Life’s origin

“In the end, there is no agreement on how to solve the problem of life’s origin. William Martin [Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf] thinks that research on the topic is “unfalsifiable conjecture” – the best we can hope for is a convincing story. “Even if you were to make a reactor in the laboratory, and put hydrogen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen in one end, and out pops something like Escherichia coli at the other end, you still couldn’t prove that we and our ancestors arose that way.  You’d just have a narrative that made it more plausible.”

—John Whitfield, Nature News, Nature 459, 316-319 (2009) | doi:10.1038/459316a.  (On plausibility as a scientific value, see 12/22/2003 commentary.)

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Creating artificial life?

It has already been more than one year that the conference of scientists was held in May 2008 in Winchester, UK where biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and social scientists from around the world gathered to discuss one of the biggest challenges in modern science: how to create an artificial life form.

The passages below from the report of the conference, published in the Telegraph.co.uk, make us just wonder whether the evolution theory is collapsing. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the whole story.

“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.”

Tom Magnuson further writes.

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.”

Speaking about the need of self-organization along with natural selection, Dr. Seth Bullock one of the conference’s organizers, also didn’t sound very supportive to evolution as a self-sufficient, creative mechanism. He said:

“Evolution on its own doesn’t look like it can make the creative leaps that have occurred in the history of life…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.

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The white blood cells

How do white blood cells – immune system ‘soldiers’ – get to the site of infection or injury?  To do so, they must crawl swiftly along the lining of the blood vessel – gripping it tightly to avoid being swept away in the blood flow – all the while searching for temporary ‘road signs’ made of special adhesion molecules that let them know where to cross the blood vessel barrier so they can get to the damaged tissue.
In research recently published in the journal Immunity, Prof. Ronen Alon and his research student Ziv Shulman of the Weizmann Institute’s Immunology Department show how white blood cells advance along the length of the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels.  Current opinion maintains that immune cells advance like inchworms, but Alon’s new findings show that the rapid movement of the white blood cells is more like that of millipedes.  Rather than sticking front and back, folding and extending to push itself forward, the cell creates numerous tiny ‘legs’ no more than a micron in length – adhesion points, rich in adhesion molecules (named LFA-1) that bind to partner adhesion molecules present on the surface of the blood vessels.  Tens of these legs attach and detach in sequence within seconds – allowing them to move rapidly while keeping a good grip on the vessels’ sides.

“The scientists believe that the tiny legs are trifunctional:,” the article said: “Used for gripping, moving and sensing distress signals from the damaged tissue.”

Comment: According to scientific understanding, it is very astonishing that tiny white blood cells with no muscles, nerves and brain can function so accurately and efficiently, just like highly developed organisms. Moreover, it is hard to imagine any scenario of evolution without such a vital element like the white blood cells. This leads to a chicken-and-egg problem: without white blood cells any species would go extinct, being unable to fight infections, and without highly evolved species there would be no white blood cells, so how the white blood cells originate?
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Ida, the missing link? Quick cheating discovery.

Recently in Germany’s Messel Pit, a member of the Natural History Museum of Oslo, Norway, paleontologist Jorn Hurum, with his team, discovered and analyzed a 47-million-year-old fossil they named Ida and suggested that it is a critical missing-link species in primate evolution. “This is the first link to all humans,” said Hurum, “the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor.”

Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, was no less excited by the new discovery and exclaimed: “[Ida] is one of the important branching points on the evolutionary tree, but it’s not the only branching point.”

The Ida fossil of the Eocene era (58 million to 40 million years ago) had well preserved fur, soft tissues and even some remains of her last meal: fruits, seeds, and leaves. “From this time period there are very few fossils, and they tend to be an isolated tooth here or maybe a tailbone there,” said Richmond.  ”So you can’t say a whole lot of what that [type of fossil] represents in terms of evolutionary history or biology.”

Although a lot of media on internet and journals trumpeted the new discovery as a “missing link”, strong scholarly criticism to this claim emerged in very short time. For example, Brian Switek, a science writer who focuses on paleontology, evolution, and the history of science, wrote on his blog: “The grand claims about it being our ancestor, though, can not be upheld as true. The researchers simply did not do the work to support their case, and even if their language was more reserved in the technical paper they have gone hand-in-hand with the History Channel to create an aura of sensationalism around the fossil. I hardly think this is a responsible way to conduct or communicate science, flooding the media with poorly supported claims, but as reported in the New York Times some of this paper’s authors care more about marketing than about good science;

“Any pop band is doing the same thing,” said Jorn H. Hurum, a scientist at the University of Oslo who acquired the fossil and assembled the team of scientists that studied it. “Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science.”

This is a shame. I would have hoped that this fossil would receive the care and attention it deserves, but for now it looks like a cash cow for the History Channel. Indeed, this association may not have only presented overblown claims to the public, but hindered good science, as well. As Karen James has suggested, the overall poor quality of the paper and the disproportionate hyping of the find make me wonder if this research was rushed into publication so that the media splash would occur on time. The paper tried to cover so much, so quickly, and contained so many shortfalls that I honestly have to wonder why it was allowed to be published in such a state. Perhaps we will never know, but I am sickened by the way in which a cable network has bastardized a legitimately fascinating scientific discovery, with the scientists themselves going along with it every step of the way. I can only hope that Darwinius will eventually receive the careful analysis it deserves.

The BBC news passages appeared no less suspicious about the blown up opinion of Ida’s classification as the “missing link.”

But some independent experts, awaiting an opportunity to see the new fossil, are sceptical of the claim.  And they have been critical of the hype surrounding the presentation of Ida.  The fossil was launched amid great fanfare at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, by the city’s mayor.  Although details of the fossil have only just been published in a scientific journal – PLoS One – there is already a TV documentary and book tie-in….
Independent experts are keen to see the new fossil but somewhat sceptical of any claim that it could be “a missing link”. Dr Henry Gee, a senior editor at the journal Nature, said the term itself was misleading and that the scientific community would need to evaluate its significance. “It’s extremely nice to have a new find and it will be well-studied,” he said.  But he added that it was not likely to be in the same league as major discoveries such as “Flores man” or feathered dinosaurs.

Other pro-evolutionists also wrote about Ida, like Robert Roy Britt, Clara Moskowitz, Benjamin Radford and Meredith Small, all of them criticizing the sloppy science, media fraud and the misleading misuse of the phrase  “missing link”. Ultimately, the Ida is 95% lemur, astonishingly similar to 100% lemurs in many zoos.