Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 67

From The Scientist: Genome Reveals Clues to Giraffes’ “Blatantly Strange” Body Shape

An updated giraffe genome, published March 17, 2021 in Science Advances, reveals new insights into how the species accommodates a “blatantly strange body architecture.” 

Author, Amanda Heidt writes…

With their long necks, giraffes are a poster child for evolutionary oddities, but scientists know very little about the genetic underpinnings of such an extreme adaptation. An updated giraffe genome, published March 17 in Science Advances, reveals new insights into how the species accommodates what Rasmus Heller, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and an author on the new study, calls a “blatantly strange body architecture.” Giraffe’s bones grow faster than any other animal, for instance, and the blood pressure required to pump blood up its six-foot neck would be fatal to humans.

Unlocking giraffeness 

When the team probed the genome further, they identified almost 500 genes that are either unique to giraffes or contain variants found only in giraffes. 

A functional analysis of these genes showed that they are most often associated with growth and development, nervous and visual systems, circadian rhythms, and blood pressure regulation, all areas in which the giraffe differs from other ruminants. As a consequence of their tall stature, for example, giraffes must maintain a blood pressure that is roughly 2.5 times higher than that of humans in order to pump blood up to their brain. In addition, giraffes have sharp eyesight for scanning the horizon, and because their strange bodies make it difficult for them to stand quickly, they sleep lightly, often standing up and for only minutes at a time, likely a result of changes during evolution to genes that regulate circadian rhythms.

Within those hundreds of genes, FGFRL1 stood out. In addition to being the giraffe’s most divergent gene from other ruminants’, its seven amino acid substitutions are unique to giraffes. In humans, this gene appears to be involved in cardiovascular development and bone growth, leading the researchers to hypothesize that it might also play a role in the giraffe’s unique adaptations to a highly vertical life. 

The Scientist

Note that seven amino acid substitutions needed to form a unique, functional gene is highly unlikely to occur naturally. Consider the following quote from Michael Behe:

Any particular adaptive biochemical feature requiring the same mutational complexity as that needed for chloroquine resistance in malaria is forbiddingly unlikely to have arisen by Darwinian processes and fixed in the population of any class of large animals (such as, say, mammals), because of the much lower population sizes and longer generation times compared to that of malaria…. (By “the same mutational complexity” I mean requiring 2-3 point mutations [amino acid substitutions]…)

Evolution News–Behe

Repeatedly, further research in a given field tends to reveal greater evidence for intelligent design, not less.

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From Evolution News: Luskin Explores Design Evidence from Geology

For those who have eyes to see, nature reveals design across the scientific disciplines.

Author David Klinghoffer reports:

If there’s an intelligent design in nature, you would expect it to be evident in a range of scientific disciplines. Biology, paleontology, chemistry, physics, cosmology… What’s missing from that list? How about geology? 

At the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, geologist Casey Luskin gave a wonderful talk about design evidence from his own field, revealing the “Good Earth” that we have the good fortune to inhabit. Or is it fortune? Dr. Luskin reviews the properties that make our planet remarkable, including the strength of the magnetic field, plate tectonics, the volume of water on Earth, the chemistry of the atmosphere, all working together to create a “global thermostat” to keep the planet not too hot and not too cool. 

Luskin considers the possibility that this is mere luck. As some ID critic would chortle about now, if the planet weren’t hospitable to life, we wouldn’t be here to observe these amazing coincidences. But then you consider all the other “just right” circumstances, reflected in life and the cosmos, that Michael Denton, Stephen Meyer, and others have documented. All a gigantic coincidence? It takes the faith of an atheist to believe that. Also, wait till the end when Luskin presents an argument from hidden artistic beauty: what is unveiled when you view rock thin sections under a petrographic microscope.

Evolution News

The geological features of our planet not only reveal intelligent design but some hidden beauty, as well.

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Reasons to Believe: Should we Expect Efficiency Inside the Cell?

Jeff Zweerink, senior research scholar at Reasons to Believe, discusses the movement efficiency of Kinesin-1 in the context of a perceived design inefficiency in the reconnaissance aircraft SR-71.

