, and the central role that energy and information have played in transforming the planet over the last 4 billion years, leading right up to the present climate crisis. (April 2, 2021)

Marshall favors horizontal gene transfer as a key method of early development because ancestor–descendant evolution is a “very slow” (42:25) evolutionary process. HGT among multiple independent lineages, by contrast, allows a “vast exchange of information,” thus sharing innovations and leading to faster development.

Okay. And in the midst of all that, Dawkins’s Selfish Gene got lost in a crowd somewhere and was never heard from again.

A lot of this thinking revolves around the white smoker, a form of hydrothermal vent:

In 1993, before alkaline vents were actually discovered, geochemist Michael Russell from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, US, suggested a mechanism by which life could have started at such vents.1 His ideas, updated in 2003,2 suggest life came from harnessing the energy gradients that exist when alkaline vent water mixes with more acidic seawater (the early oceans were thought to contain more carbon dioxide than now).

This mirrors the way that cells harness energy. Cells maintain a proton gradient by pumping protons across a membrane to create a charge differential from inside to outside. Known as the proton-motive force, this can be equated to a difference of about 3 pH units. It’s effectively a mechanism to store potential energy and this can then be harnessed when protons are allowed to pass through the membrane to phosphorylate adenosine diphosphate (ADP), making ATP.

Russell’s theory suggests that pores in the hydrothermal vent chimneys provided templates for cells, with the same 3 pH unit difference across the thin mineral walls of the interconnected vent micropores that separate the vent and sea water. This energy, along with catalytic iron nickel sulfide minerals, allowed the reduction of carbon dioxide and production of organic molecules, then self-replicating molecules, and eventually true cells with their own membranes.

Chemical gardens

Chemist Laura Barge, also a research scientist at JPL, is testing this theory using chemical gardens – an experiment you might have carried out at school. Looking at chemical gardens ‘you think its life, but it’s definitely not’, says Barge, who specialises in self-organising chemical systems. The classical chemical garden is formed by adding metal salts to a reactive sodium silicate solution. The metal and silicate anions precipitate to form a gelatinous colloidal semi-permeable membrane enclosing the metal salt. This sets up a concentration gradient which provides the impetus for the growth of hollow plant-like columns.

Rachael Brazil, “Hydrothermal vents and the origins of life” at Chemistry World (April 16, 2017)

No origin of life theory is seriously plausible when you look at all the facts. But this one at least allows us to show you chemical gardens and white smokers. Here:

and

See also: Researchers search for the “last bacterial common ancestor” (LBCA) in a world of horizontal gene transfer. One senses that the reconstruction will be subject to considerable revision. It’s not entirely clear what “ancestry” means in a world of rampant horizontal gene transfer.

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Did the argument for design in nature suffer a fatal blow from David Hume?

Every shallow pundit seems to know that skeptical philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) eviscerated the arguments of William Paley (1743–1805) for design in the universe, practically before he made them. Right?

A friend writes to remind us that agnostic Australian philosopher David Stove, author of Darwinian Fairytales, did not think so:

… of course Paley did not invent the [design] argument. For centuries before he wrote, it had been carrying conviction to almost every rational and educated mind. It continued to do so for another 50 years after Paley wrote. This is a historical fact which deserves to be known and reflected upon, yet it has been almost completely forgotten. Far from having suffered a fatal blow at Hume’s hands in 1779, the design argument entered the period of its greatest flourishing only between 1800 and 1850. In 1829, for example, the Earl of Bridgewater provided a large sum in his will for a series of books to be written by the ablest authors, which would argue, not from revelation or from authority but rationally, for ‘the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation. ‘ The ‘Bridgewater treatises’ duly came to be published, and they were written by the best authors. In retrospect, one in particular stands out. This was The Hand, (1833), by Sir Charles Bell: the greatest of all British physiologists after Harvey. Yes, that’s right: a whole book on the human hand, as evidence of the existence, intelligence, power and benevolence of God, only 26 years before The Origin of Species appeared! And it is — even if no one in the whole world now cares to know the fact — a very good book indeed.”

David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution

Yer humble news hack distinctly recalls running into a hand surgeon at a writers’ conference years ago who explained that he had come to believe in God while operating on human hands. No power merely of this universe, he insisted, could produce the human hand.

I bet that doc doesn’t know who Hume or Paley are. His education took him in a different direction.

Didn’t Philip Cunningham go to some trouble recently to set forth a similar case for the human eye? Here’s the link again: The human eye, like the human brain, is a wonder. Which allegedly required no actual design…

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Asked of Steve Meyer: If humans are so important to God, why did they take so long to develop?

