NAS Authority Speaks: That Would Be Blasphemous! Religion Provides the “Acid Test” As Evolution Goes Viral

We have seen that an evolution professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences, John Avise, argued that the evolution of the species is not by chance and that the evolution of complexity is not a problem because high fitness, point mutations are fixed in populations of bacteria in a test tube. You might think that such erroneous claims must be one-time blunders—mistakes that would be quickly retracted when pointed out. But this is not the case. These are standard evolutionary arguments. Avise’s book was endorsed by several evolutionists, and when I pointed out these enormous blunders other evolutionists rushed to his defense. Fallacious thinking is fundamental to evolutionary thought. But why? After all, evolutionists such as Avise are certainly not intellectually lacking. Evolutionists are smart, well educated and informed. So why the blatantly erroneous claims? The answer, as usual, comes down to religion.

In his book Inside the Human Genome, John Avise discusses at length the evils and inefficiencies of the world, and in particular in the genome. He explains repeatedly that this cannot be reconciled with a good god. For example, Avise introduces the reader to this problem on the third page of the book:

This is the persistent dilemma of theology. Why does suffering exist in a world governed by a loving deity? Put more simply, why do bad things happen to good (as well as bad) people? … Why for example must countless people endure sometimes lifelong pain and suffering from inherited physical disabilities? And why must the persecutions extend even to those who surely must be innocent in God’s eyes, such as the untold numbers of human embryos and fetuses who spontaneously abort in utero? Indeed, in a world run by a loving Creator God, why are senescence and death the unavoidable fates of anyone fortunate enough to have survived all of life’s earlier challenges? … But what about the evil visited upon people in situations where free will is irrelevant? The victim of a tornado or earthquake presumably had no control over such natural catastrophes, nor did an aborted embryo have control over the inherited disabilities that may have caused its premature death. [Inside the Human Genome, Oxford, 2010, p. 3-5]

This sentiment continues as Avise rehearses, later in the chapter, the standard evolutionary metaphysics that it is not the good designs that rebuke creationism so much as the harmful ones:

At least at a superficial explanatory level, evolutionary and creationist scenarios both seem plausible, in principle, for complex traits that perform their functions well. A more acid test comes from complex traits that are harmful to their bearers. As we will see in later chapters, many complex generic traits (such as pseudogenes and mobile elements) that often are functionless or even detrimental to the organisms that house them are rampant in the genomes of vertebrate animals, humans included. Did a Creator God repeat these apparent errors of genomic construction time and time again? Or are such genomic flaws merely the footprints of phylogenetic history? [28-9]

It is these harmful and inefficient designs, particularly in the genome, that Avise will elaborate on in the remainder of the book. For instance consider harmful mutations. Avise believes it would be blasphemous to ascribe them to God:

Few people would blame a loving and all-powerful God for purposefully inventing deleterious mutations; that would be blasphemous. [65]

For as Avise points out these mutations can be devastating:

most de novo mutations range from neutral to highly deleterious for human health, and collectively they leave in their wake countless shattered bodies and destroyed lives (including those of untold numbers of early human embryos). These are probably not the kinds of biological outcomes that one would wish to attribute to the direct hand of an all-powerful and loving God. [72]

It’s all about religion. It did not begin with Darwin, and ever since Darwin the religious control of science has become even stronger. Of course evolution must be a fact—our religion demands it. For otherwise we commit blasphemy. Never mind that it makes no sense scientifically. Like a Trojan Horse, religion has infected science, and it has gone viral.

Evolutionists Just Invented a New Euphemism For Today’s Evolutionary Tree Failure

Now they’re calling it “displacement.” An ubiquitous and fundamental DNA binding protein is missing from a heat-loving single cell organism. Instead, there is a novel protein in its place:

The crystal structure of Ttx1576 reveals a unique fold and a mechanism for ssDNA binding, consisting of an extended cleft lined with hydrophobic phenylalanine residues and flanked by basic amino acids. Two ssDNA-binding domains are linked by a coiled-coil leucine zipper. 

The evolutionary tree failed yet again so evolutionists just invented another just-so story. That ubiquitous and fundamental protein was “displaced”:

ThermoDBP appears to have displaced the canonical SSB during the diversification of the Thermoproteales, a highly unusual example of the loss of a “ubiquitous” protein during evolution.

I guess anything can happen “during evolution.” As one of the evolutionists explained:

All cells, whether they are microbial or human, have some things in common. These are the fundamental components or building blocks which were present in the first cells and have been passed on over 3.5 billion years. However, we have discovered that a gene normally thought to be absolutely essential and conserved throughout every form of life, is in fact lost in one group of volcanic bugs, and replaced by a completely novel gene we have christened ThermoDBP.

As one writer explained, “The discovery has ramifications for understanding about how life has evolved on earth.” That would be an understatement. What the new discovery and associated just-so story reveal, yet again, is that pretty much anything goes “during evolution.” This is not a theory, it is a tautology. It doesn’t explain nature, it is explained by nature. Whatever evolutionists find, it must have evolved. Of course there is no scientific explanation for how novel proteins could arise. In fact even the best just-so story is a ridiculous 27 orders of magnitude short of reality. Evolutionists have no idea how it could have happened, but they are absolutely sure that it did happen: “Evolution is a fact, don’t confuse me with the facts.”

