Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 46

At Phys.org: Sleeping giant could end deep ocean life

A previously overlooked factor—the position of continents—helps fill Earth’s oceans with life-supporting oxygen. Continental movement could ultimately have the opposite effect, killing most deep ocean creatures.

“Continental drift seems so slow, like nothing drastic could come from it, but when the ocean is primed, even a seemingly tiny event could trigger the widespread death of marine life,” said Andy Ridgwell, UC Riverside geologist and co-author of a new study on forces affecting oceanic oxygen.

Fish on a deep reef at Pearl and Hermes Atoll in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument near Hawaii. Credit: (Greg McFall, NOAA)

The water at the ocean’s surface becomes colder and denser as it approaches the north or south pole, then sinks. As the water sinks, it transports oxygen pulled from Earth’s atmosphere down to the ocean floor.

Eventually, a return flow brings nutrients released from sunken organic matter back to the ocean’s surface, where it fuels the growth of plankton. Both the uninterrupted supply of oxygen to lower depths and organic matter produced at the surface support an incredible diversity of fish and other animals in today’s ocean.

New findings led by researchers based at UC Riverside have found this circulation of oxygen and nutrients can end quite suddenly. Using complex computer models, the researchers investigated whether the locations of continental plates affect how the ocean moves oxygen around. To their surprise, it does.

This finding, published today, is detailed in the journal Nature.

“Many millions of years ago, not so long after animal life in the ocean got started, the entire global ocean circulation seemed to periodically shut down,” said Ridgwell. “We were not expecting to find that the movement of continents could cause surface waters and oxygen to stop sinking, and possibly dramatically affecting the way life evolved on Earth.”

Until now, models used to study the evolution of marine oxygen over the last 540 million years were relatively simple and did not account for ocean circulation. In these models, ocean anoxia—times when oceanic oxygen disappeared—implied a drop in atmospheric oxygen concentrations.

This study used, for the first time, a model in which the ocean was represented in three dimensions, and in which ocean currents were accounted for. Results show that collapse in global water circulation lead to a stark separation between oxygen levels in the upper and lower depths.

That separation meant the entire seafloor, except for shallow places close to the coast, entirely lost oxygen for many tens of millions of years, until about 440 million years ago at the start of the Silurian period.

“Circulation collapse would have been a death sentence for anything that could not swim closer to the surface and the life-giving oxygen still present in the atmosphere,” Ridgwell said. Creatures of the deep include bizarre-looking fish, giant worms and crustaceans, squid, sponges and more.

“We’d need a higher resolution climate model to predict a mass extinction event,” Ridgwell said. “That said, we do already have concerns about water circulation in the North Atlantic today, and there is evidence that the flow of water to depth is declining.”

In theory, Ridgwell said an unusually warm summer or the erosion of a cliff could trigger a cascade of processes that upends life as it appears today.

“You’d think the surface of the ocean, the bit you might surf or sail on, is where all the action is. But underneath, the ocean is tirelessly working away, providing vital oxygen to animals in the dark depths,” Ridgwell said.

“The ocean allows life to flourish, but it can take that life away again. Nothing rules that out as continental plates continue to move.”

Full article at Phys.org

At a continental drift rate of, say 2.5 cm per year for the increasing separation between S. America and Africa, the fractional change per year amounts to about 0.0000003%. It doesn’t seem likely that such a minute fractional change will cause anything as drastic as a shutdown in the deep ocean circulation anytime soon.

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Intelligent Design and the Designer – an Opinion

Eric Hedin writes:

In arguing for intelligent design for the origin of life, exhibited in the millions of species found on Earth, what is the role of the Designer?  Evolution, if merely defined as “change over time,” matches the evidence found in nature. But that doesn’t mean that the “evolution” happened by purely natural mechanisms. Our increasing understanding of the vast complexity of living organisms defies an explanation of their origin by natural causes.

While intelligent design as a scientific theory doesn’t address religious questions about the identity of the designer, as a Christian I obviously believe that the Designer is the God of the Bible. My viewpoint offered here goes beyond the theory of ID and represents my own thoughts on the matter of the origin of species, intended to be consistent with evidence from nature, and consistent with the Bible.

The Bible indicates that the Creator, God, was active in preparing the physical environment to support life, and in creating various forms of life until the creation of humans.  Setting this in the context of Earth’s history implies that God created millions of different species of living things over approximately 3.8 billion years.  I am not here suggesting a theistic evolution model, since that would imply that natural causes are capable of far more than what we actually observe. 

Could God have taken an already-existing organism and modified in such a way as to form a new species or other classification of organism? Human designers do something similar all the time, but the newly designed system still requires intelligent input of information to function properly. Since we find so much evidence for design in nature, the implication is that huge amounts of information were inputted into the biosphere during the history of life by an intelligent agent, whom I identify as the God of the Bible.

