Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 25

At Science News: This ancient worm might be an important evolutionary missing link

Allison Gasparini writes:

An ancient, armored worm may be the key to unraveling the evolutionary history of a diverse collection of marine invertebrates.

This Wufengella fossil, found in China, is roughly 520 million years old and sports several features common to sea creatures known as lophophorates. JAKOB VINTHER AND LUKE PARRY

Discovered in China, a roughly 520-million-year-old fossil of the newly identified worm, dubbed Wufengella, might be the missing link between three of the phyla that constitute a cadre of sea creatures called lophophorates.

Based on a genetic analysis, Wufengella is probably the common ancestor that connects brachiopods, bryozoans and phoronid worms, paleontologist Jakob Vinther and colleagues report September 27 in Current Biology.

“We had been speculating that [the common ancestor] may have been some wormy animal that had plates on its back,” says Vinther, of the University of Bristol in England. “But we never had the animal.”

Roughly half a billion years ago, nearly all major animal groups burst onto the scene in a flurry of evolutionary diversification during what’s known as the Cambrian explosion (SN: 4/24/19). During this time, lophophorates experienced a rapid growth of species, which has obscured the group’s evolutionary history.

The fossil is a “great find,” says Gonzalo Giribet, an invertebrate zoologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the research. Still, the scientists’ analysis does not confirm that Wufengella is the long-sought missing link, he cautions, but rather suggests it.

Some researchers had hypothesized that lophophorates’ common ancestor would be a stationary creature that sat on the seafloor and fed only through tubes, similar to its modern kin. The Wufengella fossil could refute this idea; the animal’s body plan suggests instead that it crawled around, the researchers say.

A fossil like Wufengella had long been high on Vinther’s bucket list of fossils that he and his colleagues hoped to find. But “we always thought, ‘Well, we probably will never see that in real life,’” he says. Typically, such a creature would have spent its life in shallow water. Organisms don’t tend to preserve well there, decaying faster due to exposure to lots of oxygen. Vinther suggests that the Wufengella that his team found probably washed out to deep water in a storm.

Now that the researchers have found one Wufengella, they hope to find more, in part to see if there are other varieties. And perhaps the team could identify even more distant ancestors further back on the tree of life that might connect lophophorates with other animal groups such as mollusks, Vinther says, further fleshing out how life on Earth is connected.

Full article at Science News.

In terms of the science, the Wufengella fossil is the observable evidence. “Evolutionary history,” “missing link,” and “common ancestor” are not logically deduced from this evidence, but presumptively assumed conclusions. The “Cambrian explosion” mentioned in this article, is supported by extensive fossil evidence, and falls outside of the framework of the evolutionary story line.

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At Evolution News: Intelligent Design and the Regularity of Natural Law

This article addresses one of the most commonly raised objections to the reality of God as Creator – Why did God not make a perfect world? Treatises have been written on this topic, but the piece below provides a succinct overview of some points worth considering.

Granville Sewell writes:

In a series of posts, I am considering the problem of pain, but also indirectly, the “silence” of God. See my earlier post here.

Photo: “…a magnificent world of mountains and rivers, jungles and waterfalls…” (Rio Carrao, Venezuela), by Granville Sewell.

The laws of nature work together to create a magnificent world of mountains and rivers, jungles and waterfalls, oceans and forests, animals and plants. The basic laws of physics are cleverly designed to create conditions on Earth suitable for human life and human development. Gravity prevents us and our belongings from floating off into space; water makes our crops grow; the fact that certain materials are combustible makes it possible to cook our food and stay warm in winter. Yet gravity, water, and fire are responsible for many tragedies, such as airplane crashes, drownings, and chemical plant explosions. Tragedies such as floods and automobile accidents are the results of laws of physics which, viewed as a whole, are magnificently designed and normally work for our benefit. Nearly everything in Nature which is harmful to man has also a benevolent side, or is the result of a good thing gone bad. Even pain and fear themselves sometimes have useful purposes: pain may warn us that something in our body needs attention, and without fear, we would all die young doing foolish and dangerous things, or kill ourselves the first time life disappoints us. 

Why Not Overrule Nature?