A Member of the National Academy of Sciences Made an Argument For Evolution That Isn’t Even Wrong

An obvious problem with evolution is its claim that complex designs arose spontaneously. Imagine some spark plugs, valves and other assorted mechanical parts coming together to form an engine. It’s unlikely no matter how many years you have. What evolutionists would need to show is that there is a long, long sequence of simpler, intermediate designs which gradually lead from a lifeless warm little pond to the incredible species in today’s world. Of course they have shown no such thing—not even close. So instead evolutionists use sophistry—explanations that are so flawed and illogical they cannot even be said to be wrong. For example, professor and National Academy of Sciences member John Avise makes this argument:

Another ID sentiment is that the emergence of biotic complexity via natural processes (unlike under intelligent auspices) is highly improbable, a notion that proponents of ID sometimes claim to document statistically. An undisputed law of statistics states that the probability of the joint occurrence of two or more independent events is calculated by multiplying together the separate probabilities of those events. For example, suppose that independent events A and B occur with random probabilities of 1 in 10 million (i.e., 10^-7) and 1 in 100 million (10^-8), respectively. The probability that both events occur together, by chance, is thus minuscule: one in a quadrillion (i.e., 10^-7 x 10^-8 = 10^-15). Mutations are examples of such rare and independent events, each typically occurring at a rate of about 10^-7 or 10^-8 per gene per generation. Suppose that a complex adaptation (such as a metabolic resistance to two different categories of otherwise lethal drugs) requires the joint presence in an organism of two mechanistically independent mutations. A proponent of ID might conclude that this adaptation is effectively unachievable by natural forces because its random probability is so very low. Divine intervention then becomes the default explanation.

But this is a gross misapplication of statistics, as the following example will illustrate. Consider a small colony of a billion bacterial cells, housed in a test tube, that lacks the genetic capacity to survive the antibiotics penicillin and streptomycin. New mutations for penicillin resistance (p+) and streptomycin resistance (s+) are known to arise randomly in bacteria, at low frequency. If the mutation rate to p+ is a plausible 10^-7, then a culture of 10^9 bacteria should by chance contain about 100 cells with penicillin resistance. When penicillin is added to the culture, all bacteria die except for those lucky 100 cells which then quickly divide and multiply to bring their number back up to a billion cells (all now carrying the p+ mutation). In this new colony, about 10 cells should by chance be resistant to streptomycin, assuming that the mutation rate to s+ is a plausible 10^-8. If streptomycin is then added to the culture, all of the bacteria die except for these 10 cells, which again divide and multiply to repopulate the test tube with a billion descendants (all of which are now p+ and s+ jointly). By this stepwise process, the unconscious operation of selection has made virtually inevitable what might otherwise have been deemed impossible—the evolution of a complex adaptation. [Inside the Human Genome, Oxford, 2010, p. 33-5]

The logic here is astonishing. In the hands of the evolutionist a failure of his theory is transformed into a victory with what can only be described as sheer absurdity. The underlying, unspoken, premise is that the stepwise fixation of single, high fitness, point mutations is no different than the evolution of all biological complexities. In fact there are precisely zero such designs that are known to be constructable via such a sequence. Indeed, quite the opposite, science points us in the opposite direction. Even the evolution a single protein falls 27 orders of magnitude short of reality, and that is according to evolutionist’s own, outrageously optimistic assumptions.

Avise’s argument is simply jaw-dropping. It is a complete misrepresentation of what we know from science.

A Member of the National Academy of Sciences Repeated This Huge Evolution Blunder

The whole point of evolution—that the species arose all by themselves—is also the whole problem. Evolutionists wax eloquently about how there is no goal, plan or purpose to the world. Biology arose by chance events, such as random mutations, which did not have the species in mind. But how could the species possibly arise by chance? Such a proposition is highly unlikely, to put it kindly. How do evolutionists explain this probability dilemma? How do they explain away something that is astronomically unlikely? Simple. Evolutionists say the question has got it all wrong, for the evolution of the species is not, in fact, by chance at all. Yes, there are random events involved, such as mutations, but they must pass the test of natural selection which very much is not random. But this is yet another evolutionary blunder. Not only is it a misrepresentation of evolutionary theory, it fails to resolve the probability dilemma.

The University of California Museum of Paleontology’s website about evolution, funded by your tax dollars, claims that it is a misconception that evolution means that the species arose by chance. Here is how the website explains this supposed misconception:

Chance is certainly a factor in evolution, but there are also non-random evolutionary mechanisms. Random mutation is the ultimate source of genetic variation, however natural selection, the process by which some variants survive and others do not, is not random.

In other words, yes mutations are random, but natural selection is not. This blunder is elaborated by University of California professor and National Academy of Sciences member, John Avise. Avise repeats the argument that natural selection is not random, but he also argues that the biological variation, which is subject to selection, is also, ultimately, not random:

Advocates of Intelligent Design contend that complex biological features cannot arise by chance, the implication being that chance equates to natural evolutionary processes and anti-chance equates to sentient forces. From a scientific vantage, however, the driving force of adaptive evolution—natural selection—is itself the antithesis of chance. …

Natural selection can sift only among the genetic variants available for its scrutiny, and two of the three primary sources of genetic variability—de novo mutations and recombination—occur essentially at random with respect to forging adaptations. … In this important sense, the genetic fodder upon which natural selection acts can indeed be characterized as stochastic or chancy in origin.

The third source of population genetic variation entails a mixture of “chance and necessity.” Apart from de novo mutations and recombinant genotypes, the genetic variety available for natural selection in any generation is also a function of historical circumstance, that is, of idiosyncratic genealogical outcomes that have been affected by both stochastic and directive evolutionary processes across all prior generations. Evolution going forward can work only with the biological substrates provided by evolution foregone. These biological substrates—“ghosts of evolution past”—are not supernatural legacies, but instead they are real genetic lineages and real species that have been subjected for eons to the full panoply of evolutionary processes including natural selection (the directive agent of adaptive evolution) as well as idiosyncratic mutation, recombination, and genetic drift (stochastic forces in the sense described above). [Inside the Human Genome, Oxford, 2010, p. 27-8]

Avise’s mental gymnastics are painful to watch. This blunder is consistent amongst evolutionists, but no less astonishing. First let’s consider the claim that natural selection means the origin of species wasn’t by chance. Imagine a friend wins a one-in-a-million jackpot at roulette, but he claims it wasn’t by chance because he also had some losing bets. On his losing bets he collected nothing, but on his winning bets collected his winnings. Isn’t that the very antithesis of chance?

