Archive: Wise Men, Aquaporins, Horses, Plate Tectonics, Phylogeny, More

Here are some of the stories we were reporting before Christmas in 2001, restored from archives.

Note: some embedded links may no longer work.

New Method for Studying Evolution Found   12/20/2001
The Stanford press release begins: “Evolutionary biology has always faced a major hurdle – how to test a process that takes place over thousands, if not millions, of years. Researchers at Stanford University may have come up with a solution.” And what is it?  Studying stickleback fish. David Kingsley wanted two populations that had diverged recently yet could still cross-breed, so he could map their genetics and determine whether evolution occurs through small or large jumps. In a paper in Nature this week, he begins by saying, “The genetic and molecular basis of morphological evolution is poorly understood, particularly in vertebrates.” Then he proposes the stickleback as a good field-testing candidate.

Dr. Kingsley, they are just fish. They are just stickleback fish. The size and color of scales and fins signifies nothing. Call back when you evolve them into giraffes.

Did you catch the admission that after all these years they still don’t understand the mechanism of evolution? It shouldn’t take millions of years to figure it out; they’ve been breeding thousands of generations of fruit flies and bacteria in the lab for decades (with no new kind of organism coming out of the test tube). If evolution is supposed to be such a universal life principle, the same mechanism should work for vertebrates.

This paper sounds like another empty promise. Darwin did his wishful thinking in 1859, and here we are in 2001 with evolution still poorly understood (but you students had better believe it).

Article 12/20/2001: In the latest Creation magazine (Dec 2001), Carl Wieland in an article entitled “Fouling the Nest: Christianity and the Environment” discusses the complex issues of global warming, species preservation, animal rights, and more aspects of environmentalism, seeking to strike a balanced Christian perspective.

The next day, Nature Science Update posted an article on the enigma of man’s impact on the environment. Despite what the news reports, and what the United Nations leaders decide, it’s not so clear cut what is happening: “Environmental even keel or global crisis – no one knows.”

Christmas Star an Astrology Cover-Up?   12/20/2001
Michael Molnar, an American astronomer, thinks early Christians covered up the astrological roots of the Christmas star story because it seemed pagan, reports EurekAlert based on a story in New Scientist. He bases his conspiracy theory on a fourth-century manuscript by a converted Roman astrologer named Firmicus Maternus, who describes a double eclipse of Jupiter in 6 BC as a sign of the birth of a great king. Molnar believes Maternus did not mention Jesus’ name for fear of angering Christian leaders at a time when they despised pagan beliefs.

Conspiracy theories make for good press, but this is one is pretty weak. Matthew was much closer to the events than Maternus, and walked with Jesus for three years as a disciple; why shouldn’s his clear account, written within a few decades, be given more credence than a veiled reference by an obscure astrologer hundreds of years after the events took place?

Besides, it is not improbable that the Magi, living in a culture that accepted astrology as a given, would have been products of their time to some degree. Seeing an unusual star (possibly foretold by the prophet Daniel), they could have come without completely understanding the significance of the Christ child. If even the disciples following Jesus around for three years did not grasp the nature of His kingdom, we cannot expect the Magi to have fully understood what He would do, as they presented to Him their royal gifts. But they “rejoiced with exceeding great joy” when they saw the star, having at least a profound sense that something momentous was happening. Matthew’s description does not fit a conjunction, comet, supernova, meteor, or any other known natural phenomenon, though planetarium directors this time of year like to speculate. It was a one-time sign from God.

The Star of Bethlehem in no way promotes astrology; pagans were looking at the stars anyway, so the Creator of the stars upset their expectations by giving them a star like no other, that moved and stood over where the child lay, as if to say, “You want a sign? Here’s a sign– my beloved Son: learn from Him!” God led them from natural revelation (the star) to special revelation: messages from angels and the sight of His own Son. This is the message of the gospel, leading people of all nations from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God (Acts 26:18). “For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people; for unto is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord” (Luke 2).

Wonders of the Water Gate   12/20/2001
The Dec. 20 issue of Nature has a detailed description, with diagrams, of one of the water gates inside you (and all living things): AQP1, one of the aquaporins, the superfamily of complex proteins in cell membranes that transport water into the cell interior. There are ten families of these water channels. In this paper, Berkeley scientists achieve the highest yet resolution (2.2 Angstroms) of the structure of AQP1, and show it to be a highly-organized, specifically shaped and sized pore with inner and outer vestibules, between which is a constriction region with a “selectivity filter” that lets water in but not anything else.