But why won’t God protect us from the bad side effects of Nature? Why doesn’t He overrule the laws of Nature when they work against us? Why is He so “silent” during our most difficult and heart-breaking moments? First of all, if we assume He has complete control over nature, we are assuming much more than we have a right to assume. It does not necessarily follow that, because something is designed, it can never break down. We design cars, and yet they don’t always function as designed. When our car breaks down, we don’t conclude that the designer planned for it to break down, nor do we conclude that it had no designer; when the human body breaks down, we should not jump to the conclusion that God planned the illness, nor should we conclude that the body had no designer. 

That we were designed by a fantastically intelligent super intellect is a conclusion which is easily drawn from the evidence all around us. To jump from this to the conclusion that this creator can control everything is quite a leap. In fact, I find it easy to draw the opposite conclusion from the evidence, that this creator cannot, or at least does not, control everything. Nearly everyone seems to assume that if you attribute anything to God, you have to attribute everything to God. And even if we assume He has complete control over nature it is hard to see how He could satisfy everyone. Your crops are dry so you pray for rain — but I am planning a picnic. It seems fairer to let nature take its course and hope we learn to adapt. Controlling the motions of all the atoms in the world so that nothing terrible ever happens to us, so that we always get what we most need, is probably not as easy as it sounds! 

If Natural Laws Were Unreliable

In any case, what would life be like if the laws of nature were not reliable? What if God could and did stand by to intervene on our behalf every time we needed Him? We would then be spared all of life’s disappointments and failures, and life would certainly be less dangerous, but let us think about what life would be like in a world where nothing could ever go wrong. 

I enjoy climbing mountains — small ones. I recently climbed an 8,700-foot peak in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park and was hot and exhausted, but elated, when I finished the climb. Later I heard a rumor that the Park Service was considering building a cable car line to the top, and I was horrified. Why was I horrified — that would make it much easier for me to reach the peak? Because, of course, the pleasure I derived from climbing that peak did not come simply from reaching the top — it came from knowing that I had faced a challenge and overcome it. Since riding in a cable car requires no effort, it is impossible to fail to reach the top, and thus taking a cable car to the peak brings no sense of accomplishment. Even if I went up the hard way again, just knowing that I could have ridden the cable car would cheapen my accomplishment.

When we think about it, we see in other situations that achieving a goal brings satisfaction only if effort is required, and only if the danger of failure is real. And if the danger of failure is real, sometimes we will fail.

An Athletic Contest

When we prepare for an athletic contest, we know what the rules are and we plan our strategy accordingly. We work hard, physically and mentally, to get ready for the game. If we win, we are happy knowing that we played fairly, followed the rules, and achieved our goal. Of course we may lose, but what satisfaction would we derive from winning a game whose rules are constantly being modified to make sure we win? It is impossible to experience the thrill of victory without risking the agony of defeat. How many fans would attend a football game whose participants are just actors, acting out a script which calls for the home team to win? We would all rather go to a real game and risk defeat.

Life is a real game, not a rigged one. We know what the rules are, and we plan accordingly. We know that the laws of nature and of life do not bend at our every wish, and it is precisely this knowledge which makes our achievements meaningful. If the rules of nature were constantly modified to make sure we achieved our goals — whether they involve proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, getting a book published, finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, earning a college degree, or making a small business work — we would derive no satisfaction from reaching those goals. If the rules were even occasionally bent, we would soon realize that the game was rigged, and just knowing that the rules were flexible would cheapen all our accomplishments. Perhaps I should say, “If we were aware that the rules were being bent,” because I do believe that God has at times intervened in human and natural history, and I would like to believe He still does so on occasions, but in our experience, at least, the rules are inflexible.

If great works of art, music, literature, or science could be realized without great effort, and if success in such endeavors were guaranteed, the works of Michelangelo, Mozart, Shakespeare, and Newton would not earn much admiration.

A Book from the Sky

If it were possible to realize great engineering projects without careful study, clever planning and hard work, or without running any risk of failure, mankind would feel no satisfaction in having built the Panama Canal or having sent a man to the moon. And if the dangers Columbus faced in sailing into uncharted waters were not real, we would not honor him as a brave explorer. Scientific and technological progress are only made through great effort and careful study, and not every scientist or inventor is fortunate enough to leave his mark. But anyone who thinks God would be doing us a favor by dropping a book from the sky with all the answers in it does not understand human nature very well — that would take all the fun out of discovery. If the laws of nature were more easily circumvented, life would certainly be less frustrating and less dangerous, but also less challenging and less interesting.

