Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 52

At Live Science: Scientists pinpoint the exact moment in evolutionary time when mammals became warm-blooded

And it happened much more quickly than scientists expected.

Ben Turner writes:

Scientists have pinpointed the moment in time our earliest ancestors evolved to be warm-blooded, and it happened much later and far more quickly than the researchers expected.

The discovery, made by studying the minuscule tubes of the inner ear, places the evolution of mammalian warm-bloodedness at around 233 million years ago — 19 million years later than scientists previously thought.

These semicircular canals are filled with a viscous fluid, called endolymph, that tickles tiny hairs lining the canals as the fluid sloshes around. These hairs transmit messages to the brain, giving it instructions for how to keep the body balanced. Like some fluids, the honey-like endolymph gets runnier the hotter it is, requiring the semicircular canals to change their shape so the fluid can still do its job. In ectothermic, or cold-blooded, animals, this ear fluid is colder and thus behaves more like molasses and needs wider spaces in which to flow. But for endothermic, or warm-blooded, animals, the fluid is more watery and small spaces suffice. 

This temperature-based property makes tiny, semicircular canals a perfect place to spot the moment when ancient mammals’ cold blood turned hot, researchers wrote in a paper published July 20 in the journal Nature

“This is because, like honey, the fluid contained inside semicircular canals gets less viscous [syrupy] when temperature increases, impacting function,” David explained. “Hence, during the transition to endothermy, morphological adaptations were required to keep optimal performances, and we could track them in mammal ancestors.”

To discover the time of this evolutionary change, researchers measured three inner ear canal samples from 341 animals — 243 living species and 64 extinct species — spanning the animal kingdom. The analysis revealed that the 54 extinct mammals included in the study developed the narrow inner ear canal structures suitable for warm-blooded animals 233 million years ago. 

Before this study, scientists thought mammals inherited warm-bloodedness from the cynodonts — a group of scaly, rat-like lizards that gave rise to all living mammals — that were thought to have evolved warm-bloodedness around the time of their first appearance 252 million years ago. However, the new findings suggest that mammals diverged from their early ancestors more markedly than expected.

And this drastic change happened surprisingly fast. Heat-friendly ear canals didn’t just appear later in the fossil record than the scientists expected. It happened far more rapidly, too — popping up around the same time the earliest mammals began evolving whiskers, fur and specialized backbones.

“Contrary to current scientific thinking, our paper surprisingly demonstrates that the acquisition of endothermy seem[s] to have occurred very quickly in geological terms, in less than a million years,” study co-lead author Ricardo Araújo, a geologist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, said in the statement. “It was not a gradual, slow process over tens of millions of years as previously thought, but maybe was attained quickly when triggered by novel mammal-like metabolic pathways and origin of fur.”

See the full article at Live Science.

This recent research finding, if verified, is apparently more in line with the expectations of intelligent design than current evolutionary thinking. How many stumbling blocks does a theory need to encounter before it is shelved? Ascertaining an accurate view of reality can be challenging to our presuppositions, but the reward for pursuing truth is certainly worthwhile.

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At Mind Matters News: Researchers: If we tell folks more about science, they trust less

Part 3: The researchers argue that doubts about science arise from conflict with beliefs. The many COVID-19 debacles suggest other causes…

“It may not be researchers’ fault that “the science” was grievously misrepresented by others. But they still have a lot of ground to make up with the thoughtful proportion of the public. And the next insight shared is hardly going to help: “Counterintuitively, increasing someone’s general scientific literacy can actually backfire, because it provides the skill to better bolster their pre-existing beliefs. Increasing scientific reasoning and media literacy skills, prebunking, or inoculating people against misinformation are advised instead, as is framing information in line with what matters to your audience and using relatable personal experiences. – Tessa Koumondoros, “These 4 Factors Can Explain Why So Many People Are Rejecting Science” at Sciencealert (July 16, 2022) The paper requires a fee or subscription.”

This sounds so much like: Don’t rely on telling people how to think about science; try “inoculating people against misinformation” which, in the context, sounds like: Come up with more convincing propaganda.

