Comments on Book Reviews Part 4

I've done a lot of underlining in the Essay: Concepts article (_Nature_ v. 431, 21 Oct. 2004, p. 913), "Climbing the co-evolution ladder" by Lenton, Schellnhuber and Szathmary. It starts by citing a science fiction (how appropriate) story, _Solaris_ (by Stanislav Lem), in which "a super-intelligent super-organism" has evolved on a distant planet and "has transmuted into a vast ocean covering most of the surface." This is to introduce us to a view of evolution as an interaction between "information-processing (that is, active) life and force-driven (that is, passive) environment" which may eventually merge "into a single entity." The "further reading" list includes Lovelock's _The Ages of Gaia -- A biography of our living Earth_, and I detect a strong note of New Age yin-yang-ism in this view of evolution.

The authors support and proclaim the belief that "Global industrialization, particularly since the Second World War, induced the transition into the Anthropocene," the new age of the world in which human activity is the major factor determining environmental conditions on earth. "Its environmental consequences may in turn provoke a transition to an even higher form of worldwide socio-political organization." Brrrr, that thought gives me chills.

They imagine stepping back in time to "the rise of the 'hydraulic societies' in the valleys of the Nile, Euphrate, Tigris and Indus, which were probably founded in response to the great drying of the African-Asian regions that took place in the sixth millennium before present (BP)". Hmmmm, 4,000 year ago, all those civilizations popped up, starting in the Middle East... sound familiar? But, as I recall, there were also great civilizations cropping up in China and South America that had nothing to do with the drying conditions from Africa to India.

Of course, since they're just imagining things, it's easy for them to also imagine how, "Further back, the evolution of hominins in the East African Rift valley was shaped by a rapidly changing environment." However, there's no good evidence that the Australopithicines (and there aren't any better candidates) there evolved into the first species of _Homo_, considering how early various fossils of _Homo erectus_ are dated as far away as China, Java, etc., and the advanced capabilities suggested by associated materials and locations.

While they're at it, they may as well take the dating of some (rather controversial) fossil traces and state confidently, "Life emerged remarkably soon after ... cessation of sterilizing asteroid impacts" at the start of "Earth's evolutionary history...some 4 billion years ago." Yes, "remarkably" -- not to say, "miraculously," as perhaps the greatest step in evolutionary history would be the evolution of chemicals into the first recognizable life form -- and those very early fossils, so hard on the heels of conditions that would disrupt any steps toward life, are not of truly simple proto-life forms, but of microbial mats that look just like microbial mats do today. While a bacterium might be very simple compared to advanced multicellular life forms, it still exhibits a fantastic degree and distinct kind of complexity compared to any natural non-biotic system. This suggests to me that if it is true, the formation of life is not an extremely unlikely event requiring very special conditions in an unusual if not unique sequence. However, all experiments along these lines have shown that, while producing basic organic chemicals is a snap, getting them to approach the refinement and interactivity required for a basic life form is ... well, even with all the intelligence applied, we haven't come close yet.

Given that life evolved, the favorable environment that fostered it would enable it to exponentially spread and life "would have drained the environment" of the chemicals that had nourished it, "and replaced them with degraded waste." Rather than wonder why there isn't obvious organic traces throughout all the supposed billions of years worth of rocks of that period, the authors jump right to the explanation. Somehow or other "closed recycling loops developed" and so some forms of life evolved the ability to eat the waste chemicals. It still seems to me that those ancient rocks should just be chock full o' vast sheets of fossil bacterial life that were covered over in the same sorts of natural processes that preserved so many later fossils from decay.

Anyway, even with the recycling system (BTW, aren't closed recycling systems for life, such as on space craft, one of the trickiest feats of engineering? And I believe current ones depend on storing a lot of the waste to be dumped later, so they're still not fully recycling. And look what happened to Biosphere II.) "life remained energetically limited until the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis, sometime before 2.7 Gyr. This breakthrough in metabolic evolution..." I'm amazed at how lightly they can skim over this. Photosynthesis requires very special, complex molecules, and if the cell didn't also have the supporting system to harvest and regulate the flow of energy, they'd be useless or even harmful. Slogging on through all this, we read that this amazing innovation "facilitated the great oxidation of the atmosphere around 2.2 Gyr." Since 500 million years is about equal to all the time since the first burst of fossils of macroscopic life in the Cambrian explosion, the authors note that "the long time lag indicates -- other factors were required." What the conditions were they don't know, but of course they can always guess.

