Michael Behe as a propagandist: Robbie's Week 9 New and Hot (and review)

I just read Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box, in which he tries to use the argument of irreducible complexity as evidence of design. I wrote a pretty scathing review of the book on Amazon; I think the Behe was wrong or actually unfounded in making a lot of his claims.

I decided to do a little research on Behe, who's listed as a senior fellow on the Discovery Institute Website. It says that "Behe's current research involves delineation of design and natural selection in protein structures," which basically means that Behe has been doing whatever he can to show that proteins could not have evolved.

One of the peer reviewed articles in favor of design on the DI website was wirten by Behe in the journal Protein Science in 2004. It was called "Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues," with the conclusion that the mutations required for evolution to produce functioning proteins are so improbable that proteins could have not evolved. This was an irreducible complexity argument without the use of the word irreducible complexity.

This article was pretty controversial; in an editorial in Protein Science, the editor concludes:

"Prof. Lynch’s approach of testing the problem raised by Drs. Behe and Snoke within the modern framework of evolutionary biology represents the desirable scientific approach (Lynch 2005, this issue; Behe and Snoke 2005, this issue). As Bruce Alberts wrote in a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times (Feb. 12, 2005): "In evolution, as in all areas of science, our knowledge is incomplete. But the entire success of the scientific enterprise has depended on an insistence that these gaps be filled by natural explanations, logically derived from confirmable evidence."

I guess this is true; this may be part of the desirable scientific approach because other scientists pretty much killed Behe's claim. Still, I think Dawkins has a better point in "The God Delusion:" Behe has devoted his career to developing confusing propaganda rather than finding truth.

Selling evolution - new book - Bob

Writing about evolution is clearly a growth industry.
My friend Casper turned me on to yet another episode in this saga.

Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s
Theory Can Change the Way We Think
About Our Lives
by David Sloan Wilson
Delacorte Press: 2007. 400 pp. $24

It is reviewed in NATURE|Vol 447|31 May 2007

More summer reading???

Anne's New and Hot - week 9

Interesting Plane Experience and Sam Harris's Life

So, I was sitting on the airplane reading “Letter to a Christian Nation” and the person next to me kept glancing over. Finally, the person spoke up and asked me if I liked the book and that in their opinion that Sam Harris is a “complete psycho”. I told him that I was reading the book to gain a broader perspective on the debate between creationism and evolution in the United States today, and that I don’t agree with every claim that Harris makes. The man next to me wasn’t too happy even being near close to the book, though and looked pretty uncomfortable. I can see how Harris generates extreme reactions because his writing is also extreme. I was really interested in finding out more about the man, Sam Harris, and how he came to develop such extreme opposition to all religion. The Washington Post Published an interesting article in the wake of an evening debate between Harris and a former priest at the New York Public Library. And in the long article there are brief biographical segments that I found quite intriguing.

Apparently, Sam Harris went to Stanford as an English major, but then dropped out of college, after having a life changing experience after experimenting with MDMA, or ecstasy. He said, “I realized that it was possible to be a human being who wished others well all the time, reflexively.” Harris began to Study Buddhism and Meditation and traveled to Nepal and India. While, there he spent years at a time in seclusion and meditation, like the Buddha himself. He also read hundreds of books on religion. In other words, Harris was as deeply spiritual as one could possibly be, but not necessarily religious. He re-enrolled in Stanford in 1997 to complete a degree in philosophy. During his second phase at Stanford he began writing a lot, leading to his book, “The End of Faith”.

Knowing more about Sam Harris and his background definitely gives Harris more credibility in my mind. He never discounted religion from the start; in fact he became seriously engaged in religious experiences. I still don’t personally agree with all that he says, but knowing a bit more about how Harris came to the conclusions that he did puts his letter in context.

The article also quotes a retired Stanford Professor of religious studies. I found it interesting in light of the opposing view of another Stanford Professor of theoretical physics, Leonard Susskind, whose praise is quoted on the back cover of Harris’s “Letter”.

The Article: “Atheist Evangelist” by: David Segal The Washington Post, October 26, 2006

It can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102501998.html

Alex's Extra New and Hot

Okay, so I found these two things just last night, and I actually think they are probably superior to the one that I found before. Click below for the two links:

Dolphin Braininess due to Social Life.
Is Our Style of Language in Our Genes?