Why would anyone invoke God’s intervention to create living things, while acknowledging that normal laws of physics suffice to forms, say, galaxies and stars?  The answer is that this is what science shows: the laws of nature are completely sufficient to form stars (which have a relatively low information content) but are insufficient to form even the complex bio-molecular components of the simplest living organism.[1] The only known cause that can introduce the information required for life is the action of an intelligence. This is why I see intelligent design (consistent with my belief in the God of the Bible as the designer) as the best explanation for the origin of life in all its complexity.

[1] Eric Hedin, Canceled Science, What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See (Discovery Institute Press, Seattle, 2021).

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At Science Daily: New research on the emergence of the first complex cells challenges orthodoxy

In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, simple cells lacking a nucleus and other detailed internal structure dominated the planet. Matters would remain largely unchanged in terms of evolutionary development in these so-called prokaryotic cells — the bacteria and archaea — for another billion and a half years.

Then, something remarkable and unprecedented took place. A new type of cell, known as a eukaryote, emerged. The eukaryotes would evolve many complex internal modules or organelles, including the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus and the mitochondria, forming wildly diverse cell types — precursors to all subsequent plant and animal life on earth. Prokaryotic cells, which include bacteria and archaea, are structurally simple organisms, lacking the complex internal structure found in eukaryotes. All living plant and animal species today have their origins in the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor or LECA. The transition from prokaryote to eukaryote has remained a central mystery biologists are still trying to untangle.

How this crucial transition came to be remains a central mystery in biology.

The researchers explore in detail, the energy requirements of eukaryotic cells, which are on average, larger and more complex compared with prokaryotes. Their quantitative results stand in opposition to a reigning dogma, first put forward by biologists Nick Lane and Bill Martin.

Genesis to Revelation

The basic idea of Lane and Martin is that a cell’s developmental fate is governed by its supply of energy. Simple prokaryotes are mostly small and consist of single cells or small colonies and can subsist on more limited stores of energy to power their activities. But once a cell achieves sufficient size and complexity, it eventually reaches a barrier, beyond which such prokaryotes can not pass. Or so the theory has it.

According to this idea, a singular event in Earth’s history gave sudden rise to the eukaryotes, which then grew and diversified to occupy every ecological niche on the planet, from undersea vents to arctic tundra. This vast diversification occurred when a free-living prokaryotic cell acquired another tiny organism within the confines of its interior.

Through a process known as endosymbiosis, the new cell resident is taken up by this proto-eukaryote, supplying it with additional energy and enabling its transformation. The endosymbiont it has acquired would eventually develop into mitochondria — cellular powerhouses found only in eukaryotic cells.

Because all complex life today can be traced to a single eukaryotic branch of the evolutionary tree, it has been assumed that this chance endosymbiotic event, the acquisition of mitochondria, occurred once and only once during the entire history of life on Earth. This accident of nature is why we’re all here. Without mitochondria, the larger volume and complexity of eukaryotes would not be energetically viable.

Not so fast, the authors of the new study claim.

Crossing the borderlands

Schavemaker notes that while the distinction between prokaryotes and eukaryotes among organisms living today is obvious, things were murkier during the transition phase. Eventually, all the common traits of extant eukaryotes would be acquired, yielding an organism researchers refer to as LECA or the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor.

The new study explores the advent of the first eukaryotes and notes that instead of a hard boundary line separating them from their prokaryotic ancestors, the true picture is messier. Rather than an unbridgeable gulf between prokaryotes and eukaryotes in terms of cell volume internal complexity and number of genes, the two cell forms enjoyed considerable overlap.

The researchers investigate a range of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell types to determine a) how cell volume in prokaryotes can eventually act to constrain a cell’s membrane surface area required for respiration, b) how much energy a cell must direct to DNA activities based on the arrangement of its genome and c) the costs and benefits of endosymbionts for cells of various volume.

It turns out that cells can grow to considerable volume and acquire at least some of the characteristics of complex cells while remaining primarily prokaryotic in character and without the presence of mitochondria.

LECA revisited

The new picture of early eukaryote evolution provides a plausible alternative to the mitochondria-first paradigm. Rather than evolution ushering in the age of eukaryotes with one grand gesture — the chance acquisition of a mitochondrial prototype, a series of tentative, gradual, step-wise changes over vast timespans ultimately produced complex cells packed with sophisticated internal structures and capable of explosive diversification.

