Three for Thursday - Real scientists do real science while Darwinists scratch their heads!

credit

Proverbs 9

7 Whoever corrects a mocker invites insults;
   whoever rebukes the wicked incurs abuse.
8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you;
   rebuke the wise and they will love you.
9 Instruct the wise and they will be wiser still;
   teach the righteous and they will add to their learning.
 10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
   and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
11 For through wisdom your days will be many,
   and years will be added to your life.
12 If you are wise, your wisdom will reward you;
   if you are a mocker, you alone will suffer.

Was there knowledge and wisdom before there was matter?  Yes, God had all wisdom and knowledge.  Was there information before there was matter?  Yes, God was the source of information.   Information must have an intelligent source and in order for information to be transmitted it must have an intelligent receiver and/or a receiver designed by intelligence to receive information transmissions.   All organisms require great quantities of information to operate and exist.   Thus, God had to be the source of the information.   Information does not generate randomly, however, data is generated randomly.   Data can be inspected and interpreted in order to be converted into information.  

Example:

It snowed last night.   The weather station recorded 4 inches of new snowfall.   Did the snow speak?  Do snowflakes communicate with anyone?  No.  But man made instruments using intelligence to measure things like snowfall and those measurements can be transmitted as information.  

If you are an intelligent source, you should be able to understand the need for a First Cause and that the Universe had to have a Creator, for it is not eternal but rather temporal.  Furthermore, it is expanding beyond any ability to contract back into itself and form again, as if that would be an answer.   There had to be a first Universe to have a constant stream of expanding and contracting ones.   Furthermore, taking everything around you, compacting it and then blowing it up doesn't produce order, it merely causes disorder.   We see a Universe going from order to disorder.   We also see varieties of organisms going from plentiful to fewer and from heartier to weaker.   Our genetic code, like all other organisms, degrades from occasional mutations and copying errors that successfully pass on.  In complete opposition to Darwin's thought process, these changes have negative effects.   It is estimated that 90% of the worlds historical variety of living creatures are now extinct.   Some extinct kinds like the trilobite are more advanced than the lobsters and horseshoe crabs of today.  The Flood may have wiped them out.  Many kinds of animals were hunted or predated to extinction.  But if you do a little research you will find that some geneticists fear that the human race will die off from mutations and errors in the DNA chain within a few thousand years unless we figure out a way to stop devolution.

Light micrograph, schizochroal lens assembly.  Individual lenses marked by black arrows.  Scale bar = 300 microns.


trilobite eyes

Scanning electron micrograph, unidentified trilobite specimen, schizochroal lens assembly.  The specimen was coated with palladium on a scanning electron microscope (SEM) sputter coater for two minutes and viewed and photographed on a JEOL 35 SEM.  Large bumps are individual lenses.  Small bumps are unidentified, and their function is unknown.  Scale bar = 150 microns.

On the trilobite eye: "The compound lens, consisting of a set of two precisely-matched refractive indexes of the two lens halves, corrects for the optical distortion due to being immersed in water.  These lenses are like prescription bifocals" -Bill Browning, Fossil Record: Evidence for Creation Volume 67, Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship February/March edition 2011


So riddle me this...how is it that "simple" organisms like bacteria not only have a language (remember the article on "quorum sensing?"), but have figured out how to optimize group motion?   How do geese do it?   How do bees direct other bees to exact locations by doing a dance?  There is all sorts of design and information in organisms that puzzle scientists except for the ones who are smart enough to realize that God created them.   Then it becomes a matter of "how is it done" and "can we mimic it" rather than how did it evolve, which is a foolish question leading to a dead end.  First, the latest on bacterial motion. 

