This is a magnified image of a paramecium like those used in the experiment. (Click for credit)I was reading an article on Dr. Cornelius Hunter’s blog the other day, and he mentioned a 2009 study of which I was not aware. I was surprised by what Dr. Hunter wrote, so I read the study myself and became even more surprised. Quite frankly, I nearly fell off my chair. I try to stay relatively informed on major advances in the sciences, but somehow, I missed this one entirely.
What am I talking about? It involves cellular communication. Biologists have been studying how cells communicate with one another for quite some time. In order for any multicellular organism to survive, the cells must cooperate with one another. As a result, they must communicate. Generally, this is done through chemical means: one cell releases a chemical into the environment, and other cells interact with that chemical, producing an effect. In the human body, for example, your insulin-producing cells (technically called the islets of Langerhans) release insulin into your bloodstream. When cells in your liver, muscle, and fat tissues detect the insulin, they respond by absorbing sugar from the blood. This regulates your blood sugar levels.1
Even when not part of a multicellular creature, cells in groups often communicate with one another. When bacteria group together in a colony, for example, they communicate with one another so that they can do things like forage for food as a group and form coherent structures such as biofilms.2 Once again, however, most of the research that has been done on how this communication takes place focuses on chemicals that the cells release into their environment.
The study to which Dr. Hunter referred looked at an entirely different means of cell-to-cell communication, and if its conclusions are correct, the method is nothing short of amazing.
Getting rid of information requires a release of energy.When you read these words, you are receiving information. Some would call the information “too sciency, too nerdy,” but it is information nonetheless. But what, exactly, is information? Is it a real, physical quantity, or is it some esoteric construct of the mind? Rolf William Landauer spent a lot of time thinking about this question. That’s not surprising, because he was a physicist who worked for IBM, a company that deals with lots of information. In 1961, he wrote a paper for the IBM Journal of Research and Development in which he argued that information is a real, physical quantity that is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As a result, in order to erase information (such as when a file is deleted from a hard drive), a certain amount of energy must be released.1
It is important to understand what Landauer meant. He didn’t mean that it takes energy to erase information. For example, if you want to erase the writing on a whiteboard, you have to expend energy wiping the markings off the board. That makes perfect sense, but it’s not what Landauer was referring to. He said that in order for information to be erased, energy must be released into the environment. The very act information being destroyed, regardless of the method, requires a physical response: a minimum amount of energy must be released. This is because information is a real, physical quantity and is therefore governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Now the Second Law of Thermodynamics is misunderstood and misused frequently (you can read more about that here and here), so let’s start with what the Second Law actually says. It says that the entropy of the universe must always increase or at least stay the same. It can never decrease. What is entropy? It is a measure of the energy in a system that is not available to do work. However, a more useful definition is that it is a measure of the disorder in a system. The larger a system’s entropy, the “messier” it is. Using this concept of entropy, then, we can say that the disorder of the universe is always increasing or at least staying the same: the universe never gets more ordered.
Now let’s apply this concept to a computer disk. A computer disk has a bunch of bits, and each bit can have a value of either 0 or 1. On a blank disk, all the bits have the same value. Let’s say it’s 0. However, as you start putting information on the disk, the bits change. Some stay at their original value (0), but others change (they become equal to 1). So as more information gets put on the disk, there are more possibilities for the values of the bits. If you were to erase the disk again, you would set all those bits back to 0. When you do that, the disk gets more ordered. While there was information on the disk, it was possible for many of the bits to have a value of 1. When you erase the disk, that’s not possible anymore – all the bits have to have a value of 0. From the point of view of the disk, then, when you erase the information, the disk gets more ordered.
