Archive: Flagellum, Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Crabs, Comets

Celebrate the summer solstice with these lost gems from CEH archives! The following short articles were first published in June 2002. With the benefit of hindsight, have biologists made any progress in understanding evolution? Are they taking note of intelligently designed phenomena?

Note: Some embedded links may no longer work.

Tweaking the Bacterial Flagellum Motor   06/24/2002
A team of Japanese scientists publishing in the July 7 Journal of Molecular Biology has been studying the electrical interactions of the bacterial flagellum, a molecular motor highlighted in the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life. The researchers toyed with changes at the amino acid level in some of the key proteins in the rotor and stator to see what they would do. They neutralized or reversed the charges of elements and thought they would get the motor to halt, but in some cases, it reversed direction or continued to work, but reduced the tumbling behavior and swarming of the bacteria.

Different species of bacteria have different types of flagellar motors. Some run off protons (H⁺), and some run of sodium ions (Na⁺). The sodium motors spin up to five times faster than their proton counterparts. Earlier work had shown that mutations to a certain protein MotA in the proton motors could cause failure. These researchers mutated the homologous protein PomA in the sodium motor and still got it to work, so apparently there are other unknown factors involved in torque generation in these varieties.

Scientists now have the ability to substitute individual letters in the genetic alphabet and the protein sequence and see what breaks. As in language, you can substitute some letters and still get meaning; kold for cold, for instance. Others are more damaging, like hit for hot. Some changes can create opposites, like just adding the prefix “a” turns moral into amoral. Similarly, protein sequences can tolerate some changes, but others bring the function to a halt. A key research technique these days is to watch what happens with gene substitutions. More often than not, function breaks; sometimes it continues in a weakened state or makes no difference, but never does new functionality arise.

What’s interesting in this story is the fact that these researchers have no hesitation whatsoever in calling these things motors and machines, and referring to their parts as rotors and stators. The skeptical philosopher David Hume used to contend that you could not compare living things to artificial contrivances, like watches, to support the argument from design. But now, molecular “machines” are all the rage in cell biology, and nanotechnologists are imitating nature in their engineering. The bacterial flagellum is one of the amazing examples of irreducible complexity that Michael Behe brought to the limelight in his book Darwin’s Black Box. Behe talked about the cell being made up of actual molecular machines that act just like man-made machines, only orders of magnitude smaller. As in artificial machines, the components have to be simultaneously present and fit one another, or else there is no function. The same is true in the bacterial flagellum, which is made up of at least 30 protein parts, including a rotor, stator, drive shaft, propeller and a complex ion-drive torque generator that is still poorly understood.

The protein these scientists thought was responsible for torque generation turns out to be more related to switching directions rather than torque. But again, small changes to the parts are seen to cause breakdowns: in this study, decreases in swarming behavior, but not an improved motor. It is inconceivable that this smoothly integrated system of mechanical parts could arise by small, intermediate steps, each of which would require an advantage big enough to aid survival of the whole organism. Also, as the film referred to above emphasizes, no evolutionist ever talks about the origin of the genetic instructions to build these machines. That is never addressed by opponents of the irreducible complexity argument, says Dr. Scott Minnich in the film. What we observe in fact, reminds Jonathan Wells, is “irreducible complexity all the way down.” The authors of this paper never mention evolution once, in accord with our frequent observation that evolutionary speculations are inversely proportional to the data available for analysis.

Upside Down: Family History of Brown Algae   06/24/2002
“Researcher turns brown algae phylogeny upside down,” reads the title of a press release from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. The work of Stephen Draisma of Leiden University claims that “few of the currently assumed relationships between the orders are correct. Furthermore, it transpires that some simple species arose not earlier but later than more complex species.”

The algae expert proposes classifying brown algae, which include the seaweed that washes up on beaches and the giant kelp forests off the coast of California, into 20 orders instead of the usual 13. The story was echoed on EurekAlert, the news service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Maybe textbooks should proclaim a new dogma for the genomics era: “The genomes of plants and animals reveal the devolutionary history of life on earth. Devolution is a fact.”

Martian Grand Canyon Formed by Dam Breach   06/21/2002
Evidence for a canyon bigger than earth’s Grand Canyon has been announced in the June 21 issue of Science. Apparently a large lake over a million square kilometers in size overflowed its natural dam and gouged out the gorge in short order, flowing into a large crater. For a color picture of the proposed flood scenario, see the June 27 Astronomy Picture of the Day.

They even call this an event during the “Noachian” epoch. Creationists have been saying this is how earth’s Grand Canyon formed – catastrophically, not slowly and gradually – and earth has the water to do it, but Mars today is dry. If on Mars, why not on the Water Planet?

Horseshoe Crabs Represent an Evolutionary Freeze-Frame   06/21/2002
National Geographic posted an article about the mysterious horseshoe crabs, that lay their eggs this time of year.

How long horseshoe crabs live, whether they return to the beach of their birth for spawning, why their life cycles seem directed by the moon, where they disappear to for the other 10 months of the year-all these questions remain mysteries.

Somehow, the horseshoe crab has thrived for 500 million years, and Sue Schaller wants to know why. “You’ve got an animal that predates dinosaurs by 200 million years, and it hasn’t changed much at all. It hasn’t had to evolve,’ said Schaller, a biologist who has studied Maine’s horseshoe crabs for the past three years.

Horseshoe crabs, the article explains, are not really crabs, but chelicerates, more closely related to spiders and mites and trilobites. Their mysterious mating ritual is timed to swoon under the new moon in June.

It hasn’t had to evolve is a subtle personification fallacy; did you catch it? It’s ubiquitous in Darwinspeak. Does the horseshoe crab care whether it evolves or not, or dies or not? Does Mother Earth care? Does the sea? Nobody cares; it doesn’t have to do anything. “Evolve or perish!” goes the simplistic bumper sticker, but according to naturalism, perishing is just as wonderful as surviving, because lots of species have perished, and only humans seem to give a hoot.

Horseshoe crabs are one of many living fossils. Again we must ask, if evolution is this pervasive force that gives rise to so much diversity, why would an organism like the horseshoe crab not evolve just a little bit at least during all the time that dinosaurs went from chicken-size lizards to brachiosaurs and triceratops, and then to eagles and ostriches, and shrews went from elephants to whales and bats and kittens and people? That’s a lot of time and mutations and natural selection, but horseshoe crabs still do their little moonlight fling, oblivious to all this change going on around them, and also to the three alleged meteorite catastrophes that wiped out 95% of life on earth. Maybe not only horseshoe crabs are moonstruck (def: affected by or as if by the moon; mentally unbalanced; romantically sentimental; lost in fantasy or reverie).

Rock-Throwing Preceded Tool-Making   06/21/2002
According to Nature Science Update, our early ancestors mastered the art of throwing stones before they realized they could make tools out of them. Reporting on the work of Alan Cannell, who published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the thinking is that “Our instinctive feel for the ideal projectile could explain the design of hand-grenades, the collecting habits of geologists, the size of handballs and the weight of the imperial pound,…” and “could illuminate the lives of prehistoric hominids.” Cannell found that everybody seems to prefer rocks about a half a kilogram. “We are looking for something hardwired that recognizes the ideal mass and is involved in throwing. This would show that throwing was, at some stage of our evolution, of vital importance.”

What, pray tell, does this have to do with evolution? Observation: people like to throw rocks (just watch any 10-year old kid.) Observation: people are a certain size (if people were as big as elephants, we would probably pick up bigger rocks). Does this tell us anything about ape in our ancestry? If a person did not already believe humans evolved from apes, would this article prove anything at all, other than people shouldn’t live in glass houses?

Comets Remain a Puzzle   06/21/2002
The “fading problem” of the Oort Cloud hypothesis (a severe deficit in the number of comets observed in short-period orbits like that of comet Halley) is addressed in a paper by Levison et al in the June 21 Science. They believe that based on the unexpected distribution, the majority of comets must disrupt, but that raises the question of why a body would disrupt, when only exposed to the solar wind, and also where does the mass go.

On June 28, Sky and Telescope posted a report on this story, “The case of the missing comets.” In a Perspective piece in the same issue of Science, Mark E. Bailey leaves the problems unresolved: “At present, comets remain a puzzle: They have to be both strong and weak, and there seems to be a substantial missing mass. Does this provide a clue to the origin of cometary material?”

Maybe, if one is open-minded enough to question the long ages of comets.

Students are taught the glib generality of the Oort Cloud hypothesis on TV programs and student astronomy books illustrated by artists, but few are ever exposed to the weaknesses of the theory. And there are weaknesses—severe ones—as this story reveals. Maybe comets haven’t been around for 4.5 billion years. Bailey reveals why this explanation is not preferred: “Could the steady-state assumption be mistaken? This would put us in the uncomfortable position of living at a special epoch, perhaps within a few million years of the start of a comet shower, with all sorts of attendant repercussions…”  but this is merely a philosophical bias. We think students should be told the points for an against a popular theory. It might stimulate them to go into science to explore mysteries like this.

Biblical creationists don’t have this comet problem, because they don’t accept the long ages that are spoon-fed to the public for unquestioning acceptance. For a controversial but detailed alternative view, see the theory for the origin of comets by Dr. Walter T. Brown, and judge for yourself whether Oort or Brown can handle the data and the anomalies.