Carbon Units Study
Carbon Unity 05/21/2011
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May 21, 2011 — Life’s dependency on carbon was so distinctive to aliens in
Star Trek, they nicknamed humans “carbon units.” With its four valences, carbon
is able to form an almost infinite number of complex molecules based on chains
(polymers) and geometric shapes. But does the presence of carbon in abundance
explain the appearance of life? Evolutionists desire a unified, “bottom-up”
story that derives complex life from particles exploding out of the big bang by
undirected processes and natural law. Here’s a look at stages in the grand
story.
Whence carbon? Over a half century ago, flamboyant astrophysicist
Fred Hoyle realized that a finely-tuned resonance state in nuclear reactions
going on in the interiors of stars was responsible for carbon nucleosynthesis.
Now, according to PhysOrg,
researchers at North Carolina State University have modeled the Hoyle State
state from first principles and proved it correct. Dean Lee at NC State
commented, “This work is valuable because it gives us a much better idea of
the kind of ‘fine-tuning’ nature has to do in order to produce carbon in
stars.”
Whence carbon-rich planets? Once you have carbon, what happens to
it? Much of it remains in stars, but supernovas can blast it and other heavy
elements out into molecular clouds. As theory has it, these clouds condense and
form planets (but see 05/21/2009, 06/09/2009, 08/21/2009). Rocky planets might have
abundant carbon. Science news outlets are asking if the Kepler spacecraft
has found one. Space.com
asked, “Is the Rocky Alien Planet Gliese 581d Really Habitable?” It’s
seven times bigger than earth, but appears to lie in the circumstellar habitable
zone (see other habitable zone requirements in the 02/26/2011 commentary). Beyond that, nobody
knows if it has the requirements for life, and detection of life is beyond
current capabilities. Guillermo Gonzalez, astrobiologist, intelligent
design advocate and co-author of The Privileged Planet (see video version
on YouTube), was asked
about the likelihood of life on this world on ID
the Future. He said that other factors, such as plate tectonics and the
right atmosphere and temperature, will have to be evaluated. Uncommon
Descent noticed that Gonzalez, who predicted in his book that habitable
planets would be rare, has been right in that prediction so far – but that
didn’t win him any awards in academia. After The Privileged Planet came
out proposing that life was rare in the universe, he later lost his tenure
battle at Iowa State due to the intolerance of some atheist professors for his
views on intelligent design (05/22/2007
bullet 7, 11/08/2007, 12/16/2008). An article on New
Scientist agrees that worlds like ours are rare, and is worried about it.
In “No place like home: Our lonesome solar system,” Lee Billings quoted
planet hunter Geoff Marcy saying, “Our system is a rarity, there’s no longer
a question about that. The only question that remains is, just how rare is
it?” (More from March in the 02/23/2011 entry).
Whence carbon-based life? Is that end of the road – a planet with
carbon and other heavy elements that just sits there? Obviously, evolutionary
scientists would like to see those elements self-organize into living
cells. A story on Science
Daily promised “important clues to how life originated from
non-life and how modern cells came to exhibit complex behaviors.”
Unfortunately for tantalized readers, the researchers at Penn State did not
bring carbon to life. They played with toy models of cells. They “generated
simple, non-living model ‘cells’ with which they established that
asymmetric division – the process by which a cell splits to become two
distinct daughter cells – is possible even in the absence of complex
cellular components, such as genes.” Whatever this oversimplified
model has to do with the origin of life is anyone’s guess. One researcher
claimed, “We observed that even model cells can divide in a structured
way, which implies a kind of intrinsic order.” Whether that
order was intrinsic or was inserted by the investigators into the system, since
they tweaked variables in their model to get the outcomes they desired, is a
good follow-up question. They modeled various carbon-based molecules such as
amino acids and lipids to get their toy cells to divide without genetic
control. It was left unstated if real molecules would do such things. Real
cells divide with a host of complex machines, and require accurate copying of
millions of base pairs of DNA. They saw their work as just a piece of a
puzzle: “Scientists have simulated early-Earth conditions in laboratories
and have demonstrated that many amino acids – the biochemical
constituents of proteins – can form through natural chemical reactions,”
Christine Keating [Penn State] said. We hope our research helps to
fill in another part of the puzzle: how chemical and spatial
organization may have contributed to the success of
early life forms.” Taxpayers can thank the National Science Foundation
and National Institutes of Health for funding these imaginary scenarios.