Of course not. This is a monumental blunder in thinking. Yes he doesn’t collect on his losing bets, and he does collect on his winning bets. But that does not change the fact that roulette is a game of chance. And it doesn’t change the fact that his beating the casino was unlikely.

According to evolution biological variation is random with respect to need or purpose. Natural selection doesn’t change this. It kills off the bad designs, but winning designs are nonetheless constructed by random variation—they are by chance. Every mutation and recombination event leading to whales, cherry trees and humans was, according to evolution, random. Likewise every losing design is also by chance.

In other words, some designs win and some designs lose. The process continues and the species evolve. But it is entirely by chance. The fact that some win and some lose doesn’t change this.

Avise’s second argument is that chance is also removed from the process because it is on-going, producing new species which become the basis for further evolution. This argument is equally fallacious.

A chance process that continues for awhile is still a chance process.

The evolutionary process is still by chance. If a frog evolved from an earlier amphibian—such that the evolution of frogs was limited in its possibilities—that doesn’t change the fact that the process was, from the beginning, by chance.

Every biological variation that occurs is random. Yes natural selection kills off the bad designs. And yes the process proceeds down certain pathways, producing certain species. But every species is produced by a series of random biological variations.

The origin of species by chance is unlikely. It would require a long, long series of random mutations that just happens to construct an incredible biological design. And this would have to occur repeatedly, for all of biology’s amazing designs. And in each of these long series of random mutations, there would need to be a great many—mostly undiscovered and unknown—intermediate designs. And these intermediate designs would have to be helpful to the organism.

From single proteins to cellular processes to whole organisms, the science gives little reason to think such a process is likely. Indeed the science repeatedly indicates such a process is likely to be very unlikely.

And the evolutionist’s appeal to natural selection changes none of this. Their claim that the killing off of bad designs means that the origin of species was not by chance, and that this resolves the probability dilemma, is not only false, it demonstrates an important failure in evolutionary thinking.

Here’s the Tip of the Iceberg on Cellular Regulation and it Has Evolutionists Drinking Alone Again

A recent study of how phosphate groups regulate proteins uncovered a complex network of interactions. Kinases are proteins that add a phosphate group to a molecule, such as another protein, and phosphatases are proteins that remove the phosphate group. A protein is phosphorylated when a phosphate group is attached to a hydroxyl group in the side chain of a specific and particular amino acid out of the hundreds in the protein. Such phosphorylation controls the protein’s activity, for instance by altering the protein’s shape or attracting another molecule to bind to the protein. Furthermore, the kinase and phosphatase proteins themselves are regulated. It’s just a small bit, as the study helped demonstrate, of the cell’s immensely complex regulation network. Of course this complexity was a surprise to evolutionists who expected the usual “just-add-water” version of biology. As one of the authors explained: “Our studies have revealed an intricate network of proteins within cells that is much more complex than we previously thought.” Or as one writer explained:

Scientists studying interactions between cell proteins -- which enable the cells in our bodies to function -- have shown that proteins communicate not by a series of simple one-to-one communications, but by a complex network of chemical messages. …

Researchers, including scientists from the University of Edinburgh, used advanced technology to identify hundreds of different proteins, and then used statistical analysis to identify the more important links between them, mapping almost 2000 connections in all.

Scientists expected to find simple links between individual proteins but were surprised to find that proteins were inter-connected in a complex web.

A complex web? And how did evolution create such a complex web of regulation where  proteins control other proteins by adding or removing small chemical tags such as phosphate groups?

Well first there is the problem of how random change could create a protein of any kind, let alone one that performs a needed function. Then there is the problem of how evolution could stumble upon the incredibly fine-tuned functionality of adding phosphate groups to the right hydroxyl group on the right side chain of the right amino acid in the right protein. Oh and there had to be just luckily some spare phosphate groups floating around and available.

And of course after having achieved such a miracle evolution would only have progressed a tiny step in a million mile journey. For this incredible phosphorylation capability would accomplish precisely nothing. In fact without the ability to remove the phosphate group, from the right hydroxyl group on the right side chain of the right amino acid in the right protein at the right time, the phosphorylation could be disastrous. And if not disastrous it would be an incredible stroke of luck if it accomplished anything useful. It would be a miracle if it were done at the right time, and even if it was, who knows what effect it would have on whatever function the target protein just happened to have bequeathed to it by the random actions of evolution.

You see this is all a joke. A very, very, very bad joke. And we couldn’t help but be reminded of a certain letter that touched on the topic of such bad jokes:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
And bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.”

Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

It’s not too late.

Evolutionists Self-Destructing: Now They Are Saying Evolution Created a Fine-Tuned Electro Magnetic Communications System Which We Can’t Even Detect

It has long since been known that the cells of organisms give off light but exactly how and why they do this has not been well understood. Evidence has suggested that this electromagnetic energy is more than merely a random by-product of metabolic processes but rather contains information which is transmitted and received by different cells. One recent study, for example, confirmed that some sort of non chemical information is transmitted between cells, in this case of the unicellular organism Paramecium caudatum. Different populations of the organism, separated by glass or quartz barriers which allow only certain frequencies of light, showed correlated activity. It appeared that one population can influence cell division and metabolic activities in neighboring populations. The barriers prevented any chemical influences and so information-bearing photons, rather than molecules, seem to the mechanism at work. If so, then at least two different frequencies are used in a fine-tuned electromagnetic communication system. As the paper concluded:

In the present study, three major experiments confirmed that separated populations of the ciliate Paramecium caudatum interact with each other through glass under conditions of complete darkness. A careful control showed that the interactions are due to conspecific cells and not to the medium containing bacteria. The mutual influence between the ciliates was found for cell division, growth correlation and energy uptake (vacuole formation).

