Archive: Plant Email, Aliens, Sex, Sandstone, More

Here’s a collection of short articles published by CEH in July 2001.

When we started 23 years ago, our articles were short, but have generally grown in length and detail. Which do you prefer? Short, long, or a mix of both?

Plants Talk to Themselves in Email  07/13/2001
How does one part of a plant know that another part is under attack, or how do the roots know the weather is changing and affecting the leaves According to Nature, plants have a busy system of email messages spreading the news. Scientists have discovered messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules travelling from cell to cell and onto their own little Internet (the phloem), that apparently let one part of the plant know what’s going on in another part.

Look at the nearest plant and stare at it for awhile. It seems to static and motionless; did you have any idea this beehive of communication was going on? Now look at a rock for comparison. Evolutionists have to get from one to the other; it’s like believing a desolate planet, pockmarked with craters and exposed to deadly radiation, somehow spontaneously developed its own Internet.

Embryos Grown for Stem Cell Farming  07/12/2001
For the first time, according to New Scientist, embryos have been created and destroyed for the purpose of harvesting stem cells. Sperm and eggs from donors were fertilized for the purpose at the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, Virginia. For more on the debate, read this BBC News article.

This sounds so harmless to so many people, but the ethical questions are very serious. What is the difference between this and playing with any other human being that is not “really alive.” Will we eventually have farms of specially grown brain-dead people to experiment on or harvest organs? When man plays God, does he have the righteousness to restrain his omnipotence?

Astrobiologists Discuss the Societal Impact of Finding Aliens  07/12/2001
Lee Steigel, writing for NASA’s Astrobiology Institute , speculates on the societal impact of finding aliens in “The Meaning of Life.” He interviews various thinkers who believe such a find would generate a new renaissance in human knowledge, and fundamentally change the way we look at life and the universe. One of the interviewees, Steven J. Dick of the U.S. Naval Observatory speculates on the impact on religious belief:

If extraterrestrial life is found and “if humanity is not the center of attention of a deity, what does that do to various theologies and religions?” Dick asks. “If it is Christianity, for example, [what does it mean for] the doctrines of redemption and incarnation? Would Christ have to die on other worlds for their sins the way he did here? . . . For Eastern religions, where you don’t have the idea of salvation or a single deity, it would be quite different.”

Why is Christianity always the target of these speculations, but Eastern religions come out smelling like a rose? You get the impression from some SETI people that they would love to find aliens just to hammer the last nail (in their thinking) in the coffin of New Testament theology. But would it? There is nothing in Christian thought to prohibit a universe filled with sentient beings; see the science fiction trilogy by C. S. Lewis, for instance. The Protestant Christian astronomer Johannes Kepler didn’t hesitate to speculate freely about beings on other planets just because he was a Christian. The New Testament is earth centric in its focus, but says nothing for or against other creatures an omnipotent God could have created. Despite centuries of speculation, and decades of listening for signals, it remains true for now that there is no evidence of other life in space, even bacteria. Evolutionists are understandably very uncomfortable with that hole in their data.

Gene for Hardwood Evolution Identified  07/11/2001
Researchers in Michigan have isolated a gene that produces a type of lignin unique to angiosperms, claims a report in EurekAlert. “We thought it didn’t make sense for plants to evolve new proteins and still use the old gene,” Chiang said. “Our discovery of a syringyl-specific gene overturns that traditional model; it’s been very exciting.” They also claim two features of syringyl lignin confer an evolutionary advantage: structural support and resistance to disease.

All they did was put this gene into a bacterium and grow angiosperm lignin. The raw data saw nothing about the evolution of hardwoods or angiosperms, which to Darwinists is still an “abominable mystery” as Darwin put it. Although they claim that “At least a part of that mystery may now be solved,” it does nothing of the kind. So angiosperms have a second gene for lignin. So what? There is no gradual chain of transitional forms between them. What is to demonstrate that either one evolved from the other, unless you already have a preconceived notion of their evolution? 

Both gymnosperms and angiosperms represent diverse and highly complex organisms that use photosynthesis, ATP, DNA code, and a host of other irreducibly complex structures that defy Darwinian explanation. The experimental data here do not support the conclusions. Some day when the myth of Darwinism is no longer assumed a priori, these kinds of just-so stories will be seen for the fallacies they are. 

Computer Simulates the Origin of Sex  07/11/2001
Space.Com News has a light-hearted account of two Caltech/JPL scientists who created digital organisms in their computers to simulate the origin of sex, “one of biology’s greatest mysteries,” since life seemed to get along fine without it. What mutations and selection pressures could account for such a radical change? The article summarizes the findings, saying, “Comet or asteroid impacts could have stressed asexual organisms enough to send them down the path of sexual reproduction after forcing a flurry of genetic mutations, the study shows. Heavy doses of radiation might also have done the trick.”

An evolutionary geneticist from Wake Forest University has doubts about the technique, however: “Since the idea came from a study of digital organisms and not from any historical evidence that such stresses actually acted on living organisms, or that they would have had the effect of selecting for sex, I think it’s highly speculative.” One of the authors of the study is confident the computer simulation would also work in real life experiments, but he can’t do them – it would take too long.

Your Baloney Detector will get high readings on this one. Have a good laugh. If you like your baloney served in a intellectual bun with jargon sauce, read the original paper in the Royal Society Biological Proceedings B for 7/22/01, where you will find words like “digital organisms in silico” (i.e., imaginary creatures in the computer!).