Whence life complexity? Give evolutionists all the carbon-based
molecules they want – will they get life to form and evolve? Will the amino
acids form proteins (see online book) that can evolve
into complex life? Michael Lynch and Ariel Fernandez, scientists at the
University of Chicago, reported PhysOrg
began with proteins, and then speculated that “Errors in protein structure
sparked evolution of biological complexity.” That’s right: complex life is
the result of mistakes. This idea was published in
Nature.1
Over four billion years of evolution, plants and
animals grew far more complex than their single-celled ancestors. But a new
comparison of proteins shared across species finds that complex
organisms, including humans, have accumulated structural weaknesses that
may have actually launched the long journey from microbe to man.
This new idea is actually un-Darwinian. In a nutshell,
PhysOrg said, “random introduction of errors into proteins, rather
than traditional natural selection, may have boosted the
evolution of biological complexity.” How can that be? Is there any
complex system that gets better with the introduction of random errors? The
article continued, “Flaws in the ‘packing’ of proteins that make them
more unstable in water could have promoted protein interactions and
intracellular teamwork, expanding the possibilities of life.”
Jason Palmer cheerfully echoed this “could have” story on the BBC News,
quoting Michael Lynch [Indiana U], who added this un-Darwinian comment: “We’ve
opened up the idea that the roots of complexity don’t have to reside
in purely adaptational arguments.” The team felt that new protein
interactions “nudged complexity forward” with functional possibilities.
No actual possibilities were presented. Wouldn’t many of these actions be
deleterious? Don’t proteins denature into sticky, shapeless masses unless they
fold correctly? To solve this problem, they had another could-have story up
their sleeves: “The authors suggest then that other adaptations
occur that ‘undo’ the deleterious effects of the sticky
proteins.” Co-author Fernandez applied the tinkerer metaphor to their
idea while tossing a useful line to intelligent design advocates: “Natural designs are often
one notch more sophisticated than the best engineering,” he said in the
PhysOrg article. “This is another example: Nature doesn’t change the
molecular machinery, but somehow it tinkers with it in subtle ways
through the wrapping.” (See personification.) Palmer’s BBC
story included a curious quote by Ford Doolittle [Dalhousie University] about
this “new evolutionary pathway that didn’t exist before.” Doolittle
commented about what he perceived as useless complexity in real life:
“Darwinists are a little bit like the pre-Darwinists before them, who
would have marveled at the perfection of God’s creation.” Doolittle
disagrees with Lynch about the repair of deleterious proteins; instead, he
imagines cells with “presuppression” mechanisms that would protect them from
mistakes. “But we both agree that much of complexity does not have an
adaptive explanation.” They also agree that it does not have a design
explanation, but that goes without saying; their idea presents a random
explanation: stuff happens.
That’s a new label for creationists:
“pre-Darwinists”. Will they like it?
1. Ariel Fernandez and Michael Lynch, “Non-adaptive origins of
interactome complexity,” Nature
published online 18 May 2011, doi:10.1038/nature09992.
Help your local pre-creationist friend at the
university become a full-fledged one. Give him or her the following books:
Genetic
Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome by Dr. John C. Sanford.
Fascinating and convincing evidence (from a geneticist) on why mutations will
never, ever lead to increased fitness—in fact, the human genome is
disintegrating due to mutations.
[2011/05/21] Carbon Units Study Carbon Unity