Comparing these results with corresponding studies on onion roots, yeast cells, tissue cells and zygote-germination a major common feature appears: organisms (or isolated cells) can transmit information without the use of a molecular information carrier. The observed induction on growth, furthermore, hints at a universal property of growth regulation.

If the effects on cell division (growth) found in this and other studies reveal a common feature, we are obliged to accept that cells are not only a world of effective molecules but also a world of effective light.

And this electromagnetic communication system is so sophisticated we can’t even figure it out. We don’t know how the information is generated or how the photons are transmitted or received. Even just detecting the tiny energy fluctuations is incredibly difficult.

But rest assured, evolution created all of this. Which is to say, all of this just happened to arise by itself. That’s what evolutionist insist is a fact.

What science shows, on the other hand, is that evolution is a myth. Of course that was obvious all along. Let’s be perfectly clear. We can argue over many scientific details, but what is a fact is that evolutionists dogmatically make truth claims about things they don’t even understand and cannot explain. That’s called superstition.

An Electric Face: A Rendering Worth a Thousand Falsifications

[Ed: An oldie but goodie. Make sure you watch the videos below]

From electron microscopes to earth-orbiting observatories, scientists use a variety of instruments to study nature by measuring, observing and yes, rendering. Measurements are graphed and fitted with mathematical models. Renderings, on the other hand, are not so easily quantified. This can make them less useful for the business of building quantitative models and making predictions. But renderings can, in an instant, convey a powerful message. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.

Consider, for instance, ribonuclease A, an enzyme that voraciously chops up RNA molecules. In the mid twentieth century scientists figured out how to determine the structure of such proteins using X-rays, and then later using other techniques as well. A protein sample is carefully crystallized and then exposed to an X-ray beam. The X-rays diffract as they pass through the sample and create a complex pattern which indicates the positions of the various atoms in the protein. Here is what the 124 amino acid ribonuclease A protein structure looks like when its many atoms are rendered in a three-dimensional graph:

As you can see, a graph of a protein’s individual atoms doesn’t tell you very much. It looks like, well, a bunch of atoms. But if we step back and consider the protein’s amino acids we see something very different. In a protein, the amino acids are sometimes wound tightly in a helix. Or they can be stretched out into a strand. These two patterns can be detected from the atomic locations and graphed. Here is the ribonuclease A structure again, but this time with these amino acid patterns rendered and their individual atoms left off the graph:

Suddenly a coherent structure is apparent.

Because ribonuclease A is such a voracious eater it sometimes needs to be turned off. Enter the ribonuclease inhibitor. Here are some different renderings of this beautiful horse-shoe shaped protein:

The ribonuclease inhibitor is shaped to dock with ribonuclease A and bring it to a halt. Here are renderings of the two proteins docked together:

Such renderings provide an immediate peek at the phenomena at work. They provide higher level information than do mere measurements. And it is interesting that these renderings were made with graphing tools that know nothing of ribonuclease A or ribonuclease inhibitors, in particular. Computer scientists have developed these powerful rendering tools based on general principles of protein structure. But these tools do nothing without the structural data provided by measurement techniques, such as X-ray diffraction.

So as with electron microscopes and astronomical observatories, these molecular tools create impressive, beautiful and meaningful renderings that are completely dependent on the measurements. The computer scientist creates the tool, but has no idea what rendering might emerge after the raw data are input.

A recent example of the power of rendering, and the importance of stepping back and choosing the right perspective, is the frog embryo’s electric face. If that sounds strange read on, for as one researcher said, “electric face” is the perfect description.

The body electric

Electricity is not just for engineers, it is crucial in biology as well. For instance, a cell contains various ionic compounds which give the cell interior a net charge. And the difference between the intracellular charge and that of the the external environment causes a voltage across the cell membrane. This membrane voltage is crucial in cellular biology. For instance, a wide variety of membrane proteins, such as channels that allow chemical in and out of the cell, are controlled by the membrane voltage. Change the voltage and you suddenly change the state of those proteins and their various actions.

Yes electricity is important in biology, but when Dany Adams left her digital camera and microscope apparatus running overnight, she had no idea what stunning electrical patterns would emerge on the frog embryo she was studying. Watch this video to learn more:

Here is a shorter video of just the embryo:

The video suggests that bioelectric signals presage the morphological development of the face. It also, in an instant, gives a peak at the phenomenal processes at work in biology. As the lead researcher said, “It’s a jaw dropper.”

The frog’s electric face is one of those renderings worth a thousand words. We could make detailed protein measurements showing that evolution cannot even explain how a single protein could have arisen. In fact there are 27 orders of magnitude between evolution’s expectations and reality. And that is going by the evolutionist’s own reckoning (in reality it is 100+ orders of magnitude). Or we could make detailed measurements of mutations and show that unicellular organisms are not likely to evolve spontaneously into elephants.

But the frog’s electric face, in an instant, reminds one of the utter absurdity of evolution. Religion drives science, and it matters.

* Hat tip to bornagain77

You Won’t Believe What Evolutionists Are Saying Now: Evolution Created “A Risk Management Strategy”

The Epicureans called them “veering atoms” and evolutionists updated it to “random mutations.” One way or another, man must have an evolutionary narrative. But it makes no sense on the science and so, to match the mythology with the evidence, evolution must become the master craftsman. Its latest wizardry is a “risk management strategy,” as a new paper explains. Furthermore, mutation rates have been “evolutionarily optimized.” Unbelievable. The evolutionist’s just-so stories continue to become even more ridiculous. Evolution is now so brilliant that we are supposed to believe that it created the means not only to control mutation rates, but to optimize the mutation rates as well.