Kinesin-1: The Cell’s Cargo Mover
Kinesin-1 moves vesicles around cells by “walking” along rod-like protein assemblies called microtubules (see video below). Kinesin-1 uses adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as fuel to move around. However, when a team of researchers at Yamaguchi University in Japan measured the motion of Kinesis-1 along the microtubules, they found that up to 80% of the energy released from ATP generated heat instead of movement!

When taking a quick look at the SR-71 blackbird and seeing it leaking fuel on the runway, you could draw a reasonable conclusion that the engineers had failed to design the aircraft well. However, a closer analysis reveals that the engineers intentionally designed the SR-71 blackbird in a way that would leak fuel on the ground. Flying at the incredible speeds the aircraft can achieve causes the fuel tanks to heat up and expand. If the tanks were sealed on the ground, the extreme heat during flight would make the tanks crack and explode. Stated another way, when the SR-71 fulfills its purpose in flight, all its components behave exactly as designed—even if it looks like failure when sitting on the runway.

In similar fashion, Kinesin-1 acts like a poorly designed molecule in the pristine conditions of the lab. However, when it operates in the noisy environment of the cell, it performs beautifully—just like it was designed to do.

See full article at Reasons to Believe

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At Nautilus: Were It Not for Cosmic Good Fortune, We Wouldn’t Be Here

Sean Raymond, Beibei Liu & Seth Jacobson offer a solar system model affirming that the “dynamical instability” of our early solar system had to go just right, or we probably wouldn’t be here.

Who doesn’t want the trains to run on time? When stuff runs like clockwork, we’re happy. And thankfully, that’s how the planets orbit the sun: dependable, and always on time. But it wasn’t always like this. Scientists suspect the solar system, some time in its early years, underwent a violent seismic shift. The orbits of the gas giants—Jupiter and Saturn—got tweaked big time, and the aftershocks affected all the planets, including Earth and Mars, as well as the asteroid and Kuiper belts.

In our new study, published in Nature, we rewrite the origins of this massive shift—called a “dynamical instability”—and explain how everything in the solar system today found its place. What’s more, our idea is broadly applicable and may explain the orbits of exoplanets.

Did our solar system get lucky? 

The idea of a dynamical instability crept into the minds of planetary scientists from the outside, from research on exoplanets. The first exoplanets astronomers discovered around stars like the sun were gas giants on orbits very close to their stars. Call them “hot Jupiters.” They’re exotic, circling about 1 percent of sun-like stars. But once astronomers discovered gas giants on more distant orbits—starting just wider than Mercury’s orbit around the sun—they noticed that the planets’ orbits were often extremely stretched-out.

It’s not immediately obvious, but the stretched out orbit of a gas-giant exoplanet is a massive scar. It’s a remnant of a violent past. When planets’ orbits cross, it leads to close encounters that, due to gravity, deflect the planets’ paths. After a series of encounters, one or more planets get ejected into interstellar space. The survivors have eccentric orbits—a telltale sign of something going seriously out of whack. At least three quarters (and probably 90 to 95 percent) of all giant exoplanet systems must be the survivors of dynamical instabilities.

Which raises the question: Did our solar system get lucky? Our planets have near-circular orbits—did we somehow avoid instability? Several signs point to no. The most compelling is that the giant planets’ orbits appear to have been re-shuffled since they grew out of the sun’s gaseous, planet-forming disk. Simulations show that the giant planets’ orbits should have been near-circular and much more compact. Jupiter’s orbit would be about the same as today, but the orbits of the other giant planets would be shrunk-down, putting Saturn much closer to Jupiter, Uranus close to Saturn’s present-day orbit, and Neptune just a bit farther from the sun. Clearly, the orbits of the giants shifted a lot between their birth and today.

In 2005, researchers took the world of planetary science by storm after coming up with a theory, the Nice model, linking the instability with an apparent spike in the cratering rate on the moon called the “late heavy bombardment.” An analysis of the rocks Apollo astronauts brought back from the moon suggested there was a delayed burst of impacts on the rocky planets about 500 million years after they formed, around 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. By that time, the oceans were already around, potentially harboring life. The Nice model, (pronounced like “niece”) after the city in France where it was developed, has survived 17 years of intense scrutiny, and accounts for the orbits of the asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, and even the irregular moons of the giant planets.

