Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Life and the Genetic Code.

Genetic information is stored as long, complex sequences of the four different bases in DNA: adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). Triplets of these bases are interpreted by the genetic machinery as instructions to add a certain amino acid to a protein.

Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Plus

Did life evolve more than once? Researchers are closing in on an answer

By way of an introduction to this article on abiogenesis, I'm going to try to dispel the common, but evidence-free claim from creationists that the genetic code is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent designer.

This is, of course, nothing but the usual argument from ignorant incredulity and a false dichotomy fallacy - I don't know enough, I can't be bothered to learn, and I can't imagine how something could have arisen naturally, so God did it - and of course it must be the locally popular god because there are only two possibilities; the current science or the local god. It's an argument that demonstrates better than most the scientific illiteracy, intellectual bankruptcy and cultural chauvinism of creationism.

First, I look at the genetic codes and how it could have evolved naturally, without a supernatural magician making chemistry and physics do things they couldn't do without it, or making the highly improbable happen - as though the notion of an undetectable entity existing outside space and time but able to influence things inside space and time makes any sense.

This comes in two forms: a conversation with an AI chat bot, and the book, Life Ascending by Nick Lane.

Firstly, a conversation with ChatGPT3:

Creationism in Crisis - Does Reality Really Exist? Science is Still Working On It.

Creationism in Crisis

Does Reality Really Exist? Science is Still Working On It.

Great Mysteries of Physics: does objective reality exist?

One of the more hilarious arguments against science that I have had levelled at me by a Creationist is that you can't prove reality exists, and yet the whole of science claims to be a description of reality and the scientific method is an examination of it based on materialist principles.

The conversation was ended abruptly with the traditional condescending insult when I pointed out that he was trying to persuade me that reality doesn't exist in order to justify his belief in a creator of it!

Whether or not reality exists as we see and experience it, or whether what we see is an optical illusion or an emergent product of the underlying structural chaos of spacetime is irrelevant to our everyday lives, or course. If you're shot to death by a gun, or hit and killed by a bus, you're just as dead, whether or not the gun or bus actually exists.

Creationism in Crisis - Stuff The Bible's Scientifically illiterate Authors Never Imagined

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff The Bible's Scientifically illiterate Authors Never Imagined

Figure 1: Illustration of gravitational lensing by a galaxy. Light from a more distant and reddish galaxy is bent by a more nearby and bluish galaxy, which acts like a natural cosmic telescope to magnify the more distant galaxy. In this instance, multiple images of the reddish galaxy are created, forming a reddish ring-like feature referred to as an Einstein ring around the bluish galaxy.

Image credit: ALMA, L Calcada, Y. Hezaveh et al.

Howe the authors of Genesis saw the Universe

HKU Astrophysicists Reveal the Nature of Dark Matter through the Study of Crinkles in Spacetime - All News - Media - HKU

Back in the bronze Age, in the days that Christopher Hitchens described as 'the fearful infancy of our species', before we had even invented the wheel and isolated tribes still thought Earth was flat, the best explanation they could think of for where everything came from was the result of some magic spells cast by an invisible magician who lived above the sky. Agency in all things and magic, were assumed to be behind everything, just as they are today by creationists.

So, imagine these ignorant hill farmers, who thought stars were hanging from a dome over a flat Earth, struggling to come to terms with concepts such as deep space where celestial bodies are millions of light years apart and most of it is composed of invisible matter?

Magic and agency in all things
(Bible moralisée, French, 13th century)

How on Earth were these simple, ignorant people going to guess at an accurate description of the cosmos and its origins?

They weren’t of course. The best they could do was to describe a world which ran on magic and give magical explanations for everything they didn't understand, confident that those who were going to read their guesses were equally ignorant.

Contrast that situation about 3000 years ago with today's astrophysicist trying to make sense of what can be observed.

Having abandoned magic and supernatural agency as an explanation for anything, about 200 years ago, modern scientists have to rely on what can be observed, either directly or indirectly, and one of their observations is that the Universe has far more mass in it than can be accounted for by observation of that which can be seen. In other words, the observable universe has a lot of stuff that can't be seen but which is giving it mass.

