Archive: Robots, Hubble, Proteins, Cell Motor, Arctic, More

Here are some of our entries from our First Anniversary year 23 years ago. These were lost during a website upgrade but reposted here.

Note: Some of the embedded links may no longer work.

Humans Are Causing Rapid Evolution  09/07/2001
By using antibiotics, humans are speeding up the evolution of resistant bacteria, claims Stephen Palumbi, a Harvard biologist, reports New Scientist. He claims that HIV evolves so rapidly it forms a new quasi-species in each person it infects. He says, “In the US more than half the people don’t believe in evolution. We have to train people about it – we can’t afford not to.”

Well, how is that for a non-sequitur? Palumbi needs to talk to Chris Adami, who recently stated there is no evidence whatsoever that HIV is evolving. The evolution of resistance is a myth. The resistant strains were already there; they are just brought to the forefront when the unresistant strains are destroyed. Also, resistance involves a net loss of information, not upward evolution. James Perloff says it’s like sending the cops to handcuff a man, only to find he has no arms, so he is “resistant” to arrest.

Robot Makers Envy the Octopus  09/07/2001
The lowly octopus is not so lowly in terms of engineering. Human robots are limited by joints, “But octopus arms can adopt a virtually infinite number of positions. Each tentacle contains 50 million nerves, of which around 40,000 are connected to muscles. As only a few nerves run from each tentacle to the animal’s brain, however, biologists have puzzled over how the movement of one such arm – let alone eight – is coordinated,” states a news story in Nature Science Update. Biologists have found that the brain doesn’t need to operate all eight arms; the octopus nervous system uses distributed processing to allow the arms to function autonomously. This might give engineers a lead on how to simulate this weird animal’s capabilities; maybe someday we will have octobots.

Human engineering is just a crude copy of what God has already masterfully demonstrated.

Hubble Shoots a Starburst Galaxy  09/06/2001
The Hubble Space Telescope has taken another awesome photo of a face-on spiral galaxy, NGC 3310 known as a starburst galaxy. Astronomers infer that the period of prodigious star formation apparently lasted longer than expected, 100 million years, rather than being a brief episode as was previously thought.

It’s always important to separate the data from the conclusions. The data are the colors of the stars. The way these colors fit on a graph of color (temperature) vs. brightness (magnitude) leads to speculations about how old the stars are. The age estimates and the stories built on them are inferences, not facts. There is so much we don’t know, it is likely big upsets in understanding are just around the corner. But in the meantime, everyone can enjoy the beauty of these cosmic pinwheels brought home to us by the sharpest eyes in space.

Sun Created Short-Lived Isotopes  09/06/2001
Planetary scientists have long been mystified about how certain short-lived isotopes formed in meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites. According to theory, the sun would not have had the energy to form them. Now, astronomers at Penn State using data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have detected flare levels hundreds of thousands of times brighter than expected in sunlike stars in the Orion nebula. If our sun had experienced a similar flaring tantrum in its early years, they surmise, the energy could have been sufficient to form these short-lived isotopes.

Seems like a mighty big hammer for pounding a small nail; hundreds of thousands of times bigger flares in the past? What other effects on earth and the solar system would these flares have produced? Have they thought this one through?

In another Chandra Observatory story, the big telescope is putting constraints on dark matter theories. See our June 30 headline on dark matter.

Protein Hunters Search for Order in Chaos  09/06/2001
Like searching for lucky numbers in an intergalactic lottery, Swiss biochemists are trying to explore a nearly infinite array of possible combinations of amino acid chains to find functional catalysts. (For background information on proteins and amino acids, check the links on this NASA site.)  The paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes the sequence space (that is, the set of all possible combinations) as 1.3 x 10¹³⁰ – a value so huge, the mass of the earth, if all composed of polypeptide chains, would amount to a tiny fraction of this number. The authors concede that trying to find a useful protein or catalyst out of random chains of amino acids would be “impractical,” like searching for a needle in uncountable myriads of haystacks. Yet trying to build functional proteins by design is also exceedingly difficult, since “Misplacement of catalytic residues by even a few tenths of an angstrom [i.e., 10^-10 m] can mean the difference between full activity and none at all.”

In their experiments, the authors gained limited success by starting with a subset of eight amino acids instead of the 20 used by living cells, and biasing their randomized search toward chains with helical shape. While offering a timid suggestion that proteins might have evolved from precursors made up of small chains of polar and nonpolar amino acids, they immediately admit that “There is, nevertheless, a low probability of finding catalysts, even when both position and identity of all critical active site residues are determined in advance.

This finding contrasts with the ease of obtaining folded helical proteins through binary patterning, underscoring the exacting demands that catalysis places on protein design.” They mention that RNA chains with a little catalytic activity can be found in 1 in 10 trillion chains, but protein catalysts are extremely more rare. The authors suggest an approach to building new protein catalysts: “By iteratively combining combinatorial mutagenesis and selection with intelligent design, it may also prove possible to create novel protein scaffolds, unknown in nature, and to endow them with tailored catalytic activities.”

Did you hear the words intelligent design? The authors do their best to pay tribute to evolution, but are forced by the facts of nature to admit that proteins are extremely improbable. Their partial success is due to investigator interference, using their intelligence to guide processes against their natural tendencies.

This paper is important for two reasons. It proves that proteins, of which life is primarily composed, are not just random chains of amino acids, but highly specialized, intricately crafted arrangements that are tremendously rare in nature. It also bears on the thesis of the book Evolution: Possible or Impossible? by James F. Coppedge (available online at this site) that useful proteins would never spontaneously assemble by chance. To calculate the probability of evolving a useful protein, Dr. Coppedge used a working assumption that the number of functional proteins among all possible chains of amino acids is analogous to the number of useful words among random letters of the alphabet. It appears this assumption was much too generous toward evolution. According to this paper, the number of useful proteins out of the sea of possibilities is so miniscule, it makes Coppedge’s conclusion (that chemical evolution is mathematically impossible to a mind-boggling degree) a huge understatement.

It is hard to see how the theory of chemical evolution will survive for much longer. Someday soon it may well be viewed in hindsight as one of the most ridiculous notions ever espoused by intelligent scientists.

ATP synthase is a rotary motor that generates 3 ATP per revolution.

Scientists Marvel at Miniature Motor in All Life  09/05/2001
Nature Molecular Cell Biology reviews a book on ATP Synthase, the world’s tiniest motor, entitled appropriately, “ATP Synthase: A Marvellous Rotary Engine of the Cell.” The review mentions some of the wonders of this tiny motor: it runs on protons, it is ubiquitous in all life forms, it is composed of a complex of large proteins, it generates ATP (the energy currency of all life processes, and is reversible: ATP fuel can run it backwards to generate protons. Click “Slide Show” on the Table of Contents page for an illustration.

Everyone should know about these amazing motors that are sustaining your body right now. There is no way these intricately crafted machines could have created themselves by slow, gradual processes. Due to popular demand, we’ll provide the link again to a German website that has a fascinating animation of how ATP synthase works. Download “Animation 2” and stare in amazement: http://www.biologie.uni-osnabrueck.de/biophysik/junge/overheads.html; click on “Rotary ATP Synthase”. See also our March 9, January 23 and October 26 stories on ATP synthase for links to additional information and illustrations.

Early Man Braved Arctic Sooner Than Expected  09/04/2001
Norwegian anthropologists were shocked to find evidence of modern humans inhabiting the Arctic 20,000 years earlier than previously believed. This is just a few thousand years after their appearance in Europe, according to Nature Science Update. They’re trying to determine if these artifacts are modern human or Neandertal. If the latter, being able to survive the Arctic would show “they were not a load of numbskulls.”

Who are the numbskulls here? Evolutionists’ whole scenario about early man seems utterly implausible. Can you imagine people, with all their curiosity, ingenuity and mobility, taking even 100 years to explore and colonize the unknown regions of the planet? Yet they want us to think it took tens of thousands of years to work up the curiosity to look for better hunting grounds up north (see also our January 19 story about early man and horseback riding). The radiocarbon dates are based on unproveable assumptions about equilibrium concentrations of C₁₄ in the atmosphere, and are unreliable.

The Biblical scenario fits the evidence better, both in terms of population dynamics and knowledge of man’s nature: curious people moved throughout the world after the Flood and Tower of Babel. Some groups interbred, producing exaggerated features (which could also have been influenced by diet, climate, and disease). Their lifestyles varied according to their tastes and the demands of the environment, but they all manifested the unique characteristics of humanness.  

Physicists Untangle Mysteries of Water  09/04/2001
“One molecule at a time,” scientists are figuring out how water works. Scientists at UC Berkeley, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have used laser spectra to examine “water clusters” or groups of water molecules whose hydrogen bonds form in complex arrangements, to glimpse into the mysterious ways water manifests its unique properties.

Take a look at this paper just to see how a substance as simple as water can be complex and mysterious. Look through our other links on water for previous headlines about this wonderful liquid that sustains all life and makes our planet so extraordinary.

Human Brain Differs From Ape Brain  09/04/2001
Researchers at Medical College of Georgia have detected differences in neuron patterns between apes and humans in part of the brain related to language. They claim these differences show that it is not just brain size, but brain wiring that gives humans their capacity for communication.

Interesting, but you cannot reduce the soul to a wiring diagram. Their study focused on just one tiny “minicolumn” of 80-100 neurons in the vast array of brain topology. The article’s claim that humans and chimpanzees share 99% of their DNA is also unsupportable, since the human genome is still under review and the chimpanzee genome has never been mapped. Christians expect the brains of humans and apes to be different. Apes do not write poetry, worship God, make music, bury their dead, or build spaceships. That is more than a 1% difference, and it is a difference not reducible to purely physical terms like brain size and wiring.