You've heard of a Flea Circus… now get ready for the Germ Circus!

Thinking Ahead: Bacteria Anticipate Coming Changes In Their Environment

LOL!!! Something a bit more than Shapiro's "cellular intelligence," researchers at Princeton have demonstrated some interesting intelligence in e.coli per anticipating future conditions and turning genes on or off based on that acquired knowledge.

In addition to shedding light on deep questions in biology, the findings could have many practical implications. They could help scientists understand how bacteria mutate to develop resistance to antibiotics. They may also help in developing specialized bacteria to perform useful tasks such as cleaning up environmental contamination.

Huh. An understanding of evolution as endogenous adaptive mutagenesis looks to "have many practical implications?" Who'd a thunk?

The researchers say that their findings open up many exciting avenues of research. They are planning to use similar methods to study how bacteria exchange genes with one another (horizontal gene transfer), how tissues and organs develop (morphogenesis), how viral infections spread, and other core problems in biology.

By golly, here we have actual biological scientists at an Ivy League institution and publishing in Science reporting that life anticipates the future at the most rudimentary level and adapts itself accordingly. Who was it who predicted years ago that science would eventually come to accept an EAM-ish version of intelligent design in biological evolution because it offers better solutions to 'problems' the RM-NS paradigm simply cannot explain?

Very cool.

I imagine that in one of his two upcoming volumes, Mike Gene will discuss whether DNA and RNA were optimal design materials. When I read Robert Shapiro's comments that Mike linked to here:

http://www.edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf

I found this:

There's famous set of experiments from about ten years ago when Albert Eschenmoser, a brilliant Swiss synthetic chemist, set out to prove why
nature had a select DNA. With enormous Swiss skill and manpower he set
students out to make DNA-like molecules using different sugars, one after the
other, expecting that in every instance he would fail. But in fact he succeeded and
he found that different sugars in many cases was superior to DNA. They had
greater stability; they had fewer complications in replication.
I thought that he would arrange to have the Swiss government declare that from
now on every Swiss life form would adapt his symbiosis and dispense with DNA
as quickly as possible. There's PAN, and someone else came up with TNA "”
there's endless ones "” and so to me DNA is probably what evolution stumbled
upon through accident, and it's the easiest thing that could be come upon by slow
trial and error that would make a molecule that could be replicated by proteins
and that's how it came into being.

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Awhile back I offered what I considered to be an inductive argument for ID here:

http://telicthoughts.com/inductive-argument-for-id/#more-1609

Even though it wasn't an argument from ignorance, it was criticised as being such. Recently, MiKe Gene has brought up the topic of proteins here:

http://telicthoughts.com/an-amazing-design-material/

What I consider to be interesting is that we can make an inductive argument for ID in regards to proteins. First, let's review the form of an inductive argument:

(1) All known Bs are Cs.
(2) X is B.
(3) Therefore X is probably C.

There is an inherent weakness in any inductive argument: How do we know our sample of Bs is large enough to allow a valid inference to C? And the answer is: We never know. That doesn't stop us from using inductive arguments in order to draw probabilistic conclusions. What it means is that we should realize the weakness, and be cautious about our conclusions. With that in mind, here is the following argument: Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere in Telic Thoughts, Mike Gene went on record as saying that he did not consider SETI to be science. Meanwhile, Zachriel said:

SETI is based on a well-defined, albeit weak, scientific hypothesis.

SETI's (the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) hypothesis, if I understand it, is that if we found a narrow bandwidth radio signal from outerspace, it would be reasonable to conclude that it was generated by an extra-terrestrial intelligence. This is based on (1) the prior experience that we human beings generate such narrow signals, due to the energy required to produce a radio signal powerful enough to send long distances, and (2) the lack of knowing what non-intelligent causes would produce narrow bandwidth signals. Further evidence might come, if the signal is of a type unlikely to be produced by non-intelligent means, such as the prime numbers, from 2 to 101 (as in the movie, Contact).
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Rational Design is also reflected in precisely specified interactions. Such specified interactions work to maximize the fidelity of the flow of information, energy and/or material.- The Design Matrix by Mike Gene; Chapter 9; Rationality and Foresight; Page 252

In The Design Matrix. Mike has crafted good arguments outlining criteria that would guide one in detecting design. The book challenges conventional thinking without the 'take no prisoners attitude' that all too often marks exchanges about Intelligent Design. The greatest resistence to ideas outlined in the DM are not likely to be based on scientific data. Rather they are more likely to stem from a religious philosophy that makes evolutionary change a belief that is separated from its biological, empirical moorings.

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The seeds of intelligent design were sown when Erwin Schrodinger had the insight to realize two things. First, encoded instructions should be found in a biomolecule within cells. He mistakenly thought proteins were the best candidate but his main idea was vindicated with the discovery of DNA function.

Second, Schrodinger's instincts about the relationship of physics to biology was expressed in this statement:

"We are faced with a mechanism entirely different from the probabilistic one of physics, one that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics… Living matter, while not eluding the laws of physics … is likely to involve other laws of physics hitherto unknown…"

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Well, darn. Nobody's posted anything new for two days, so this would be a good time for a new post, but I don't have Behe's book with me. So I'll have to wing this one from memory, and give the references later.

Near the end of his book, The Edge of Evolution, Michael Behe responds to both the Many Universes Hypothesis, and the Infinite Universes Hypothesis. We should keep them separate, since his response to each is different. In this post, let's focus on the Many (but finite) Universes Hypothesis. Read the rest of this entry »

In a paper entitled, "On the Very Possibility of Intelligent Design," published in the book, The Creation Hypothesis, back in 1992, William Dembski offered the following thought experiment: Read the rest of this entry »

In a comment within the Misusing Science thread Keiths made the following brief remark:

If immaterial souls exist "” particularly souls of the kind that most people envisage "” then there are testable empirical consequences.

The logic of the statement indicates that if we could observe what are reasonably inferred as consequences of an immaterial soul then we would have cause to suspect a soul exists and that the lack of such expected consequences would be evidence against the existence of a soul. I'm not going to explore what those consequences might be or whether the linkage is appropriate but instead want to focus on another implication inherent in the statement.

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Over at Behe's amazon.com blog, in the question and answer section, this question comes up:

In Edge of Evolution you indicate that some of the evidence supporting common ancestry is pretty persuasive. Yet a number of scientists have questioned some of the evidence for common ancestry. Do you think it is beyond the pale for them to do so? In your mind is it scientific to question common ancestry?

Behe's response is intriguing:

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