Many of the tragedies, failures, and disappointments which afflict mankind are inevitable consequences of laws of nature and of life which, viewed as a whole, are magnificently designed and normally work for our benefit. And it is because we know these laws are reliable, and do not bend to satisfy our needs, that our greatest achievements have meaning.

This series is adapted from Dr. Sewell’s book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design.

Evolution News

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At Reasons.org: More Evidence for a Beautiful Universe

Hugh Ross writes:

I’m frequently asked to debate whether the universe exhibits extraordinary fine-tuning. On one recent podcast, what was proposed as a debate on cosmic fine-tuning turned into an affirmation that the universe is designed for observability.

Credit: Reasons.org

Physics Podcast “Debate”
I was interviewed by Ukrainian physicist Mikhail Abukumov on the subject of the fine-tuning of the universe for the possible existence and benefit of human beings. (Abukumov has translated my debate with Oxford University chemist Peter Atkins on the British radio/podcast show Unbelievable? into Russian.) Abukumov paired me up with Russian physicist Alexey Burov, who is presently a staff scientist at Fermi Lab in Batavia, Illinois. Abukumov presumed that this podcast episode would be a debate about fine-tuning since he was aware that my books and articles on cosmic fine-tuning were different from the papers and articles written by Burov.

There was no debate. What I have written on cosmic fine-tuning complemented what Burov had written, and what Burov had written complemented what I had written. Anyone can watch or listen to the “debate” here.

Universe Designed for Observability
Both Alexey Burov and his son Lev Burov are theoretical physicists. Together, they wrote a paper titled Genesis of a Pythagorean Universe.1 The paper is equation-free and, for the most part, can be understood by readers without a degree in physics.

Genesis of a Pythagorean Universe complements what I wrote in my book, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is, concerning how the universe is designed for observability. In my book, I explained how there’s a relatively narrow time window in the history of the universe during which astronomers can observe 100% of the universe’s past history. Humans are inside that time window now. I also demonstrated that we are living in the one location within this vast universe where intelligent physical life is possible, and where that intelligent life can observe 100% of the past history of the universe. I argued that perhaps our epoch in cosmic history or our location might be coincidental, but not both simultaneously. I concluded that the most rational reason for why we exist at both the ideal time epoch and location is that Someone wanted us to read the entirety of the universe’s “book” so that we can fully comprehend his glory, power, care, righteousness, and other attributes (Psalm 19:1–4, 50:6, 97:6; Romans 1:18–20).

Balance between Complexity and Simplicity
Alexey and Lev Burov made a similar argument based on the laws of physics. They explained how the laws of physics are complex enough to make our existence possible, yet simple enough to allow us to discover and understand those laws and their significance in allowing us to exist and fulfill the purposes for which the Creator created us. They pointed out that the minimum complexity of the laws of physics that would permit us to exist and thrive on one planet equals the maximum complexity of those laws that we could conceivably discover. They wrote, “Every little increase in complexity of the laws would create a tremendous jump in difficulty of their discovery, but if they were even a little simpler, the universe would have lacked the structural variety of life, not to mention human brains.”2 This equality, they argue, has no naturalistic explanation. The multiverse cannot account for it. Only a personal Creator who wanted us to exist and discover him explains such an extraordinary equality.

The Burovs demonstrate that what makes the equality a powerful testimony of God’s existence and the degree to which he has fine-tuned the universe for our benefit is that we can prove that the laws of physics are unchanged and noncontradictory throughout the entire space-time continuum of the universe, in some cases to eighteen places of the decimal! Additionally, we can show that the laws of physics apply over a size scale range of 1045, from the largest-sized structures in the universe, like the cosmic web, down to the smallest ones, such as the top quark and the Higgs boson. As the Burovs conclude, an Ultimate Mind is necessary not only to explain the mathematical nature of the laws of physics but also to continuously guarantee the noncontradiction of all the laws of physics.

