Science Literature

One only has to visit a tropical rainforest to discover a world filled with abundant treasures. It is entirely natural for people to want to protect these regions from any threat. Climate change has been perceived as a threat: cooler climates do not support tropical ecozones - but what about warmer climates? Concerns have been raised about plants being unable to adapt to the heat, and there are potential dangers of rainfall reductions. Geological research has revealed a remarkable period of Earth history at the Paleocene-Eocene Boundary, a very warm period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Although this has been much studied, little is known of the way the tropics responded to high temperatures globally (temperatures rose by about 5 degrees C) and to higher levels of carbon dioxide (perhaps 2.5 times the present level). One point that is agreed is that this rise in global temperatures was geologically rapid: "one of the most abrupt global warming events of the past 65 million years". New research concludes that, fat from being compromised by heat stress, the tropical regions coped very well.

"Most scientists have assumed that, as carbon dioxide levels increase and the Earth warms, plant species diversity in the rainforests will start to dwindle, with plants unable to adapt to the heat. But a new study suggests that the opposite may be true. In the past, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and higher temperatures actually drove the evolution of far greater numbers of new rainforest plant species than were wiped out."

Although the study says the Amazon can adapt to a warmer world, it still faces an extreme threat from deforestation. (Image: Gerd Ludwig/Corbis, Source here)

The fieldwork was located in Columbia and Venezuela and led by Carlos Jaramillo, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, In the late Paleocene, the northern Andes had not been uplifted and most of Central America was still underwater. Pollen recovered from cores was used to gain an understanding of the plants growing at the time.

"To find out how this ancient climate change affected rainforest plants, Jaramillo and his team analysed fossilized pollen trapped in rock cores from rainforests in Colombia and Venezuela. They spent seven years locating appropriate sites and taking samples, then used a battery of dating techniques to ensure that they were examining cores formed before, during and after the thermal maximum - a relatively narrow time window in geological terms. The results are published this week in Science."

The findings were an eye-opener. The researchers were expecting the abrupt warming event to have had adverse effects. However, Jaramillo is reported as saying: "we didn't find any extinction event [in plants] associated with the increase in temperature, we didn't find that the precipitation decreased". Furthermore, diversity increased.

"Although some plant species disappeared, many more new species arose. That included entire families, suggesting that the increased temperatures and carbon dioxide levels actually boosted biodiversity. "What we found was exactly the opposite of what we were expecting," says Jaramillo. "The diversity of the tropical forest increased really fast over a very short amount of time.""

With hindsight, the research outcomes are not so surprising. The authors point out in their paper that "Greenhouse experiments have shown that high levels of CO2 together with high levels of soil moisture improve the performance of plants under high temperatures, and it is possible that higher Paleogene CO2 levels contributed to their success." Fieldwork undertaken in forests has documented increased rates of growth that correlate with increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere (go here). The implication is that tropical forests are not as fragile and vulnerable to climate change as many have suggested.

"Indeed, it is possible that rainforest families in general, which have been present in the Neotropics since the Paleocene, have the genetic variability to cope with high temperatures, CO2, and rainfall."

Whilst these conclusions have primary applications in the fields of ecology and the environment, this blog is written to point out the relevance for a design-orientated perspective on the natural world. The clue is in the concept of "genetic variability" that enables animals and plants to adapt to environmental change. Within the Design paradigm, animals and plants are designed to adapt because the world's environments experience change. (Speciation, however, can often lead to a loss of genetic variability, which is why some species reach a state where environmental change threatens them with extinction.) This paradigm expects negative feedback mechanisms to be dominant in ecological systems (as pointed out here and here) so that perturbed systems are restored to an equilibrium state.

There is an important application to all this. Design thinking is relevant to many contemporary issues affecting human societies and the world's environments. I should add that there is no party line on such issues, and every view expressed is ultimately a personal view. Climate models have been developed that incorporate significant positive feedback mechanisms - allowing them to predict avalanche scenarios (whether heating or cooling). This has been accompanied by a strong emphasis on the fragility of the Earth's ecosystems - with consequent apocalyptic scenarios much loved by the media. These emphases have led to the politicisation of science, with climate scientists and many others advocating the expenditure of large sums of money to "save the planet". A design perspective allows us to look at the scientific evidence more dispassionately - and there are good reasons for rejecting climate models with large positive feedback parameters. It also allows us to have more confidence in the self-regulating character of the natural world. We recognise that climate change has always been an aspect of history, so adaptation to a changing world is the way forward.