Earlier research by Lynch and Marinov cited in the new study takes a somewhat more radical view, implying that mitochondria offered few if any benefits to early eukaryotes. The new study stakes out a more moderate position, suggesting that beyond a critical cell volume, mitochondria and perhaps other features of modern eukaryotic cells would have been necessary to satisfy the energy needs of large cells, but a range of smaller proto-eukaryotes may have done just fine without these innovations.

Hence, the transition to the mysterious LECA event may have been preceded by a series of organisms, which may have initially been mitochondria-free.

The new research also throws into question the timing of eukaryotic transition events. Perhaps the great transition began with the development of a eukaryotic cytoskeleton or other advanced structure. 

Much more research will be required to confidently place the series of events leading to fully-fledged eukaryotes in their proper sequence.

Full article at Science Daily

From the 2nd paragraph: “The eukaryotes would evolve many complex internal modules or organelles, including the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus and the mitochondria, forming wildly diverse cell types — precursors to all subsequent plant and animal life on earth. Prokaryotic cells, which include bacteria and archaea, are structurally simple organisms, lacking the complex internal structure found in eukaryotes.” To acknowledge the vast increase in specific, functional biochemical complexity accompanying the origin of eukaryotes and to not even mention the constraints on information gain by any natural processes (step-wise or otherwise) is to simply be whistling Dixie in the dark.

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At Phys.org: Underwater snow gives clues about Europa’s icy shell

Below Europa’s thick icy crust is a massive, global ocean where the snow floats upwards onto inverted ice peaks and submerged ravines. The bizarre underwater snow is known to occur below ice shelves on Earth, but a new study shows that the same is likely true for Jupiter’s moon, where it may play a role in building its ice shell.

The underwater snow is much purer than other kinds of ice, which means Europa’s ice shell could be much less salty than previously thought. That’s important for mission scientists preparing NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will use radar to peek beneath the ice shell to see if Europa’s ocean could be hospitable to life. The new information will be critical because salt trapped in the ice can affect what and how deep the radar will see into the ice shell, so being able to predict what the ice is made of will help scientists make sense of the data.

An illustration of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft flying by Jupiter’s moon Europa. The spacecraft, which is planned to launch in 2024, will carry an ice-penetrating radar instrument developed by scientists at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The study, published in the August edition of the journal Astrobiology, was led by The University of Texas at Austin, which is also leading the development of Europa Clipper’s ice penetrating radar instrument. Knowing what kind of ice Europa’s shell is made of will also help decipher the salinity and habitability of its ocean.

“When we’re exploring Europa, we’re interested in the salinity and composition of the ocean, because that’s one of the things that will govern its potential habitability or even the type of life that might live there,” said the study’s lead author Natalie Wolfenbarger, a graduate student researcher at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences.

Europa is a rocky world about the size of the Earth’s moon that is surrounded by a global ocean and a miles-thick ice shell. Previous studies suggest the temperature, pressure and salinity of Europa’s ocean nearest to the ice is similar to what you would find beneath an ice shelf in Antarctica.

Armed with that knowledge, the new study examined the two different ways that water freezes under ice shelves, congelation ice and frazil ice. Congelation ice grows directly from under the ice shelf. Frazil ice forms as ice flakes in supercooled seawater which float upwards through the water, settling on the bottom of the ice shelf.

“We can use Earth to evaluate Europa’s habitability, measure the exchange of impurities between the ice and ocean, and figure out where water is in the ice,” he said.

Full article at Phys.org.

Liquid water is thought to be a definite requirement for life. Is its presence enough? Could living organisms have formed in Europa’s under-ice ocean by natural forces? What about the information-rich, complex biomolecules interacting in a coordinated, functional manner in every living cell? Should we expect water and ice and salt and….to form a living organism?

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Distribution of tossed coins, a reminder

We see the binomial distribution of coin-flipping possibilities, here based on 10,000 actual tosses iterated 100,000 times, also indicating just how tight the peak is, mostly being between 4,850 and 5,150 H:

Thus we see the roots of discussions on fluctuations:

Note, not coincidentally, sqrt (10^4) = 10^2, or 100.

(Compare the bulk of the 10,000 coin toss plot on 100 k repetitions, centred on 5000h, with +/- 100 capturing the main part. Obviously possibilities run from 0 H to 10,000 H but there is a sharply peaked clustering about the “average”.) END

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At Evolution News: Mammoth Support for Devolution

Michael Behe writes:

The more science progresses, the more hapless Darwin seems.

In my 2019 book Darwin Devolves I showed that random mutation and natural selection are powerful de-volutionary forces. That is, they quickly lead to the loss of genetic information. The reason is that, in many environmental circumstances, a species’ lot can be improved most quickly by breaking or blunting pre-existing genes. To get the point across, I used an analogy to a quick way to improve a car’s gas mileage — remove the hood, throw out the doors, get rid of any excess weight. That will help the car go further, but it also reduces the number of features of the car. And it sure doesn’t explain how any of those now-jettisoned parts got there in the first place.