Meyer’s most recent book is The Return of the God Hypothesis, which makes such questions fair game:

To welcome Stephen Meyer’s new book, Return of the God Hypothesis, into the world, distinguished U.C. San Diego physicist Brian Keating welcomed Steve onto his podcast. It’s both a very profound and a very entertaining conversation.

I happened to be listening in the car on my way to and from the funeral of a friend’s father. Obviously, the end of life, like its beginning, is an occasion for pondering ultimate questions. At one point, Professor Keating asks Dr. Meyer about death. An intelligent design perspective sees purpose and meaning in the process, over some 13 billion+ years, from the Big Bang to the origin of human beings, with humans as the ultimate goal — the one creature in the universe, as far as we know, able to reflect on its own death. In the book, Meyer argues from three scientific discoveries to an inference to a personal God. If God is the creator, Keating wants to know, why was He so patient as to wait billions of years, during which not much that was very interesting happened, for the fulfillment of His purpose in initiating the universe to begin with? Meyer admits that some Young Earth Creationist friends ask the same question, and his answer is to point to the “extravagance” of the Deity in the activity of creation. In other words, I think, why 13 billion years? Because why NOT 13 billion years?

David Klinghoffer, “Meyer, Keating: Why Was the Object of Creation So Long in Coming? And Other Good Questions” at Evolution News and Science Today

Stephen Meyer discusses whether the laws of cosmology, physics, and biology exhibit evidence for Intelligent Design. Does Fine-Tuning imply a “Mind” behind the Cosmos, or was the appearance of design inevitable thanks to random fluctuations due to the capaciousness of the Multiverse?

Meyer, author of the NYT Bestseller Darwin’s Doubt”, and Keating debate whether we can intuit the existence of God from the mere existence of information such as the low entropy state of the Universe at the Big Bang and from DNA.

Of course, God is eternal so it’s not clear that time, as such, is much of an issue for Him.

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Christian Scientific Society conference: Is there life in outer space?

Free webinar May 29, 2021, 10:00 am to some time after the panel discussion at 1:20 pm, EST. Suggested donation $20.

Here. Registration details to be provided.

Talks:

“Waiting for ETI: A Christian Scientific Perspective on Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence” by Bijan Nemati: “The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, or SETI, project has spent the last half-century looking for a telltale signal, and has come up short. In this talk, we examine from a Christian perspective the likelihood for extra-terrestrial life, taking into account what we have learned about extra-solar planets over the last two decades.”

“A Christian Perspective on the Space Aliens of the UFO Phenomenon” by Kenneth Samples “This talk will briefly examine the UFO phenomenon identifying the three broad explanatory theories concerning “ufology.” The talk will also exam the general view of space aliens as set forth in common UFO experience and religion.”

“The Privileged Planet and the Rarity of Habitable Planets” by Jay Richards “A common way of organizing our speculations about extraterrestrial life is with the Drake Equation. The problem, as someone once quipped, that it is, in effect, a way of compressing a great deal of ignorance in a small amount of space.”

“Towards a Protestant Christian Exotheology” by Jonathan Barlow “In this presentation, Barlow will discuss the history of Christian exotheology and attempt to sketch the meta-theological contours of a systematic exotheology that is both Christian and Protestant.”

One guesses the panel discussion will feature the speakers.

A good chance to check out the perennial topic, “Are We Alone?” with thoughtful people. Blow clear of the others.

Did you know about this, by the way?: The surprising role dolphins have played in the search for ET Dolphins, with their apparent alien intelligence, have been seen by scientists interested in ET as a stand-in. The discovery of dolphin intelligence supported the view that intelligence might evolve in unexpected places among life forms without hands.

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J. P. Moreland on mind over matter

On this special episode, Nate chats with Dr. J.P. Moreland about the difference between the mind and the brain, how it points to the existence of the soul, and how we can communicate this to others. Don’t miss this important discussion! (October 13, 2020)

See also: How do we know what is real? Philosopher J. P. Moreland can help Remember Moreland’s advice when you are told that your own consciousness is an illusion because one thousand profs say so.

Note: J.P. Moreland is an evangelical Christian and some readers might have many questions about some of his views. But he also talks honestly about his struggles with depression.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

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Is science drifting from simple materialism to panpsychism?

To judge from the favorable treatment panpsychism has been receiving recently in science literature, it appears so:

Leading neuroscientist Christof Koch, for example, explained last month in MIT Reader:

But who else, besides myself, has experiences? Because you are so similar to me, I abduce that you do. The same logic applies to other people. Apart from the occasional solitary solipsist this is uncontroversial. But how widespread is consciousness in the cosmos at large? How far consciousness extends its dominion within the tree of life becomes more difficult to abduce as species become more alien to us.