How then do we know about it? Because we now understand the relationship between mass and gravity, so we can observe dark matter indirectly by observing the effect its gravity has on things we can see, such as galaxies.

You wouldn't expect the simple-minded hill farmers who wrote Genesis to have any inkling that such substance even existed, let alone come up with an explanation of what this 'dark matter' is, other than the product of magic words, of course.

This is why there is no mention, not even the tiniest hint, of dark matter in the Bible, or even that the universe is as massive as it is. In the ignorant minds of the authors, 'stars' (whether galaxies or suns) were points of light stuck on the underside of the dome that kept the water above the sky out. Of course, you wouldn't expect scientifically illiterate and ignorant people to describe and explain the origins of dark matter, but you WOULD expect any creator god who filled the Universe with dark matter to be able to describe and explain it.

Creationism in Crisis - Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

A view of Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies from the James Webb Telescope.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope

New map of the universe’s cosmic growth supports Einstein’s theory of gravity

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), Chile

It has been said that, like the Qur'an, if the Bible were discovered for the first time today, we could date it accurately by the scientific ignorance in it.

There is no hint of knowledge about Germ Theory, electricity, atoms, photosynthesis, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, gravity, or dark matter and dark energy, anywhere in the Bible, unless you stretch the meanings of words beyond breaking point and add things that are not there.

It's as though the authors knew no more than the little that was already known at the time and didn't realise that much of what they thought they knew was fundamentally wrong. But you would expect a creator god who wanted us to believe it knew everything and most importantly, had a vital message for mankind, would have included something new and even something useful - like electricity or antibiotics, for example, but it couldn't even describe the scientific method, let alone a null hypothesis or the need for controls in an experiment.

So, it took until the early part of the 20th century for a scientist to discover that matter and energy are interchangeable because they are different aspects of the same thing, and so why planets orbit suns and Earth has enough gravity to stop us and the atmosphere floating off into space. Einstein’s discovery of Relativity is now a fundamental of cosmology and theoretical astrophysics.

Creation News - Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Creation News

Scientist Observe Creation in Progress. No Gods Involved

Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars | NASA

Artist's impression of a runaway supermassive black hole that was ejected from its host galaxy as a result of a tussle between it and two other black holes. As the black hole plows through intergalactic space it compresses tenuous gas in front of it. This precipitates the birth of hot blue stars. This illustration is based on Hubble Space Telescope observations of a 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of stars behind an escaping black hole.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a runway supermassive blackhole, with a mass about that of 20 million of our suns, which is moving through space and leaving a trail of newly created suns in a wake about 200,000-light-years long (twice the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy). The object is travelling so fast it covers the equivalent of the distance from Earth to the moon in 14 minutes.

Hubble image of black, deep-space field with white, yellow, and reddish galaxies. Image center: small, white-bordered, boxed area that contains one, long, thin, diagonal streak of whitish-blue stars. Two galaxies also reside within the box.

This Hubble Space Telescope archival photo captures a curious linear feature that is so unusual it was first dismissed as an imaging artifact from Hubble's cameras. But follow-up spectroscopic observations reveal it is a 200,000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars. A supermassive black hole lies at the tip of the bridge at lower left. The black hole was ejected from the galaxy at upper right. It compressed gas in its wake to leave a long trail of young blue stars. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in the universe. This unusual event happened when the universe was approximately half its current age.

NASA, ESA, Pieter van Dokkum (Yale); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Close up of the area inside the white sqyare above.

It is believed that, by compressing the thin interstellar gas ahead of it, this initiates a gravitational collapse to condense into suns. The time taken for this process puts the black hole far enough away to avoid swallowing the nascent suns, so leaving the trail of young sons behind it.

We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole. What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole.

Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known.

This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it. I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before.

Pieter van Dokkum
Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole.

Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. The original binary may have remained intact, or the new interloper black hole may have replaced one of the two that were in the original binary, and kicked out the previous companion.