If the disk gets more ordered when information is erased and nothing else happens, the universe would become a bit more ordered, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics forbids this. Thus, in order to follow the Second Law, the very act of erasing information must release energy. Furthermore, that energy must be large enough to disorder the universe as much as or more than the disk became ordered. That way, the decrease in entropy of the system (the disk) will be offset by the increase in entropy of the disk’s surroundings so that the total entropy of the universe remains the same or increases. Landauer even used the Second Law of Thermodynamics to predict the minimum amount of energy that must be released for each bit of information that is erased.
This idea remained theoretical for more than 40 years, but it was recently tested by experiment, and it seems that Landauer was correct.
An Italian wall lizard such as the ones analyzed in the study (Click for credit)Nearly a week ago, a student sent me a web article about a study that slipped by me in 2008. According to the student, the study has been used by Richard Dawkins to show that evolution can produce entirely new structures in animals. This bothered the student, and he asked me to take a look at the web article to see what I thought of the study. Of course, the first thing I had to do was find the actual scientific paper upon which the web article was based. Once I read through the scientific paper, I thought it provided a great example of what young-earth creationists think happened after the worldwide Flood.
As I have mentioned previously, young-earth creationists are in debt to Charles Darwin, because he allows us to understand how an ark filled with two of every kind of animal (and seven each of the clean kinds) could produce all the biological diversity we see today. In case you aren’t aware, God did not command Noah to put every species of animal on the ark. Instead, He instructed Noah to take every kind of animal that needed protection from the Flood onto the ark. We young-earth creationists think that “kind” is a much broader term than “species.” For example, there are many species of cat today (tigers, lions, jaguars, domestic cats, etc.). However, we think that God created only one kind of cat.1 As a result, only two cats went on the ark, and all the cats we see today have descended from that one pair of cats.
This is why Charles Darwin is so critical to a young-earth understanding of biological history. We think that variation and natural selection are what produced all the species of cats we see today. As the one pair of cats went out from the ark, they reproduced, and their progeny spread out. As the progeny encountered new environments, they adapted to those new environments via variation and natural selection, just as Darwin envisioned.
Where we differ from modern evolutionists is that we think biological change is limited by genetics. There is a certain amount of information in a genome, and varying what kind of information is expressed in the organism will produce all sorts of diversity within a genome. However, it is not possible to add information to a genome, so it is not possible to fundamentally change a genome. Thus, while a specialized cat (like a tiger) can come from two unspecialized cats (such as those that were on the ark), there is no way that a horse can come from those cats. The genomes of horses and cats are too fundamentally different.
The study this student sent me provides a perfect example of how that works and how quickly it happens when the environment demands it!
Worker bees entering a hive loaded down with pollen. (Public domain image.)
If you don’t follow the news as it relates to science, you might not be aware of a genuine threat to our food supply that was identified six years ago: Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Many beekeepers have experienced the disappointment of checking their hives to find one of them mostly empty. While this is to be expected, most beekeepers report it happening rarely – on the order of one hive in five each year. Starting in the winter of 2006, however, some beekeepers started reporting losses of 30 to 90 percent of their hives. This unusual increase in beehive loss has continued, and the problem is called CCD.
Why should we worry about CCD? Doesn’t it just mean there may be a shortage of honey one day? Absolutely not. Bees are critically important in the reproduction of many flowering plants. They collect pollen from flowers and take it back to their hive, as shown in the picture above. The big yellow “globs” on their legs are pollen sacs that are full of pollen. However, while they are collecting pollen, they can’t help but transfer some of it from one flower to another. That transferred pollen fertilizes the egg cell that is held in the female part of the flower, producing a new plant that gets packaged into a seed. The seed is further packaged in a fruit, which provides food for animals and people.
So without bees, animals and people would have a much harder time finding food. Now as far as we know, wild bees are not affected by CCD. As a result, it is doubtful that CCD will destroy the food supply in nature. However, hives that are maintained by beekeepers are responsible for fertilizing all sorts of commercial crops. As a result, if beekeepers continue to lose hives, there will eventually be a shortage of bees available for crops, which will result in higher food prices. These higher prices will not be limited to fruits, because some fruit products (such as almond hulls) are used for feeding livestock. In the end, many foods will become more expensive if CCD continues at its current rates.
Scientists have been looking for the cause of CCD for quite some time, and many avenues have been investigated. However, there haven’t been any studies that have proved particularly promising…until now.
A human embryo after about 7 weeks of development
(public domain image)I have written a lot about the evolutionary myth of vestigial organs (here, here, here, here, and here), showing how several biological structures evolutionists once thought were vestigial are, in fact, quite necessary. The concept of vestigial organs is very popular among many evolutionists, but it usually boils down to ignorance. If evolutionists don’t know the use for a biological structure, they assume that it must be vestigial. As is often the case, however, further research generally shows that this evolutionary assumption is quite wrong, due to our ignorance of the structure being considered.
This concept is often employed when studying the development of embryos. Because of the fraudulent work of Ernst Haeckel, evolutionists have long promoted the myth that an embryo will produce vestiges of its evolutionary history as it develops. Once again, this is mostly the result of ignorance. Embryonic development is rather difficult to study, so we often observe things that we don’t understand. When these things superficially resemble something that supposedly developed in the evolutionary history of the organism that is being studied, it is often pointed to as some vestige of evolution.
For example, in Why Evolution is True, Dr. Jerry Coyne tries to make the case that the human embryo is covered in a fine coat of lanugo hair simply because it is a part of the evolutionary heritage of humans. He says that there is no reason for a human embryo to be covered with hair, but it happens because humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor that was covered in hair. The coat of hair is simply a leftover vestige from that part of the human evolutionary lineage. As I have already pointed out, this is utterly false. In fact, the fine coat of hair that human embryos have is incredibly important to their development, and the idea that it is a leftover vestige of evolution is just a result of ignorance when it comes to human embryonic development.
Well, in a Facebook group discussion I recently had, the conversation turned to the supposed “tail” that human embryos have early in their development. This is a popular myth, but it is utterly false, and I thought I would post this so that others would benefit from a modern scientific analysis of this important embryonic structure. As you can see in the photograph of a human embryo above, there is a structure (pointed out in the figure) that resembles a tail. The structure eventually goes away, but it is a rather striking part of the embryo while it is present. Evolutionists have long taught that this is a leftover vestige of when our ancestors had tails,1 but we now know that such an idea is simply 100% false.
Like most galaxies, the spiral galaxy M74 has more visible matter at its center than near its edges (NASA image)In 1932, astronomer Dr. Jan Oort was studying the motion of stars in the Milky Way and could not understand his results unless he assumed there was a lot of matter in the galaxy that he was not seeing. As a result, he proposed the existence of matter that he assumed was very real but was not detectable using the instruments available at the time. Just a year later, astrophysicist Dr. Fritz Zwicky found that he had to make the same assumption to understand the Coma galaxy cluster. Several years later, he referred to this undetectable matter as “dunkle Materie,” which is German for “dark matter.”
However, the most compelling evidence for the existence of dark matter came more than 40 years later, when astronomers started measuring the speeds at which stars orbit the center of the galaxy they are in. If you look at the photo of a spiral galaxy above, you will see that it is much brighter at its center than it is at its edges. Based on such observations, it was assumed that most of a galaxy’s mass is located at its center. If that assumption were correct, it would mean that the stars near the center of the galaxy would orbit the center faster than the stars at the edge of the galaxy, just as the planets near the sun orbit much faster than the planets far from the sun.