Ok, so the first article is really straightforward. It talks about how two studies have been published in the last month or two with somewhat similar conclusions. Both studies contend that a good explanation has been found for the reason why dolphins are so smart. We all know that dolphins are probably among the most intelligent species on earth. They behave in a very intelligent manner and they are easily trained, in addition to the fact that they have one of the greatest brain-to-body-mass ratios out of all the organisms on earth. Anyways, both studies suggest that this over-sized brain is at least partially due to the intellectual demands of living in a highly social society. Anyway, I'm not too sure how the studies themselves were actually conducted, however the two articles did state that they are two alterative theories for the evolution of large brains in cetaceans: 1.) their ancestors' re-migration from land to sea; 2.) their brain's use of echolocation. The other two explanations are sort of brushed off.

I think the second article is really interesting. Long story short, there are two genes that are associated with brain development, ASPM and Microcephalin. These two genes are of particular interest because both have changed very recently in terms of human history. ASPM most recently changed approximately 5800 years ago (a blink of an eye in geologic time), and microcephalin most recently changed about 37000 years ago. In any case, the researchers at the University of Edinburgh divided up some of the major languages on the planet into two categories: tonal languages are like Chinese that use pitch changes to convey meanings of words, and non-tonal languages like English that don't.

The overall trend that the researchers found after removing biases due to geography and such was that people who spoke tonal languages LACKED the most recent mutations in ASPM and microcephalin, whereas people who speak non-tonal languages do possess the most recent versions of these two genes. So depending on how confident we are in these conclusions, this is definitely evidence to the assertion that languages is hard-coded into our genes. Which I think is kinda cool. Because I think there's a few things that we can infer from that. For example, languages definitely evolve very quickly in today's society, so is that indicative of how quickly evolution in progressing as well? That's probably something interesting to think about.

Roarke's New and Hot (Week 9)

A collection of papers soon to be published in the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology presents a new methodology that can be used to observe evolution in action. By studying the rapidly evolving E.coli bacteria, the scientists performing these studies are able to gain new insights into how organisms are able to adapt to environmental changes and fluctuations. These particular studies focused on how E.coli evolves to deal with changes in acidity, which is relevant to the occupation of human intestines by the bacteria.

The scientists had four experimental groups: one exposed to a constantly acidic environment, one to a constantly basic environment, one to a randomly fluctuating environment, and one to an environment that changed from acidic to basic every 24 hours. Each group was left in its experimental environment for 1000 generations and then tested in acidic and basic environments. The researchers found that the groups placed in a constant environment survived well in the environment they had been exposed to, while the groups placed in fluctuating environments performed well in both acidic and basic environments. As the article states, this demonstrated that the "jack-of-all-trades" can be the master of some as well.

While this is only one study that can be done using E.coli as a model, it opens the door to many other new studies of how rapidly evolving populations can quickly adapt to new environments. Exciting stuff!

Read the article here.
(The paper isn't published yet.)

-Roarke

Becca's New and Hot #2 Week 9

I posted once this week, but when I read this article on moth evolution at breakfast this morning, I was prompted to write again. Says Nicolas Wade, the author of this article and also one of the books assigned for the Hum Bio core, "Every feature of a butterfly or moth, throughout its life from egg to adult, has been shaped over millions of years of evolution for specific purposes." Those specific purposes are basically escape from predators and parasites, for apparently monkeys and birds love to eat moths-- they taste "like raw shrimp." This made me think about fitness; are these ornate moths and butterflies more evolved than other species? Are they more fit for their environments? I also thought about the fallacy that some reading this article might commit: assuming that evolution had an end goal in "designing" the butterfly and moth patterns. Of course, evolution has shaped the moths and butterflies. But as we know, evolution did not shape the designs to promote survival; rather, the species with the most fit designs survived. Beyond helping me to synthesize some of the ideas to which we've repeatedly returned in this class, the article gives very interesting examples of butterfly patterns and their supposed purposes: those that look like dead leaves, those with patterns that accentuate movement to make them look like they're too fast to catch, those that camouflage well. Here are some pictures-- the first blends into tree bark, the second looks like sunlight streaming through a dead leaf, and the third looks like a dead leaf. I think it's a very cool application of what we know!