Image credit: Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.The Bottom Line

The same goes for biology. Helpful mutations that arrive most quickly are very much more likely to degrade genetic features than to construct new ones. The featured illustration in Darwin Devolves was the polar bear, which has accumulated a number of beneficial mutations since it branched off from the brown bear a few hundred thousand years ago. Yet the large majority of those beneficial mutations were degradative — they broke or damaged pre-existing genes. For example, a gene involved in fur pigmentation was damaged, rendering the beast white — that helped; another gene involved in fat metabolism was degraded, allowing the animal to consume lots of seal blubber, its main food in the Arctic — that helped, too. Those mutations were good for the species in the moment — they did improve its chances of survival. But degradative mutations don’t explain how the functioning genes got there in the first place. Even worse, the relentless burning of genetic information to adapt to a changing environment will make a species evolutionarily brittle and more prone to extinction. The bottom line: Although random mutation and natural selection help a species adapt, Darwinian processes can’t account for the origins of sophisticated biological systems.

In Darwin Devolves, I also mentioned work on DNA extracted from frozen woolly mammoth carcasses that showcased devolution: “26 genes were shown to be seriously degraded, many of which (as with polar bear) were involved in fat metabolism, critical in the extremely cold environments that the mammoth roamed.” It turns out that was an underestimate. A new paper1 that has sequenced DNA from several more woolly mammoth remains says the true number is more than triple that — 87 genes broken compared to their elephant relatives. 

There’s Lots More

The point is that these gene losses aren’t side shows — they are the events that transformed an elephant into a mammoth, that adapted the animal to its changing environment. A job well done, yes, but now those genes are gone forever, unavailable to help with the next change of environment. Perhaps that contributed to eventual mammoth extinction.

As quoted above, the mammoth authors note that gene losses can be adaptive, and they cited a paper that I hadn’t seen before. I checked it out and it’s a wonderful laboratory evolution study of yeast.2 Helsen et al. (2020) used a collection of yeast strains in which one of each different gene in the genome had been knocked out. They grew the knockout yeast in a stressful environment and watched to see how the microbes evolved to handle it. Many of the yeast strains, with different genes initially knocked out, recovered, and some even surpassed the fitness of wild-type yeast under the circumstances. The authors emphasized the fact of the evolutionary recovery. However, they also clearly stated (but don’t seem to have noticed the importance of the fact) that all of the strains rebounded by breaking other genes, ones that had been intact at the beginning of the experiment. None built anything new, all of them devolved.

Well, Duh

That’s hardly a surprise. At least in retrospect, it’s easy to see that devolution must happen — for the simple reason that helpful degradative mutations are more plentiful than helpful constructive ones and thus arrive more quickly for natural selection to multiply. The more recent results recounted here just pile more evidence onto that gathered in Darwin Devolves showing Darwin’s mechanism is powerfully devolutionary. That simple realization neatly explains results ranging from the evolutionary behavior of yeast in a comfy modern laboratory, to the speciation of megafauna in raw nature millions of years ago, and almost certainly to everything in between.

ReferencesVan der Valk, Tom, et al. 2022. Evolutionary consequences of genomic deletions and insertions in the woolly mammoth genome. iScience 25, 104826.Helsen, J. et al. 2020. Gene loss predictably drives evolutionary adaptation. Molecular Biology and Evolution 37, 2989–3002.

Behe’s conclusions have significant implications: evolutionary adaptation seems to progress by breaking existing genes in such a way as to confer a survival advantage in a niche environment; the result is a more “brittle” species with fewer options for surviving further environmental stresses; the mystery of the origin of the original genes is in no way explained by natural means at any step in the process. Rather than Darwinian evolution providing a mechanism for the “origin of the species,” it more adequately explains the demise of species.

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At Quanta: How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything

The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a more complete understanding of the vacuum.

Charlie Wood writes:

As modern physicists have grappled with more sophisticated candidates for the ultimate theory of nature, they have encountered a growing multitude of types of nothing. Each has its own behavior, as if it’s a different phase of a substance. Increasingly, it seems that the key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a careful accounting of these proliferating varieties of absence.

“We’re learning there’s a lot more to learn about nothing than we thought,” said Isabel Garcia Garcia, a particle physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in California. “How much more are we missing?”

So far, such studies have led to a dramatic conclusion: Our universe may sit on a platform of shoddy construction, a “metastable” vacuum that is doomed — in the distant future — to transform into another sort of nothing, destroying everything in the process.