One line of argument takes the principles of integrated information theory (IIT) to their logical conclusion. Some level of experience can be found in all organisms, it says, including perhaps in Paramecium and other single-cell life forms. Indeed, according to IIT, which aims to precisely define both the quality and the quantity of any one conscious experience, experience may not even be restricted to biological entities but might extend to non-evolved physical systems previously assumed to be mindless — a pleasing and parsimonious conclusion about the makeup of the universe.

CHRISTOF KOCH, “IS CONSCIOUSNESS EVERYWHERE?” AT THE MIT PRESS READER (MARCH 15, 2021)

That’s MIT Reader, you understand, not Levitation News and Views. And Koch is Chief Scientist of both the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, which is dedicated to “Measuring Consciousness: From Theory To Practice.” He is not alone in his sympathies. A recent article in New Scientist makes that clear.

It seems to have come down to a choice between “nothing is conscious” and “everything is conscious.” But materialism becomes incoherent when it requires us to believe that we only imagine we are conscious — that’s a basic error in logic.

News, “Why would a neuroscientist choose panpsychism over materialism?” at Mind Matters News

Will the materialists hit back or have they already left or converted?

You may also wish to read:

At Nautilus: Electrons do have a “rudimentary mind” Panpsychists in science believe that nature is all there is but, they say, it includes consciousness as a fundamental fact of nature.

and

Why is science growing comfortable with panpsychism (“everything is conscious”)? At one time, the idea that “everything is conscious” was the stuff of jokes. Not any more, it seems.

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Researchers: Assigning new properties to dark matter might remove the need for dark energy

Dark energy is estimated to be nearly 70% of the universe — provided it exists:

Until now, researchers have believed that dark energy accounted for nearly 70 percent of the ever-accelerating, expanding universe.

For many years, this mechanism has been associated with the so-called cosmological constant, developed by Einstein in 1917, that refers to an unknown repellent cosmic power.

But because the cosmological constant — known as dark energy — cannot be measured directly, numerous researchers, including Einstein, have doubted its existence — without being able to suggest a viable alternative.

Until now. In a new study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, a model was tested that replaces dark energy with a dark matter in the form of magnetic forces.

“If what we discovered is accurate, it would upend our belief that what we thought made up 70 percent of the universe does not actually exist. We have removed dark energy from the equation and added in a few more properties for dark matter. This appears to have the same effect upon the universe’s expansion as dark energy,” explains Steen Harle Hansen, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute’s DARK Cosmology Centre.

University of Copenhagen – Faculty of Science, “New study sows doubt about the composition of 70 percent of our universe” at ScienceDaily

Dark matter is thought to be about 25% of the universe but we haven’t found a single particle of it:

“We don’t know much about dark matter other than that it is a heavy and slow particle. But then we wondered — what if dark matter had some quality that was analogous to magnetism in it? We know that as normal particles move around, they create magnetism. And, magnets attract or repel other magnets — so what if that’s what’s going on in the universe? That this constant expansion of dark matter is occurring thanks to some sort of magnetic force?” asks Steen Hansen. …

As Hansen puts it:

“Honestly, our discovery may just be a coincidence. But if it isn’t, it is truly incredible. It would change our understanding of the universe’s composition and why it is expanding. As far as our current knowledge, our ideas about dark matter with a type of magnetic force and the idea about dark energy are equally wild. Only more detailed observations will determine which of these models is the more realistic. So, it will be incredibly exciting to retest our result.

University of Copenhagen – Faculty of Science, “New study sows doubt about the composition of 70 percent of our universe” at ScienceDaily

If the two competing ideas are “equally wild,” couldn’t they be equally wrong?

The paper is open access.

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Convergent evolution: Our most distant relatives were sponges, not comb jellies, say researchers

They developed a new approach to analyzing amino acids:

Sponges are structurally simple, lacking complex traits such as a nervous system, muscles, and a though-gut. Logically, you would expect these complex traits to have emerged only once during animal evolution — after our lineage diverged from that of sponges — and then be retained in newly evolved creatures thereafter.

However, a debate has been raging ever since phylogenomic studies found evidence that our most distant animal relatives were in fact comb jellies. Comb jellies are considerably more complex than sponges, using a nervous system and muscles to detect and capture prey, for example, and a through-gut to help them digest it.

As such, if they were our most distant animal relatives, it would seem likely that the complex traits they evolved were later lost in simple animals such as sponges, or that they evolved twice over the course of evolutionary history — once in comb jellies and again, independently, in humans, sharks, flies and other related animals that have them.