The orbit of a gas-giant exoplanet is a remnant of a violent past.

But a re-analysis of the moon’s craters suggests that there was no cataclysm or spike. The impact rate declined smoothly instead. So, our only hint is that the seismic shift in the early solar system must have happened within the first 100 million years—although this doesn’t tell us whether it happened before Earth and the other rocky planets finished forming or afterward. What triggered the big shift? We show, in our new paper, that it was likely the dispersal of the sun’s planet-forming disk.

The instability was a big deal for our solar system but, compared to those in other exoplanet systems, it was far weaker. Fortunately, Jupiter and Saturn must have avoided any close encounters, because if they had scattered off of each other, Jupiter’s present-day eccentricity would be 5 to 10 times greater—similar to many giant exoplanets. In that case, there would be no Earth. Its building blocks would have been scattered into the sun. 

See full article at Nautilus.

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At Mind Matters News: The remarkable medicines wild animals find in nature

The “animals’ pharmacy” mainly aims at treating parasites and wounds using plants and insects. But there are some unknowns here:

Is medication use a sign of intelligence? That’s not clear. In the case of animals already known to be intelligent — dolphins, chimps, elephants, dogs, and cats, for example — we can assume that the ability to foresee and remember a benefit and to learn from others plays a role in turning an accidental discovery into a habit.

But what about insects? Take butterflies:

Denyse O’Leary, “The remarkable medicines wild animals find in nature” at Mind Matters News (May 24, 2022)

Take the monarch butterfly that lays its eggs on milkweed, which has antiparasite effects. “All we have to do is look at a healthy monarch butterfly and a sick monarch butterfly,” says Jacobus de Roode, assistant professor of biology at Emory University, who specializes in the beautiful creatures. “Now, a sick monarch butterfly is really affected by these parasites. The parasites bore little holes in the abdomen, and she will lose some of her bodily fluids and doesn’t feel good.” The changes in her physiology can change the way she responds to smells of the vegetation around her and she may have a genetic preference for these that would do her good.

Joel Shurkin, “Animals that self-medicate” at Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Dec 9; 111(49): 17339–17341.

Fruit flies do something similar: They ensure their larvae are dunked in ethanol (alcohol) to drive off deadly parasitoid wasps.

Takehome: While intelligent animals like dolphins may sense cause and effect, we don’t know how butterflies and fruit flies pick out the plants that can help.

You may also wish to read: Why cats can University of Kyoto scientists found that they can indeed remember, provided they live in the same household. The researchers are unsure exactly how cats remember other cats’ names. But that may not be a great mystery if we keep in mind what is involved.

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Astronomy.com: The struggle to find the origins of time

Quantum entanglement — when the states of two particle are intertwined by the laws of quantum mechanics — has long vexed physicists. But the phenomenon may also hold the key to understanding how time emerged.  Jurik Peter/Shutterstock

St. Augustine said of time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I don’t know.” Time is an elusive concept: We all experience it, and yet, the challenge of defining it has tested philosophers and scientists for millennia. 

It wasn’t until Albert Einstein that we developed a more sophisticated mathematical understanding of time and space that allowed physicists to probe deeper into the connections between them. In their endeavors, physicists also discovered that seeking the origin of time forces us to confront the origins of the universe itself.

What exactly is time, and how did it come into being? Did the dimension of time exist from the moment of the Big Bang, or did time emerge as the universe evolved? Recent theories about the quantum nature of gravity provide some unique and fantastic answers to these millennia-old questions.

Just glancing at these diagrams makes it immediately obvious which scene came before and which one came after. That’s because of entropy, which observes that the amount of disorder in the universe increases over time. Curiously, there is currently no good explanation for why entropy was lower in the past than it is now — the laws of physics describe a pile of blocks springing up to form a tower just as well as they describe a structure of blocks falling down.
Astronomy: Roen Kelly

Our world features an arrow of time where entropy increases with time. This accords with our sense of time as a one-way street, from past order to future disorder. Yet, there is no basis for the arrow of time in microscopic physics — the realm of quantum mechanics. Those equations are just as valid when time runs in reverse. Therefore, some scientists think the arrow of time exists because the universe must have started out in an incredibly orderly and unlikely state. This is called the Past Hypothesis.