Utah Sandstone Formed by Jurassic Monsoons  07/11/2001

The Wave: Navajo sandstone, Arizona, by David Coppedge

Geologists from the University of Nebraska claim to have found evidence of monsoon rains in Navajo Sandstone deposits, common in southern Utah. According to the report in SciNews, heavy rains falling on sand dunes created characteristic patterns in the deposits, which can total more than 2,000 feet in thickness. The rain evidence, however, they find in only the bottom layers, but David Loope claims “an amazing amount of detail is recorded in these cliffs and we can tell how far the dunes moved each year, and tell that the dominant wind was in the winter.”

The ruddy Navajo Sandstone provides some of the most dramatic scenery in the southwest.  The layers are so thick and so widespread, it is hard to imagine any uniformitarian processes producing them. Nothing in these findings preclude huge floods depositing the Navajo Sandstone; in fact, they seem to support it. Why would you have annual monsoon rains occurring each year in a vast desert of sand? Other alleged dune deposits like the Coconino Sandstone in the Grand Canyon, which also show widespread evidence of crossbedding, have been explained by Dr. Steve Austin at ICR as the result of waves from strong currents under deep water.

Haeckel Fraud Criticized  07/10/2001
The July issue of WorldNet Daily is devoted to the subject: “Evolution: The Complex and Profound Basis of All Life, or a Fairy Tale for Scientists Who Reject God?” The online magazine includes this expose of Haeckel’s embryos as one of the “worst cases of scientific fraud; It’s shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading.  It makes me angry . . . . What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development.  They don’t . . . . These are fakes.” So said Dr. Michael Richardson to the Times of London in 1997, after organizing a team to re-photograph embryos and compare them with Haeckel’s drawings. Many textbooks, however, still reprint the drawings as evidence of evolution.

How much evidence of evolution is based on fraud or misrepresentation? If you look at the ten most-cited evidences, including homology, the horse series, Darwin’s finches, peppered moths, the ape-man series, Haeckel’s embryos and more – you find every one of them evaporating under scrutiny. For a complete analysis of all ten, read Jonathan Wells’ recent book Icons of Evolution. The Huntington Library’s recent exhibit on Darwin still featured both the peppered moths and Darwin’s finches without providing any information that the evidence was not favorable to evolution.

Another Antimatter Asymmetry Found  07/10/2001
News sources like the BBC are reporting that Stanford physicists have found another imbalance in matter-antimatter pair production, and expect to find others. A rarely observed asymmetry called charge-parity violation was previously only seen in the K-meson and its antiparticle (see our previous headline on this). Now, Stanford physicists have confirmed CP violation in the heavier B-meson. Physicists and cosmologists hope these observations might help account for the preponderance of regular matter in the universe. A physicist at CERN (Switzerland) commented, “The standard [big bang] model cannot produce enough CP violation to explain the total dominance of matter in the universe.”

The antimatter problem has been one of the puzzles of Big Bang cosmology. If there were a big bang, there should have been equal quantities of matter and antimatter produced, which would have annihilated one another. Physicists must believe that a tiny asymmetry existed, and that most of the material universe was annihilated, but this tiny leftover fraction of regular matter became our universe.  Is that credible? 

Proteins Evolve in Fits and Starts  07/09/2001
A paper in the Journal of Molecular Evolution reported in Nature Science Update disputes the conventional view that proteins evolve steadily over long ages, regardless of environmental pressures (neutral evolution). Michael Wallis of the University of Sussex in the U.K. studied growth hormone in various animals and concluded that the protein did not evolve at all for long periods, then had bursts of change. Quote:

“There’s an enormous mass of conventional ideas that the rate of protein evolution is relatively constant, but from what I’ve seen that isn’t the case,” says Wallis.  The constant rate of protein evolution is “part of the dogma” of molecular biology, agrees Rodney Honeycutt, who studies molecular evolution at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Did you notice their own use of the word dogma? Here again is evidence against slow, gradual Darwin-style evolution. It is analogous to the theory of punctuated equilibria that Niles, Eldredge and Gould promoted as a way to explain away the gaps in the fossil record. Even so, this new story has built-in assumptions of evolution, so it is like one fairy tale finding fault with another. Somewhere hidden in the storytelling is a little bit of raw data.

Clones Express Genes Differently  07/06/2001
Why do so many cloned embryos die before birth? Why do the ones that survive have abnormalities? According to scientists at MIT reported by Scientific American News, it’s because clones express genes differently than the donor; i.e., even though the donor and the clone have identical DNA, they do not activate the same genes in the same way. Apparently there are “epigenetic” factors at work, influences other than the coded language of life. These include enzyme tags on genes that affect their expression. Embryonic stem cells with nuclei from donors can have different tags that cause them to develop in wildly different ways, producing chimeras (monsters), abnormally large offspring, or survivors that while appearing outwardly normal have hidden abnormalities that can lead to problems later.

The statement that the DNA is the master molecule that accounts for everything in life may be too simplistic. What are all the epigenetic factors that influence development? Are any of them heritable? How do cells know which genes to express in which part of the body, even though the entire code is present? We don’t know, but the science of cloning is showing just how complex a process development is, and the ramifications have ethical and political overtones.