So what was really found on Mars? Not surprisingly, the title of the scientific paper that was published in the journal Science comes close to the truth:
Organic matter preserved in 3-billion-year-old mudstones at Gale crater, Mars
Now, of course, I think the “3-billion-year-old mudstones” is scientifically irresponsible, but notice the difference between the scientific article’s title and the title of the articles written by “science journalists.” There is no mention of life in title of the scientific article.
But wait a minute. Isn’t that just semantics? Doesn’t “organic” refer to chemicals that come from living things. Absolutely not! As I tell students in my elementary science book Science in the Industrial Age:
While organic chemicals are generally associated with living things, it is possible to make them from nonliving things…Scientists still use the terms “organic” and “inorganic” today to classify chemicals, but they do so based on the elements that make them up, not based on where they come from.
Now, of course, the news articles I linked above eventually get around to saying that it is possible for the molecules discovered on Mars to have come about without the presence of life. Even with that caveat, however, the news articles are still wrong, because the molecules discovered are not, in any way, the “building blocks of life.”
Most of an animal’s DNA is in the nucleus of the cell, but there is DNA in the powerhouse of the cell, which is called the mitochondrion.In a comment on a previous article, a reader informed me of a study that I had not seen. It was published in the journal Human Evolution and its results are consistent with the idea that 90% of all animal species came into being at roughly the same time. This is certainly not what the hypothesis of evolution would predict, so some creationists as well as some intelligent design advocates have presented the study as evidence against evolution. In my reply to the comment, I expressed skepticism, even though I would love for the conclusions of the study to be correct. Now that I have read the study itself, I am even more skeptical.
The authors of the study analyzed the DNA of many different species of animals. However, they did not look at the DNA found in the nucleus of the cell. That DNA, called nuclear DNA, is responsible for most of an organism’s genetically-defined traits. They looked at mitochondrial DNA, which is the small amount of DNA that is found in the mitochondrion, the structure that produces most of the energy that the cell ends up using. To give you an idea of how different mitochondrial DNA is from nuclear DNA, the nuclear DNA of a human being is over 3 billion base pairs long, while human mitochondrial DNA is just over 16,000 base pairs long. You don’t need to know what “base pairs” are to see that there is only a tiny, tiny amount of mitochondrial DNA in a human cell compared to nuclear DNA.
Now even though there isn’t a lot of mitochondrial DNA, some sections of it seem to be very characteristic of the species of animal from which the cell comes. For example, a 2016 study analyzed a section of mitochondrial DNA (called the COX1 gene) among different species of birds. It showed that the COX1 gene alone was enough to separate 94% of the birds into species. Similar studies indicate that the COX1 gene can separate other species of animals, so the sequence of the COX1 gene is often referred to as the DNA barcode of the animal. This is what the authors of the study I am discussing focused on.
A few days ago, I ran across an interesting study that I think is worth discussing. Like most studies that try to understand human behavior, its results are incredibly tentative. Nevertheless, they are interesting, and they also are consistent with a trend that I have noticed among my colleagues and friends.
The researchers wanted to probe how a person’s belief in human-induced “climate change” affects his or her personal behaviors. They recruited 600 people from Amazon Mechanical Turk (I had never heard of it until reading the study), and assessed both their beliefs about human-induced climate change as well as their behavior when it came to four types of “pro-environmental” activities: recycling, using public transportation, purchasing environmentally-friendly consumer products, and utilizing reusable shopping bags.
One very important aspect of this study is that the researchers didn’t just do this once. They did it seven times throughout one year. That way, they could track beliefs and behaviors as they ebbed and flowed. Unfortunately, it is hard to keep people interested in a study like this, so while they started with 600 participants, only 291 actually completed all seven evaluations. However, some participants missed just a few evaluations, so an average of 413 participants were evaluated in each of the second through seventh analyses.
Illustration of the i-motif structure of DNA formed from the standard double-helix structure.
(This figure is from the scientific article being discussed.)
DNA is a wonderfully complex chemical that we are still a long way from fully understanding. Its ability to store information is amazing. Experiments indicate that a single gram of DNA (a gram is approximately the mass of a U.S. dollar bill) can store 500,000 CDs worth of information! It uses a complicated system of alternative splicing so that a single region of the molecule can store the information needed to produce many different chemicals (see here and here, for example). It is so complex that even the best chemistry lab in the world cannot produce a useful version of it. In the end, the best human science can do is make tiny sections of DNA and then employ yeast cells to stitch those segments together so that they become something useful.