The trouble is, the COVID pandemic was practically a laboratory experiment in watching claims about science self-destruct. People who noticed probably won’t forget. And their science literacy may well have increased in a way no one anticipated: a much deeper agnosticism about claims made in science’s name.

News, “Researchers: If we tell folks more about science, they trust less” at Mind Matters News (July 20, 2022)

Takehome: Generally, the remedy for loss of trust after widespread failures is reform of the system, not reform of its doubters. Post-COVID, scientists should take heed.

Note: The paper itself, which requires a subscription, is “Why are people antiscience, and what can we do about it?” by Aviva Philipp-Muller, Spike W. S. Lee, and Richard E. Petty, July 12, 2022, PNAS 119 (30) e2120755119 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120755119

Here are Parts 1 and 2:

Why many now reject science… do you really want to know? COVID demonstrated — as nothing else could — that the “science” was all over the map and didn’t help people avoid panic. As the panic receded, the government started setting up a disinformation board to target NON-government sources of panic, thus deepening loss of trust.

and

Researchers: Distrust of science is due to tribal loyalty. In Part 2 of 4, we look at a claim arising from a recent study: We blindly believe those we identify with, ignoring the wisdom of science. There seems to be no recognition that researchers, however fiercely competitive among themselves, also have a tribal loyalty that skews their judgment.

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At Nautilus: Under Anesthesia, Where Do Our Minds Go?

To better understand our brains and design safer anesthesia, scientists are turning to EEG.

Jackie Rocheleau writes:

After experimenting on a hen, his dog, his goldfish, and himself, dentist William Morton was ready. On Oct. 16, 1846, he hurried to the Massachusetts General Hospital surgical theater for what would be the first successful public test of a general anesthetic.

His concoction of sulfuric ether and oil from an orange (just for the fragrance) knocked a young man unconscious while a surgeon cut a tumor from his neck. To the onlooking students and clinicians, it was like a miracle. Some alchemical reaction between the ether and the man’s brain allowed him to slip into a state akin to light sleep, to undergo what should have been a painful surgery with little discomfort, and then to return to himself with only a hazy memory of the experience.

Monitoring patients’ brains still isn’t something that medical boards require.

General anesthesia redefined surgery and medicine, but over a century later it still carries significant risks. Too much sedation can lead to neurocognitive disorders and may even shorten lifespan; too little can lead to traumatic and painful wakefulness during surgery. So far, scientists have learned that, generally speaking, anesthetic drugs render people unconscious by altering how parts of the brain communicate. But they still don’t fully understand why. Although anesthesia works primarily on the brain, anesthesiologists do not regularly monitor the brain when they put patients under. And it is only in the past decade that neuroscientists interested in altered states of consciousness have begun taking advantage of anesthesia as a research tool. “It’s the central irony” of anesthesiology, says George Mashour, a University of Michigan neuroanesthesiologist, whose work entails keeping patients unconscious during neurosurgery and providing appropriate pain management.

Unlike the 1846 demonstration, when Morton merely administered the anesthetic and stepped aside for the surgeon, today anesthesiology entails maintenance: Clinicians are required to monitor the patient’s vital signs, like heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature throughout the operation, adjusting dosages as needed. But monitoring patients’ brains still isn’t something that medical boards require or that medical schools train anesthesiologists to do in the operating room.

EEG records the electrochemical activity between communicating neurons in the brain. As the brain lapses into anesthetic-induced unconsciousness, this activity follows a predictable pattern of sequences. Through electrodes stuck to the scalp, EEG records these sequences, which are then visualized as spiky waves on a monitor. When a patient is under general anesthesia, typically the waves crest more slowly with greater amplitude as the drugs disrupt connections between networks that keep us awake and aware. For example, propofol enhances inhibition of cortical neurons and disrupts communication across the cortex, the hub of complex functions like thinking and making sense of stimuli from the environment. It also dampens communication between the cortex, the brainstem, and the thalamus, an egg-shaped collection of neurons deep within the brain important for sensory information processing and arousal.

In some of these states of unconsciousness, awareness of the self and the body remains intact.