The complexity of life continues to boggle the mind. Although this paper is difficult for laymen to read because of the technical jargon, the gist of it is clear: AQP1 is an elaborately designed security gate. Nebuchadnezzar or the Pentagon never had anything so marvelous. You would think water transport into a cell would be simple, that it might just leak across by osmosis, but no! The cell has to carefully regulate how much water comes in or goes out, and has to regulate every other substance – salts, ions, nutrients – very carefully, usually against the concentration gradient (i.e., contrary to what would happen naturally, by osmosis). This is called active transport. A cell has to be able to take in scarce water while its surroundings are drying up. How? This article opens a window into the answer, and it is wondrous.

It can best be approximated by analogies: think of an automated turnstile that whisks you through the eye of the needle if you pass authentication, but blows you away if you are an alien. Think of a multi-tier security check that reads your badge electronically at Stage 1 then checks your fingerprint at Stage 2, then transports you through an isolation gate so narrow you have to inhale as you pass single file. Think of a club with an outer bouncer that won’t even let you near the door if you don’t belong, but grabs your hand and pulls you in if you are a member. Think of all these systems, yet completely automated, and you start to get a picture of AQP1.

To be able to do all this, AQP1 has to be composed of thousands of atoms, composing hundreds of amino acids, all left handed and precisely ordered; even the substitution of a single amino acid at the “selectivity filter” would alter the security checks and let aliens in. (The authors describe another channel in bacteria that, with a difference of one or two elements, allows glycerol through.) The channel is composed of four complex proteins arranged into a tight ring through which the security pore passes from interior to exterior of the cell. These water gates are “highly conserved” (i.e., unchanged) in all living things from bacteria to people, showing no variation from simple to complex; it is complex from the very beginning.

We spend a little time on this little marvel just to remind readers of the wonders of God’s creation being revealed by modern biochemistry, and to emphasize the difficulty evolution has explaining this kind of design. The argument for design in the cell has a one-two punch: irreducible complexity (multiple parts must simultaneously be present or there is no function), and (2) the sheer magnitude of the design. This water gate AQP1 is one of the simpler structures in the cell, yet look at the level of complexity even here. And each other molecule the cell must transport in or out has its own elaborate gate as well, some more sophisticated than this one. This alone should blow evolution out of the water, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other examples here in the most simple, basic unit of life, the cell. It’s as if God did overkill on the message design demands a Designer, just when modern science needs to hear it most.

Horses’ “Vestigial Muscles” Are Really Dampers   12/20/2001
Horses and camels have tiny muscles in their legs, as short as 6mm, attached to very long tendons (almost as long as the leg itself). Evolutionists have thought these muscles must be vestigial; i.e., useless leftovers from earlier ancestors. But now, writing in Nature 12/20/01, Alan M. Wilson and colleagues think there’s a reason for these unusual muscles. Modeling the forces and tensions and vibrations involved in galloping, the researchers demonstrate that the muscles serve as dampers, to reduce damage to bones and tissues from vibrations caused by the foot striking the ground.

A layman’s summary of the paper was added December 21 on Nature Science Update and is well worth reading. It explains that tendons are like elastic springs, giving the horses’s legs the bounce of a pogo stick. But the 93% recoil of the tendons causes a problem: “Spring heels are all very well, but they could shake horses and other runners, such as camels, to bits.” The small muscles, being more “squashy,” act like rubber washers to damp out the otherwise damaging vibrations. “As it is, racehorses run at their limits. Fatigue damage is a leading cause of injury, and the spring system can fail in as little as 10,000 strides when galloping. Without the muscle fibres, this rate would be even worse.” The summary also explains that “These fibres may be costly to develop and maintain but they are ideally suited to absorbing the shockwaves that accompany each stride. They are not mere evolutionary vestiges, as some had suspected.”

The argument for evolution based on vestigial organs has been dying a slow death for a long time. Evolutionists sometimes accuse creationists of taking the lazy way out, failing to explain something by giving up and saying, “God did it.” But in the sorry history of vestigial organ theory, isn’t the shoe on the other foot? Instead of finding the function of an unknown organ, evolutionists have tended to give up and say, “It’s just an evolutionary leftover.” A belief in creation, on the other hand, has often been the stimulus for outstanding scientific research, because of the conviction that nature is intelligible, follows intelligently-formulated laws, and possesses an underlying plan and design that can be discovered and utilized.

For “Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week,” let’s enter this line from the Nature Science Update article: “Why use muscle as the damping material, when practically any squashy material would do? One answer is that muscle just happens to be available – evolution didn’t equip horses with rubber washers.” No, Henry, the infinite-personal Creator gave them something far more wonderful: self-healing, self-regenerating, living dampers, filled with DNA code and molecular machines.