When the single black hole took off in one direction, the binary black holes shot off in the opposite direction. There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core. The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by The American Astronomical Society. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

The research paper was published yesterday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Abstract

The interaction of a runaway supermassive black hole (SMBH) with the circumgalactic medium (CGM) can lead to the formation of a wake of shocked gas and young stars behind it. Here we report the serendipitous discovery of an extremely narrow linear feature in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys images that may be an example of such a wake. The feature extends 62 kpc from the nucleus of a compact star-forming galaxy at z = 0.964. Keck Low-resolution Imaging Spectrometer spectra show that the [O iii]/Hβ ratio varies from ∼1 to ∼10 along the feature, indicating a mixture of star formation and fast shocks. The feature terminates in a bright [O iii] knot with a luminosity of ≈1.9 × 1041 erg s⁻¹. The stellar continuum colors vary along the feature and are well fit by a simple model that has a monotonically increasing age with the distance from the tip. The line ratios, colors, and overall morphology are consistent with an ejected SMBH moving through the CGM at a high speed while triggering star formation. The best-fit time since ejection is ∼39 Myr, and the implied velocity is v BH ∼ 1600 km s⁻¹. The feature is not perfectly straight in the HST images, and we show that the amplitude of the observed spatial variations is consistent with the runaway SMBH interpretation. Opposite the primary wake is a fainter and shorter feature, marginally detected only in [O iii] and the rest-frame far-ultraviolet. This feature may be shocked gas behind a binary SMBH that was ejected at the same time as the SMBH that produced the primary wake.

van Dokkum, Pieter; Pasha, Imad; Buzzo, Maria Luisa; LaMassa, Stephanie; Shen, Zili; Keim, Michael A.; Abraham, Roberto; Conroy, Charlie; Danieli, Shany; Mitra, Kaustav; Nagai, Daisuke; Natarajan, Priyamvada; Romanowsky, Aaron J.; Tremblay, Grant; Urry, C. Megan; van den Bosch, Frank C.
A Candidate Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Identified by Shocks and Star Formation in its Wake
The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2023), 946(2). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/acba86.

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by The American Astronomical Society. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Compare that to the creationist notion that the formation of the universe is accurately described by a Bronze Age Hebrew origin myth that has a magic man made of nothing, spoke some magic words that cause the Universe to form out of nothing. More magic words then cause Earth's sun to form, several days after there was light, measured on a time basis based on the rotation period of a planet that didn't yet exist as it orbits a sun that hadn't been created, and which wasn't going to orbit it anyway as it would be fixed in space so it couldn’t move, while the sun orbits around it.

Creationists hold that this is the best available description of reality, far surpassing for accuracy and reliability anything that science can reveal. People who believe that also hold that their evidence-free superstition is a valid alternative to modern science and should be given equal status in any debate because Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers who thought Earth was flat and hadn't yet invented the wheel, knew more than we do.

Creationism in Crisis - The Fallacy of the Fine-Tuned Universe

Creationism in Crisis

The Fallacy of the Fine-Tuned Universe

Great Mysteries of Physics 2: is the universe fine-tuned for life?

It won't be long in any debate forum with Creationists, or even theists who are not Bible literalists but still like to think their magic invisible friend created the Universe with them in mind, that someone will claim the Universe is fine-tuned for life. The claim is that there are about 30 constants which all have to have just the values they have for intelligent life to exist.

There are of course many problems with this claim, most of which the person making it will be completely unaware, having only read what they want to believe and not anything that might contradict their 'faith'.

The main ones are:

• In effect, they are arguing that their putative creator god can only create life within very narrow parameters, and yet an omnipotent god who allegedly created the 'rules' should be capable of creating anything it wants to create in any given set of parameters. So, if the creator constrained by natural laws and incapable of working outside its limitations? If so, who or what set those limitations.
  