Time and space-time

Of course, scientists want to understand how we experience time in mathematical terms that can be tested through experiments. In relativity, the three dimensions of physical space are combined with the one dimension of time into a four-dimensional space-time. The basic elements of space-time are events and worldlines. Events are points within four-dimensional space-time at which some physical interaction or phenomenon takes place, such as two particles colliding or a particle emitting a photon. Worldlines are the paths objects trace through space-time along a sequence of events.

Quantum gravity

The Standard Model is our fundamental theory of how three of the forces of nature — electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces — operate on a collection of 12 different matter particles (and their antimatter twins). This model describes quantum fields that exchange particles that mediate forces (bosons) between matter particles (fermions) and produce complex structures such as atoms.

The Standard Model is so successful that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, operating at energies up to 14,000 GeV, have been unable to find any significant deviations from calculated predictions. But we know that the Standard Model is incomplete because it has no room for several phenomena we observe. These are dark matter, the invisible stuff that glues galaxies together; dark energy, the mysterious repulsive energy driving the ever-faster expansion of the universe; and any mechanism to explain either cosmological inflation, the exponential expansion of the universe in its early stages, or the fact that we live in a universe dominated by matter instead of equal amounts of matter and antimatter.

The bottom line

Our experience of time may be subjective and limited to a sense of now, but on the cosmic scale, time seems to be a feature of entangled relationships between objects and not a feature from outside our universe. The arrow of time is a consequence of the increasing entropy of an expanding universe since the Big Bang. It appears this precludes us from remembering the future. But at least we have our memories, courtesy of the steady march of entropy, which allows us to recover past events and stitch them into a consistent story. Lucky for us, our universe seems to have a consistent story to tell in the first place!

Astronomy

The figure showing before and after events agrees with our experience and common sense: systems progress naturally with the passage of time from specified arrangements to random, disordered arrangements–never the other direction.

Scripture agrees with concepts derived from physics theory and observation: time had a beginning. “We declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.” (I Corinthians 2:7, emphasis added)

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At Evolution News: Günter Bechly repudiates “Professor Dave’s” attacks against ID

Günter Bechly, Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture, addresses the off-base accusations made against ID and the Discovery Institute.

Dave Farina is an atheist American YouTuber who runs a channel called Professor Dave Explains with almost two million subscribers.

The clichés and misrepresentations Farina recycles about intelligent design are beyond tired. Still, those new to the debate might find it helpful to see Farina’s false claims debunked.

Farina seems more interested in caricaturing those he disagrees with than understanding them.

Three Major Problems 

Farina also thinks that intelligent design theory “cannot be validated as real science because it does not explain or predict anything.” Here are three major problems with this statement:

Who defines what qualifies as “real science”? It is certainly not Dave Farina. It is not judges in court rooms. And it is not even the scientists themselves who define “science.” Reasonably, it is philosophers of science who address this question. But Farina seems to be totally ignorant of the fact that there is no consensus among philosophers of science about a demarcation criterion that could reliably distinguish science from non-science. Any criterion yet suggested, including Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, either excludes too much (e.g., scientific fields like string theory or evolutionary biology) or includes too much (e.g., homeopathy or parapsychology).

Of course, intelligent design has explanatory power. Otherwise, we could not even explain the existence of Romeo and Juliet by the intelligent agency of William Shakespeare. There is no doubt that the designing activity of an intelligent agent is a perfectly valid explanation for complex specified patterns. The only question under debate is whether such patterns are confined to the realm of human cultural artifacts or if they are also found in nature. But this question should not be decided by dogmatic a priorirestrictions of certain worldviews that do not allow for design explanations whatever the evidence might be, but should rather follow the evidence wherever it leads. It is an empirical question to be decided by the data.