Getting under the hood

A better understanding of how patients wake from anesthesia and under what circumstances they struggle could also help scientists with an even knottier problem: how to treat disorders of consciousness, including coma. General anesthesia lends itself to studying these questions, as researchers can control the transition into and out of unconsciousness and track how brain activity changes as the anesthetic takes hold and wears off. Like anesthesia, coma seems to alter essential communication between different brain networks. For example, in both coma and general anesthesia, communication between the cortex and thalamus slows.

General anesthesia is “a very good tool to disentangle responsiveness and unconsciousness because you can play on the verge of these two,” says Athena Demertzi, a research associate at the University of Liège in Belgium. “It’s especially fascinating to see how these brain network configurations change in different states of anesthesia.”

The complete article is available at Nautilus.

If artificial intelligence (AI) has anything to do with consciousness, what would be the equivalent of a general anesthesia for an AI machine? “Where do our minds go” when we’re unconscious? The question itself implies that mind is more than machine.

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Cancel Culture comes for the James Webb Space Telescope

It’s probably the only way the Woke can

Get ready to cancel your favourite space photos!

James Webb may have served in the US Marine Corps, held a senior role at the State Department, and been appointed by President John F. Kennedy as Administrator of NASA during the heyday of the space race. What really matters, however, is that Webb lived in the homophobic 1950s and may even have been homophobic himself.

Rumours of Communist infiltration of the American government during that era made the US fearful that homosexual employees could be blackmailed by the Soviets on the basis of their taboo lifestyle. This was known as the “Lavender Scare”, and it led to the sacking of gay members of the civil service.

James Webb was aware of this policy and didn’t oppose it, even though he knew full well that 70 years later social norms would change and his behaviour would become appalling, repugnant and unthinkable. As reported by Scientific American last year:

James Mahlberg, “” at MercatorNet (July 20, 2022)

If we’re so lucky that the Woke promise to boycott science altogether and picket NASA instead, we accept their offer!

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At Mind Matters News: Recent research: Imaginary numbers are part of the real world

According to new research, if we try to leave them out of quantum mechanics, our description of nature becomes faulty:

“Without imaginary numbers, the device on which you are reading this article probably wouldn’t even work. As science writer Padavic-Callaghan points out, When you set out to try and capture a quantum state in the language of mathematics, these seemingly impossible square roots of negative numbers are an integral part of your vocabulary. Eliminating imaginary numbers would highly limit how accurate of a statement you could make. The discovery and development of quantum mechanics upgraded imaginary numbers from a problem seeking a solution to a solution that had just been matched with its problem. As the physicist and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose noted in the documentary series Why Are We Here? (2017): ‘[Imaginary numbers] were there all the time. They’ve been there since the beginning of time. These numbers are embedded in the way the world works at the smallest and, if you like, most basic level.’ – Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, “Imaginary Numbers Are Real” at Aeon (July 14, 2022)”

News, “Recent research: Imaginary numbers are part of the real world” at Mind Matters News (July 17, 2022)

Takehome: Perhaps the universe is bound to seem mysterious, in part because it is not wholly material. It keeps the rules but the rules are not always what we expect.

You may also wish to read: You may also wish to read: Yes, you can manipulate infinity in math. The hyperreals are bigger (and smaller) than your average number — and better! (Jonathan Bartlett)

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At Live Science: ‘Unlucky’ creatures that enter rare Red Sea brine pools are immediately stunned to death

Charles Q. Choi writes:

Rare deep-sea brine pools discovered in the Red Sea may hold clues to environmental upheavals in the region that span millennia, and could even shed light on the origins of life on Earth, a new study finds.

Deep-sea brine pools are extraordinarily salty or “hypersaline” lakes that form on the seafloor. They are among the most extreme environments on Earth, yet despite their exotic chemistry and complete lack of oxygen, these rare pools teem with life and may offer insights on how life on Earth began — and how life could evolve and thrive on water-rich worlds other than our own.

Scientists discovered the rare brine pools in the Gulf of Aqaba during a four-week OceanXplorer research voyage. (Image credit: OceanX)

“Our current understanding is that life originated on Earth in the deep sea, almost certainly in anoxic — without oxygen — conditions,” study lead author Sam Purkis, a professor and chair of the Department of Marine Geosciences at the University of Miami, told Live Science. “Deep-sea brine pools are a great analog for the early Earth and, despite being devoid of oxygen and hypersaline, are teeming with a rich community of so-called ‘extremophile’ microbes. Studying this community hence allows a glimpse into the sort of conditions where life first appeared on our planet, and might guide the search for life on other ‘water worlds’ in our solar system and beyond.”