First, if evolution is true, we must believe that the basic mutation rate varies by more than an order of magnitude in different bacteria:

Upon comparing 34 Escherichia coli genomes, we observe that the neutral mutation rate varies by more than an order of magnitude across 2,659 genes, with mutational hot and cold spots spanning several kilobases. 

The next result is that, under evolution, the variation between different mutation rates must not be random, but rather must follow a rational pattern:

Importantly, the variation is not random: we detect a lower rate in highly expressed genes and in those undergoing stronger purifying selection.

And so, given evolution, we must conclude that evolution has optimized the mutation rate:

Our observations suggest that the mutation rate has been evolutionarily optimized to reduce the risk of deleterious mutations.

Of course there is no known mechanism that could do this:

Current knowledge of factors influencing the mutation rate—including transcription-coupled repair and context-dependent mutagenesis—do not explain these observations, indicating that additional mechanisms must be involved. 

But evolutionists will think of something, no matter how speculative.

The findings have important implications for our understanding of evolution and the control of mutations.

In other words, results that rebuke a fundamental concept of evolution, and that cannot even be explained by evolutionists (who are notorious for being able to explain anything with their just-so stories), are presented by evolutionists as important findings for understanding how evolution works. It is all about those veering atoms.

Here’s That Paper on Cell Membranes That Went Viral and Evolutionists Are Trying to Clean Up

As we saw in the previous post the cell membrane has been found to be increasingly sophisticated. Not only is the protein-punctuated sandwich structure incredibly complicated, but organisms actively fine-tune its design as conditions change. For instance, the number and location of carbon-carbon double bonds, in the phospholipid tails in the lipid bilayer, are astonishingly modified in real-time to deal with temperature changes. A recent paper agreed that “the membrane is a biological device of a staggering complexity”:

A topologically closed membrane is a ubiquitous feature of all cellular life forms. This membrane is not a simple lipid bilayer enclosing the innards of the cell: far from that, even in the simplest cells, the membrane is a biological device of a staggering complexity that carries diverse protein complexes mediating energy-dependent – and tightly regulated - import and export of metabolites and polymers.

And how could it have evolved? The paper agrees that “the origin(s) of the membrane(s) and membrane proteins remain enigmatic”

Studies of the past several decades have provided major insights into the structural organization of biological membranes and mechanisms of many membrane molecular machines. However, the origin(s) of the membrane(s) and membrane proteins remain enigmatic.

Indeed, such evolution is downright obscure:

Despite the growing understanding of the structural organization of membranes and molecular mechanisms of many membrane proteins, the origin(s) of biological membranes remain obscure.

And this is only the beginning. The paper is loaded with preposterous just-so stories, many of them contradictory, of how evolutionists believe the membrane evolved. Calling all of this raw speculation would be kind. The evolution of the cell membrane is downright ridiculous but evolutionists, as usual, remain ever dogmatic. They may not know of evolution occurred, but they’re sure it did. What’s worse, they insist it is a fact that is beyond any reasonable doubt. It would be perverse, as they often say, even to consider the possibility it may be wrong. All one needs to do is listen to evolutionists to understand what it is all about, and it isn’t science.

Complex Patterns Have Been Discovered in the Cell Membrane

The membrane that surrounds and encapsulates living cells is truly amazing. This lipid bilayer-protein mixture, which is only a few nanometers thick, has complex chemical, structural and electrical properties which are finely-tuned and crucial for the cell’s operation. And the various proteins perform a great diversity of tasks, ranging from transmitting information to transporting molecules, across the membrane. As usual the inexorable march of science continues to reveal the sophistication and elegance of the membrane design. A recent study, for instance, revealed that the membrane proteins are arranged in complex patterns, ranging from what has been described as “patches” to “networks.” Furthermore, the all-important lipid composition of the membrane strongly influences these patterns as well as the protein sequences themselves. This work reveals far greater structure and organization in the cell membrane than was previously understood. And it continues to reveal how unlikely it is that such designs spontaneously arose. For more interesting details on the cell membrane design, here is a post from a year ago on the fine-tuning of the membrane’s fluidity:

You learned about DNA and proteins in your high school biology class, but you may not remember much about the cell’s membrane which is based on a dynamic, fluctuating sandwich structure. This cellular envelope controls what chemicals enter and exit the cell, partly due to molecular machines such as channels and pumps in the membrane, and partly due to the sandwich structure itself. This sandwich structure is a barrier to certain types of chemicals. But the membrane permeability and the operation of the molecular machines depend on the details of the sandwich structure. And as recent research has been finding, contra evolutionary expectations, organisms actively maintain and fine-tune the sandwich structure in response to environmental challenges.

The cell membrane’s sandwich structure consists of two layers facing away from each other. Each layer is made up of an array of phospholipid molecules lined up next to each other. Phospholipid molecules consist of a water-loving (or hydrophilic) head, a phosphate group, and two oily (or hydrophobic) hydrocarbon tails.

The two layers face away from each other in a tail-to-tail arrangement. This creates a very oily, low dielectric, interior of the sandwich. While small oily molecules are able to pass through this membrane structure, it is difficult for any water-loving molecule, including water itself, to pass through the barrier. So when this sandwich structure forms a closed sphere surrounding the cell, the inside compartment is separated and protected from the outer aqueous environment. But the sandwich structure is not a simple, rigid, structure. It fluctuates, and this influences the membrane performance.

At lower temperatures the sandwich structure has a more rigid, gel, phase and at higher temperatures it has a less rigid, fluid phase. As with the freezing and melting of water there is a distinct phase change, between the gel and fluid phases of the sandwich structure, which occurs over a rather narrow temperature range. This melting point temperature is strongly influenced by the degree of attraction between the adjacent phospholipid tails. Depending on the temperature and this degree of attraction, the sandwich structure may be like a gel or like a fluid, and this is important because the phase influences the membrane permeability and the membrane’s molecular machines.

Within the membrane sandwich structure, the phospholipid tails are attracted to each other via the weakest chemical force, van der Waals interactions. Unlike the stronger chemical bonds, van der Waals interactions do not arise from the trading or sharing of electrons. So how do these interactions work?

Consider two neighboring atoms. As the electrons quickly move about, uneven charge distributions can occur across the atom. One side of an atom may temporarily be positively charged, and the other side negatively charged. Such charges influence the neighboring atom. For instance, a negative charge will tend to repel the electrons of the neighboring atom causing an attractive, uneven charge distribution in that atom. The two atoms can then continue with synchronized, fluctuating charge distributions. But all of this depends greatly on the distance between the two neighboring atoms. If they are too far apart (or too close together), the entire interaction, weak as it is, becomes insignificant.

The distance between adjacent phospholipid tails depends on their shape. If the tails have two hydrogen atoms for each carbon atom, then there are no double bonds. Such saturated chains have a consistent, linear, shape and they pack tightly together at the van der Waals preferred distance.

Unsaturated chains, on the other hand, have double bonds which cause structural kinks, loose packing and therefore weaker van der Waals interactions. And the particular location of the double bond is important, as some locations disrupt the van der Waals interactions more than others.

So all of this means that the number and location of hydrogen atoms in the phospholipid tails is an important tuning parameter (there are other tuning strategies as well), determining the phase of the sandwich structure and, in turn, the cell’s membrane performance. This is particularly important for organisms that are subject to greater temperature variations, such as poikilotherms. Such temperature variations can cause unwelcome phase changes in the membrane’s sandwich structure.

Physiological response to temperature change

Years ago it was thought that the various protein machines in the cell’s membrane were more or less randomly distributed. It is yet another example of the influence of evolutionary thinking on biology. If the biological world is a fluke, then aren’t biological designs, such as the cell’s membrane architecture, random?

Now we know better. The cell membrane architecture is anything but random. In fact, the attention to detail is enormous. This includes the phase of the sandwich structure and its tuning mechanisms, such as the degree to which the phospholipid tails are saturated. Here are quotes from representative research papers discussing how organisms monitor and control their membrane fluidity, particularly in response to temperature variations:

E. coli incorporates increasing proportions of saturated and long-chain fatty acids into phospholipids as growth temperature is increased. It was found that this compositional variation results in the biosynthesis of phospholipids that have identical viscosities at the temperature of growth of the cells. [link to paper]

Numerous studies have shown that fluidity is an important factor in the function of biological membranes. Changes in fluidity affect the activity of membrane-bound enzymes and the activity of transporters, as well as the permeability of membranes to nonelectrolytes, water, and cations. Given that temperature has profound effects on membrane fluidity, it is not surprising that poikilotherms adjust the composition of their membranes in ways that defend fluidity in the face of changes in body temperature. …

Although the ways in which membrane composition is altered in response to temperature are not always consistent among species, tissues, cells, or even organelles, a few important trends have emerged. One prominent response to a decrease in the body temperature of poikilotherms is an increase in the percentage of unsaturated fatty acids that make up the phospholipids. … Phospholipids with saturated fatty acids pack readily into bilayers, whereas phospholipids with unsaturated (and therefore, kinked) acyl chains tend to disrupt hydrophobic interactions among acyl chains of adjacent phospholipids. An increase in the proportion of unsaturated fatty acids thus results in an increase in membrane disorder and fluidity, which tends to oppose the ordering effect of a drop in temperature. [link to paper]

The phospholipid composition of plasma membranes from the kidney of rainbow trout, Salmo gairdneri, was determined over a period of 21 days as fish were acclimating between temperatures of 5 and 20 degrees C. Proportions of phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) were significantly higher (29.03 vs. 23.26%) in membranes of 5 degrees C- than 20 degrees C-acclimated trout [link to paper]

Our observations suggest that a physical parallel to the changes of lipid composition is the maintenance of an optimal lipid order in the hydrophobic core of the cytoplasmic membranes. It can be interpreted as a tendency of Bacillus subtilis to keep the lateral pressure in its membranes at an optimal value, independent of the temperature of cultivation. [link to paper]

Not only is the cell membrane intricate and complex (and certainly not random), but it has tuning parameters such as the degree to which the phospholipid tails are saturated. It is another example of a sophisticated biological design about which evolutionists can only speculate. Random mutations must have luckily assembled molecular mechanisms which sense environmental challenges and respond to them by altering the phospholipid population in the membrane in just the right way. Such designs are tremendously helpful so of course they would have been preserved by natural selection. It is yet another example of how silly evolutionary theory is in light of scientific facts.

Venus Transit This Tuesday

Venus transited the Sun in June 2004 and will again next week. Venus transits occur in pairs separated by eight years. The last pair occurred in December of 1874 and 1882 and the next pair will occur in December 2117 and 2125. So next week this rarest of predictable astronomical events will occur for the last time in our lifetimes.