In 1953, American biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick published a landmark paper describing the structure of DNA that we have all come to know: the double-helix. Since then, however, scientists have discovered at least 10 other structures that DNA can take on. One of the more interesting ones is called the i-motif structure, which is illustrated above. Rather than the well-known double-helix, it is a four-stranded, interlocking ladder.
This rather bizarre form of DNA was first discovered as a structure produced in the lab, and many biochemists thought that it couldn’t exist in most living organisms (especially humans), because it tends to form in acidic conditions. Human blood is just slightly basic (pH between 7.35 and 7.45), so it was thought that i-motif DNA wouldn’t be found in human cells. However, a new paper provides very strong evidence that i-motif DNA not only exists in human cells, but that it is constantly forming and unforming based on what is going on in the cell!
The researchers decided to look for this form of DNA in human cells by making an antibody that would bind only to the i-motif form of DNA. They tagged the antibody with a fluorescent dye that would glow green when the antibody attached. They demonstrated that the antibody was faithful to bind only to that form of DNA, and they put the antibody in the nucleus of a human cell. Using a microscope, they were able to see antibodies glow in several different places, indicating that i-motif DNA was, indeed, present in the nucleus.
What’s even more remarkable, however, is that the glowing regions turned on and off. This indicates that the i-motif structure was being made from the double-helix form and then transformed back into the double helix form. Why? There’s no solid answer to this question, but the researchers noticed that i-motif DNA tended to form a lot during transcription. If you don’t recognize that term, in order to make a protein, the cell must read the “recipe” for that protein from the DNA and then send that recipe to another place in the cell to make the protein. The first part of that process (reading the DNA) is called transcription, and the second part (turning it into a protein) is called translation. That means i-motif DNA is formed more frequently when the cell is starting the process of making a protein.
Because of this, the researchers suggest that the i-motif form of DNA provides some sort of regulation in the production of proteins. After all, the cell not only needs to know how to make proteins, but it also needs to know when to make them and how much to make. The “how” part is something we know pretty well. The “when” and “how much” parts are still quite mysterious to modern science. We have uncovered (and partially understood) some of DNA’s regulatory mechanisms, but as this new discovery of i-motif DNA in human cells indicates, we still have a long way to go.
DNA is just one of the many marvels in Creation that testify to the design ingenuity of the Creator, and the more we learn about it, the more I stand in awe!
Dr. Adam Perkins is a personality researcher at King’s College London (KCL). On March 16 of this year, he was scheduled to give a talk to a group on campus. However, that same day, the college’s events office informed him that they had deemed his talk a high-risk event and did not have time to organize the security that kind of situation would require. Thus, the talk would have to be postponed. What was the title of this high-risk talk? It was:
The Scientific Importance of Free Speech
Why in the world would that title cause KCL’s events office to consider the event to be risky? As far as I know, the office hasn’t answered that question. Perhaps it got skittish after thugs stormed into a debate that was taking place at KCL and violently stopped it. Perhaps they were afraid that the group which arranged the talk (the KCL Liberterian Society) was so controversial that any event it arranged would have to be treated as high-risk. Perhaps they thought that promoting free speech in science is just too controversial.
Regardless of the reason, the very fact that such a speech needs to be given indicates the depths to which parts of the culture have sunk. When professors actually have to remind students how important it is for scientists to be able to openly and honestly debate their ideas, you know that something is terribly wrong.
When one side of a scientific debate is allowed to silence the other side, this is an impediment to scientific progress because it prevents bad theories being replaced by better theories.
As I have stated before (see here, here, and here, for example), anyone who promotes censoring scientific ideas because they go against the current “consensus” is decidedly anti-science.
Fossil of an extinct form of dragonfly that was named for Chris Moore and Michael Behe. The black line indicates a distance of 10 millimeters. (click for source, which includes a link to the license.)
Dr. Michael Behe is an icon in the intelligent-design movement. His book, Darwin’s Black Box, was an important early contribution to the intelligent-design movement, but more importantly, his most famous peer-reviewed paper put forth the idea that the majority of adaptive changes occur as a result of loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function. This view, of course, puts a serious limit on the amount of evolutionary change that can occur as a result of random mutations guided by natural selection. The world’s longest-running evolution experiment seems to confirm this view (see here, here, and here).
Now please understand that Dr. Behe is no creationist. He believes in common descent, but his work indicates that it cannot be accomplished by random mutations guided by natural selection. In his book The Edge of Evolution, he explores how much such a process can change an organism and shows that it has severe limitations. In the end, he thinks that when the Designer created the first cell, He/She/It “front-loaded” all of the information into the cell’s genome, allowing evolution to proceed in a designed manner. I don’t think that’s a reasonable hypothesis, but I admire Dr. Behe for following the data and proposing something that most scientists find heretical. I also admire his ability to take the scorn that has been heaped on him and continue to persevere. Even though I think his particular hypothesis is wrong, he is doing science a service by challenging a hypothesis that is most certainly wrong.
As a result, I was happy to see that Dr. Behe (along with famous fossil-hunter Chris Moore) has been honored by having a species of dragonfly named after him. The fossil was in Chris Moore’s collection, but Mr. Moore didn’t know that it comes from a previously-unrecognized species. However, Dr. Gunter Bechly, world-renowned paleotologist and former curator at the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History, saw a picture of the fossil and thought it looked unique. As a result, he asked Mr. Moore to send him the fossil so that he could study it closely, and he confirmed that it did, indeed, represent a new genus and species. In his peer-reviewed paper, he officially names it Chrismooreia michaelbehei.
Why did Dr. Bechly choose this name? His analysis indicates that there is no genus for this extinct form of dragonfly, so he named the genus (the first part of the scientific name) after Mr. Moore, since he was kind enough to lend his fossil to Dr. Bechly for study. The species (the second part of the scientific name) is named in honor of Dr. Behe, because as I have written in a previous article, Dr. Bechly was originally an apologist for Darwinism. However, the works of intelligent design authors allowed him to see that the data do not support the evolutionary hypothesis, and like any good scientist, he decided to follow the data and stop promoting Darwinist propaganda. Since Dr. Behe’s book The Edge of Evolution was a major influence in this process, Dr. Bechly thought it was an appropriate honor.
Cyclone Larry near northeast Australia (left) and Hurricane Hernan near Mexico (right). Notice that the rotation in the Southern hemisphere is clockwise, and the rotation in the Northern Hemisphere is counterclockwise.
(Images Courtesy of NASA/GSFC, by Jeff Schmaltz and Jacques Descloitres)
When I see it, I generally comment that the video is a clever con. It is based on a scientific concept that is quite true, but it does not apply to situations that involve short distances. Most of my Facebook “friends” express appreciation for me pointing out the error, but one of them was adamant for a while that the video shows a real truth. In my efforts to educate him, I ended up finding a really nice video resource, which I will share after my long-winded statements on this issue.
This diffuse galaxy, NGC 1052-DF2, has no “need” for dark matter.
Dark matter is one of those things that scientists use to make up for an observation which is inconsistent with the known laws of physics. When astronomers look at the motion of stars in a galaxy, they can use Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation to estimate how much mass must be in the galaxy to produce the motion that is observed. However, they can also use the amount of light they see coming from the galaxy to estimate how much mass is there. In general, those two masses don’t agree. The motion of the stars indicates significantly more mass than the light coming from the galaxy.
That’s where dark matter comes in. Since the matter we can see using the light that comes from a galaxy doesn’t account for the motion of the stars within the galaxy, there must be a lot of matter that is too dark to see. But if it’s too dark to see, it must be some strange type of matter that is fundamentally different from the matter we have studied here on earth. Many experiments have been done trying to directly observe dark matter, but so far, they have come up empty. Thus, if dark matter exists, its nature is a complete mystery to us. This is frustrating, since astrophysicists think that about 80% of the mass in the universe comes from dark matter!
Some scientists (I count myself among them) are hesitant to accept that about 80% of the universe’s mass is made up of something we can’t detect, so they look for alternate explanations. One group suggests that on very large scales, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is slightly different from what it is here on earth. These physicists suggest a modified version of the law, which they call Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). If you accept their modification, the need for dark matter goes away. Another scientist suggests that if you actually apply Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation properly (taking into account that there are multiple bodies exerting gravitational force on all the other bodies and that those bodies are in constant motion), you need very little (if any) dark matter to understand why the stars move so quickly in galaxies.