Note: The relevance of extremophiles for the origin of life has been addressed in the past. Here is a quote from an Astrobiology article cited in a blog at Reasons.org: “Their point was that as intractable as a naturalistic explanation for mesophilic life is, naturalistic explanations of extremophilic life are orders of magnitude more intractable.”

Scientists know of just a few dozen deep-sea brine pools in the entire world, which range in size from a few thousand square feet to about a square mile (2.6 square kilometers). Only three bodies of water are known to host deep-sea brine pools: the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.

Using a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV), the scientists discovered the pools 1.1 miles (1.77 km) beneath the surface of the Red Sea…

“At this great depth, there is ordinarily not much life on the seabed,” Purkis said. “However, the brine pools are a rich oasis of life. Thick carpets of microbes support a diverse suite of animals.”

Most interesting among those “were the fish, shrimp and eels that appear to use the brine to hunt,” Purkis said. The brine is devoid of oxygen, so “any animal that strays into the brine is immediately stunned or killed,” he explained. The predators that lurk near the brine “feed on the unlucky,” he noted.

What happens in a brine pool, stays in a brine pool

Because the brine lacks oxygen, the pool keeps out the usual animals that live in and on the seabed, such as burrowing shrimp, worms and mollusks. “Ordinarily, these animals bioturbate or churn up the seabed, disturbing the sediments that accumulate there,” Purkis said. “Not so with the brine pools. Here, any sedimentary layers that settle to the bed of the brine pool remain exquisitely intact.”

Core samples that the researchers extracted from the newfound brine pools “represent an unbroken record of past rainfall in the region, stretching back more than 1,000 years, plus records of earthquakes and tsunami,” Purkis said.

Complete article at Live Science.

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Webb: WASP-96b the most detailed spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere

At Astronomy Now:

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has demonstrated its unprecedented ability to analyse the atmosphere of a planet more than 1,000 light-years away. With the combined forces of its 270-square-foot mirror, precision spectrographs, and sensitive detectors, Webb has – in a single observation – revealed the unambiguous signature of water, indications of haze, and evidence for clouds that were thought not to exist based on prior observations. The transmission spectrum of the hot gas giant WASP-96 b, made using Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, provides just a glimpse into the brilliant future of exoplanet research with Webb.

A transmission spectrum made from a single observation using Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) reveals atmospheric characteristics of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-96 b. ILLUSTRATION: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant Sun-like star.

The observation, which reveals the presence of specific gas molecules based on tiny decreases in the brightness of precise colors of light, is the most detailed of its kind to date, demonstrating Webb’s unprecedented ability to analyze atmospheres hundreds of light-years away.

In a demonstration of its intelligent design and remarkable functionality, the James Webb has obtained an analysis of an exoplanet’s atmosphere!

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The layered hills of Mars’ Arabia Terra

Keith Cooper writes:

These layered hills, seen in this false-colour image of a portion of Arabia Terra on Mars, may possibly have a watery origin. Arabia Terra is a highland region in Mars’ northern hemisphere, dating back to the red planet’s Noachian geological era, around four billion years ago. Given the region’s great age, it sports many craters, inside of which are often found layered mounds such as those in this image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 

Image: NASA/JPL–Caltech/University of Arizona.

The layered rocks in Arabia Terra come in three forms. The first type, seen in this image, is described by alternating layers of light and dark material, which may represent episodic periods of sedimentary deposition. One can imagine an ancient lake filling the crater in which these mounds are located, the shoreline changing as the sea level varied with the Martian climate, the tides leaving behind alternating layers of mudstone and limestone. Or, perhaps the layers signify different volcanic events that interrupted the usual depositional processes by dumping layers of ash onto the mounds.

The second type consists of layers that look like they are composed from the same material and form ‘stair-step’ mesas, while the third type features dark, thin layers of rubbly, uneven material, and often produce boulders that roll down slopes. This third type could be the result of lava having once flowed through a sandy region; afterwards, the basaltic rock hardened, and on cliff edges where sandy material crumbles away, the larger chunks of basaltic rock end up giving way and rolling down to the bottom of the crater floor.