bacteria flagella


How Bacteria Use Their Flagella     02/09/2011    
Feb 09, 2011 — Do an imaginary mind-meld with a bacterium for a moment.  Visualize yourself encased in a membrane, surrounded by fluid.  You have no eyes, ears, or hands.  You need to find where food is, and avoid danger, so you have organelles that can take in molecules that provide information about what is going on outside, where other bacteria can also communicate information to you.  To get around, you have a powerful outboard motor, called a flagellum.  Lacking eyes, how do you know where to go?  How do you steer and make progress toward food or away from danger?  These are the questions of chemotaxis – the ability to move toward or away from chemicals.  Two recent papers discuss how bacteria use their rotary motors to succeed in life.
    Some bacteria have only one flagellum (monotrichous, or “one-haired,” since the flagella look like hairs at low resolution).  One such critter is Vibrio alginolyticus, an inhabitant of the coastal ocean.  In a PNAS Commentary,1 Roman Stocker discussed how this microbe uses its single flagellum in a “reverse and flick” movement to explore its environment.  This “newly discovered mechanism for turning,” he said, “....is part of an advanced chemotaxis system.”  The bacterium can actually make better progress toward or against a concentration gradient with this semi-random search method.  “How can a simple back-and-forth movement result in high-performance chemotaxis, rather than causing the bacterium to endlessly retrace its steps?” Stocker asked.  The answer is that the flick action, which involves a sudden kinking of the U-joint of the flagellum, combined with reversal of flagellar rotation, provides three times the chemotaxis efficiency of E. coli.  He showed this with mathematical models.
    Stocker attributed this to evolution: “Despite the limited morphological repertoire of the propulsive system, radically different movement strategies have evolved, likely reflecting the diversity of physicochemical conditions among bacterial habitats.”  But what he was really talking about was adaptation of different microbes to different habitats and conditions.  He ended with praise, not for evolution, but for the cleverness of microbe transportation: the study he cited “makes monotrichous marine bacteria an appealing model system to expand our knowledge of motility among the smallest life forms on our planet.”
    Other bacteria have 2, 4, or 8 flagella (“peritrichous”), like Escherichia coli.  When all 8 flagella begin turning in the same direction, they bundle into a kind of V8 engine that can propel the germ at around 30 micrometers per second (�m/s).  To change direction, they reverse one or more flagella, causing the bundle to fall apart, stopping forward movement in a strategy called tumbling, after which unified motion begins in another direction.  While not as efficient at chemotaxis as V. alginolyticus, it should be remembered that E. coli live in different environments – and they have other tricks up their sleeve.
    Flagellum specialist Howard Berg and colleagues figured out how to watch fluid movement around swarms of bacteria.  Reporting in PNAS,2 they discovered that bacteria, by rotating their flagella counterclockwise in swarms, create small “rivers” of fluid moving clockwise ahead of the swarm that help them move faster as a group than they could be swimming alone.  They wrote,
we discovered an extensive stream (or river) of swarm fluid flowing clockwise along the leading edge of an Escherichia coli swarm, at speeds of order 10 �m/s, about three times faster than the swarm expansion.  The flow is generated by the action of counterclockwise rotating flagella of cells stuck to the substratum, which drives fluid clockwise around isolated cells (when viewed from above), counterclockwise between cells in dilute arrays, and clockwise in front of cells at the swarm edge.  The river provides an avenue for long-range communication in the swarming colony, ideally suited for secretory vesicles that diffuse poorly.
The observations may have practical applications: “These findings,” they wrote, “broaden our understanding of swarming dynamics and have implications for the engineering of bacterial-driven microfluidic devices.

1.  Roman Stocker, “Reverse and flick: Hybrid locomotion in bacteria,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print February 2, 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1019199108 PNAS February 2, 2011.
2.  Wu, Hosu, and Berg, “Microbubbles reveal chiral fluid flows in bacterial swarms,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before rint February 7, 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1016693108 PNAS February 7, 2011.
And these are “simple” or “primitive” organisms that were the first to evolve, they tell us.  The outboard motors alone are phenomenally complex, but when they work together with signal transduction mechanisms and group search strategies, it’s overkill for Darwin, who was dead anyway.
Next headline on:  Cell BiologyPhysicsBiomimeticsAmazing Facts
 


Suppose that we do assume that God created and therefore there is always a possibility of learning from the very simplest of organisms?   Biomimetics does just that.   While no one is required to say "God did it" what science is doing is treating organisms as being designed and learning to copy the design or use the creature itself to advance knowledge and technology:

