Archive: Fungi, Dinosaurs, Octopus, Appendix, JPL, More
A broad variety of stories have been published at CEH for 23 years. Look back at to August 2001.
Note: Some embedded links may no longer work.
Plants and Fungi Related, Maybe 08/30/2001
A paper by two Belgian researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences strives to sort out genetic markers between plants, fungi, slime molds and metazoa and determine their evolutionary phylogenies (relationships). They make a tentative, albeit weak, association that plants and fungi are separate from the metazoa, contradicting earlier studies.
In a related paper, biologists at Arizona State say that evolutionary geneticists need to look at longer sequences.
What slippery claims these are. They are full of excuses for why the genetic data do not show evolution. By tweaking the parameters, and excluding the data that don’t fit their heuristic (hunch) approach, they make a tentative root of the evolutionary tree that doesn’t fit other researchers’ conclusions. Creationists can have a field day reading papers like these for fumbling statements and excuses. Hopes for finding evolutionary relationships in the genes have crumbled.
Velociraptors Tame as Ducks? 08/30/2001
Soft parts of the beaks of ornithomimids, members of the same group as Velociraptor and T. Rex, show structures similar to the filter-feeding lamellae in modern ducks, reports Scientific American. Two specimens, one from China and another from Canada, were well preserved enough to detect the keratin material which suggests these creatures strained their food from water like some modern waterfowl. “While we can’t definitively say that their feeding behavior was just like that of ducks, it is unlikely that the delicate features of their beaks were used for eating large animals.”
The propaganda damage has already been done in three Jurassic Park movies. Maybe they should do a remake, with kids standing at the shore of a pond in a local park, throwing seeds to the cute velociraptors.
Shape-Shifting Octopus Masters Mimicry 08/30/2001
A striped octopus found off the coast of Indonesia should get an Academy Award. It can imitate a lionfish, a sea snake, and a flatfish. It may even have other roles in its repertoire, like a sand anemone, stingray or crocodile snake eel. For summary and pictures of this unusual actor, see Science Now.
Isn’t natural selection wonderful. For more on problems with mimicry and evolution, click here or here.
Human Appendix Not Vestigial 08/30/2001
In an “Ask the Experts” column on the website of Scientific American, wildlife veterinarian Julie Pomerantz tackles the question, “Does the appendix serve a purpose in any animal?” She describes which mammals have and do not have the organ, and admits that though its entire function is not well understood, the appendix is involved in the body’s ability to recognize foreign antigens in ingested material. “Thus, although scientists have long discounted the human appendix as a vestigial organ, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that appendix does in fact have a significant function as a part of the body’s immune system. The appendix may be particularly important early in life because it achieves its greatest development shortly after birth and then regresses with age . . . . The immune response mediated by the appendix may also relate to such inflammatory conditions as ulcerative colitis.”
Yes, the appendix had a vestigial function: as a propaganda tool for evolution. The appendix was one of over a hundred such organs Darwinists portrayed as useless leftovers from our evolutionary past. The list included the thymus gland, pineal gland, pituitary gland, the coccyx, tonsils and many other organs whose functions have subsequently been discovered, and in some cases have been shown to be vital for life and health. This illustrates how evolutionary thinking can actually inhibit scientific research. Instead of cutting out every kid’s tonsils as useless vestiges of their animal ancestry, as was common in the 1960s, why not approach them as designed organs, and see what they are there for?
Roaring Evolved Into Speech 08/29/2001
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. This evolved from male grunting to scare off rivals, according to a Harvard professor, as reported in New Scientist. In humans, the larynx descends after childhood and is critical in the development of speech ability. But now, Tecumseh Fitch and a French colleague have found a descended larynx in red deer and fallow deer, used not for speech but for intimidating rivals. They speculate that this may have been how human speech started.
Good grief. What more can be said about evolutionary storytelling like this? Language expert Steven Pinker commented, “Deer and humans are so different in behaviour that inferring a similar evolutionary history is a stretch.”