Anthony Redmond, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, is first author of the research article just published in leading international journal, Nature Communications. He said:

“It may seem very unlikely that such complex traits could evolve twice, independently, but evolution doesn’t always follow a simple path. For example, birds and bats are distantly related but have independently evolved wings for flight.

“However, instead of comb jellies, our improved analyses point to sponges as our most distant animal relatives, restoring the traditional, simpler hypothesis of animal evolution. This means both that the animal ancestor was simple and that muscles, and the nervous and digestive systems, although further elaborated upon in many lineages, have a single origin.”

Trinity College Dublin, “Scientists pinpoint our most distant animal relatives” at ScienceDaily

Curiously, they add,

Other researchers had come to different conclusions about our most distant animal relative, and that was the case even when they used the same data — they had just used different methods.

Trinity College Dublin, “Scientists pinpoint our most distant animal relatives” at ScienceDaily

Well, we’ll see what the other researchers say about whose methods are right.

Re the researcher’s comment, “It may seem very unlikely that such complex traits could evolve twice, independently, but evolution doesn’t always follow a simple path,” he is virtually admitting that Darwinism stretches (snaps?) the bounds of probability but no one is allowed to discuss that honestly. That is most likely why there is a controversy in the first place.

The paper is open access.

See also: Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?

Sponge as first animal

Comb jelly as first animal:

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Researchers search for the “last bacterial common ancestor” in a world of horizontal gene transfer

They admit the difficulty of finding LBCA:

Higher life forms pass on their genetic code from parent to offspring via vertical gene transfer. As a result, the genome provides information on phylogenetic history. But bacteria are masters in another form of gene transfer, namely lateral gene transfer (LGT). This allows bacteria to exchange genetic information across different strains. This posed a major challenge in reconstructing the LBCA genome, as it renders the traditional phylogenetic methods incapable of inferring the root in the bacterial evolutionary tree.

For this reason, the researchers in Duesseldorf used biochemical networks together with thousands of individual trees. They investigated 1,089 anaerobic genomes and identified 146 protein families conserved in all bacteria. These proteins make up a nearly complete core metabolic network …

“We can infer with confidence that LBCA was most likely rod-shaped,” says Xavier. “If it was similar to Clostridia, it is possible that LBCA was able to sporulate.” This hypothesis was recently laid out by other researchers “and is highly compatible with our results,” says Xavier. Forming spores would allow early cells to survive the inhospitable environment of the early Earth.

Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf, “In search of the first bacterium” at ScienceDaily

One senses that the reconstruction will be subject to considerable revision. It’s not entirely clear what “ancestry” means in a world of rampant horizontal gene transfer.

The paper is open access.

See also: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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Researchers: Radioactive snowflakes will destroy stars!

This is a Hubble Space Telescope composite image of a supernova explosion designated SN 2014J in the galaxy M82/NASA, ESA, A. Goobar (Stockholm University), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Barry and Jonathan have offered reasonable, serious news today.

But it’s Saturday night so what we need just now is a total freakout over something that doesn’t matter much. We can’t offer you Murder hornets attack! or COVID from space! just yet. But we CAN offer you radioactive snowflakes:

A pair of researchers with Indiana University and Illinois University, respectively, has developed a theory that suggests crystalizing uranium “snowflakes” deep inside white dwarfs could instigate an explosion large enough to destroy the star. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, C. J. Horowitz and M. E. Caplan describe their theory and what it could mean to astrophysical theories about white dwarfs and supernovas.

White dwarfs are small stars that have burned up most of their nuclear fuel—they are typically much cooler than they once were and are very dense. In this new effort, Horowitz and Caplan used data from the Gaia space observatory to theorize that sometimes small grains of uranium could begin to crystalize (due to enriched actinides), forming what they describe as snowflakes. They suggest this could happen because of the differing melting points of the material involved. They further suggest that if this were to occur, it could lead to splitting of atomic nuclei, resulting in a series of fission reactions as the solids become enriched in actinides. And if such reactions were to raise the temperature of the interior of the star by igniting carbon, the result would likely be merging of atomic nuclei and eventually a very large fusion reaction that would result in a large explosion—likely large enough to destroy the star. They note that such an occurrence would be much like a thermonuclear bomb detonating due to fission reactions.

Bob Yirka, “New theory suggests uranium ‘snowflakes’ in white dwarfs could set off star-destroying explosion” at Phys.org

The paper is closed access.

Try to forget the fact that none of it matters to us. If you need a freakout closer to home, go back to murder hornets. If you need to freak out with a group, turn on the TV and listen to a cacophony around COVID-19 Be sure to wear your mask in the shower!

If you want to stay sane most of the time, keep reading Uncommon Descent. It’s free and it is good for your mental health.

Get to know the white dwarfs:

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