Well, these three competing ideas (dark matter, MOND, and multiple-body analysis) have just been presented with a means by which they can distinguish themselves: a diffuse galaxy charmingly named NGC 1052-DF2, which is pictured above. This is the first discovered galaxy for which the mass calculated from the motion of the stars is pretty much equal to the mass calculated from the light that we see. Thus, there is no “need” for dark matter in this galaxy.
Now this galaxy is anything but a run-of-the-mill collection of stars. Most galaxies have a noticeable central region. This one doesn’t. Most galaxies have dense enough stars that there are portions through which you cannot see. This galaxy is completely see-through. Most galaxies have tight clusters of stars that orbit the outer parts of the galaxy. While this one has those clusters, they are about twice as large as the clusters seen in other galaxies. Most galaxies show evidence of a central black hole. This one doesn’t. Finally, it is part of a group of galaxies that is dominated by a very large, active galaxy known as NGC 1052. It’s possible that all these features somehow explain the apparent lack of need for dark matter.
I really hope the group promoting MOND and the scientist promoting a multiple-body solution to star motion in galaxies turn their attention to this new discovery. While I am happy to believe in dark matter if there is strong evidence for it, right now, I am inclined to believe there is an alternate solution to the “missing mass” problem in galaxies. Hopefully, further analysis of this galaxy will help us find out.
Schematic of the newly-found human anatomical feature (Illustration by Jill Gregory licenced under CC-BY-ND – click for more information)
In one of my online biology classes last week, a student asked if I had any comments on the new organ that was just discovered in the human body. I didn’t have any comments, because I didn’t know anything about it. I expressed a lot of skepticism, saying that with all the imaging techniques available to scientists, it’s hard to imagine that an organ in the human body has been missed. However, I promised the student I would look into it, and while I hesitate to call it a new organ, it turns out that a new feature of the human body has most certainly been discovered!
You can read about it in the open-access article published by Scientific Reports. As shown in the illustration above, the researchers found that wherever tissues are stretched or compressed (like the lungs or even the intestines), there is a network of fluid-filled spaces underneath. In the illustration above, think of the part labeled “Mucosa” as the lining of an organ. Underneath that lining, there is a mesh of collagen proteins and elastin proteins (elastin is a part of the “collagen bundle” in the illustration). Those proteins have specific cells attached to them that react to CD34, a stain used to highlight a feature of certain cells when they are viewed under a microscope. In between this mesh of proteins and cells, the spaces are filled with fluid.
For a long time, anatomists have understood that there is a lot of fluid in between the cells of an organism. It is called “interstitial fluid,” and it makes up about 16% of the human body’s weight. It bathes the cells, keeping their environment reasonably constant and serving as way that cells can exchange chemicals with the rest of the body. It comes from the blood, and then it drains into the lymphatic system, where it is cleaned and returned to the blood. So the fluid found in those spaces is not new. The fact that the fluid is found in a mesh of proteins and cells and forms the sponge-like structure illustrated above was completely unknown up to this point.
Identical twin astronauts, Scott Kelly (right) and Mark Kelly (left).
Newsweek headlined its article, “Scott Kelly: NASA Study Confirms Astronaut’s DNA Actually Changed in Space.” The article says:
After landing, 93 percent of Scott Kelly’s genes returned to normal, the researchers found. The altered 7 percent, however, could indicate long-term changes in genes connected to the immune system, DNA repair, bone formation networks, oxygen deprivation and elevated carbon dioxide levels.
The Telegraph headline reads, “Nasa astronaut twins Scott and Mark Kelly no longer genetically identical after space trip.” The article states:
But new findings by Nasa have found that life away from planet Earth has exacted a surprising toll. The pair are no longer genetically identical twins.
Please understand that both of these articles are doing what is typical of the modern media when it comes to science. They are taking results that are really, really interesting, and they are hyping the results to the point where they are not telling the truth anymore. NASA did do a wonderful experiment on the genetic effects of being in space a long time, and while the results are quite remarkable, they don’t indicate that space changes a person’s genes. They indicate that space changes the expression of certain genes, and for some, that change is remarkably long-lived.