  The fine-tuned argument is actually an argument against the existence of an omnipotent creator god, not for one.
• Discussions about the existence of intelligent life can only be conducted in a Universe in which intelligent life exists, therefore, the fact that the debate is taking place means the Universe must be capable of giving rise to intelligent life. Trying to work out the probability of something happening that has already happened is statistical nonsense. The probability is 1 (certainty).
• Assuming those constants do have a range of possible values (and that's only an assumption with no evidence ever presented), in order to calculate the probability of it having the value it has in this Universe, we would need to examine a large sample of universes. That of course is impossible, so, for all we know, the probability of any constant having its current value may be certainty, i.e. it might not be capable of having any other value. That the probability of it having its current value being unlikely, is merely an assumption - a claim without evidence which can be dismissed without evidence.
• In this universe, the vast majority of it is highly hostile to life as we know it. Even in this planetary system, life can only exist on one planet, and intelligent (human) life can only exist on a fraction of the surface of this planet and within a few thousand feet of its surface without special equipment. So, far from being fine-tuned for life, almost all of it is fine-tuned to make life impossible.
• Earth is not particularly well designed for human life (which is what Creationists men by 'intelligent life'). It is tectonically active which means it is subject to frequent natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis; humans cannot survive for long and without equipment in the oceans or at the top of mountains, in deserts of at the poles. Earth is subject to occasional cosmic disasters such as meteorite strikes and it orbits a sun which will one day destroy it by turning into a red giant, hence intelligent life such as that on Earth will only exist for a fraction of the time the Universe will exist.
• There are very many more black holes in the Universe than there are humans, so it would be more logical to argue that the Universe is fine-tunes for making black holes.

Creationism in Crisis - Does Reality Really Exist? Science is Still Working On It.

Creationism in Crisis

Does Reality Really Exist? Science is Still Working On It.

Great Mysteries of Physics: does objective reality exist?

One of the more hilarious arguments against science that I have had levelled at me by a Creationist is that you can't prove reality exists, and yet the whole of science claims to be a description of reality and the scientific method is an examination of it based on materialist principles.

The conversation was ended abruptly with the traditional condescending insult when I pointed out that he was trying to persuade me that reality doesn't exist in order to justify his belief in a creator of it!

Whether or not reality exists as we see and experience it, or whether what we see is an optical illusion or an emergent product of the underlying structural chaos of spacetime is irrelevant to our everyday lives, or course. If you're shot to death by a gun, or hit and killed by a bus, you're just as dead, whether or not the gun or bus actually exists.

Creationism in Crisis - Order From Chaos, Fundamentally

Chaos Gives the Quantum World a Temperature | TU Wien

A central plank of Creationist pseudoscience, is the assertion, designed to appeal to those arrogant fools who believe their ignorant intuition is the best available measure of reality, is that you can't get order from chaos.

That this is just plain wrong can be seen by looking at clouds, where apparent form has emerged from increased order in the chaotic movement of molecules of water in water vapour. This is even more apparent in raindrops where the chaos of water droplets in clouds condenses into water droplets which fall under gravity to produce rain.

Another example of order from chaos results in an internal combustion engine working.

Wikipedia - Internal combustion engine.

The working of the internal combustion engine depends primarily on one of the gas laws, Boyle's Law, which states that the volume of a given mass of gas is inversely proportional to the pressure when the temperature remains constant. When the compressed mixture of fuel and air is ignited the result is a very rapid increase in the number of molecules in the gas, which results in a rapid increase in volume, so the pressure rises, driving the piston down.

So, what has this to do with chaos?

Individual molecules of gas don't have any pressure in themselves, all they have is thermodynamic energy making them move. The faster they move the more they will impart that energy to the walls of the container (in this case the cylinder) and to one another when they collide. The distribution of the velocity (energy) of the population of molecules can be described by a bell-curve. In any mass of gas, individual molecules will have more or less energy around a mean and their direction of movement will be random. In other words, it is a system in chaos, from which order emerges by the operation of a few fundamental laws. The downward stroke of the piston is an emergent property from the chaos in the system. It is so well ordered that it is entirely predictable, and can be altered by changing the amount of fuel and air mixture injected into the combustion chamber, and yet it was caused by nothing more than basic thermodynamic and the chaotic movement of gas molecules.

There are many other examples of order from chaos in nature, of course. The swirls and eddies of water flowing round an obstacle or through a bridge; the graded order of grains of sand and pebbles on a beach; the organic shapes formed by drifting snow, etc.

Oder from chaos - Intelligent Design – What A Lot Of Balls.

And now we have a research paper by quantum physicists from the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Vienna University of Technology that (UT) argues that elementary laws of thermodynamics, and thus the behaviour of matter as we know it, ONLY exists because the underlying structure from which they emerge is chaotic.