Extreme Biomimetics     02/07/2011    
Feb 07, 2011 — Imitating spider silk or gecko feet is one thing, but some researchers are going to extremes to try to do what living organisms do.
  1. DNA railcar:  Researchers at University of Oxford have constructed a “programable [sic] molecular transport system” that travels like a railcar on DNA molecules, reported PhysOrg.  And that’s not all: they would like to build “synthetic ribosomes,” the article said.  “DNA origami techniques allow us to build nano- and meso-sized structures with great precision,” said Prof. Hiroshi Sugiyama.  “We already envision more complex track geometries of greater length and even including junctions.  Autonomous, molecular manufacturing robots are a possible outcome.”
  2. DNA iPad:  More DNA origami is at work creating smaller components for consumer and industrial electronics like iPods, iPads and similar devices, reported another article on PhysOrg.  Japanese researchers at Arizona State University, familiar with their culture’s art of origami, work with “have discovered a way to use DNA to effectively combine top-down lithography with chemical bonding involving bottom-up self-assembly.”
  3. Turbo dragonflies:  Imagine “micro wind turbines that can withstand gale-force winds.”  Such marvels are being prepared with inspiration from dragonfly wings, reported New Scientist.  Who would have thought that the energy source for powering your cell phone might some day owe its design to the dragonfly?
  4. Flagella carnival:  Nanoscopic inventions being built at Rice University look like “a carnival ride gone mad,” said Science Daily.  Researchers want to build arrays of programmable rotating machines modeled after the bacterial flagellum (07/12/2010) and ATP synthase (see CMI).  Such devices could be used for “radio filters that would let only a very finely tuned signal pass, depending on the nanorotors’ frequency.”  The computers used to model the molecular rotors are not yet capable of characterizing ATP synthase found in all living things, “but as computers get more powerful and our methods improve,” a team member said, “we may someday be able to analyze such long molecules.”
  5. Plankton armorScience Daily said that “The ability of some forms of plankton and bacteria to build an extra natural layer of nanoparticle-like armour has inspired chemists at the University of Warwick to devise a startlingly simple way to give drug bearing polymer vesicles (microscopic polymer based sacs of liquid) their own armoured protection.”  One goal is “stealth” armor that looks like water but can allow drugs to sneak past the immune system.  What were they looking at for inspiration?  “Organisms that particularly attracted our interest were those with a cell wall composed of an armour of colloidal objects – for instance bacteria coated with S-layer proteins, or phytoplankton, such as the coccolithophorids, which have their own CaCO3-based nano-patterned colloidal armour.”
Here’s an update on an old biomimetics story: the imitation of nacre, or mother-of-pearl (see 07/06/2004; 09/18/2008, bullet 4; 12/06/2008, 03/27/2010).  PhysOrg said that researchers at Northwestern University and McCormick School of Engineering are still trying to understand the molecular structure of this attractive material that is strong yet resistant to cracking.  They created an interlocking composite material that, while not as good as nacre, achieved “a remarkable improvement in energy dissipation.”
If these researchers succeed in getting DNA and rotating molecules to do the work of molecular machines already active in the living cell, will science finally admit that life shows evidence of intelligent design?  Notice that they cannot yet come close to doing what ATP synthase, a flagellum, mother-of-pearl, a ribosome or a dragonfly wing has been doing for millennia.  Ironic, is it not, that ATP synthase is powering their bodies and minds to imitate it.
    Intelligent design is revolutionizing science via biomimetics, promising amazing benefits for human health and society, forcing thinking along engineering concepts, challenging our best scientific minds, inspiring awe at natural capabilities, ignoring Darwin entirely.
Next headline on:  BiomimeticsCell BiologyTerrestrial ZoologyMarine BiologyPhysicsIntelligent Design

Finally, as I posited earlier in the year, once a paleontological cat is let out of the bag, a surprising number of "me too" stories emerge.   It is likely that for years field paleontologists have been finding evidence that harms the cause of Darwinism and have judiciously kept their yappers shut for fear of losing jobs and/or funding.  Mary Schweitzer's T-Rex opened the door for others to admit that they have found remains and not just fossils.   Soon more researchers will admit to fossils found out of place.   Now they are admitting that there are fossils that are wildly out of place in the Antarctic.  But you see, finding sedimentary rocks there does not mean that the sediments and fossils came from the South Pole, for rapid plate subduction means that continents reformed and moved and the global flood means that a current could have taken organisms hundreds and even thousands of miles away from it's place of origin.



