In the News

In ScienceDaily, it is reported that thhe mantis shrimps in the study are found on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and have the most complex vision systems known to science. They can see in twelve colours (humans see in only three) and can distinguish between different forms of polarized light.

Special light-sensitive cells in mantis shrimp eyes act as quarter-wave plates -- which can rotate the plane of the oscillations (the polarization) of a light wave as it travels through it. This capability makes it possible for mantis shrimps to convert linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light and vice versa.

Dr Nicholas Roberts, lead author of the Nature Photonics paper said: "Our work reveals for the first time the unique design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp's eye. It really is exceptional - out-performing anything we humans have so far been able to create."

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And how did this evolve through only natural processes? Given enough time anything can happen?

Michael Behe posts on ENV that Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution.

Behe comments that "Before reading their paper, even I would have happily conceded for the sake of argument that random mutation plus selection could convert an MR-like protein to a GR-like protein and back again, as many times as necessary. Now, thanks to the work of Bridgham et al (2009), even such apparently minor switches in structure and function are shown to be quite problematic. It seems Darwinian processes can't manage to do even as much as I had thought."

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Michael Behe posts that Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution.

The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is entitled "An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution". The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework. Nonetheless, like the important work over the years of Michigan State's Richard Lenski on laboratory evolution of E. coli, which has shown trillions of bacteria evolving under selection for tens of thousands of generations yielding just broken genes and minor changes, the new work demonstrates the looming brick wall which confronts unguided evolution in at least one system. And it points strongly to the conclusion that such walls are common throughout all of biology.

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Reported in Science Daily, the lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.

Now, some of those same researchers are back, reporting on the first-ever study of the appendix through the ages. Writing in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Duke scientists and collaborators from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University conclude that Charles Darwin was wrong: The appendix is a whole lot more than an evolutionary remnant. Not only does it appear in nature much more frequently than previously acknowledged, but it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected.

"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"

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Just another example of the power of Darwinism to slow down life science discoveries...

Natalie Angier, for the NY Times, reports that scientists have discovered that the spleen, long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs and known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body's defense system than anyone suspected.

Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis.

"The parallel in military terms is a standing army," said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. "You don't want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it."

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A new Web site, by Cornelius Hunter is up and running.

Click HERE, for DarwinsPredictions.org

Is evolution about to enter a new phase? Three hundred biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and social scientists from around the world are gathering in Winchester, UK. Their aim is to address one of the greatest challenges in modern science: how to create a genuine artificial life form.

Maybe the facts are beginning to cause cracks in the wall of scientism...

Prof Mark Bedau of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, argues at the 11th International Conference on Artificial Life that despite the promise that organisms could one day breed in a computer, such systems quickly run out of steam, as genetic possibilities are not open-ended but predefined. Unlike the real world, the outcome of computer evolution is built into its programming.

His conclusion? Although natural selection is necessary for life, something is missing in our understanding of how evolution produced complex creatures. By this, he doesn't mean intelligent design (of course not) - the claim that only God can light the blue touch paper of life - but some other concept. "I don't know what it is, nor do I think anyone else does, contrary to the claims you hear asserted," he says. But he believes ALIFE will be crucial in discovering the missing mechanism.

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Dr Richard Watson of Southampton University, the co-organiser of the conference, echoes his concerns. "Although Darwin gave us an essential component for the evolution of complexity, it is not a sufficient theory," he says. "There are other essential components that are missing."

And for good measure...

"Evolution on its own doesn't look like it can make the creative leaps that have occurred in the history of life," says Dr Seth Bullock, another of the conference's organisers. "It's a great process for refining, tinkering, and so on. But self-organisation is the process that is needed alongside natural selection before you get the kind of creative power that we see around us.

Changing one's worldview is like trying to turn a bus around on a one-lane road with no shoulders. Some can do it...and some will not.

ScienceDaily reports that Berkeley Lab scientists have for the first time pieced together the three-dimensional structure of one of nature's most exquisite pieces of machinery, a gossamer-like filament of proteins in the inner ear that enables the sense of hearing and balance.

"It's one of the most beautifully deigned systems in the body," says Manfred Auer of Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division. "But how it really works remains a mystery. Our goal is to determine what the system looks like, so we can determine how it functions."

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Interesting how the scientists cannot seem to get away from the word "designed". To the materialist, the "design" is accomplished by time, chance, and natural selection. Materialist bow at the alter of time. For ID proponents the apt phrase is, "If it looks designed, maybe it is!"

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More on the flatfish flap from Casey Luskin on ENV...

Science News reports that a new look at the fossils of primitive flatfish offer evidence that these fish - well-known for having both eyes on one side of their head - started out symmetrical and gradually evolved their one-sided trait.

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You could ask two questions...

Since the eyes move during normal development, how do we know that the fossil intermediates found are specimens that had not completed their normal development yet?

Is the eye migration genetically preprogrammed (which would be necessary for Darwinism) or is it environmentally induced already being in the genetic code and then expressed? This question is likely the most important.

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