It is simply false that intelligent design does not predict anything. Indeed, this is yet another common stereotype that has been refuted so many times by ID proponents that any further use of this argument can be based only on a total ignorance of the facts (or perhaps deliberate lying, but I prefer not to apply that interpretation). Stephen Meyer (2009) included in his book Signature in the Cell a whole chapter with a dozen predictions inspired by intelligent design theory. These are often very precise and easily falsifiable, for example: “No undirected process will demonstrate the capacity to generate 500 bits of new [specified] information starting from a nonbiological source.” Just write a computer simulation that achieves this, without smuggling the information in through a backdoor, and you can claim victory over a core prediction of intelligent design.

Evolution News

Dr. Bechly addresses numerous additional misfires attempted by Professor Dave. With such a voluble spray of baseless accusations coming from someone like Professor Dave, it can be helpful to be reminded of the proverb, “Like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, a curse that is causeless does not alight.” (Proverbs 26:2)

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Wm Lane Craig on Systematic Philosophical Theology

He has a book that seems to be forthcoming. Here is a Talbot introductory lecture:

He has a Q&A:

A key clip:

Notice, a paper, here.

Excerpting Dr Clinton:

Ostensibly, the reason for a ‘system’ of theology is that someone, or some group, has come to understand the teachings of the Bible and of their church in a distinctive, organized way, and is ready to share that organized thinking with their church and the world. Such systems grow much more intricate and complex when they add the results of the first three councils, historical theology, integration of thinking outside any one specific approach, and broader interaction with human experience.
Logic informs all such conceptual systems. But far more than logical thinking patterns comes from
philosophy to help systematic theology (Corduan, 1981). The following elements make up the philosophical “bones” of a theological system:

1 choice of a starting point (God; the individual; humanity; experience; spirituality)

2 choice of a metaphysical stance (realism, dualism, idealism, etc.)

3 choice of a methodology (rationalism, empiricism, systematic consistency)

4 understanding of the main points of a conceptual model

5 interrelation in the developmental process of doing theology of reason, experience, tradition, and scripture
All of these processes are part of any theological system. All processes come to the system from a person’s or group’s philosophy and values.

All of this now comes up as there has been a side debate in a current thread in which the matter of personhood of God has come up as a consequence of what we may term an emerging neo-deism.

For information. END

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Defend the Children

The madness will not end until we grasp the following truths:

1. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US.

2. Even assuming for the sake of argument that it would be a desirable thing to do, no gun control law can eliminate all or even a small fraction of those guns.

3. Evil men will always be able to get a gun.

4. Schools are soft targets full of defenseless people.

5. We can’t hire enough cops to guard all of those people.

6. We need to equip and train school staff who are willing to do so to defend themselves and the children in their care.

7. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. It is being done in Israel.

Fight me. Show me that one of those statements is false.

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At Astronomy Now: MeerKAT paints a mesmerising portrait of the Milky Way

MeerKAT’s radio view of the central regions of the Milky Way, highlighted by glowing red emissions surrounding the galaxy’s central black hole. Image: I. Heywood, SARAO.

New radio-wavelength images of the Milky Way’s galactic core show its exotic beauty and peril. In terms of the galactic habitable zone, life-friendly conditions certainly don’t exist near the core.

Ever wonder what you might see if your eyes were sensitive to radio waves instead of visible light? Then check out the latest images from the 64-antenna MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, revealing the heart of the Milky Way as as it appears in radio emissions.

The stunning imagery shows previously known and newly-discovered features, including supernova remnants, huge magnetised radio filaments and the blazing inferno surrounding the 4-million-solar-mass black hole at the core of the galaxy.

The imagery is based on detailed analysis of a survey carried out during the telescope’s commissioning, resulting in a mosaic of 20 observations captured during 200 hours of telescope time. The result is a 100-megapixel mosaic with a resolution of 4 arc seconds.

Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole at the core of the Milky Way shows up as a blaze of surrounding radio emissions, along with huge magnetised radio filaments in cirrus-like arcs. Image: I. Heywood, SARAO.

The images reveal never-before-seen supernova remnants, including a rare, almost perfectly spherical example, along with numerous stellar nurseries, cirrus-like emissions made up of many parallel radio filaments and a mesmerising view of “the mouse,” a runaway pulsar possibly ejected in a supernova blast.

At the heart of the mosaic is the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, shining like a giant red eye embedded in a vast cloud of less powerful emissions.

Astronomy Now

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