In our day of cars and freeways, we should still consider the marvel of the horse and camel. For thousands of years, these sturdy animals have been the staple of the human economy. As mounted police and rescue workers know, they still have superiority over man-made vehicles in many situations (plus, they can live off the land and don’t pollute). Horses are sleek, handsome, versatile, lovable animals, and now we find they are equipped with hi-tech shock absorbers, too. Get a horse.

How Sweet the Meteorites   12/19/2001
Analysis of two meteorites that fell in 1950 and 1969 has yielded sugars thought to be extraterrestrial in origin, according to National Geographic and Nature. The NASA-Ames crew believes they have ruled out terrestrial contamination. This adds to the earlier finding of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in some meteorites. National Geographic titles the story “Building Blocks of Life Found in Two Meteorites” and states, “Some scientists have speculated that material from meteors may have provided some starting material for early life forms, possibly even jump-starting the origin of life itself.” Nature describes these extraterrestrial compounds “well along the road to primitive life.”

That phrase building blocks of life, common in popular astrobiology, is so misleading. It assumes life is nothing more than chemicals, and suggests that chemical evolution is becoming well understood. Nothing could be further from the truth. The origin of life is one of the most vexing problems facing naturalistic philosophy today, because of the extreme complexity of all living system (even the simplest), and the presence of molecular machines and motors inhabiting all of life (to say nothing of the complex DNA code that necessarily is even more complex than the machines for which it codes). Should it be surprising that living systems also possess simple molecules like amino acids and sugars? Why not take a step back and call atoms the building blocks of life?

Many organic compounds have been discovered in space, because they are thermodynamically probable and stable under the right conditions. It is the arrangement of the molecules of life into informational and functional structures that is crucial; these are arrangements that are not predestined by their atomic valences. Paul Davies said in The Fifth Miracle, “the whole point of the genetic code is to free life from the shackles of nonrandom chemical bonding.” Furthermore, many cellular structures are composed of interdependent parts that could not have assembled into working systems by gradual steps, but will not function until fully assembled. Dr. David Rosevear (chemist) stresses, “Nothing works until everything works.”

The astrobiologists’ “building blocks of life” are no more helpful to explaining life than finding iron ore, oil, water, and coal would be to explaining the chance origin of a factory, or the discovery of scattered Scrabble letters would explain a Shakespeare play. Until astrobiologists can explain the origin of information that leads to directed function, they will have no cause for celebrating, nor for ending the head-scratching and hand-wringing, as Davies describes it, over these intractable problems.

Moving Hot Spots Undermine Plate Tectonics Beliefs   12/18/2001
At the American Geophysical Union meeting this week, geologists presented evidence that the Hawaiian hot spot has moved around. The conventional wisdom about hot spots has been that they remain stationary relative to moving plates. The classic example, the Hawaiian islands, were said to form as a plate moved over a stationary hot spot. But now, evidence from magnetic polarization in Hawaiian rocks indicates the islands may have formed at different latitudes. This finding casts doubt on a reference frame used to measure plate motion, and “undermines many of the accepted ideas about how the Earth’s tectonic plates are moving,” reports New Scientist.

It’s also possible that we don’t know all we think we do about the earth’s magnetic field polarization over time, or the influences on polarity in rocks. Either way, we see again a difference between TV and textbook dogma and what geologists actually find and report to each other.

Bacterial Ancestor of Man Found   12/17/2001
If all the higher animals evolved from one-celled organisms, which modern one-celled organism is the closest to the primitive ancestor? The authors of a paper in the 12/18/01 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences think they have a candidate: choanoflagellates. They found a molecule called receptor tyrosine kinase in one of these bacteria that had never before been seen in single-celled organisms. According to one of the authors, this is “important because it implies that the choanoflagellates had evolved some of the machinery necessary to interact with one another like animal cells. … In general, these discoveries have made us confident that we’ve picked the right organism to understand what happened on the eve of animal evolution. Thus, we believe we can discover in this organism more elements of the genetic toolkit that was first used to build animals.” Sources: EurekAlert and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Now whoa there. Bacterial cells and human cells have a lot of common counterparts; why pick out this one and call it evidence of ancestry? And tell us how bacteria engineered a toolkit without intelligence or consciousness, and how, without intelligence or consciousness, bacteria could use a toolkit to “build” anything, even if the toolkit was handed to them, unless the DNA instructions were already present to direct the process. Natural selection can’t build anything, and mutations are not a engineering substitute. The receptor tyrosine kinase and the flagellum motors these organisms possess are irreducibly complex structures that could not self-organize in any conceivable cosmic time frame, so how does this paper present any credible case for evolution? It’s an argument only a believer could love.

Placental Mammals Family Tree Redrawn Again   12/17/2001
Three evolutionists writing in Science (summarized in Science Now) claim placental mammals arose in Africa, not a northern landmass, then diversified into four major groups. They used a 250-year old logic technique called Bayesian inference, that seeks to deduce the likeliness a model is correct based on identifying the variables involved, and observing the model’s response to new information. The authors devalue the role of molecular phylogeny (inferring evolution from animal genomes) with this approach. Their model puts rabbits in the same group with people, elephants with aardvarks, and carnivores with whales and horses. Their theory is getting mixed reviews from other evolutionists.  One likes the grouping, but considers their idea of the timing of mammalian divergences “completely unreasonable.”

For another recent article on Bayesian inference applied to evolutionary theory, see this 12/20 story on Uppsala University at EurekAlert.

Bayesian inference can only be useful if you identify all the variables and define all their possible values. It’s the old garbage in, garbage out problem. When they rule out design from the get-go, and define only evolutionary values to the variables, they are inbreeding flawed ideas and producing a retarded theory. The apparent logic is just bluff for more circular reasoning: the assumption of evolution is used to prove evolution. This paper is another volley in the ongoing fight between the molecular phylogenists and the morphologists, an amusing but worthless controversy if evolution isn’t true. See our important Oct 22 headline on the confused state of evolutionary family trees.

Geophysicist Proposes Multiple Edens   12/17/2001
According to Stanford geophysicist Norman Sleep, earth’s garden of Eden was not interrupted by sin, but by asteroid impacts. In the opening presentation to the American Geophysical Union Friday 12/14, Sleep presented his theory that life repeatedly evolved and diversified after periodic impacts. These impacts either sterilized the earth or allowed only thermophiles (bacteria able to live in hot conditions) to survive in the “Goldilocks Zone,” regions between the burnt surface and the molten interior. He bases his theory on two lines of evidence; (1) two of the three major branches of life have primitive thermophiles (presumably the common ancestors of their respective branches), and (2) geophysicists believe there were less than 20 large asteroid impacts between the formation of our moon and the first fossil evidence of life, with gaps of hundreds of millions of years in between. In addition, Sleep thinks some of the impacts could have blasted microbes to Mars (at the time a more congenial water-filled environment), which might have acted as a nursery for earth’s life until it was blasted back to earth again by meteors hitting Mars. This report was posted on EurekAlert 12/14/01.

The only evidence he supplies is evolution, so the whole theory is circular reasoning. It is incredible what tall tales evolutionists are allowed to weave in the media and to each other at their scientific meetings.  Now, instead of asking us to believe one highly improbable, incredibly unlikely miracle, we are asked to believe in multiple miracles, up to twenty recurrences of the origin of complex life, with a couple of bonus miracles thrown in, that life survived trips to Mars and back. “Did it really happen? So far there is no direct evidence of life on other planets or asteroids, although it is becoming clear that conditions exist, at least on Mars and Europa – one of Jupiter’s inner moons – where microbes that life comfortably in Earth’s harsher climates would have felt at home,” writes the author of the story, science writing intern Etienne Benson, echoing a common astrobiology non-sequitur. Would there were science writing interns bold enough to ask hard questions and not take this kind of guff as science.

Plant Kingdom Tree of Life Closer to Solution?   12/14/2001
“Some 470 million years ago, the first land plants emerged from prehistoric waters, put down roots in soil and ended up ruling the plant world. But scientists haven’t been certain about the family history of those pioneer plants,” begins the press release from the National Science Foundation. With funding by the NSF, researchers at the University of Maryland sequenced genes from 40 different algae and landed on Charales, a branching alga that reproduces sexually, is the closest living relative. “What used to be a very short story – land plants evolved from aquatic algae – just became a much more interesting narrative,” said an NSF representative.

More of the same, like we relayed on February 20: begging the question, assuming evolution in spite of evidence, and wild extrapolation. The admissions in the story are more important than the alleged evidence: “Science has long believed that land plants are derived from primeval algae that became adapted to live on land, but we weren’t sure exactly how this happened, or which living algae were most closely related to land plants. …  It’s an important part of the Tree of Life that has been unresolved” (emphasis added), in spite of 142 years since Darwin; “…their common ancestor has been extinct for even longer and hasn’t been identified in the fossil record.” So when they say, “Our data confirm that land plants and the Charales both evolved from a common ancestor…” (emphasis added) they’re just bluffing in the dark. Ironic that they capitalize Tree of Life, access to which was blocked because of disobedience.