Having said this, there is no doubt that human activity is affecting the Earth's ecozones in a damaging way. The biggest threat to tropical rainforests is not climate change but unmanaged logging. Governments are often complicit in this, and consumers are at fault whenever wood is purchased without any evidence that is from a managed forest source. Instead of blaming the consumption of fossil fuels, those concerned about tropical rainforests would do well to ensure the wood they purchase has the FSC trademark (or similar).

"Jaramillo believes that there is a more pressing threat to the diversity of tropical rainforests. "Deforestation is the real enemy," he says, "not the increase in temperature and carbon dioxide." "

Effects of Rapid Global Warming at the Paleocene-Eocene Boundary on Neotropical Vegetation
Carlos Jaramillo, Diana Ochoa, Lineth Contreras, Mark Pagani, Humberto Carvajal-Ortiz, Lisa M. Pratt, Srinath Krishnan, Agustin Cardona, Millerlandy Romero, Luis Quiroz, Guillermo Rodriguez, Milton J. Rueda, Felipe de la Parra, Sara Moron, Walton Green, German Bayona, Camilo Montes, Oscar Quintero, Rafael Ramirez, German Mora, Stefan Schouten, Hermann Bermudez, Rosa Navarrete, Francisco Parra, Mauricio Alvaran, Jose Osorno, James L. Crowley, Victor Valencia, and Jeff Vervoort.
Science, 330, 12 November 2010: 957-961

Abstract: Temperatures in tropical regions are estimated to have increased by 3 [deg] to 5[deg]C, compared with Late Paleocene values, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, 56.3 million years ago) event. We investigated the tropical forest response to this rapid warming by evaluating the palynological record of three stratigraphic sections in eastern Colombia and western Venezuela. We observed a rapid and distinct increase in plant diversity and origination rates, with a set of new taxa, mostly angiosperms, added to the existing stock of low-diversity Paleocene flora. There is no evidence for enhanced aridity in the northern Neotropics. The tropical rainforest was able to persist under elevated temperatures and high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast to speculations that tropical ecosystems were severely compromised by heat stress.

See also:

Milton, J. Rapid warming boosted ancient rainforest, Nature News, 11 November 2010 | doi:10.1038/news.2010.604

A key concept for Darwinism is adaptation. Traits are identified that confer survival and reproduction advantages to an organism. These traits are supposed to experience selection pressures that drive adaptive change and speciation. Consequently, traits are of central importance for theories of evoplutionary transformation, as is also time. However, when contemplating the flowering plants, even Darwin found them difficult to reconcile with his theory. Writing to J.D. Hooker in 1879, he described the evolutionary success of angiosperms as "an abominable mystery". He was troubled by the abrupt origin and extraordinarily rapid diversification of flowering plants in the mid-Cretaceous.

"The answer to whether any of the above traits are consistent predictors of diversity of a given rate of lineage growth depends more upon geographical rather than biological traits, such as geographical extent (i.e., total area occupied by a clade) and climate. Others have suggested that neither geographical nor biological traits determine diversification on their own but rather certain traits (or combinations thereof) may stimulate diversification within a particular geographical context."

Darwin freely acknowledged weaknesses in his case for evolution by natural selection (Source here).

If branching speciation, as illustrated in Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and if there are no limits to the number of species possible (i.e. gradualism reigns), then a broad prediction can be made that the number of species within a clade will increase with clade age. A recent analysis of all families of flowering plants has looked for correlations like this but has failed to confirm this particular trend. Even allowing for statistical variations from the predicted pattern, the conclusion to be drawn is that clade age is no guide to species diversity.

"Drs. Jana Vamosi and Steven Vamosi of the Department of Biological Sciences have found through extensive statistical analysis that the size of the geographical area is the most important factor when it comes to biodiversity of a particular flowering plant family. The researchers were looking at the underlying forces at work spurring diversity - such as why there could be 22,000 varieties of some families of flowers, orchids for example, while there could be only forty species of others, like the buffaloberry family. In other words, what factors have produced today's biodiversity?"

The research considered all the 409 angiosperm families and amassed data on species richness. Four putative key traits were documented: growth form, fruit type, sexual system and floral symmetry. In addition, the researchers recorded the geographical range of the lineage and the area potentially available for expansion (based on an ecozone classification of biogeographical realms). Phylogenetic relationships were based on published angiosperm family trees and best estimates of their age of origin.

"In total, the procedures used here attempt to incorporate our broadest knowledge of angiosperm systematics to produce the most comprehensive phylogenetic hypothesis."

For people interested in the details of angiosperm diversity, there are some really interesting findings, including useful analyses of tropical ecozones. Our purpose here, though, is to focus on the main findings: species richness is primarily dependent on the geographical area colonised.

"Our analyses reveal that available area for expansion is the most critical determinant of increased diversification in flowering plants, followed by zygomorphy, as revealed by model-averaged estimates. Our best models consistently incorporated these features, explaining up to 51% of the variation in species richness. Age explained little of the variation in species richness, indicating diversity-dependent diversification consistent with previous studies. There was no indication that particular trait combinations, rather than isolated traits, lead to higher diversification rates."

The findings of this study are not out of step with other recent research. Vamosi and Vamosi refer to similar conclusions relating to passerine birds (published in 2006). Land vertebrates are discussed here, drawing the same conclusions. The Darwinian scenario of evolution by natural selection acting on inheritable variations is really a hypothesis that is failing to be validated by these analyses of data. Instead, we are witnessing a 'colonisation' theme emerging, in which animal and plant orders/families experience radiations influenced primarily by geography (and ecology).

"We find that several key traits are associated with species richness and geographical extent but that their effects are best seen when accounting for ecoregion area. These constraints on the 'carrying capacity' of a lineage are emerging as critically important in disparate lineages and placing the most severe bounds on the species richness of a lineage. Geography, thus, determines the species richness of a clade far more than age as lineages rapidly expand and diversify upon a landscape. Certain traits (herbaceousness and tropicality) encourage diversification by expanding the size of the landscape upon which diversification occurs. Once the landscape is 'full' of members of a particular family with a characterizing adaptation, speciation rates decline (or extinction rates increase) leaving both medium-aged and old-aged lineages with equivalent species richness."

For those of us who have questioned the efficacy of the Darwinian mechanisms so prominently promoted in textbooks, these new biodiversity studies are very interesting. They are opening the door for new perspectives on life's history - away from Darwinian adaptationism towards colonisation accompanied by relatively rapid diversification. The fossil record has never provided support for Darwinian transformation, but it does offer some fascinating scenarios of responses to global ecological change: abrupt appearance followed by rapid diversification and colonisation. Recent blogs exploring these issues have considered photosynthesizing plant communities in the late Precambrian, the first land plants (liverworts), land vertebrates, and planktic foraminifera. When these ideas get into the educational curriculum, the tendency to present everything from a Darwinian perspective will be challenged - alternatives are available and they demonstrate a better fit to available data.

Key innovations within a geographical context in flowering plants: towards resolving Darwin's abominable mystery
Jana C. Vamosi and Steven M. Vamosi
Ecology Letters, 13(10), 1270-1279, October 2010 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01521.x

Abstract: Elucidating factors associated with diversification have been attempted in lineages as diverse as birds, mammals and angiosperms, yet has met with limited success. In flowering plants, the ambiguity of associations between traits and diversification has sparked debate since Darwin's description of angiosperm diversification as an 'abominable mystery'. Recent work has found that diversification is often diversity-dependent, suggesting that species richness depends on geographical area available more than on traits or the time available to accumulate species. Here, we undertake phylogenetic generalized least squares analyses that jointly examine the effects of age, ecoregion area and four ecological traits on diversification in 409 angiosperm families. Area explained the most variation, dwarfing the effect of traits and age, suggesting that diversity-dependent diversification is controlled by ecological limits. Within the context of area, however, traits associated with biotic pollination (zygomorphy) exhibited the greatest effect, possibly through the evolution of specialization.

See also:

Toward resolving Darwin's 'abominable mystery', EurekAlert (16 September 2010).

Stephen Hawking has achieved the status of 'celebrity scientist'. He writes books that sell well and has both presented and performed in television series. His latest book, The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, has been reviewed widely by both popular press and scientific journals. According to Michael Turner, who wrote the Nature review, these authors:

"offer a brief but thrilling account of some of the boldest ideas in physics - including M-theory and the multiverse - and what these have to say about our existence and the nature of the Universe."

"How do we know that the reality we perceive is true?" - or are we like fish seeing the world from a bowl? (Graphic by Barron Storey, source here).

The media appeared to be stimulated primarily by the claim that physics has made God redundant. "God is unnecessary, science can explain the universe without the need for a creator" (BBC News), "Why God Did Not Create the Universe. There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world - no gods required." (Wall Street Journal). The Guardian responded by conducting a poll among its readers, asking the question: "Is physicist Stephen Hawking right that physics, not God, created the universe?" This theme is also picked out in the Nature review: "No miracle in the Multiverse". Some might find the argument to be artificially polarised - for did not the pioneers of science link the existence of laws of nature with the reality of a supreme Lawgiver? More recent research has unearthed evidence for the "fine-tuning" of the Cosmos, so the evidences of design have become more prominent with time. Hawking and Mlodinow recognise this when they write:

"Newton believed that our strangely habitable solar system did not "arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature." Instead, he maintained that the order in the universe was "created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition." The discovery recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that this grand design is the work of some grand Designer."