Permian Extinction Asteroid Claimed 08/29/2001
Asteroids are becoming the favored whipping boy for deaths of millions of creatures. Many attribute the death of the dinosaurs to an impact at the end of the Triassic, and now Chinese scientists examining layers for sulfur theorize a large impact in the ocean at the end of the Permian may have “prompted a massive release of sulfur from the earth’s mantle to the ocean-atmosphere system, which in turn led to oxygen consumption and strong acid rain,” according to Scientific American.
Evolutionists don’t have to have much in the way of data, they just need to be able to tell a good whopper.
Germs Do Not Evolve Drug Resistance 08/28/2001
Exclusive In a noontime talk at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr. Chris Adami, Caltech physicist specializing in thermodynamics, nuclear physics and information theory, presented his strategy of “Using Molecular Evolution and Information Theory to Improve Drug Design.”An integral part of his presentation concerned how viruses develop resistance to drugs. Apparently, resistance mutations do not give rise to new, improved forms, but were already there as part of an ensemble of varieties that, collectively, can be thought of as a “quasi-species” (using the term coined by Manfred Eigen in 1971). Each member of the ensemble can give rise to the others, so attacking one member with a designer drug will not be effective for long. Instead, Adami proposed measuring the entropy of the ensemble, and through an iterative process, designing drugs that share the same entropy, and thus have overlapping information, so that the drug attacks the entire ensemble.
If true, this undermines a common argument of Darwinists that evolution is as commonplace as the emergence of drug-resistant germs by mutation and natural selection. If all the mutant forms already existed, (actually, polymorphisms is a more accurate term, since mutation suggests detrimental change), forming a stable “neutral network” of fit members (i.e., individuals able to reproduce), then there is no evolution.
Dr. Adami showed diagrams of fitness landscapes, like a map of hills and valleys, describing how organisms can be on narrow or broad peaks where their fitness is high enough to allow them to reproduce. (Organisms in valleys with low fitness would, by definition, die out). Higher organisms have low mutation rates because of their error-correction mechanisms during DNA transcription; these tend to occupy narrow, high fitness peaks. Viruses, without the error-correction mechanisms, mutate more rapidly and occupy low, broad fitness peaks, where they form a network (quasi-species) of equally-fit varieties (polymorphisms). This means that any evolution would require moving off a stable peak and losing fitness before rising to a higher peak. Clearly, natural selection would resist such a move.
Dr. Adami’s presentation focused on designing drugs to fight HIV. He said there is no evidence whatsoever that HIV is evolving. He showed diagrams that indicated almost all the variations in amino acid sequence of HIV protease, one of the key proteins in HIV, are on high-entropy loci (i.e., not on the active sites) that do not bear on fitness. He also compared Transfer RNA sequences between vastly different organisms and found that their “entropic profile” was conserved. This means that, while variations exist, there is no evidence for an increase in tRNA fitness over alleged millions of years of evolution.
(Disclaimer: This report does not imply Dr. Adami, an evolutionist and theorist on Artificial Life and Self-Organizing Systems, doubts evolution, or that he considers viruses to be living organisms.)
SETI: Nobody @Home So Far 08/28/2001
Space.Com reports that the seti@home project has caught 17 suspect signals, but each one so far has been downgraded to radio interference. Seti@home allows volunteers to crunch the numbers on their home PCs, sifting through radio telescope data in a world-wide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is continuing its search for habitable planets among the stars.
They’ve got a perpetual program going. You can’t prove a universal negative, so the SETI people can run these efforts for a thousand years and still say they haven’t checked enough haystacks for the needle yet. Meanwhile, a message is beeping right inside them: the DNA code.
You, too, can join SETO@home, the search for eternal transcendent omniscience: read the Bible.
Brain Can Withstand Reduced Workforce 08/28/2001
When one half of the brain is out on sick leave, the other half can take up the slack, and even work harder, says Nature Science Update. Boston University researchers found ways to numb one side of the brain of patients, and found that while sensing objects the numb half was impaired, the other half actually showed increased performance. “It’s challenging to think that all these brain regions could be working for themselves,” said Vincent Walsh of the university of Oxford. He believes this study suggests that “by snuffing each other out, brain regions may concentrate our attention on the most important of many competing stimuli,” the report states. “Competition seems to be present at every level in the brain.”