When I Pointed Out the Evolutionary Tree Has Failed Two Professors Gave Me Pushback

Evolutionists proclaim that evolution is a fact as much as the fact that the Earth is round rather than flat, or that the planets circle the Sun rather than the Earth. Their favorite comparison is with gravity. As Joseph Le Conte explained a hundred and twenty years ago, evolution is not merely as certain as gravity, “Nay, it is far more certain.” Such claims have only escalated and today evolutionists are as certain as ever. But these claims go against everything we know from science. Indeed, evolution has failed every major test. Evolutionists do not have a scientific explanation for how life could have arisen from non life. They cannot even explain how a single protein could have first evolved. And we observe populations adapting to the environment rapidly via directed change, rather than the slow incorporation of random changes via natural selection. Furthermore the fossil record reveals bursts of diversity followed by extinctions. This hardly makes for an evolutionary tree and, indeed, when we compare the species they don’t fall into the expected tree-like pattern. Minor deviations might be expected, but the contradictions we observe are far more significant and are not explained by evolutionary mechanisms. It is precisely in situations like this, when a theory incurs repeated, independent, significant failures that scientists doubt its validity. Perhaps evolution is somehow true, or perhaps parts of the idea are true. And if not true, the theory nonetheless might be a useful model in certain problems. But when a theory incurs so many problems scientists certainly do not hold it to be a fact on par with gravity. And yet this is what evolutionists do. When I pointed this out two professors gave me pushback.

One professor argued that the problems with evolution are not so significant. Most theories have failures here and there, or at least have limited application. So what if evolution has some unanswered questions, should we therefore throw it out? Of course not:

So when Hunter points to the latest understanding of evolution, notes the failure of the tree of life, and then wants to declare that the entire theory of evolution should be declared a failure, he just looks desperate. His audience, which consists mostly of YECs, is willing to believe his nonsense. But face it, Cornelius, you aren't even trying to win any converts, you're just preaching to the choir. If you try to flaunt your stuff at a professional biology conference, people will shrug you off as a crackpot. And they will be right.

Evolutionists often use this argument. They claim evolution is a fact, and when you point out that it has significant problems and comes nowhere close to being a fact, they shift the burden of proof to you. You must demonstrate evolution to be false. Otherwise you are desperate and a crackpot.

The other professor repeated much the same argument, saying that common descent has not been falsified:

Basically, creationists who are desperate to avoid admitting common descent like to point to exceptions to a strict tree. Those exceptions are nevertheless other sorts of genealogy connecting the species. This they are at pains not to mention. Then they say that a (perfect) tree has been invalidated. That leaves their audience thinking that it has been shown that there is no common descent. Which it hasn't been. They are being disingenuous.

The professor then made the fallacious argument that common descent is demonstrated by non random relationships between the proteins species. You can read more about that here.

If you are new to the evolution debate you might wonder why evolutionists do not simply acknowledge the painfully obvious fact that evolution is not a fact. It is not as sure gravity and in fact there are significant questions and problems with evolution. Why don’t evolutionists admit to the truth of how the science bears on their theory?

The answer is that evolution is not about the science. At issue here is not merely the status of another scientific theory. Evolutionists won’t be swayed by the evidence because doing so—and confessing that evolution is not overwhelmingly supported by the evidence—would immediately expose evolutionists to all kinds of possibilities which they simply cannot accept. An evolutionist can no more change his mind than could a cultist. Evolution is underwritten by a religious worldview—it is a metaphysical theory, not at scientific theory. As such it may lose every battle, but it cannot lose the war.

These New Studies Demonstrating Acquired Inheritance Don’t Even Give the Secret Handshake

Another day, another refutation of evolutionary thought, this time in the form of acquired inheritance. Yes, that’s right, the same acquired inheritance spoken of by Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck (otherwise known as Lamarck) and ridiculed by twentieth century evolutionists. Now, two centuries after Lamarck, acquired inheritance is well established in biology, no thanks to evolutionists. Even the usual, once obligatory, bow to evolution is gone. Traditionally, before presenting the scientific evidence, research papers must begin with submissive nod to evolution. A sentence or two about how evolution created the incredible findings about to be discussed usually suffices. Then, having dispensed with the secret handshake, authors are free to show their completely contradictory results. But now even that is gone. Evolution does not explain the findings. Evolution did not inspire or motivate the research. Evolution’s predictions are falsified by the evidence. And evolution ridiculed and resisted the entire idea. It therefore is only fitting that the fanciful evolutionary just-so stories, and yes even the secret handshake, should be expunged (see here, here and here).

The Evolutionary Tree Failed But Evolutionists Still Insist Evolution is a Fact

The fundamental thesis of evolution is that the species evolved according to the evolutionary tree. Students learn about the evolutionary tree in biology class and biologists use the evolutionary tree in their research. But in fact the evolutionary tree is based on a limited, and carefully selected, set of observations. Ever since Darwin, science has continued to document exceptions and anomalies—species that don’t fit neatly into the evolutionary pattern. These biological contradictions come in various forms and are found throughout the tree. For instance, species that in many regards appear to be quite similar, which evolutionists have placed on neighboring twigs of the evolutionary tree, are routinely found to have profound differences. On the other hand, species that are obviously quite different, which evolutionists have placed on distant limbs of the evolutionary tree, are often found to have profound similarities. And these various differences and similarities are found in every imaginable aspect of the species designs, ranging from the visible features of the adult form to the developing embryonic form to the underlying cellular and molecular structures. At this point, such cases are no longer exceptions and anomalies. For years evolutionists attempted to explain this growing list of contradictions using their evolutionary tree model. But it is obvious that this was an exercise in forcing the evidence to fit the theory rather than the other way around. The inexorable march of science has taken its toll and in recent years evolutionists have finally begun to deemphasize their iconic evolutionary tree model. What this does not change, however, is their insistence that evolution is a fact.