Bizarre Fossils Raise Questions     02/08/2011    
Feb 08, 2011 — For decades, students have been taught that the fossil record shows a long, slow, gradual progression of increasing complexity over millions of years.  Scientific data are usually not so simple.
  1. Surprising youth in old fossil:  When you see the word unexpected in a headline, expect the unexpected.  “Unexpected exoskeleton remnants found in Paleozoic fossils,” reported PhysOrg about chitin protein remains found in scorpion-like arthropod fossils alleged to be 310 million and 417 million years old.  The previous record was 25 to 80 million years.  The subtitle reads, “Surprising new research shows that, contrary to conventional belief, remains of chitin-protein complex — structural materials containing protein and polysaccharide — are present in abundance in fossils of arthropods from the Paleozoic era.”
        George Cody of the Carnegie Institution “speculates that the vestigial protein-chitin complex may play a critical role in organic fossil preservation by providing a substrate protected from total degradation by a coating waxy substances [sic] that protect the arthropods from desiccation.”  Is he claiming the proteins protected the rock impressions, and not the other way around?  Other than that, the article did not explain how proteins could last for over 400 million years.  Prior to the discovery, it was unexpected, surprising, and contrary to conventional belief.
  2. Antarctic forests:  The caption of artwork in a BBC News piece reads, “Dinosaurs once foraged beneath the Southern Lights in Antarctica.”  It shows young dinosaurs admiring the skylights while grazing around conifers in the long polar night.  “It may be hard to believe, but Antarctica was once covered in towering forests.”  Fossil trees in Antarctica have been known since Robert Falcon Scott explored the frozen wastes of the south polar regions, finding evidence of a subtropical climate where no trees grow today.
        Jane Francis (University of Leeds) has spent 10 seasons collecting samples.  As she described her adventures, it was evident the surprise of fossil trees in ice has not worn off:
    “I still find the idea that Antarctica was once forested absolutely mind-boggling”, she told the BBC.
        “We take it for granted that Antarctica has always been a frozen wilderness, but the ice caps only appeared relatively recently in geological history.
        One of her most amazing fossil discoveries to date was made in the Transantarctic Mountains, not far from where Scott made his own finds.
        She recalled: “We were high up on glaciated peaks when we found a sedimentary layer packed full of fragile leaves and twigs.”
        These fossils proved to be remains of stunted bushes of beech.  At only three to five million years old, they were some of the last plants to have lived on the continent before the deep freeze set in.
    The article says that this was not the only period of warmth.  Fossil plants dated 100 million years old indicate the area must have resembled forested areas of New Zealand.  “We commonly find whole fossilised logs that must have come from really big trees.”  One of the specimens found is Ginkgo biloba, a well-known “living fossil” that was thought extinct from the age of dinosaurs till living trees were discovered in Japan (cf. NW Creation.net article with links).
        How did the trees adapt to the polar light conditions, when long periods of darkness alternate with six months of light?  Francis did experiments growing trees in simulated polar light conditions and found they adapted remarkably well.  In addition to the trees, dinosaurs lived under these conditions.  One kangaroo-size vegetarian dinosaur had large optic lobes, possibly suggesting adaptation to the low light of the long winters.
        The article tried to tie this evidence into the current debate over global warming, but clearly the climate changes of those prior times were not caused by humans.  “Visiting the frozen wasteland of Antarctica today, it is hard to believe that rainforests haunted by small dinosaurs once flourished where 3km thick ice-sheets now exist, the article ended.  “However, the geological record provides irrefutable evidence that dramatic climate fluctuations have occurred throughout our planet’s history.”
  3. Snakes alive and dead:  Fossil snakes show remnant hind legs, reported MSNBC News.  At first, this seems to support the belief that snakes descended from lizards, and lost their legs through evolution.  The snake fossil studied by Alexandra Houssaye (National Museum of Natural History in Paris), named Eupodophis descouensi, has “ultra tiny 0.8 inch legs” with “four anklebones but no foot or toe bones.”  It appears that calling these structures legs requires some interpretation; they were clearly not used for walking.
