”Smart Evolution” Learns, New Scientist Claims

New Scientist attempts to see the feather as a product of smart evolution.




Joel Kontinen

New Scientist introduces an article on smart evolution with words that remind us of design:

“A FEATHER isn’t just pretty: it’s pretty useful. Strong, light and flexible, with tiny barbs to zip each filament to its neighbours, it is fantastically designed for flight. The mammalian eye, too, is a marvel of complex design, with its pupil to regulate the amount of light that enters, a lens to focus it onto the retina, and rods and cones for low light and colour vision – all linked to the brain through the optic nerve.”

Pro-evolution publications don’t have any love for the words 'design' or 'designer'. If anyone doubted this, the recent episode featuring the use of Creator and design in a PLOS ONE article might have prompted a rethink.

Way back in 2011 the journal BioEssays instructed would-be authors to avoid using terms that might suggest that a biological trait is designed.

Now, however, New Scientist wants to hijack the word and use it for solely Darwinian purposes. Relying on the views of computer scientist Richard Watson, an associate professor at the University of Southampton, UK, it introduces an unorthodox view of evolution.

This approach allows the magazine to use expressions like “fantastically designed for flight”, without attracting the ire of the Darwinian thought police.

It manages to do this by giving all the credit to evolution. The solution is to use phrases like “evolution’s incredible prowess as a designer”.

In what it calls a radical new view of evolution, evolution remembers past solutions and is clever enough to use them in the future.

" 'If past selection has shaped the building blocks well, it can make solving new problems look easy,’ says Watson. Instead of merely making limbs longer or shorter, for example, evolution can change whether forelimbs and hindlimbs evolve independently or together. A single mutation that changes connections in the network can lengthen all four legs of a giraffe, or allow a bat to increase its wingspan without getting too leggy. And a feather or an eye needn't be generated from scratch, but can evolve by mixing and matching building blocks that have served well in the past.”

Evolutionists might believe that mutations are marvellous mistakes but they have usually overestimated their power, and the new view repeats the same old mistakes in a slightly different way.

The article discloses the real reason for this new approach (apart from the self-evident truth that Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy isn’t working) is to explain nature without God.

“This ability to learn needs no supernatural intervention -- it is an inevitable product of random variation and selection acting on gene networks.”

This approach has merely changed the unit of selection: gene becomes gene networks, and everyone can pretend that the watchmaker isn’t blind at all. Poor Dawkins.

What the article misses is that creation is not a god-of-the-gaps approach (and neither is intelligent design), but in the Genesis based model, God makes everything good in the beginning, without the need for improvement, and even programmes the ability for variation – within kinds, that is.

Creation is a far more plausible model than any new view of old evolution.

Source:

Nature’s brain: A radical new view of evolution. New Scientist 3066 (22 March, 2016).

Religious Belief May Promote Scientific Creativity and Insight, New Study Suggests

David Livingstone meets Henry Morton Stanley. Image courtesy International Mission Photography Archive, ca.1860-ca.1960, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Religious faith might not be a bad thing for a top scientist. The pioneers of modern science (for instance Robert Hooke, Sir Isaac Newton and Louis Pasteur) were Christians. In spite of what atheists might claim, “from 1901 to 2000, 654 Nobel laureates, or nearly 90 percent, belonged to one of 28 religions.”

A new paper published in PLOS ONE attempts to fathom the assumed dichotomy between science and belief. The researchers believe they were able to explain this by the structure of our brains.

They also found that people of faith tend to be more prosocial and empathic than those who take a more analytical approach to the great questions of life.

Even some atheists acknowledge that religion is good for us.

However, religions do differ. Christianity is the most pro-social religion, but political correctness would not allow the researchers to say so. Christians have done much to make the world a better place. William Wilberforce and David Livingstone fought against the slave trade, for instance.

"Having empathy doesn't mean you necessarily have anti-scientific beliefs. Instead, our results suggest that if we only emphasize analytic reasoning and scientific beliefs, as the New Atheist movement suggests, then we are compromising our ability to cultivate a different type of thinking, namely social/moral insight," says Jared Friedman, a co-author of the paper.

The study throws cold water on those who emphasise the bad consequences of religion: “Religious belief is associated with greater compassion, greater social inclusiveness and greater motivation to engage in pro-social actions.”

The paper’s lead author, associate professor Anthony Ian Jack, also issued a warning: "Religion has no place telling us about the physical structure of the world; that's the business of science.”

This perhaps reflects the same journal’s recent episode featuring the Creator’s design that attracted much attention – and ire – from some atheists.

Source:

Case Western Reserve University. 2016. Conflict between science, religion lies in our brains. Science Daily (23 March).

Famous Bonobo Fails Easy Language Test

Bonobos might be good at hunting termites, but they don’t understand grammar. Image courtesy of Mike R., Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).





Joel Kontinen

In the early 1980s, a male bonobo named Kanzi made headlines with its assumed linguistic skills. Coached from an early age by primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the ape understood a wide variety of commands.

A new study throws some cold water on the enthusiasm. According to a report in the journal Science:

“But a new study reveals he may not be as brainy as scientists thought—at least when it comes to grammar. The original test consisted of 660 verbal commands, in English, that asked Kanzi to do things like ‘show me the hot water’ and ‘pour cold water in the potty.’ Overall, the ape did well, responding correctly 71.5% of the time (compared with 66.6% for an infant human). But when the researchers asked him to perform an action on more than one item, his performance plummeted to just 22.2%, according to the new analysis.”

Obviously, the bonobo failed to understand basic grammar:

“When he was asked to ‘give the lighter and the shoe to Rose,’ for example, he gave Rose the lighter, but no shoe. When asked to ‘give the water and the doggie to Rose,’ he gave her the toy dog, but no water. The cause? Animals like bonobos may have a harder time than humans in processing complex noun phrases like ‘water and doggie,’ linguist Robert Truswell of the University of Edinburgh reported in New Orleans, Louisiana, this week at the Evolution of Language conference.”

While we can teach animals to carry out easy tasks, it seems that grammar is beyond their comprehension:

“This feature of grammar—which effectively ‘nests’ one unit within the bigger construct of a sentence—is easily picked up by humans, allowing us to communicate—and understand—more complex ideas.”

This all highlights our uniqueness. Only humans were created in God’s image. While dogs can be cute and we can teach them to fetch the newspaper, for instance, a huge intellectual gap makes us distinct from all animals.

While evolutionary publications tend to see human traits in apes, much of the reporting is little more than pure speculation.

For Charles Darwin, the sudden appearance of language was a horrid doubt.

For Darwinists, language evolution has remained a big mystery that cannot be solved by storytelling.

Some researchers say that humans may be programmed to learn language.

Source:

Matacic, Catherine. 2016. Ape ‘language ace’ gets tripped up by simple grammar. Science (25 March).

Brussels Bombings: Reminders of the Fall

Reminder of a world plagued by the consequences of sin. Image courtesy of Miguel Discart, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).




Joel Kontinen

Despite all the beauty around us, we are no longer living in the perfect world that Adam and Eve were able to enjoy before they turned their backs on God, bringing death and suffering into human history.

The first murder soon followed. Their son Cain killed his brother Abel.

ISIS follows the path Cain chose.

We cannot understand evil if we don’t believe that Genesis means what it says.

But in the midst of all the turmoil God has not given up on humans. He is still in control. He still wants to give us hope.

He still loves the ones created in His image, the ones for whom He suffered and died, but rose from the dead.

Religion Is Good for Us, It Helps Us to Co-operate, Research Suggests

The old rugged cross could help us to be better individuals.




Joel Kontinen

Even though PloS ONE recently deemed that one should not use the word Creator in a science paper, journals cannot escape the concept of a supernatural being.

While some atheists used to claim that religion was bad for us, it seems that those days are past and gone, as several studies have pointed out the very opposite.

A paper published in the journal Nature looked at how beliefs affected behaviour suggested that religion helps us to co-operate.

Science Daily summarises the findings:

“Beliefs about all-knowing, punishing gods -- a defining feature of religions ranging from Christianity to Hinduism -- may have played a key role in expanding co-operation among far-flung peoples and led to the development of modern-day states.

Researchers looked at how religion affects humans' willingness to co-operate with those outside their social circle. They found that beliefs about all-knowing gods fosters co-operation.”

It was a fairly comprehensive study, involving “interviews and behavioural experiments with nearly 600 people from communities in Vanuatu, Fiji, Brazil, Mauritius, Siberia and Tanzania whose religious beliefs included Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, animism and ancestor worship.”

The study suggested that religion is good for us. It helps us to co-operate. Knowing that we are accountable for our deeds will keep us from being nasty, even towards strangers.