While the failure of the evolutionary tree model can be seen in data even as far back as the nineteenth century, such contradictions were generally discussed only in the highly technical scientific journals. Textbooks held to evolutionary orthodoxy and journalists dutifully reported that evolution was a scientific fact. Even today students are taught that the species fall into the expected tree pattern. But some venturesome writers are beginning to mention this unmentionable. A few years ago, for instance, the Telegraph reported that “Charles Darwin's tree of life is ‘wrong and misleading’, claim scientists.” The article reported:

They believe the concept misleads us because his [Darwin’s] theory limits and even obscures the study of organisms and their ancestries. …

Researchers say although for much of the past 150 years biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree it is now obsolete and needs to be discarded. …

“For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life. We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality.” …

More fundamentally recent research suggests the evolution of animals and plants isn't exactly tree-like either. …

Dr Rose said: "The tree of life is being politely buried – we all know that. What's less accepted is our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change." He says biology is vastly more complex than we thought and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.

All of this was important not because it was reporting on any new scientific findings, but rather that a fundamental failure of evolutionary theory was being reported, period. Contrary evidence was being openly discussed.

But of course none of this was allowed to cast any doubt on evolutionary theory itself. As the article reported:

"If you don't have a tree of life what does it mean for evolutionary biology. At first it's very scary – but in the past couple of years people have begun to free their minds." Both he and co-researcher Dr Ford Doolittle stressed that downgrading the tree of life doesn't mean the theory of evolution is wrong just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe.

It is yet another example of how well protected evolution is from the scientific evidence. The tree of life is just one of many failures of evolutionary theory. Over and over the theory fails to elucidate the science, but rather must be repeatedly modified and augmented to try to fit the data. At some point the theory becomes little more than a tautology. Whatever we discover in biology, evolution must have created it, no matter how contradictory and unlikely. The real story here is not that another prediction of evolution has failed, the real story is that evolution is protected from such failures.

Evolutionists Are Up in Arms Over Real Time Epigenetics

Epigenetics has gone real-time and evolutionists are insisting it has no impact on the fact of evolution. Recall that epigenetics provided one of the many falsifications of evolution’s claim that biological variation knows nothing of need. According to evolution, if the environment shifts, presenting a new challenge to a population, then the population responds via the selection of random changes, such as mutations, which are not in response to the new challenge. In short, biological variation must not be directed. Any such intelligent response to the environment smacks too much of teleology, which evolutionary thought fundamentally rejects. So under evolution, populations adapt by chance. Mutations that just happen to address the challenge are selected.

But epigenetics falsified all of that. Science tells us that populations rapidly and intelligently adapt to environmental challenges. Such responses, for example, may be accomplished via modifications to the DNA sequence or via modifications to how genes are expressed. For instance small chemicals, such as methyl groups or hydroxyl groups (or one on top of the other!), may be attached to the DNA or to the histone proteins about which the DNA is wrapped. And such modifications can be passed on to subsequent generations.

This makes no sense on evolution. We would have to imagine that evolution’s random mutations and the like created this fantastic directed adaptation machine, ready to respond to a range of future environmental challenges.

And now epigenetics has been found to occur in real-time, providing profound falsifications of evolutionary expectations. These “real-time” epigenetic mechanisms are applied not to DNA, but to its temporary transcript, mRNA, which supplies the information used to synthesize a protein.

So now evolution must not only have created another fantastic directed adaptation machine, ready to respond to a range of future environmental challenges, but this machine must have been capable and ready to operate, immediately at sometime in the future, on the transitory mRNA molecule.

The absurdity of evolution has just become that much more absurd.

Not surprisingly evolutionists are struggling to provide any sort of coherent explanation for all this. Their mandate that evolution must be a fact has been long since known to be little more than dogma, and the continuing onslaught of scientific findings is not helping.

Evolutionists had no scientific explanation for the fantastic mechanisms behind epigenetics. I once debated an evolution professor who simply denied that cells had any such capability. Needless to say, meaningful debate is not possible when evolutionists deny known facts of science.

Such denial is continuing with the new findings of real-time epigenetics. Evolutionists are not seriously reckoning with the science. One evolutionist, for instance, attempted to defend the evolution of real-time epigenetics by conflating it with the general operation of gene regulation:

I'm absolutely astonished by this series of yours on methylation, Cornelius. You seem to think it's new. How on earth do you think that biologists think that cells even differentiate in multicellular organisms, let alone function, without control of gene expression? Do you think that biologists until recently thought that all genes were switched on all the time? Have you never heard of cell signalling? And what do you imagine that "regulatory genes" actually do if not, um, regulate genes? i.e. switch them on and off?

This argument that the evolution of complex mechanisms is obvious because, after all, we’ve known about it all along, may seem bizarre to newcomers. But for evolutionists this sort of argument is typical. Point out that diversity appears abruptly in the fossil record and evolutionists will tell you that they’ve explained all that with “punctuated equilibrium.” Point out that the origin of life is unlikely, and they’ll tell you that they’ve long since synthesized amino acids in a test tube.

Such problems are not really problems, evolutionists will tell you, because they’ve been known for a long time, and about them evolutionists have produced plenty of speculation.

Evolution has no scientific explanation, beyond speculation, for gene regulation in general. And they don’t have one for real-time epigenetics in particular.

Nonetheless, this evolutionist continued with the same sort of argument, this time recruiting the study of development and how it relates to evolution:

And far from being problematic for evolutionary theory, "evo-devo" answers a huge number of problems for evolutionary theory as it stood, namely how very small incremental DNA variation can make considerable, but viable, changes to the phenotype.

Aside from the fact that the so-called “evo-devo” research fell short of expectations and that development has contradicted evolutionary expections, it has nothing to do with the evolution of real-time epigenetics.

Again, newcomers will be surprised by the level of argumentation produced by evolutionists. But such nonsensical logic does provide a teachable moment. It is another sign of the closing of the evolutionary mind.