Then, 2.2 Gyr leaves us about 1,800 million years away from said Cambrian explosion, and in that vast, virtually fossil-free wasteland and playground for evolutionary imagination, "the emergence of a soft cell-boundary membrane coupled to an internal skeleton and a means for cellular division" can be inserted, with lots of wishful thinking about "the fixation of thousands of rare mutations" that would have been required.

But you'll note we're still not up to the critters of the Cambrian. Oh no, all that just gets us to much simpler forms of eukaryotes. These unknown, (mostly? totally?) unfossilized life forms "may be implicated in the worst crisis of past co-evolution." Forget about the impending disaster scenarios about global warming, these creatures that have hardly left any direct trace were so numerous and climate-affecting that the authors credit them with triggering the "snowball Earth" (as others have called it) conditions dated from 800 to 600 million years ago, as well as "a second rise in oxygen." The cooling is linked to the organisms' colonization of land to such an extent that their feeding on nutrients in rocks increased weathering and associated chemical reactions that used carbon dioxide so much that it reduced the greenhouse effect to the point where the entire planet cooled. Some researchers, as I recall, believe the earth came very close to being entirely covered by ice and snow.

The associated second rise in oxygen levels supposedly "opened the door for the diversification of larger, hard-shelled, animal life in the Cambrian explosion." Another fine example of evolutionary natural-magical thinking. "Now we pour extra oxygen into the hat and, Poof! all the major phyla of life appear! Ta-daaa!" Oh yes, and never mind that many of those life forms that appear in the Cambrian are not shelled at all, let alone hard-shelled. Why don't such soft life forms appear earlier? There are some earlier traces of what appear to be soft life forms, but these are again unique and for the most part can't reasonably be lined up as ancestors of any Cambrian forms.

Hmmm, they never really explained how the snowball earth crisis was abated so all those life forms could arise. Perhaps that's a bit too tricky and controversial to go into in a short, pat essay. Eventually the "triumph" (?) that produced vascular plants spreading over the land caused "a further rise in oxygen and fall in carbon dioxide" paved the way (somehow) for the evolution of "active megafauna (including ourselves)." It seems to me we need an explanation for why the second fall in carbon dioxide didn't bring back the snowball earth conditions. Come to think of it, wasn't the time from, oh, about the Devonian up to the end of the Mesozoic, one of the warmest?

The authors conclude with the wishful thinking that this environment-life concept "may reveal where we are ultimately heading," but the possibilities they mention aren't anything I'd wish for: "towards Solaris, or something even scarier." Another fine example of how evolutionary thinking leads naturally to one happy thought after another...

Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump

Comments On Book Reviews Part 3

(_Nature_ v. 431, 21 Oct. 2004, p. 907) "Food for thought for geneticists," a review by T. Colin Campbell of Gary Paul Nabhan's "Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes and Cultural Diversity" discusses the "observation of early genetic similarity and stability" throughout the human race which "has suggested to some observers that there is a one-size-fits -all diet," and how "Nabhan challenges this view." When we're talking about slight variations such as food preferences and tolerances, "A change of only one nucleotide can make a substantial difference." [paragraph] "Nabhan identifies a group of 26 'disease genes' that are likely to have been fashioned by food factors and endemic diseases." Problems that include "adult-onset diabetes, lactose intolerance and heritable food allergies" serve as examples, and "these genetic 'disorders', as some would call them...are so common that they should be considered normal." So much for natural selection, at least in humans, I guess.

What intrigues me most is the statement that "It is remarkable that meaningful genetic adaptation can occur in a few thousand years or so, but even more so that genetic-like adaptations can occur within only one or two lifetimes." This warrants further investigation.



Here's a gem of a quotation from "The sincerest form of flattery," a review by John Doyle and Marie Csete of _Imitation of Life: How Biology is Inspiring Computing_ by Nancy Forbes: "Generations of engineers have recognized that, in many respects, biology does it better."

(_Nature_ v. 431, 21 Oct. 2004) Judging from the review, there's not as much material that could be directly related to creation v evolution as we might have expected. There is a "section on the intriguing computational power in the organization of DNA" which "is particularly well presented."