Redundant systems and fail-safe backup mechanisms contradict the principle of natural selection, which would weed out the damaged and unfit and only allow the fittest to survive and reproduce. Walsh claims that brain research has gotten rid of the idea of the homunculus or the little man operating the machine, “but we still think that the brain is there to do something for us.” The “us” are our souls, which cannot be reduced to mechanical devices.
Proteins Work Better Wet 08/27/2001
Dry proteins are useless, says a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the longest-running scientific journal in the world. In the August 2001 special issue devoted to properties of water, the paper by Goodfellow and colleagues examines the interactions of water molecules with proteins, and find that they have many important relationships. Water molecules not only adhere to the exterior surfaces, but also line the grooves and cavities inside proteins; “the presence of solvent affects the flexibility, stability, and dynamics of proteins and hence their function.” Of particular interest is the role of water in protein folding, the “holy grail” of many biologists. Unless proteins fold accurately, they become useless or harmful, leading in some cases to serious disease: “In at least 16 families of proteins, misfolding may lead to the formation of amyloid fibers with disastrous consequences.”
Miracles never cease. These are life-and-death tightropes at the atomic level that Darwin never dreamed of. See also our May 3 and January 30 stories on this subject.
T. Rex Died of Hunger? 08/24/2001
Either there wasn’t enough for them to eat, or they had denser bones that fossilized better, says Jack Horner about new Tyrannosaurex rex specimens he has been excavating in Hell Creek, Montana, in a write-up by Discovery Channel Online. In a dig partially funded by Universal Studios (creators of the Jurassic Park movies), Horner says he is “totally puzzled” by the shortage of prey skeletons found in the area, wondering how the eight T. Rex specimens found so far had enough to eat.
Horner is a heretic among dino paleontologists who, when asked if there is evidence that T. Rex was the fierce hunter portrayed in the movies, answers “none whatsoever” and calls such portrayals bad science, according to Dinosaur Magazine. If T. Rex stubbed her toe and fell over, her tiny arms could not have broken her fall, and the impact could have broken her bones and proved fatal. Horner believes T. Rex was a slow, clumsy oaf given to scavenging on other predator’s work. Sorry to spoil your moviegoing. Wonder if Universal will pull the funds.
Astrobiologists Testify to Congress 08/23/2001
NASA astrobiologists made presentations July 12 to the House of Representatives at hearings on Life in the Universe. The Astrobiology Institute has now published this testimony on its website, along with a summary of current understanding of life from testimony by NASA astrobiologist Jack D. Farmer (University of Arizona).
The usual astrobiology fare. No mention of whether the congressmen were impressed.
High Resolution Image Reveals Mysteries on Callisto 08/23/2001
A field of knobby spires of ice and dust, 300 feet tall and lined up like soldiers, is what the Galileo Spacecraft saw on May 25 as it flew 86 miles above the surface of Callisto, the outermost large satellite of Jupiter, on its closest encounter of the mission. “We haven’t seen terrain like this before. It looks like erosion is still going on, which is pretty surprising,” considering it should be a geologically dead world. Now, scientists are eagerly examining the incoming data from the inner moon Io, the most volcanically active moon in the solar system, which Galileo flew by on August 6. At 126 miles, it may have flown through the plume of Tvashtar Catena, a volcano that was active seven months ago, but preliminary results are uncertain. Also, unlike the other moons, Io does not appear to have a magnetic field.
We hope readers enjoy the excitement of new discoveries on these bizarre worlds first seen as points of light by Galileo Galilei in 1610 through his crude telescope. Now, we are there! There’s more to come from the Io flyby as the data is still trickling in for analysis (slowly, due to Galileo’s failed main antenna). Over and over, scientists have been surprised and stumped by the processes occurring on these moons, that after billions of years should be dead and dormant, but are clearly not. Interesting sidelight: Project Manager Eileen Theilig is a Christian and an active member of her church.