Beauty Principle
Another testimony of God’s existence and his designs comes from the observation that the laws of physics are described by equations that are extraordinarily beautiful and elegant. For example, we see the principles of symmetry, conservation, and equivalence manifested in the physical laws. We note that the laws are designed to fulfill multiple purposes simultaneously. This beauty and elegance are evident throughout the entire size scale range of 1045. The beauty and elegance of the physical laws are so profound that it caused atheist theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner,3 a Nobel Laureate, to declare, “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor desire. We should be grateful for it.”4 The Burovs point out that Wigner’s conclusion concerning this wonderful gift that we should be grateful for “can only have meaning if a mind to be grateful to is implied.”5 

The Burovs’ demonstrations remind me of the best advice I ever got from my undergraduate physics professors. That advice: the key to obtaining the correct answer on a physics problem assignment is to look for the solution that is described by the most beautiful and elegant equations.

The undeniable beauty and elegance of the mathematical equations that describe the laws of physics provide profound evidence for God and his attributes. Humans are the only species of life on Earth capable of discovering the laws of physics. We’re also uniquely endowed with the aesthetic sense to comprehend and value beauty and elegance. That capability has no survival advantage. In fact, it’s a survival disadvantage. It finds explanation only in the context of a Creator who values and enjoys beauty and elegance and who wants us, as beings created in his image, to also value and enjoy beauty and elegance.

Endnotes

Alexey Burov and Lev Burov, “Genesis of a Pythagorean Universe,” in Trick or Truth? The Mysterious Connection between Physics and Mathematics, edited by Anthony Aguirre, Brendan Foster, and Zeeya Merali (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2016): 157–70, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-27495-9.Alexey Burov and Lev Burov, “Metaphysical Status of Physical Laws,” in Plato in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times: Selected Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, held in Ottawa, Canada (2019), edited by John F. Finamore and Mark Nyvlt (Lydney, UK: The Prometheus Trust, 2020): 130. This paper is available free in its entirety at http://www.prometheustrust.co.uk/Metaphysical_Status_of_Physical_Laws.pdf.Andrew Szanton, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner: As Told to Andrew Szanton (New York: Plenum, 1992), 60–61.Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Richard Courant Lecture in Mathematical Sciences Delivered at New York University, May 11, 1959,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, issue 1 (1960): 14, doi:10.1002/cpa.3160130102.Burov and Burov, “Genesis of a Pythagorean Universe,” p. 168.

Reasons.org

Here’s a quote from “Genesis of a Pythagorean Universe”:

Since the laws of our universe are not picked randomly, they can only be purposefully chosen. Our

universe is special not only because it is populated by

living and conscious beings but also because it is

theoretizable by means of elegant mathematical

forms, both rather simple in presentation and

extremely rich in consequences. To allow life and

consciousness, the mathematical structure of laws

has to be complex enough so as to be able to

generate rich families of material structures. From the

other side, the laws have to be simple enough to be

discoverable by the appearing conscious beings. To

satisfy both conditions, the laws must be just right.

The laws of nature are fine‐tuned not only with

respect to the anthropic principle but to be

discoverable as well. In other words, the Universe is

fine–tuned with respect to what can be called as the

Cosmic Anthropic Principle: its laws are purposefully chosen for the universe to be cosmically observed. It

could be even that our laws are at their simplest

within our sort of life. Would it be possible to take any

part away from our existing theories without compromising forms of life as we know them?

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At Phys.org: Genes and languages aren’t always found together, says new study

More than 7,000 languages are spoken in the world. This linguistic diversity is passed on from one generation to the next, similarly to biological traits. But have language and genes evolved in parallel over the past few thousand years, as Charles Darwin originally thought?

An interdisciplinary team at the University of Zurich, together with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) has now examined this question at a global level. The researchers have developed a global database linking linguistic and genetic data entitled GeLaTo (Genes and Languages Together), which contains genetic information from some 4,000 individuals speaking 295 languages and representing 397 genetic populations. The work is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One in five gene-language links point to language shifts

In their study, the researchers examined the extent to which the linguistic and genetic histories of populations coincided. People who speak related languages tend to also be genetically related, but this isn’t always the case. “We focused on cases where the biological and linguistic patterns differed and investigated how often and where these mismatches occur,” says Chiara Barbieri, UZH geneticist who led the study and initiated it together with colleagues when she was a postdoc at the Max-Planck-Institute.