Merrill Sherman/Quanta MagazineQuantum Nothingness

Nothing started to seem like something in the 20th century, as physicists came to view reality as a collection of fields: objects that fill space with a value at each point (the electric field, for instance, tells you how much force an electron will feel in different places). In classical physics, a field’s value can be zero everywhere so that it has no influence and contains no energy. “Classically, the vacuum is boring,” said Daniel Harlow, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Nothing is happening.”

But physicists learned that the universe’s fields are quantum, not classical, which means they are inherently uncertain. You’ll never catch a quantum field with exactly zero energy. Harlow likens a quantum field to an array of pendulums — one at each point in space — whose angles represent the field’s values. Each pendulum hangs nearly straight down but jitters back and forth.

Left alone, a quantum field will stay in its minimum-energy configuration, known as its “true vacuum” or “ground state.” (Elementary particles are ripples in these fields.) “When we talk about the vacuum of a system, we have in mind in some loose way the preferred state of the system,” said Garcia Garcia.

Most of the quantum fields that fill our universe have one, and only one, preferred state, in which they’ll remain for eternity. Most, but not all.

True and False Vacuums

 In the 1970s, physicists came to appreciate the significance of a different class of quantum fields whose values prefer not to be zero, even on average. Such a “scalar field” is like a collection of pendulums all hovering at, say, a 10-degree angle. This configuration can be the ground state: The pendulums prefer that angle and are stable.

In 2012, experimentalists at the Large Hadron Collider proved that a scalar field known as the Higgs field permeates the universe. At first, in the hot, early universe, its pendulums pointed down. But as the cosmos cooled, the Higgs field changed state, much as water can freeze into ice, and its pendulums all rose to the same angle. (This nonzero Higgs value is what gives many elementary particles the property known as mass.)

With scalar fields around, the stability of the vacuum is not necessarily absolute. A field’s pendulums might have multiple semi-stable angles and a proclivity for switching from one configuration to another. Theorists aren’t certain whether the Higgs field, for instance, has found its absolute favorite configuration — the true vacuum. Some have argued that the field’s current state, despite having persisted for 13.8 billion years, is only temporarily stable, or “metastable.”

If so, the good times won’t last forever. In the 1980s, the physicists Sidney Coleman and Frank De Luccia described how a false vacuum of a scalar field could “decay.” At any moment, if enough pendulums in some location jitter their way into a more favorable angle, they’ll drag their neighbors to meet them, and a bubble of true vacuum will fly outward at nearly light speed. It will rewrite physics as it goes, busting up the atoms and molecules in its path. (Don’t panic. Even if our vacuum is only metastable, given its staying power so far, it will probably last for billions of years more.)

The discovery that string theory allows nearly countless vacuums jibed with another discovery from nearly two decades earlier.

Cosmologists in the early 1980s developed a hypothesis known as cosmic inflation that has become the leading theory of the universe’s birth. The theory holds that the universe began with a quick burst of exponential expansion, which handily explains the universe’s smoothness and hugeness. But inflation’s successes come at a price.

The researchers found that once cosmic inflation started, it would continue. Most of the vacuum would violently explode outward forever. Only finite regions of space would stop inflating, becoming bubbles of relative stability separated from each other by inflating space in between. Inflationary cosmologists believe we call one of these bubbles home.

A Multiverse of Vacuums

To some, the notion that we live in a multiverse — an endless landscape of vacuum bubbles — is disturbing. It makes the nature of any one vacuum (such as ours) seem random and unpredictable, curbing our ability to understand our universe. Polchinski, who died in 2018, told the physicist and author Sabine Hossenfelder that discovering string theory’s landscape of vacuums initially made him so miserable it led him to seek therapy. If string theory predicts every imaginable variety of nothing, has it predicted anything?

To others, the plethora of vacuums is not a problem; “in fact, it’s a virtue,” said Andrei Linde, a prominent cosmologist at Stanford University and one of the developers of cosmic inflation. That’s because the multiverse potentially solves a great mystery: the ultra-low energy of our particular vacuum.

When theorists naïvely estimate the collective jittering of all the universe’s quantum fields, the energy is huge — enough to rapidly accelerate the expansion of space and, in short order, rip the cosmos apart. But the observed acceleration of space is extremely mild in comparison, suggesting that much of the collective jittering cancels out and our vacuum has an extraordinarily low positive value for its energy.

In a solitary universe, the tiny energy of the one and only vacuum looks like a profound puzzle. But in a multiverse, it’s just dumb luck. If different bubbles of space have different energies and expand at different rates, galaxies and planets will form only in the most lethargic bubbles. Our calm vacuum, then, is no more mysterious than the Goldilocks orbit of our planet: We find ourselves here because most everywhere else is inhospitable to life.

Love it or hate it, the multiverse hypothesis as currently understood has a problem. Despite string theory’s seemingly infinite menu of vacuums, so far no one has found a specific folding of tiny extra dimensions that corresponds to a vacuum like ours, with its barely positive energy.

These researchers suspect that our vacuum is not one of reality’s preferred states, and that it will someday jitter itself into a deeper, more stable valley. In doing so, our vacuum could lose the field that generates electrons or pick up a new palette of particles. The tightly folded dimensions could come unfurled. Or the vacuum could even give up on existence entirely.

This instability of tiny dimensions has long plagued string theory, and various ingredients have been devised to stiffen them. In December, Garcia Garcia, together with Draper and Benjamin Lillard of Illinois, calculated the lifetime of a vacuum with a single extra curled-up dimension. They considered various stabilizing bells and whistles, but they found that most mechanisms failed to stop the bubbles. Their conclusions aligned with Witten’s: When the size of the extra dimension fell below a certain threshold, the vacuum collapsed at once.

With a large enough hidden dimension, however, the vacuum could survive for many billions of years. This means that theories producing bubbles of nothing could plausibly match our universe….Nature may not be a big fan of the vacuum. In the extremely long run, it may prefer nothing at all.

Full article at Quanta Magazine.

The discussion presented above brings up the famous philosophical question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The (nearly) empty vacuum of space is not “nothing.” Space itself is something. If nothing (a true “nothing” without quantum fields or anything) preceded our “something,” it could not logically give rise to something, otherwise it wouldn’t truly be nothing). If “something” preceded our something, then what gave rise to that pre-existing something? Naturalism seems to require an infinite regress of somethings, made up of matter, energy, or fields, none of which show evidence of being able to exist for infinite time (and even time seems to have had a beginning).

So, why is there something rather than nothing? if infinitely existing nature isn’t in line with logic or science, then there must have been another type of cause, a cause that is immaterial, timeless, powerful enough to give rise to a whole universe, intelligent enough to create living organisms, conscious so that it could impart consciousness, and volitional, so that it could make a choice to bring this universe into being. What do you think?

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At Reasons.org: Science, Faith, and the Problem of Pain

RTB Visiting Scholar Balajied Nongrum writes:

In his book, Does He Know a Mother’s Heart?: How Suffering Refutes Religion,1 Arun Shourie, a journalist and a former minister for Communications and Information Technology of India, concludes that “suffering and God are incompatible.” When we reflect on both the extent and depth of pain and suffering in the world, whether it is due to moral evil (man’s cruelty to one another) or to natural evil (resulting in natural calamities), people will inevitably question the existence of God or ask, “Why?”

No doubt, many of us have felt the same way and perhaps we wanted to turn away from God. As someone who thinks about these issues deeply, I believe that everyone—regardless of what they believe—must offer a reasonable response to the problem of pain and suffering. In other words, every worldview under the Sun must deal with the problem of pain and suffering.

As a believer in God, I’m persuaded that the problem of pain and suffering, terrible as it is, does not negate God’s existence. On the contrary, I believe that having God in the equation is humanity’s last best hope of making sense of this issue. The Bible tells us that God does not merely exist, but he is also all-good and all-powerful. The Bible also recognizes the reality of evil (moral and natural) and proposes a reality where God will one day end evil and all sufferings.2 

However, I agree that humans may not fully know God’s specific purpose or design and the reasons for his permitting pain and suffering to exist in this world. But to a certain extent, human beings can gain some wisdom from different sources, such as our personal experiences with pain or the experiences of others, and from Holy Scripture. However, this article will offer a scientific view on the purpose of pain.

Pain: Foe or Friend?
In our modern world, pain is often viewed as the enemy that must be done away with or defeated at all costs. At the individual level, just a slight signal of pain such as a severe headache or a body ache is enough reason for us to gulp down an analgesic or pain killer. Readily available medication perhaps explains the hope and growing interest that people place in science and its perceived potential to eradicate pain and suffering.3 Even limiting or managing pain is welcomed. However, while the intention may be good, this goal is sadly shortsighted. This kind of hope in science is misplaced because it ignores the vital role that pain and suffering play in our lives.  

For instance, consider the medical condition seen among patients with diseases such as “leprosy, congenital painlessness, diabetic neuropathy, and other nerve disorders” where their inability to experience pain causes greater harm to them than the disease itself.4 People in such cases end up injuring themselves simply because the pain signal in their body is not functioning. In other words, from a scientific point of view, some pain serves as a warning of danger ahead.

The Gift of Pain, a book jointly authored by world-renowned hand surgeon Dr. Paul Brand and award-winning writer Philip Yancey tells the story of Tanya, a four-year-old girl who was brought to the hospital with a “swollen left ankle.” On further investigation, Brand found out that the “foot rotated freely, the sign of a fully dislocated ankle” and yet to the doctor’s utter shock Tanya was not the least bothered. She did not even exhibit any pain!5

Tanya was later diagnosed with a very rare genetic disease informally referred to as congenital indifference to pain. According to the experts, her overall health was fine except in one area: she did not feel pain! When she injured herself by any accident, all she felt was “a kind of tingling—but these carried no hint of unpleasantness.” It was evident that Tanya “lacked any mental construct of pain.” In other words, she did not have a “built-in warning system” to warn her of any further injuries.6 This case and others led Brand to say:

Tanya and others like her dramatically reinforced what we had already learned from leprosy patients: pain is not the enemy, but the loyal scout announcing the enemy. And yet—here is the central paradox of my life—after spending a lifetime among people who destroy themselves for lack of pain, I still find it difficult to communicate an appreciation for pain to people who have no such defect. Pain truly is the gift nobody wants. I can think of nothing more precious for those who suffer from congenital painlessness, leprosy, diabetes, and other nerve disorders. But people who already own this gift rarely value it. Usually, they resent it.7

This fact made me reevaluate my own painful visits to the dentist. Though the immediate pain of having my decaying tooth rectified was unbearable, the pain nevertheless served a better outcome. My dentist’s good intention kept me from suffering even greater pain in the future. Having come to this point, I could not help but agree with Brand’s conviction that pain truly is one of God’s greatest gifts to us, a gift that perhaps none of us want yet none of us can do without! 

Reasons.org

Even pain can be considered evidence of intelligent design. Although not discussed in the article directly, the pain we feel is exquisitely moderated to adequately warn our consciousness of the level of danger we may be experiencing at the moment. A pin-rick produces modest pain, while hitting one’s thumb with a hammer generates much greater pain. The level of pain we experience most often matches the level of danger to our body. Again, this is consistent with the expectations of a well-designed feedback system.

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At Science News: Why humans have more voice control than any other primates

Asa Stahl writes:

A crying baby, a screaming adult, a teenager whose voice cracks — people could have sounded this shrill all the time, a new study suggests, if not for a crucial step in human evolution.  

It’s what we’re missing that makes the difference. Humans have vocal cords, muscles in our larynx, or voice box, that vibrate to produce sound (SN: 11/18/15). But unlike all other studied primates, humans don’t have small bits of tissue above the vocal cords called vocal membranes. That uniquely human trait helps people control their voices well enough to produce the sounds that are the building blocks of spoken language, researchers report in the Aug. 12 Science.

10’000 HOURS/DIGITALVISION/GETTY IMAGES PLUS

Vocal membranes act like a reed in a clarinet, making it easier for some animals to shout loud and shrill. Think of the piercing calls of howler monkeys (SN: 10/22/15). When researchers used MRI and CT scans to look for vocal membranes in 43 different primate species, the scientists were surprised by what they saw: All primates except humans had the tissue. 

That loss of vocal membranes would have been a “very major, very revolutionary event in human evolution,” says Takeshi Nishimura, a paleontologist at Kyoto University in Japan. 

Primates mostly make sound in the same basic way: They push air out from their lungs while vibrating muscles in the larynx to create sound waves. To understand the role that vocal membranes play, Nishimura’s team studied videos of primate voice boxes in action in chimpanzees, rhesus macaques and squirrel monkeys. The researchers also took larynges from macaques and chimpanzees that had died of natural causes and — in what’s common practice for the field — mounted the parts on tubes, pushing air through the larynges to see how the vocal cords and membranes would react.

In both experiments, the larynges made sounds that would often fluctuate wildly in pitch. Nishimura’s team found that happens only when an animal has both vocal membranes and vocal cords.

In humans, that sort of screeching can happen when we put extreme amounts of pressure on our voice, like when we scream — or when teens struggle with controlling their growing vocal cords and their voices crack. But those are rare cases. Since humans don’t have vocal membranes, we usually make more stable sounds than other primates, the team concludes. Our mouths and tongues, the idea goes, can then manipulate those stable tones into the complex sounds that language is based on.

“That’s a really elegant explanation,” says Sue Anne Zollinger, an animal physiologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in England who was not involved in the study. It’s almost counterintuitive, she says: “You lose complexity to be able to produce more complex sounds.”

The loss of vocal membranes isn’t the only thing that makes humans more eloquent than other primates. Beyond anatomical differences, humans have specific genes that may have helped drive language evolution (SN: 8/3/18). And perhaps most importantly, human brains are structured differently from other primates in ways that also give us more control over our speech.

Science News

After playing the evolution joker card throughout the article, insinuating that human speech arose from monkey howling after a mutation deprived us of vocal membranes, the report parenthetically acknowledges that there are other things “that makes humans more eloquent than other primates.” But none of the “other things” are consistent with the loss of function typically observed in mutationally driven evolutionary changes.

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At Evolution News: From Intelligent Cause to Intelligent Design: My Debt to Charles Thaxton

Stephen C. Meyer shares, from the Foreword to the new memoir by Charles Thaxton, A Leg to Stand On:

I first met Charles Thaxton after a conference in 1985. Little did I know at the time that meeting him would change the entire direction of my life. 

Photo: Stephen Meyer and Charles Thaxton, by Chris Morgan.

The conference, titled “Christianity Challenges the University: An International Conference of Theists and Atheists,” convened in Dallas, Texas, in February of that year. It featured panels of scientists from competing philosophical perspectives discussing three big scientific and philosophical questions: the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the nature of human consciousness. 

During a session on the origin of life, the scientists discussed a question I had never considered: Where did the information stored in the DNA molecule come from? 

On February 10, 1985, I learned I wasn’t the only one. On that day I found myself sitting in front of eight world-class scientists, who were discussing the vexing scientific and philosophical question: How did the first life on earth arise? 

What introduced drama into what might have otherwise been a dry academic discussion was the reaction of some of the scientists to a new idea. Three of the scientists on the panel had just published a controversial book called The Mystery of Life’s Origin, with a prominent New York publisher of scientific monographs. Their book provided a comprehensive critique of the attempts that had been made to explain how the first life had arisen from the primordial ocean, the so-called “pre-biotic soup.” These scientists — Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen — had concluded that all such theories had failed to explain the origin of the first life. Surprisingly, the other scientists on the panel — all experts in the field — did not dispute this critique. 

The Code of Life

What the other scientists did dispute was a controversial new hypothesis Thaxton and his colleagues had floated in the epilogue of their book in an attempt to explain this DNA enigma. Thaxton et al. had suggested the information in DNA might have originated from an intelligent source, or as they put it an “intelligent cause.” Since, in our experience, information arises from an intelligent source, and since the information in DNA was, in their words, “mathematically identical” to the information in a written language or computer code, they suggested the presence of information in DNA pointed to an intelligent cause. In other words, the code of life pointed to a programmer. 

That was where the fireworks started. Other scientists on the panel became uncharacteristically defensive and hostile. 

[It] was also clear, to me at least, that the authors of the new book had seized the intellectual initiative. They had offered a bold new idea that seemed at least intuitively plausible, while those defending the status quo offered no alternative to their new explanation.

A Mystery Story

I left deeply intrigued. If Thaxton’s portrayal of the scientific status of the problem was accurate — if there was no accepted or satisfactory theory of the origin of the first life — then a mystery was at hand. And if it was the case that evolutionary theory could not explain the origin of the first life, because it could not explain the origin of the genetic information in DNA, then something we take for granted was quite possibly an important clue in a mystery story. 

DNA with its characteristic double-helix shape is a cultural icon. We see the helix in everything from music videos and modern art to science documentaries and news stories about criminal proceedings. We know DNA testing can establish guilt, innocence, paternity, and distant genealogical connections. We know DNA research holds the key to understanding many diseases, and manipulating DNA can alter the features of plants and animals and boost food production. Most of us know roughly what DNA is and what it does. But could it be that we do not know anything about where it came from or how it was first formed? 

If Thaxton was right, then the classical design argument that had been dismissed first by Enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume in the 18th century and then later by evolutionary biologists in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, might have legitimacy after all. 

Could the design argument be resuscitated based upon discoveries in modern science? And was DNA the key? 

My discussion of these questions changed the course of my professional life. By the end of that year, I was preparing to move to the University of Cambridge in England to investigate questions I first encountered earlier that February and in my subsequent discussions with Charles. During my PhD research, I investigated several questions that had emerged in my discussions with Thaxton. What methods do scientists use to study biological origins? Is there a distinctive method of historical scientific inquiry? Could the argument from DNA to design be formulated as a rigorous historical scientific argument? 

Intelligent Cause, Intelligent Design

Years later, after completing a PhD on the topic of origin-of-life biology, I would write my own book on the subject of the origin of life and intelligent design. My book, Signature in the Cell, built directly on the critique of chemical evolution that Charles and his co-authors had developed in The Mystery of Life’s Origin. It also further developed the positive case for an intelligent cause, or what we now call “intelligent design,” as the best explanation of the information in DNA — in other words, the same hypothesis Thaxton and his colleagues first proposed in the epilogue to Mystery. 

Full article at Evolution News.

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