Astronomy Now

If water, then life? This fascinating research on the past history of Mars indicates how a planet’s potential habitability can transition to barrenness. We can be thankful that didn’t happen on Earth!

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At Phys.org: To keep up with evolving prey, rattlesnakes tap genetically diverse venom toolbox

In the evolutionary arms race between rattlesnakes and their prey, rodents, birds and other reptiles develop resistance to the snakes’ deadly venom to survive. But new research led by the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Texas at Arlington sheds light on how snakes manage to keep the upper hand: They maintain a broad and diverse toolkit of genes that encode snake venom, allowing them to adapt as local prey and conditions change.

The findings, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, explain how rattlesnakes have kept up with prey species evolving resistance to their venoms over millions of years. This research overturns decades of thought on what factors shape venom gene evolution and venom variation, and sheds new light on why developing effective antivenom treatments for snakebites remains so challenging.

Snake venom, an evolutionary adaptation, is made up of different enzymes and toxins that enable snakes to capture their prey. For decades, biologists have thought that co-evolution between predator and prey would drive snake venom to become highly specialized: the venom evolving to effectively kill specific prey and unused venom gene genetic diversity disappearing along the way. Known in evolutionary biology as “directional selection,” this process is like the sharpening of a knife—while the weapon gets more deadly, it loses a bit of itself in the process.

The new study proposes that instead, “balancing selection” is the mechanism at play, an evolutionary process where multiple versions of a gene—in this case, genes that encode venom proteins—are maintained instead of eliminated. This could be the key to how snakes prevent themselves from going down evolutionary dead ends.

Let’s pause and consider this statement: “Snake venom, an evolutionary adaptation”. How would this work? “To [subdue their prey], venom is injected via the use of a venom delivery system. The venom delivery system includes a postorbital venom gland on each side of the upper jaw that is associated with specialized venom-conducting fangs or teeth.” (Springer) Not only does the snake need the venom, it needs to be able to store it and deliver it without harming itself in the process. Sounds mildly reminiscent of an irreducibly complex system.

“Our findings help explain decades of seemingly contradictory theory and evidence for what drives the extreme variation observed in snake venoms. It turns out that the arms-race between snakes and prey ends up favoring the constant re-shuffling of venom variants that are favored, leading to the retention of lots of venom variants over time, some of which are ancient,” said Todd Castoe, co-author on the study and professor of biology at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Understanding how diverse venomous snake genomes truly are—from rattlesnakes to cobras and coral snakes—can inform advances in anti-venom therapeutics and save lives around the world, Schield said.

See the complete article at Phys.org.

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At Mind Matters News: Why many now reject science… do you really want to know? Part 1

COVID demonstrated — as nothing else could — that the “science” was all over the map and didn’t help people avoid panic:

Science-sponsored panic probably drove up the damage from COVID. Jay Richards, one of the authors of The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe (October 2020), has noted, “In working on the book, we watched social media and platforms such as Google Search manipulate news coverage of the pandemic. It was, honestly, terrifying to watch important stories and studies get buried in real time on Google searches. It was also distressing to watch Twitter and Facebook attach warnings to the advice and viewpoint of scientists who urged calm and caution, while boosting the views of “officials” such as Anthony Fauci and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom.”

And, just as most of the world was getting the impression that the pandemic — and the panic — had largely run their course, up pops a proposal in 2021 for a “reality czar” to fight disinformation and misinformation, as if all of that were coming from non-government or non-science sources. The proposal was (we are told) put on hold after the fear of just consequences prevailed.

News, “Why many now reject science… do you really want to know?” at Mind Matters News (July 17, 2022)

Takehome: As the panic receded, the government started setting up a disinformation board to target NON-government sources of panic, thus deepening loss of trust.

You may also wish to read: Did social media panic drive up the damage from COVID-19? Richards: It was, honestly, terrifying to watch important stories and studies get buried in real time on Google searches. Social media did a very good job of panicking the population about COVID-19, instead of relaying facts, says Jay Richards, an author of The Price of Panic.

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