The review also notes: "Making DNA computing work requires a firm grasp of the principles and careful design, but now anyone can download cellular automata or genetic algorithm software and run laptop artificial-life experiments." I've yet to see, however, any such software that coded for the virtual "life" forms on a realistic scale. They are all based on over-simplified systems, and much of the "living" is done by fixed computer code that can't be affected by the "mutations."

Most unfortunately, "The book contains almost no explicit discussion of complexity." As the review notes, "Computer control systems ...represent ... the main source of complexity in technological systems," so it's a shame that it is "barely mentioned either in this book or elsewhere." Such aspects of complexity "are the points of greatest contact between engineering and biology."

Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump

Comments on Book Reviews Part 2

Maybe it's not just coincidence that the review of _Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist_ on p. 904 (_Nature_ v. 431, 21 Oct. 2004) includes an account of when Richard Dawkins was a child and mistook "a blue tit for a chaffinch." Any British folk on the list care to enlighten me as to how big an error this is? For all I know, there's not much difference, but his grandfather wondered aloud, "...is that possible?"

BTW, there doesn't seem to be any common factor in the journey from childhood to becoming a scientist. Also, I note that Stephen Pinker is one of the contributors. Isn't he one of those fellows who've written a lot of scathing attacks on "creationism" -- which have often been soundly refuted by Answers in Genesis? And if so, is there any other reason he might have been selected as a contributor?

(_Nature_ v. 431, 21 Oct. 2004 p. 905) "Stalking life's second secret" is a review of Ann B. Parson's _The Proteus Effect: Stem Cells and their Promise for Medicine_. Reviewer Lee M. Silver, "a professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton" -- biology and public affairs? curious... -- starts the review in an unremarkable way, but at a couple points... well...

The first "secret of life," as Francis Crick proclaimed in 1953, was the structure of DNA, but "while everyone knows of Watson and Crick, hardly anyone has heard of Leroy Stevens and other early stem-cell pioneers" seeking the answers to "A second mystery ... the process by which a microscopic embryo could develop into a fully functional human being or other mammal. Embryologists...didn't know how developmental control was asserted."

All well and good, a fine but unremarkable review. Then I read this comment (based on Parson's book, or the reviewers own opinion?) as to why it was "assumed, without evidence, that a permanent loss of biological components or capabilities was responsible for the narrowing of cellular potential": "Goal-oriented unidirectional development was easily accepted as scientific dogma because it aligns neatly with traditional Judaeo-Christian-derived religious doctrine, which permeates Western culture."

Wow, what do you think of that? In the creation v evolution arena, we hear so much about religion and science being opposed, or in separate realms, or science dictating what to believe, or about religion that finds God in (or in spite of) the god-free nature of modern science, "modern" being about everything since Darwin... and now here's this statement that a belief ("dogma," no less) of science in the 1950s was due to the influence of "traditional Judaeo-Christian-derived religious doctrine"! Okay, either Silver (or Parson, or both) are just spouting so much hooey, or I'd like to see the documentation on this, and every other case they might come up with. Wouldn't that be interesting? There's certainly reason to believe that Darwin and Darwinism were strongly influenced by "modern" liberal religious ideas and religio-philosophical progressivism.

I think it may just be that Silver is on a crusade against those who oppose embryonic stem cell research. He never mentions adult stem cell research _per se_, let alone how successful it's been, especially compared to embryonic stem cell tests. He does devote most of the rest of that paragraph to attacking a member of the Bush administration (another professor at Princeton and "a defender of strict Catholicism") for saying that embryonic growth "is not extrinsically determined" and (in Silver's words) "Consequently, according to ...the Bush administration, human zygotes...are...deserving of protection from the murderous pursuits of biomedical scientists."

I can't speak for the Bush administration, but the actual effects of extrinsic conditions on the embryo has nothing to do with why I believe human embryos should be considered human life and should not be destroyed by experiments. Silver notes that "Parson engages the debate between supporters and opponents of human embryo research by allowing the main players to speak for themselves. She doesn't advocate for or against, although the book's subtitle leaves no doubt as to her own position." So I wonder if a lot of this review isn't more about Silver venting or something, as when he boldly and grandly proclaims/predicts that when human embryos were first kept growing in a culture without differentiating, "the age of regenerative medicine was initiated."

Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump