Evolution Archives : Page 19 of 23 : Proslogion

Entropy and Evolution, Part 2

In my previous post, I discussed the proper way to apply the Second Law of Thermodynamics to a simple process: the freezing of water in a bucket. Now I want to apply the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the process of evolution. This is a difficult thing to do, because currently, there is no accepted mechanism for the process of evolution. Evolution might occur according to the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis; it might occur via punctuated equilibrium; it might occur according to the evo-devo view; it might occur as a result of facilitated variation; it might occur by some as yet undiscovered mechanism; or it might occur as a result of a combination of all or some of these mechanisms.

Even though there is no agreed-upon mechanism for evolution, some general statements can be made about the supposed process, and that should be enough to allow us to roughly apply the Second Law of Thermodynamics to it. In general, evolution says that organisms increase in complexity over time. A single-celled organism, for example, eventually developed the ability (through some as yet unknown process) to cooperate with other cells, which eventually led to a multicelled organism. Clearly, a multicelled organism is more complex than a single-celled organism, so via that unknown process, “simpler” single-celled organisms gave rise to “more complex” multicelled organisms. These multicelled organisms began to develop (once again, through some as yet unknown process) more “advanced” features, so that eventually a large diversity of life formed.

The longer evolution had to work through its unknown process, the more complex living creatures became. Thus, while it took some time for the evolutionary process to create relatively “simple” multicelled creatures, it took more time for evolution to produce complex invertebrates, and it took more time for evolution to produce vertebrates. The more “advanced” the vertebrate, the longer it took for evolution to produce it.

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Entropy and Evolution, Part 1

I was reading Dr. Hunter’s blog yesterday, and he had a post about entropy and evolution. In that post, he cited an article that comes to the right conclusion on the issue, but for the wrong reason. In fact, I am surprised that it passed peer review, since it promotes a very bad misconception regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Because both creationists and evolutionists do a very poor job of applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the concept of origins, I thought I would try to explain the proper way to interpret the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the next post, I will then apply the Second Law to the concept of evolution.

Before I get started, however, let me tell you the overall conclusion. The Second Law of Thermodynamics DOES NOT forbid the process of evolution. I know there are many creationists out there who claim that it does, but they are simply wrong. In addition, I know there are a lot of evolutionists out there who claim that it doesn’t, but they do so for reasons that are often wrong. So let’s talk about the Second law of Thermodynamics and how to properly apply it to many situations, including the process of evolution.

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That’s a Good Point!

In a recent issue of Science, there are a couple of short articles (called “Technical Comments”) about Ardipithecus ramidus. If you don’t remember this fossil, nicknamed “Ardi,” it was originally discussed in an October 2009 issue of the same journal.¹ It was a collection of severely-crushed and poorly-fossilized remains that took more than 15 years to analyze. This analysis included a digital reconstruction of large portions of the skeleton. The skull pictured here, for example, is a digital reconstruction based on the crushed bones that were found.

At the time, Ardi was hailed as an amazingly important discovery, because the authors of the study claimed that the fossil’s features clearly showed it was a part of the supposed evolutionary lineage between an apelike ancestor and modern man. Indeed, Science called it the “breakthrough of the year” and said:

Even the earliest members of her species, Australopithecus afarensis, lived millions of years after the last common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees. The first act of the human story was still missing. Now comes Ardi, a 4.4-million-year-old female who shines bright new light on an obscure time in our past.²

The short articles I mentioned above disagree with some of the conclusions of the original studies on Ardi.

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Coyne and Embryonic Development…Wrong AGAIN!

A student recently sent me a question based on a statement made in Dr. Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True. Since there doesn’t seem to be much written about it for a general audience, I thought I would summarize the issue. Here is Dr. Coyne’s statement:

One of my favorite cases of embryological evidence for evolution is the furry human fetus. We are famously known as “naked apes” because, unlike other primates, we don’t have a thick coat of hair. But in fact for one brief period we do – as embryos. Around sixth months after conception, we become completely covered with a fine, downy coat of hair called lanugo. Lanugo is usually shed about a month before birth, when it’s replaced by the more sparsely distributed hair with which we’re born. (Premature infants, however, are sometimes born with lanugo, which soon falls off.) Now, there’s NO NEED for a human embryo to have a transitory coat of hair. After all, it’s a cozy 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the womb. Lanugo can be explained ONLY as a remnant of our primate ancestry: fetal monkeys also develop a coat of hair at about the same stage of development. Their hair, however, doesn’t fall out, but hangs on to become the adult coat. And, like humans, fetal whales also have lanugo, a remnant of when their ancestors lived on land.¹ (emphasis mine)

Note the strong words by Dr. Coyne. Embryos have “no need” for such hair, and thus its presence can “only” be explained as a remnant of our primate ancestry. Not surprisingly, Dr. Coyne is wrong on both counts.

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Synthetic Life Shows the Impossibility of Abiogenesis

Dr Craig Venter made the news last week in a big way. As The Guardian put it:

Craig Venter and his team have built the genome of a bacterium from scratch and incorporated it into a cell to make what they call the world’s first synthetic life form.

It’s an amazing feat of biotechnology, and the process he and his team produced might result in some incredible applications down the road. What I find interesting about the process, however, is how well it illustrates that life simply cannot come about as the result of random chemical reactions guided by some sort of selection process. In other words, this stunning achievement really demonstrates the impossibility of abiogenesis.

The scientific report of Venter and his team’s accomplishment can be found on the website of the journal Science¹. I finally got around to reading it, and it is truly fascinating. When you look at the details of how they created their “synthetic” life form, you find that Venter and his team relied on already-living systems not once, not twice, but a total of three times. Without relying on these already-living systems, they would not have been able to produce their “synthetic” cell.

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Genetic Redundancy – An Amazing Design

DNA_animation — Rotating Anmation of DNA
(Animation in the public domain)

As I mentioned previously, Dr. Peter Borger has an amazing series of articles on genetics over at Creation Ministries International’s website. He is putting together a very impressive interpretation of the genome based on what has been learned about genetics over the past few years. He starts his series with a discussion of genetic redundancy, which is truly incredible.

The article begins by discussing something that has been known for quite some time: It is possible to disable a gene so that it no longer produces the protein it is supposed to produce. This technique is called gene knockout, because it as if the gene has been “knocked out” of the organism’s genome. The organism is referred to as a knockout organism or just a knockout.

Why would you study a knockout organism? Well, imagine that you have identified a gene but don’t really know what it does for the organism. If you create a version of the organism with that gene knocked out, any negative effects that you see will most likely be the result of the missing gene, so that will give you some idea of what the gene does.

This is a great experimental procedure that has produced a lot of genetic understanding over the years. However, it has also produced a very interesting result: often a knockout organism is not significantly different from the standard (usually called wild-type) organism. In other words, some genes can be knocked out of an organism with little or no effect on the organism itself.

This might sound surprising to someone who is not familiar with the genetics literature, but it really isn’t. In fact, geneticists thought they had an explanation for this interesting result…until experiments over the past decade or so really upset the applecart.

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The RNA Virus Paradox

A diagram of HIV, which is a retrovirus (image in the public domain)

Dr. Peer Terborg has an incredible series of articles on genetics and the design of life over at Creation Ministries International’s website. The ones to which I refer begin with “Evidence for the design of life…” While I plan to write about many of the major concepts discussed in these articles, I want to start with sort of a “sidelight” that appears in part 3 of his series.

Not too long ago, I wrote about the fact that evolution (in the ‘goo to you’ sense) is, at best, an unconfirmed hypothesis. A commenter, Grant C, tried to convince me that it is something more by offering several lines of evidence for evolution. Of course, I attempted to educate Grant on what the evidence really meant, but after only a few exchanges, he stopped responding.

One of his major lines of evidence for evolution was endogenous retroviral insertions (ERVs) in the genomes of primates. If you don’t know what ERVs are, you need to first learn what a retrovirus is.

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Science Has Demonstrated Evolutionists Wrong and Creationists Right…AGAIN

eye1 — Schematic of the Human Retina
Illustration by Megan Fruchte

Many evolutionists have claimed that the human eye (actually the vertebrate eye in general) is wired “backwards.” According to evolutionists, this is such a terrible way to make an eye that it clearly shows the eye has no Designer. What is so “terrible” about the way the eye is wired? Well, light that enters the eye is detected by specialized cells called rods and cones. Those rods and cones convert the light that they detect into signals that travel through association neurons and into nerve fibers that carry the signals to the brain. As shown in the illustration above, however, the neurons and nerves that carry those signals are in front of the rods and cones. Thus, light must travel through the nerves and association neurons before it can hit the rods and cones.

According to evolutionists, this is a terrible design. After all, if anyone with any sense were to design an eye, the rods and cones would be the first thing the light hits. That way, the rods and cones would get an unobstructed view of the light. Since the vertebrate eye is not designed the way these evolutionists think should be “obvious,” it is clear (to them) that the eye was not designed. Indeed, in his book The Blind Watchmaker (probably his best work), Richard Dawkins says:

Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas.¹

Of course, like most evolutionary nonsense, the more science we learn, the more we see how wrong this argument is.

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Babies and Morality

Is morality something that is a part of our very being, or is it something that is learned from our culture? From a scientific point of view, that is a hard thing to answer. Data exist that could support either argument, so often the conclusion that is drawn from the scientific evidence tells us more about the interpreter than the data. A very interesting article in the New York Times illustrates this in very stark terms.

Before I start discussing this article, there are two things I want to make clear. First, I got this article from PZ Myers’s blog. As anyone who reads this blog probably knows, he is my favorite atheist. More than anyone else, he demonstrates how the atheistic worldview is based on irratonaility. As I have written before, there are serious scholars who are atheists, and their arguments need to be heeded. There are also hacks that are atheists, and their arguments make it very easy to be a theist. PZ Meyers is, indeed, one of the hacks. Nevertheless, I read his blog because it is fun to see the mental gymnastics through which a scientist must go in order to be an atheist.

The second thing I want to make clear is that I do not think that the argument from morality is a reasonable argument for the existence of God. While there is ovewhelming scientific evidence for the existence of God, the argument from morality simply isn’t one of them. Indeed, in my experience, some of the most immoral people I know call themselves Christians, and their “morality” is put to shame by many atheists.

So…while I don’t think the argument from morality holds much weight, I do think that the interpretation of any data related to morality (like the interpretation of many other kinds of data) is heavily influenced by whether or not you think God exists. This New York Times story demonstrates that in no uncertain terms.

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Is DNA Providing a Coherent View of Evolution?

tree — Darwin's Proposed 'Tree of Life'
source:http://darwin-online.org.uk/life10b.html

Darwin believed that all forms of life existing on this planet arose from “a few…or one”¹ form(s) of life. While mulling over this idea, he sketched in one of his notebooks something that has been an icon of evolution ever since: the tree of life. His idea was that if you could properly trace the evolutionary relationships of all organisms, you would find that they would form a “giant tree,” with all the “branches” eventually tracing back to the one or few life forms that started all of evolution. Since that time, evolutionists have been trying to construct such a “tree of life,” but they have met with limited success. The problem is that different methods for constructing the “tree of life” give rather different results. For example, if you look at the morphology (form and structure) of organisms, you construct one “tree.” However, if you look at common molecules, such as the RNA found in a cell’s ribosomes, you get a different “tree.” As Masami Hasegawa and colleagues wrote:

That molecular evidence typically squares with morphological patterns is a view held by many biologists, but interestingly, by relatively few systematists. Most of the latter know that the two lines of evidence may often be incongruent.²

Once scientists got to the point where they could sequence many, many genes and compare the genes in one organism directly to the genes in another organism, it was thought that a “definitive tree of life” would be produced. After all, since evolution is supposed to occur via mutations in the genome being acted on by natural selection, genetics should provide a clear map of how evolution progressed.

The problem is that DNA has simply muddied the waters even more when it comes to evolutionary relationships. Indeed, it has caused some biologists to say that evolution cannot even be represented by a tree.

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