Sunday, June 12, 2005

Reverend William Paley's Circadian Clock


bryanm, the proprietor of the aptly-named The Narrow blog, describes himself as "...nobody who wants to tell everybody that there is somebody who can save anybody." In other words he is a know-nothing who keeps bothering everybody trying to push his idea that there is this non-existent being who can save anyone from whatever one wants to be saved from except from the nagging by bryanm. The other day, he wrote this post densely packed with nonsense. No need to look around the blog - it contains mostly stuff debunked here and here.


Finally, let's look at circadian rhythms and the age of the earth.

Investigation of nearly all of the earth's living organisms including microorganisms, plants, animals and humans reveal the existence of circadian rhythms or biological clocks.




Looking at a complex circadian system, e.g., that of mammal, reveals not just great complexity, but also great redundancy: multiple copies of the same clock genes, one copy of which can always be "knocked-out" with no apparent effect on the workings of the clock. If you knock out all redundant copies out of a mammalian clock you will still have a functional, albeit much simpler, circadian clock that is VERY similar to that of a fruitfly.




The blades of knives, spears and swords had to be made very sharp, because our skins are resistant to hits by blunt objects. My body temperature is alaway around 37 degrees Celsius, no matter what the temperature is outside. My blood levels of Calcium are practically constant and taking TUMS does not change that. My blood pH is fantastically resistant to change, although I drink liters of highly-acidic Coke every day. Some people's brains are highly resistant to change by presentation of facts that challenge one's prior beliefs. Yet, all those systems have evolved. How does resistance to changes in the environment have anything to do with their evolvability? If brianm took a pill of Lithium, his endogenous freerunning circadian rhythm would dramatically change. Yet, that is not important - what is important is that brainm's circaidan rhythm, with or without Lithium, is highly malleable to environmental change: its "natural" period of about 25 hours is "forced" by a light-dark cycle to assume a 24-hour period EVERY DAY. Entrainment is the most obvious example of malleability of the circadian rhythms.

Also, brianm is confusing resistance at the time scale of an organism's lifespan and resistance at the time scale of evolutionary change. Even if endogenous rhythms were highly rigid within an individual, that has nothing to say about the ability of natural selection to alter its properties over many generations over a large period of time.


which eliminates external factors, be it "Factor X" or Aliens or Designer-God. We know the genes and we have tracked how they evolved. Something being "genetic" makes it easier to explain by population genetics than traits not directly attributable to individual genes (e.g., emergent properties of a complex system).

I have written about it before:
The second view assumes that the environment itself forces rhythmicity onto the early unicellular organisms (Goodwin 1966). To economize waste, the cell evolves modifier genes. Each of these gene products will have a role in facilitating a smooth transition from one to the next phase of the imposed cycle. As more and more such genes evolve, every state of the cycle comes under genetic control. Three billion years later "the cell might surprise itself to discover...when some scientist first puts it into constant conditions, that it shuffles its way spontaneously through almost the same cycle" (Winfree 1990, p.390). So, even though all the cogs and wheels were, the whole clock itself was never selected for.


How did Jesus Christ manage to create a world which he was to be born into a couple of thousand years later? I can see the argument that his Daddy did it, but Jeebus himself? Makes no sense. I like the use of the word "programmed" - I can just imagine the Big Hacker In The Sky playing with code on his huge computer that never freezes and gets no viruses ever. Is all of Creation just God's blog?

What brianm got hooked on was the term "biological clock". This is the favourite Creationist example ever since Paley wrote about the Watchmaker. What a coincidence: if there is no watch without a watchmaker, there cannot be a circadian clock without a circadian clockmaker. Hey! Just because we use metaphors and call a cell-component a machine that does not mean it actually IS a machine. It's a metaphor!




Blogger Chris said...

Great post, Bora. This is really fascinating stuff. Sometimes I feel like I should learn more about the biological aspects of time-representation in humans, since I am doing research on the conceptual representation of time in humans, but then I remember that I'm not at all qualified to evaluate biology reserach, and that while the theory of time representation that I am competing against does treat time representations as embodied, I'm not sure how even they would integrate this sort of stuff. Still, I find it incredibly fascinating.

7:18 PM  
Blogger jamie said...

Excellent response, coturnix, and from a field that, from what I've seen, isn't often at the forefront of the IDC "debate" though it sounds like it should be. I need to remind myself to read this blog, I do keep up w/ you other one. Especially since my circadian clock is broken, apparently, from full time work and school. . .

1:58 AM  
Blogger Suresh said...

Is all of Creation just God's blog?

cool line. I will use it in my .signature (with attribution of course ;))

6:11 PM  
Blogger Henry Holland said...

I too love the "God's blog" line. He is all too redolent of right wingers, though, in that he doesn't have a comments section. I have a few choice remarks I'd like to leave for Him.

Great stuff, btw, thank you for writing it at a non-specialist level so that peasants like me can grasp it.

5:11 PM  
Blogger Canis Ex Machina said...

It can also be noted that the sadly popular creationist Ken Ham's blog does not have comments. A pity - yea verily, he speaketh much bullshit.
Nice blog! Very interesting both as a foil to creationist spiel and also from the point of view of scientific interest.

9:11 AM  
Blogger Apesnake said...


I wish someone had asked him how the word obvious was meant here.

1)It was obvious that the creator did the programing as opposed to the creator's lab assistant or his IT support workers.

2) It was obvious that the programing occurred initially as opposed to after the creation of bacteria which lack the clock.

3) It was obvious that the creator is Jesus Christ as opposed to Vishnu, Saint Barnabas or Mr Magoo.

None of these things seem obvious even if you accept the unsupported assumption of intelligent origin for the clock.

The only thing that is obvious is that they do not teach logic in schools.

12:04 PM  

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