This brings us to the heart of the argument presented by Hawking and Mlodinow: they are endorsing M-theory and the Multiverse cosmological model. This is how Turner puts it:

"In searching for the holy grail, Hawking and others pinned their hopes first on super-gravity and then on string theory. Both are now seen as different regimes of a grander mathematical framework called M-theory, where M is yet to be determined - is it master, miracle or mirage? M-theory unifies gravity with the other fundamental forces (weak and strong nuclear and electromagnetism), predicts seven additional dimensions of space and suggests that space and time might be emergent phenomena rather than fundamental. It is exciting and important, but much of it remains to be explored."

Using M-theory, cosmologists have suggested that our universe is but one of a vast number of universes, all with different physics and with different life-histories. We happen to be in one that has the parameters that favour life. The fine tuning is not by design, but by chance. When you have an infinity of options, anything is theoretically possible! Hawking and Mlodinow explain it this way:

"As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat - now the entire observable universe - is just one of many. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation."

Some of us will continue to think that the multiverse advocates are driven by a theological agenda: the need to account for the miracle of fine tuning. The theories of modern cosmology are being selected by intelligent agents: they have other options. But atheism is driving these agents to find responses to the strong evidences of design which are staring them in the face. This blog is arguing that they are on a road that leads to the destruction of all that we value within science. The first casualty is testability and the falsification criterion. This is where Turner finds a problem (and for more on this point, John Horgan's blog is worth reading):

"The multiverse is possibly the most important idea of our time, and may even be right, but it gives me a headache. Is it science if we cannot test it? The different patches are incommunicado, so we will never be able to observe them. The multiverse displaces rather than answers the question about choice and who chooses, and does not explain why there is something rather than nothing."

Secondly, the concept of realism in science is sacrificed. This is the focus of the article Hawking and Mlodinow wrote for Scientific American. In the quest for a theory of everything (that explains our Cosmos), they have adopted a theory with a seemingly infinite number of solutions. M-theory never leads to a unique set of equations. Every implementation of the theory is accompanied by its own dependent reality. Consequently, it does not make sense to talk of what "reality" actually is.

"In our view, there is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If two models agree with observation, neither one can be considered more real than the other. A person can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration."

Thirdly, we are presented with a cosmological extrapolation of quantum mechanics. The authors are so captivated by their theoretical models that they have lost touch with the need to constrain their thinking by reference to empirical data. This is from a review in The Economist:

"The main novelty in "The Grand Design" is the authors' application of a way of interpreting quantum mechanics, derived from the ideas of the late Richard Feynman, to the universe as a whole. According to this way of thinking, "the universe does not have just a single existence or history, but rather every possible version of the universe exists simultaneously." The authors also assert that the world's past did not unfold of its own accord, but that "we create history by our observation, rather than history creating us." They say that these surprising ideas have passed every experimental test to which they have been put, but that is misleading in a way that is unfortunately typical of the authors. It is the bare bones of quantum mechanics that have proved to be consistent with what is presently known of the subatomic world. The authors' interpretations and extrapolations of it have not been subjected to any decisive tests, and it is not clear that they ever could be."

Paradoxically, scientific realism has been used to promote atheism against theism, but Hawking is now leading his band of atheists towards a virtual reality dream-world that is generated by the manipulation of mathematical models. With science developing independently of the empirical world, realism becoming localised and history becoming a construct of observation, post-modernist thinking reigns supreme. Now it is time for theistic realists to quote Sagan's words with conviction:

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." (Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995) Chapter 1)

No miracle in the Multiverse
Michael Turner
Nature, 467, 657-658 (7 October 2010) | doi:10.1038/467657a

1st paragraph: Despite publicity to the contrary, The Grand Design does not disprove the existence of God. Science has not had much new to say about God since mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace remarked to Napoleon that he had no need for "that hypothesis" when asked why he had neglected the deity in his treatise Mecanique celeste (Celestial Mechanics, 1799-1825).

The Elusive Theory of Everything
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Scientific American, October 2010.

1st paragraph: A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved fishbowls. The sponsors of the measure explained that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl because the curved sides give the fish a distorted view of reality. Aside from the measure's significance to the poor goldfish, the story raises an interesting philosophical question: How do we know that the reality we perceive is true?

See also:

Lennox, J., As a scientist I'm certain Stephen Hawking is wrong. You can't explain the universe without God. The Daily Mail, 3rd September 2010.

Tyler, D. The Metaphysics of Multiverse Theory, ARN Literature Blog (20 November 2008).