In 1975, Dr. Vera Rubin and Dr. Kent Ford announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society that their studies indicated the stars in a galaxy orbit the center at roughly the same speed, regardless of where they are in the galaxy. This was a shock, and about the only thing that could explain it was the assumption that there was a lot of mass spread throughout the galaxy that could not be detected. Dark matter, which up until that time was mostly a curiosity, soon became a staple of modern astronomy. Today, astrophysicists estimate that 83% of the matter in the universe is dark matter – stuff that we cannot (as yet) detect directly.1
This map of a portion of the earth shows the motion of specific locations relative to a fixed point. The arrows indicate the velocity of each location, and the blue lines are the outlines of what are thought to be the plates that are producing this motion. (Click for credit)
In the theory of plate tectonics, the earth’s surface is broken into several distinct plates which move about, carrying the continents with them. As a result, a fixed location on the planet is not really stationary. It is actually moving along the earth! We don’t notice the motion, of course, because it is happening very slowly. However, according to the theory, it is always happening. If scientists make certain assumptions about how this motion occurred in the past, they can conclude that at one time, all the continents on earth were grouped together in a supercontinent called Pangaea. Over time, the motion of the plates then separated the continents into the positions we see today.
If you assume that the plate motions we think are happening today are representative of how fast the plates have always moved, you find that it would take hundreds of millions of years for the continents to have moved from Pangaea to where they are today. However, many young-earth creationists think that plate motions were much faster during the worldwide Flood, and some have produced detailed computer models that attempt to explain how the Flood happened in the context of this catastrophic plate tectonics. Other young-earth creationists are skeptical about plate tectonics, claiming that there isn’t a lot of evidence to support it.
I tend to disagree with the young-earth creationists who are skeptical about plate tectonics. While I am definitely not a geologist or geophysicist, I do think there is a lot of indirect evidence to indicate that the plates are real and that they are really moving. Interestingly enough, I recently ran across an article by Dr. John Baumgardner that, in my mind, really clinches the case for the reality of plate tectonics.1 Not only that, the data used in the article are just plain cool!
Question: What is the significance of the freshwater fish groups represented by the individuals pictured below?
Saddled Bichir, a representative of the Polypteriformes. (Click for credit)Atlantic sturgeon, a representative of the Acipenseriformes (Click for credit)A bowfin, representative of the Amiiformes (Click for credit)
Believe it or not, the answer is as follows: The most recent evolutionary analysis says that nearly all saltwater fishes* evolved from fishes that were members of these freshwater groups!
The information in DNA is stored in specific sequences of the nucleotide bases adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). (Click for credit)
We hear a lot about how similar the human genome is compared to the chimpanzee genome. As I have discussed previously, if we compare the genomes one way, they are 72% identical. If we compare them another way, they more than 95% identical. If we compare them yet another way, they are 88-89% identical. That’s a wide range of results! Why can’t we say definitively how similar the human genome is to the chimpanzee genome? There are probably several reasons for this, but I want to highlight a basic one. Even though the human and chimpanzee genomes have been sequenced, we still don’t know them as well as you might think.
To understand why we don’t know these sequenced genomes very well, you need to know a bit about how DNA stores information. As most people know, DNA is a double helix. Each strand of this double helix has a sequence of chemical units called nucleotide bases. There are four different nucleotide bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). Taken three at a time, these four nucleotide bases code for a specific kind of chemical called an amino acid. The two strands of the double helix hold together because the nucleotide bases on one strand link up with the nucleotide bases on the other strand.
As shown in the illustration above, the way the nucleotide bases link up is very specific. Adenine (A) links only to thymine (T), and cytosine (C) links only to guanine (G). Because of this, if you know the sequence on one strand of DNA, you automatically know the sequence on the other strand. After all, A can only link to T, so anywhere one strand has an A, the other strand must have a T. In the same way, C can only link to G, so anywhere one strand has a C, the other strand must have a G. So the two strands of the DNA double helix are held together by pairs of nucleotide bases.
As a result, we count the length of a genome in terms of how many base pairs there are. The illustration above, for example, has 14 base pairs (the black G is hiding a C behind it, and the black A is hiding a T behind it). Obviously, then, the larger the number of base pairs in the genome, the longer the genome is. Believe it or not, even though the human and chimpanzee genomes have been sequenced, we don’t know for sure how long either of them are!