Dani's New & Hot (Week 9) and Book Review

My new & hot this week comes from USA Today. The whole article can be found here.

The article is entitled "Why Do Flowers Grow Like So?" and it talks about the discovery of two genes in Robbie's favorite family of plants, Arabidopsis, whose relative amounts determine how the plant flowers. The question that instigated this research was that theoretically, there should be no limit on the number of ways a plant can flower, but regardless of these immense possibilities, why do are plants found to only flower in THREE different ways? And what determines how the plant flowers?

The same type of question can be posed for animals as well. Wouldn't two noses enhance a bloodhound's sense of smell? What about three? Four? A hundred? So why has nature selected against animals with extra body parts? And why has nature selected against animals with fewer body parts? For instance, we can surive on one kidney, so why do we have two? One for backup? Then why don't we have a backup heart?

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On another note, today in my Biotech class, Hank Greeley, a professor from the law school came in to talk to us about ethics & genetics. His presentation was pretty interesting, especially because he started off talking about the DNA database tha we had discussed last week or so. He brought up some interesting points about CODIS:

• arrests have been made on relatives of databased individuals due to partial matches

• about 14% of the population is in the database, the majority of which are males, 42% are African American

These details would indicate that a partial database such as CODIS discriminates against African American males.

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And finally, Darwin + Stanford = LOVE:

http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/5/25/whatYouDidntKnowAboutDarwin

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Book Review

I've decided to post my book review on this blog instead of on Amazon because it is more of a personal reflection than a objective book review:

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

I began this book with high expectations because of what others had said about it and also because of its general popularity. Maybe it is because my expectations were too high, but I was quite disappointed in the overall argument provided. Overall, I think Dawkins, in the process of trying to get his point across, undermined some of his arguments along the way.

Speaking as someone who comes from a non-religious background and whose belief in God is fickle at best, but who also does not consider herself an atheist, this book did not further persuade me to become more or less of an atheist. And nor did Dawkins’s argument persuade me in the non-existence of a supernatural being that has the potential to control all aspects of the world. In fact, I am perhaps even more inclined to give a little to the religious faction in that after reading The God Delusion, the one conclusion that I am thoroughly convinced of is that there is absolutely no way to scientifically prove the God Hypothesis, as Dawkins successfully hammered through in just the second chapter. I believe that this argument, presented at the very beginning (although I concede that it was necessary to do so) made me very skeptical as I read further.

Also, just to play devil’s advocate (no pun intended), Dawkins’s presentation about how scientists and other higher educated people are more likely to be non-religious can be undermined by the idea of self-preservation. The belief in an omniscient/omnipotent God renders scientific work useless. If every time an enigma about the natural world comes up and science cannot explain it, then religion would automatically say that this enigma is how it is because God decided to create it that way. And thus, problem solved, and no further experiments would be needed. Thus in a completely religious world, there would be no need for science, and scientists would have no purpose. Therefore, I argue that scientists are less religious not because they know better, but because they cannot be religious in order to preserve their purpose and distinction in society.

However, one argument that Dawkins brings up that I think is valid to consider when debating the existence of a supernatural God and the validity of religion is the question of “Who created God?” To me, the answer is obvious: Man did. [Sidenote: this is a quaint contradiction to the religious belief that God created Man.] Following on Dawkins’s train of thought, if God is the most perfect perfect being, then whoever created him must also be near perfection, a state which definitely does not describe Man, as both sides would agree. The idea of a God created by Man would not hold up in religion and thus the idea of God falls.

On the other hand, Dawkins does bring up a good point that in order for a God to create such complexity in the world, God himself would have to be extraordinarily complex. However, this argument does not prove the non-existence of God, as Dawkins tries to use it as evidence for his case because it only works against the postulation that God is a being. But what if God is a process or a means? What then? Does God, the process have to be extremely complex? Darwin’s theory of evolution is a great example where the means of complexity is very simple. Natural selection is so simple that it is intuitive.

In conclusion, Dawkins’s The God Delusion was a disappointment for me, but it did get me thinking on the creation vs. evolution debate and has allowed me to form my own opinions based on my personal experiences. The book provides some thought-provoking arguments but the arguments were not strong enough to persuade me on either position.