The researchers found that about every fifth gene-language relation is a mismatch, and they occur worldwide. These mismatches can provide insights into the history of human evolution. “Once we know where such language shifts happened, we can better reconstruct how languages and populations spread across the world,” says Balthasar Bickel, director of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Evolving Language, who co-supervised the study.

Switching to the local lingo

Most mismatches result from populations shifting to the language of a neighboring population that is genetically different. Some peoples on the tropical eastern slopes of the Andes speak a Quechua idiom that is typically spoken by groups with a different genetic profile who live at higher altitudes. The Damara people in Namibia, who are genetically related to the Bantu, communicate using a Khoe language that is spoken by genetically distant groups in the same area. And some hunter-gatherers who live in Central Africa speak predominantly Bantu languages without a strong genetic relatedness to the neighboring Bantu populations.

In addition, there are cases where migrants have picked up the local language of their new homes. The Jewish population in Georgia, for example, has adopted a South Caucasian language, while the Cochin Jews in India speak a Dravidian language. The case of Malta reflects its history as an island between two continents: While the Maltese are closely related to the people of Sicily, they speak an Afroasiatic language that is influenced by various Turkish and Indo-European languages.

Preserving their linguistic identity

“It appears that giving up your language isn’t that difficult, also for practical reasons,” says the last author Kentaro Shimizu, director of the URPP Evolution in Action: From Genomes to Ecosystems. However, it’s more rare for people to preserve their original linguistic identity despite genetic assimilation with their neighbors. “Hungarian people, for example, are genetically similar to their neighbors, but their language is related to languages spoken in Siberia,” Shintaro notes.

This makes Hungarian speakers stand out from among the rest of Europe and parts of Asia, where most people speak Indo-European languages, such as French, German, Hindi, Farsi, Greek and many others. Indo-European has not only been extensively studied, but also scores particularly high in terms of genetic and linguistic congruence. “This might have given the impression that gene-language matches are the norm, but our study shows that this isn’t the case,” concludes Chiara Barbieri, who adds that it is important to include genetic and linguistic data from populations all over the world to understand language evolution.

Phys.org

This fascinating research indicates that prevalent overlap between common genetics and language seems to be more of a result of convenience than necessity. (“It appears that giving up your language isn’t that difficult…). So this would indicate that human language ability is the hard-wired characteristic, not any specific language. It seems to me that this disconnect between specific genetics and a specific language is problematic for the theory of evolution. If a specific language evolved along with a specific people group, it isn’t clear that this would result in an innate ability to become fluent in any human language, as children raised in cross-cultural settings have demonstrated.

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At Space.com: NASA’s Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft aces close moon flyby in crucial engine burn

Mike Wall writes:

Artemis 1’s uncrewed Orion spacecraft has been cruising toward the moon since Wednesday morning (Nov. 16), when it launched atop NASA’s gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. 

The Earth and moon as seen by NASA’s Artemis I Orion spacecraft as it approached a lunar flyby on Monday, Nov. 21, 2022. (Image credit: NASA)

The burn “sent Orion close enough to the lunar surface to leverage the moon’s gravitational force, and swing the spacecraft once around the moon toward entry into a distant retrograde orbit,” NASA’s Sandra Jones said during an Artemis 1 livestream Monday (Nov. 21) at 8:28 a.m. EST, nearly an hour after the burn took place.

NASA was in the dark, literally, during the burn Monday as Orion finished the burn by itself on the far side of the moon from our planet, where radio signals cannot penetrate from Earth. At its closest approach, the spacecraft skimmed just 80 miles (130 kilometers) or so above the lunar surface at 7:44 a.m. EST (1244 GMT). 

The capsule took advantage of the close approach to its main engine in a “powered flyby burn,” which will set it on course to enter lunar orbit four days later.

Artemis 1 is the first mission of NASA’s Artemis program of lunar exploration, which aims to set up a crewed research base on the moon by the end of the 2020s, among other objectives. The Artemis 1 liftoff also marked the debut of the SLS, the most powerful rocket ever to launch successfully.

Monday’s successful burn will set up another crucial maneuver on Nov. 25: an engine firing designed to insert Orion into a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the moon. The capsule will stay in the DRO — a stable path that will take it as far as 40,000 miles (64,000 km) from the lunar surface — until Dec. 1, when another engine burn will send the capsule back toward Earth.

“This orbit is different than the orbit done during the Apollo program, in which the spacecraft and its crew orbited much closer to the lunar surface in a more circular fashion,” Jones said during the broadcast. “Distant retrograde orbit is important because it helps us to learn about how a spacecraft functions in a deep space environment.”

Orion will come home on Dec. 11, hitting Earth’s atmosphere at tremendous speeds before ultimately splashing down softly in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

If all goes well with Artemis 1, NASA will be free to start gearing up for Artemis 2, which will send astronauts around the moon in 2024 or thereabouts. 

In 2025, the agency plans to launch Artemis 3, which will put boots down near the lunar south pole, the site of the envisioned research base. Artemis 3 will be the first crewed lunar landing since the final Apollo mission in 1972, and the first ever to put a woman and a person of color down on the moon. 

Space.com

Being able to launch a rocket from Earth to moon shouldn’t be taken for granted, as discussed in this quote summarizing findings from astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez:

Thus, as the surface gravity of a planet increases, the amount of fuel needed for a rocket to be blasted into space increases at an exponential rate until so much fuel would be needed that it would be impossible for the rocket to escape a planet’s gravity. 

[Gonzalez] finds “that the maximum payload mass is reduced by about 40% for a super-earth only about 20% more massive than Earth. Beyond 1.65 Earth masses the Saturn V could not launch anything beyond the planet’s atmosphere.” In other words, a civilization on a planet larger than about 1.65 Earth masses would find it very difficult to engage in planetary exploration as we have done going to the moon.

Evolution News

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At Live Science: 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite may reveal the origin of Earth’s water

Ben Turner writes:

An ancient meteorite that crash-landed on a U.K. driveway may have solved the mystery of where Earth’s water came from.

The meteorite landed in a driveway in the town of Winchcombe in February 2021 (Image credit: Trustees of the Natural History Museum)

The 4.6 billion-year-old space rock, which landed in front of a family home in the English town of Winchcombe in February 2021, contains water that closely resembles the chemical composition of water found on Earth — presenting a possible explanation for how our planet was seeded with the life-giving substance.   

When the rocky inner planets of the young solar system first coalesced — clotting from the hot clouds of gas and dust billowing near the sun — they were too close to our star for oceans to form. In fact, past a certain point called the frost line, no ice could escape evaporation, making the young Earth a barren and inhospitable landscape. Scientists think this changed after Earth cooled, when a barrage of icy asteroids from the outer solar system brought frozen water to our planet to melt. Now, a new analysis of the Winchcombe meteorite, published Nov. 16 in the journal Science Advances, has lent weight to this theory.

“One of the biggest questions asked of the scientific community is, how did we get here?” study co-author Luke Daly, a lecturer in planetary geoscience at the University of Glasgow, said in a statement. “This analysis on the Winchcombe meteorite gives insight into how the Earth came to have water — the source of so much life. Researchers will continue to work on this specimen for years to come, unlocking more secrets into the origins of our solar system.”

The space rock, a rare carbon-rich type called a carbonaceous chondrite, was collected just a few hours after it smashed into the ground and so remains largely uncontaminated, making it “one of the most pristine meteorites available for analysis”; it offers “a tantalising glimpse back through time to the original composition of the solar system,” said lead author Ashley King, a research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London.

To analyze the minerals and elements inside the rock, the researchers polished, heated and bombarded it with X-rays and lasers, revealing that it had come from an asteroid in orbit around Jupiter and that 11% of the meteorite’s mass was water.

The hydrogen in the asteroid’s water came in two forms — normal hydrogen and the hydrogen isotope known as deuterium, which goes to make up “heavy water”. The scientists found that the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium matched the ratio found in water on Earth, strongly implying that the meteorite’s water and our planet’s water shared a point of origin. Amino acids, the building blocks for proteins and subsequent life, were also found inside the rock.

To expand on this research, scientists may analyze other space rocks floating around the solar system, such as the asteroid Ryugu, which has also been found to contain the building blocks of life. A comprehensive survey of the solar system’s space rocks could give scientists even better insight into which rocks helped to seed early Earth, and where they came from.

Live Science

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“Every Cell Comes from a Preexistent Cell”

Eric Hedin writes:

Perhaps we unconsciously ascribe fertility to the Earth, since out of its soil grow all of the plants that provide food for animals and for us. And yet the Earth would produce nothing without the seeds of the plants. One of biology’s “universal laws” (accredited to Rudolph Virchow) states, “Every cell comes from a preexistent cell.”[1] So, we look to the seed, and what do we find? A rich storehouse of information coded in the seed’s DNA. We find information as the source of the physical complexity of life; the Earth is just the environment in which the seed’s hidden information can be unfolded and activated.

From where does the information embedded within the seed come? Not from the Earth, nor from the stars, nor from the Big Bang origin of the physical universe. One possibility—one that some refuse even to consider—is that the information found in a seed ultimately comes from a mind. A maker. And based strictly on the unmatched sophistication of these information systems, a mind far above ours.

There is good news here. Nature itself testifies that our lives may indeed have more significance than could be found in a merely naturalistic universe. The question for each of us, and our scientific culture generally, is whether we are willing even to consider this testimony.

[1] Franklin M. Harold, The Way of the Cell, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 99.

Excerpt from Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See, by Eric Hedin (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021), 212.

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At Evolution News: An Argument from C. S. Lewis for Intelligent Design

John G. West writes:

November 29. Perhaps best known for his Chronicles of Narnia and works of Christian apologetics including Mere Christianity, Lewis was a first-rate scholar of medieval and renaissance English literature, and a first-rate mind on many topics.

Photo: C. S. Lewis, by Asar Studios/Alamy (Photo by Hans Wild/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images).

As I discuss in my book The Magician’s Twin, Lewis frequently examined the impact of modern science on human life, including debates over evolution and what has become known as intelligent design.

In the waning days of World War II, Lewis published two little-known essays advancing a positive argument for intelligent design: “Is Theology Poetry?” and “Who Was Right — Dream Lecturer or Real Lecturer?” Both essays were published in 1945, although the first was originally delivered as a talk to the Socratic Society at Oxford University in November 1944. The second essay was later republished under the title “Two Lectures.”

“Universal Evolutionism”

According to Lewis in these essays, “universal evolutionism” has schooled us to think that in nature complicated functional things naturally arise from cruder and less complicated things. Oak trees come from acorns, owls from eggs, and human beings from embryos.

But for Lewis, this “modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion” that defies the actual data of the natural world.

In each of the aforementioned cases, complex living things arose from even more complex living things. Every acorn originally came from an oak tree. Every owl’s egg came from an actual owl. Every human embryo required two full-grown adult human beings.

We see the same pattern in human culture. The “evolution” from coracles to steamships, or from one of the early locomotives (the “Rocket)” to modern train engines, requires a cause that is greater than either steamships or train engines. Wrote Lewis: “We love to notice that the express [train] engine of today is the descendant of the ‘Rocket’; we do not equally remember that the ‘Rocket’ springs not from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself — namely, a man of genius.”

Lewis made clear the relevance of this truth for understanding the wonderful functional complexity we see throughout nature: “You have to go outside the sequence of engines, into the world of men, to find the real originator of the Rocket. Is it not equally reasonable to look outside Nature for the real Originator of the natural order?”

An Explicit Argument for ID

This is explicitly an argument for intelligent design, and Lewis implies that this line of reasoning was central to his own disavowal of materialism. “On these grounds and others like them one is driven to think that whatever else may be true, the popular scientific cosmology at any rate is certainly not.”

This argument for intelligent design does not in and of itself lead to the Christian God according to Lewis. But it opens the door to considering the alternatives to materialism of “philosophical idealism” and “theism,” and from there Lewis believed that one may well progress to full-blooded Christian theism after further reflection.

Evolution News

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From Astronomy Now: Webb captures stunning new view of ‘Pillars of Creation’

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a spectacular new view of the “Pillars of Creation” at the heart of the Eagle Nebula, an infrared look at the towering columns of gas and dust in a vast stellar nursery that became one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most iconic photos. Webb’s view reveals thousands of previously unseen stars in the translucent interstellar medium surrounding the pillars and a multitude of delicate swirls and eddies sculpted in the columns themselves by embedded protostars.

The “Pillars of Creation” at the heart of the Eagle Nebula, more familiarly known as M-16. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; J. DePasquale, A. Koekemoer, A. Pagan (STScI)

Hubble’s view of the pillars, captured in 1995, amazed astronomers and the public alike, an image that became an iconic symbol of the repaired space telescope’s astronomical prowess. As stunning as Hubble’s image was, Webb’s infrared capability reveals a much more detailed tapestry. Here’s a side-by-side view showing off Webb’s ability to peer inside the pillars and the interstellar medium:

A comparison showing Hubble’s view of the “Pillars of Creation” in mostly visible light and Webb’s infrared view. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; J. DePasquale, A. Koekemoer, A. Pagan (STScI)

NASA and the European Space Agency provided a “fly through” of the Webb image, giving viewers a zoomed-in view of the pillars’ intricate structure:

Astronomy Now

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At Phys.org: Earth can regulate its own temperature over millennia, new study finds

Jennifer Chu writes:

The Earth’s climate has undergone some big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating.

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Now, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.

Just how does it accomplish this? A likely mechanism is “silicate weathering”—a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.

Scientists have long suspected that silicate weathering plays a major role in regulating the Earth’s carbon cycle. The mechanism of silicate weathering could provide a geologically constant force in keeping carbon dioxide—and global temperatures—in check. But there’s never been direct evidence for the continual operation of such a feedback, until now.

The new findings are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record changes in average global temperatures over the last 66 million years. The MIT team applied a mathematical analysis to see whether the data revealed any patterns characteristic of stabilizing phenomena that reined in global temperatures on a geologic timescale.

They found that indeed there appears to be a consistent pattern in which the Earth’s temperature swings are dampened over timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. The duration of this effect is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is predicted to act.

The results are the first to use actual data to confirm the existence of a stabilizing feedback, the mechanism of which is likely silicate weathering. This stabilizing feedback would explain how the Earth has remained habitable through dramatic climate events in the geologic past.

Stability in data

Scientists have previously seen hints of a climate-stabilizing effect in the Earth’s carbon cycle: Chemical analyses of ancient rocks have shown that the flux of carbon in and out of Earth’s surface environment has remained relatively balanced, even through dramatic swings in global temperature. Furthermore, models of silicate weathering predict that the process should have some stabilizing effect on the global climate. And finally, the fact of the Earth’s enduring habitability points to some inherent, geologic check on extreme temperature swings.

“You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,” Arnscheidt says. “But it’s never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”

Arnscheidt and Rothman sought to confirm whether a stabilizing feedback has indeed been at work, by looking at data of global temperature fluctuations through geologic history. They worked with a range of global temperature records compiled by other scientists, from the chemical composition of ancient marine fossils and shells, as well as preserved Antarctic ice cores.

“This whole study is only possible because there have been great advances in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records,” Arnscheidt notes. “Now we have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart.”

Speeding to a stop

To the data, the team applied the mathematical theory of stochastic differential equations, which is commonly used to reveal patterns in widely fluctuating datasets.

“We realized this theory makes predictions for what you would expect Earth’s temperature history to look like if there had been feedbacks acting on certain timescales,” Arnscheidt explains.

Without stabilizing feedbacks, fluctuations of global temperature should grow with timescale. But the team’s analysis revealed a regime in which fluctuations did not grow, implying that a stabilizing mechanism reigned in the climate before fluctuations grew too extreme. The timescale for this stabilizing effect—hundreds of thousands of years—coincides with what scientists predict for silicate weathering.

Interestingly, Arnscheidt and Rothman found that on longer timescales, the data did not reveal any stabilizing feedbacks. That is, there doesn’t appear to be any recurring pull-back of global temperatures on timescales longer than a million years. Over these longer timescales, then, what has kept global temperatures in check?

“There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,” Rothman offers.

In other words, as the Earth’s temperatures fluctuate over longer stretches, these fluctuations may just happen to be small enough in the geologic sense, to be within a range that a stabilizing feedback, such as silicate weathering, could periodically keep the climate in check, and more to the point, within a habitable zone.

“There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt says. “We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.”

Full article at Phys.org.

Effective climate-stabilizing feedback mechanisms to keep Earth’s temperature within a habitable zone over the 3.7-3.8 billion year timescale that life has been present on Earth are rather strongly consistent with intelligent design. I’ve never been impressed with “chance” as a scientific explanation for anything.

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