        Questions remain, however, about the evolution of snakes.  “The oldest snake remains are dated to 112 to 94 million years ago, and this snake is dated to around 90 million years ago,” Houssaye said.  Yet her evolutionary story seemed to allow opposite conclusions: “If something is not useful it can regress without any impact on the (animal’s) survival, or regression can even be positive, as for here if the leg was disturbing a kind of locomotion, like for burrowing snakes or swimming snakes.”  But why would useless structures remain for 4 to 22 million years?  It would seem millions of generations of snakes would have had to contend with useless structures getting in their way, if it took that long for legs to regress.  Houssaye was not prepared to announce a victory for evolutionary theory: “The question of snake origin should not be resolved in the next 10 years,” the article quoted her saying, ending, “She is, however, hopeful that all of the separate teams working on this puzzle can one day pinpoint what species was the common ancestor of all snakes.”  The lizard-like ancestor, if there was one, is not known from the fossil record.
        According to Live Science, which also reported the story, “the bones suggests that evolution took snakes’ legs not by altering the way they grew.  Instead, Houssaye said, it looks as though the limbs grew either slower or for a shorter period of time.”  PhysOrg’s coverage includes an image of the very simple structures.  According to this entry, “Only three specimens exist of fossilised snakes with preserved leg bones.”  None of the articles mentioned whether the structures had a function, or might have been developmental anomalies, such as when babies are born with an enlarged coccyx (cf. CMI).  What evolutionary stories could be told if a fossil two-headed snake were found?
Only the third entry tried to tie the fossil to an evolutionary prediction, but even then, the story was not straightforward.  It is not clear, for instance, that the loss of legs represents an increase in genetic information or in fitness.  Flightless birds are adapted to their land-based habitats, but it would be a greater leap for birds to evolve from ground to air than the other way around.  Same for snakes losing legs instead of evolving them de novo.  In the first two entries, though, the discoveries were clearly unexpected, surprising, and contrary to conventional wisdom.
Conventional wisdom is not always wise.  A better term might be conventional folly, or popular credulity.  Enough reports like this, and a consistent theme emerges: evolutionists are clueless about not only their own theory of common ancestry, but about the millions-of-years scheme on which their theory is built.  You can’t just read one BBC News or PhysOrg article to get the whole picture.  Individual articles present puzzles, but maintain the triumphal theme of the march of secular science toward Understanding Reality.  That is a false picture.
    Sites like CEH help document the reality, that secular scientists sold on an evolutionary world view maintain their belief system by telling stories in spite of the evidence.  And for you creation-bashing lurkers out there who lambaste CEH as anti-science, pay attention!  This is not anti-science, because we clearly honor and support legitimate scientific discovery and analysis (see yesterday’s entry, for instance).  This is anti-storytelling – anti- twisting evidence to support a belief system.  An honest rationalist skeptic should join with us in that goal.
Next headline on:  DinosaursTerrestrial ZoologyFossilsDarwin and EvolutionDating Methods

Honesty among Darwinists is something we can all hope for.   But the problem is that Darwinism is almost entirely built on worldview with very little science or evidence to back it up.  Virtually every aspect of Darwin's initial hypothesis has been shown to either be consistent with creationism or wrong.   Lyell and Hutton and their followers were wrong about the "geological column" and uniformitarianism.  Darwin was wrong about the specimens he brought back with him.   Darwin was wrong about the evolution of man and beast.  There was not a first living cell.   The tree of life shows great diversity at the beginning with multiple branches of different kinds all appearing at once and then most of them going extinct and/or speciating while some remain exactly the same.  Speciation was posited by Blyth and natural selection was understood by him to be the way God had designed organisms to conserve the kind.   Modern science has backed him up and falsified Darwin.  Only the religious mindset of the elites atop the world of academia and science and government force-feeding their naturalistic materialistic secular humanism to the rest of the world has prevented mankind in general from understanding the evidence and what it really means.   Life was designed.   There is only one logical candidate for Designer.