The take away message of this paper is that if we believe in a Deity that sees what we are doing and that He will punish us if do bad deeds, we will be morally better individuals.

Religion has not been absent from science publications lately. They have speculated on the assumed evolution of religion and the significance of God and religion.

It is indeed difficult to escape God. ”I wonder what God thinks of us, as we don’t believe in him?,” a young atheist kid once asked.

Source:

University of British Columbia. 2016. Beliefs about all-knowing gods fosters co-operation. Science Daily (10 February).

Soft Tissue from Two “247-Million-Year-Old” Reptiles

Nothosaurus mirabilis. A recent study featured soft tissue found in nothosaurid bones. Image courtesy of Nobu Tamura, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).



Joel Kontinen

How long can old fossils retain soft tissue? Research recently published in the journal PloS ONE documents perhaps the oldest cases of biomolecules supposedly hailing from the Early/Middle Triassic, ca “247.2 million years” ago.

Polish scientists examined the fossils of two ancient reptiles, and found much more than just old-looking stony material:

“Fossil biomolecules from an endogenous source were previously identified in Cretaceous to Pleistocene fossilized bones, the evidence coming from molecular analyses. These findings, however, were called into question and an alternative hypothesis of the invasion of the bone by bacterial biofilm was proposed. Herewith we report a new finding of morphologically preserved blood-vessel-like structures enclosing organic molecules preserved in iron-oxide-mineralized vessel walls from the cortical region of nothosaurid and tanystropheid (aquatic and terrestrial diapsid reptiles) bones. These findings are from the Early/Middle Triassic boundary (Upper Roetian/Lowermost Muschelkalk) strata of Upper Silesia, Poland."

The researchers pointed out that they really found what they reported:

"Multiple spectroscopic analyses (FTIR, ToF-SIMS, and XPS) of the extracted ‘blood vessels’ showed the presence of organic compounds, including fragments of various amino acids such as hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine as well as amides, that may suggest the presence of collagen protein residues.”

Just to keep on the safe side, however, they put blood vessels in quotes.

“Because these amino acids are absent from most proteins other than collagen, we infer that the proteinaceous molecules may originate from endogenous collagen. The preservation of molecular signals of proteins within the ‘blood vessels’ was most likely made possible through the process of early diagenetic iron oxide mineralization. This discovery provides the oldest evidence of in situ preservation of complex organic molecules in vertebrate remains in a marine environment.”

To their credit, they acknowledged finding “complex organic molecules” in the bones.

Previous studies have reported on blood vessels, collagen, haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as radiocarbon (C-14) found in dinosaur bone.

Researchers have also found soft tissue in dino-era marine fossils.

The most logical explanation is that biomolecules cannot last millions of years. But that might go against the evolutionary worldview of some people.

Source:

Surmik, Dawid et al. 2016. Spectroscopic Studies on Organic Matter from Triassic Reptile Bones, Upper Silesia, Poland. PloS ONE 11(3): e0151143. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0151143. (15 March).

Pluto’s Atmosphere Challenges Faith in Billions of Years

Pluto has managed to keep its atmosphere. Image courtesy of NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.



Joel Kontinen


NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft keeps on sending new images from its flypast of Pluto. Researchers were surprised at what they saw in July when they got to see the first pictures: Pluto was anything but cold and old.

The dwarf planet is strikingly active and has glaciers and ice volcanoes.

New Scientist acknowledges that Pluto presents a big dilemma for the old age of the solar system:

“One of the biggest surprises of the mission was how closely Pluto holds its atmosphere.

‘Pluto’s really tiny, so it doesn’t have the mass to hold on to an atmosphere over the age of the solar system – at least we wouldn’t have thought that,’ says Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.”

The magazine also touched on a related mystery:

”Remote observations showed that the atmosphere was dominated by nitrogen, and astronomers expected to find a tail of nitrogen streaming off the dwarf planet like a comet. But in reality, the chief material Pluto is losing to space is methane, and much less of it than predicted.”

Pluto is not the odd one out. Many other planets and moons look far too young for a 4.5 billion-year-old solar system, for instance Ceres, Jupiter’s moons Io and Europa, as well as Saturn’s moons Enceladus, Mimas and Titan.

Just what we would expect from Genesis.

Source:

Grossman, Lisa. 2016. Pluto gives up its icy secrets as New Horizons data pours in. New Scientist (17 March).