Admittedly, this is an area of science which is not easy to understand, especially for someone like me with no background in physics and quantum theory, so it is something for which most people like me, are ill equipped to judge intuitively. As I argued in my book, What Makes You So Special: From The Big Bang To You, Intuition is a very unreliable measure of reality and not the best available measure of it as Creationists like to imagine. Having the humility to ignore intuition and go with the science is what distinguishes a good scientist from a Creation pseudoscientist. So, this is the explanation for why chaos is responsible for the existence of fundamental laws, and so of chemistry, cosmology, biology and just about all science and technology, provided by UT Vienna:

Chaos Gives the Quantum World a Temperature

Two seemingly different areas of physics are related in subtle ways: Quantum theory and thermodynamics. How chaos theory mediates between them has now been studied at TU Wien.

A single particle has no temperature. It has a certain energy or a certain speed - but it is not possible to translate that into a temperature. Only when dealing with random velocity distributions of many particles, a well-defined temperature emerges. How can the laws of thermodynamics arise from the laws of quantum physics? This is a topic that has attracted growing attention in recent years. At TU Wien (Vienna), this question has now been pursued with computer simulations, which showed that chaos plays a crucial role: Only where chaos prevails do the well-known rules of thermodynamics follow from quantum physics.

Boltzmann: Everything is possible, but it may be improbable

Physically, it would be possible for all the energy in this space to be transferred to one single particle, which would then move at extremely high speeds while all the other particles stand still, But this is so unlikely that it will practically never be observed.

Prof. Iva Brezinova, co-author.
Institute for Theoretical Physics
Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

The air molecules randomly flying around in a room can assume an unimaginable number of different states: Different locations and different speeds are allowed for each individual particle. But not all of these states are equally likely. The probabilities of different allowed states can be calculated - according to a formula that the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann set up according to the rules of classical physics. And from this probability distribution, the temperature can then also be read off: it is only determined for a large number of particles.

In quantum physics, the entire system is described by a single large many-particle quantum state. How a random distribution and thus a temperature should arise from this remained a puzzle for a long time.

Prof. Joachim Burgdörfer, co-author Institute for Theoretical Physics
Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

The whole world as a single quantum state

However, this causes problems when dealing with quantum physics. When a large number of quantum particles are in play at the same time, the equations of quantum theory become so complicated that even the best supercomputers in the world have no chance of solving them.

In quantum physics, the individual particles cannot be considered independently of each other, as is the case with classical billiard balls. Every billiard ball has its own individual trajectory and its own individual location at every point in time. Quantum particles, on the other hand, have no individuality - they can only be described together, in a single large quantum wave function.

Chaos theory as a mediator

A team at TU Wien has now been able to show that chaos plays a key role. To do this, the team performed a computer simulation of a quantum system that consists of a large number of particles - many indistinguishable particles (the "heat bath") and one of a different kind of particle, the "sample particle" that acts as a thermometer. Each individual quantum wave function of the large system has a specific energy, but no well-defined temperature - just like a single classical particle. But if you now pick out the sample particle from the single quantum state and measure its velocity, you can surprisingly find a velocity distribution that corresponds to a temperature that fits the well-established laws of thermodynamics.

Whether or not it fits depends on chaos – that is what our calculations clearly showed. We can specifically change the interactions between the particles on the computer and thus create either a completely chaotic system, or one that shows no chaos at all - or anything in between.

Prof. Iva Brezinova.

And in doing so, one finds that the presence of chaos determines whether a quantum state of the sample particle displays a Boltzmann temperature distribution or not.

Without making any assumptions about random distributions or thermodynamic rules, thermodynamic behavior arises from quantum theory all by itself - if the combined system of sample particle and heat bath behaves quantum chaotically. And how well this behavior fits the well-known Boltzmann formulae is determined by the strength of the chaos.

Prof. Joachim Burgdörfer.

This is one of the first cases in which the interplay between three important theories has been rigorously demonstrated by many-particle computer simulations: quantum theory, thermodynamics and chaos theory.

The group's findings are published, open access, in the journal, Entropy:

Abstract

One key issue of the foundation of statistical mechanics is the emergence of equilibrium ensembles in isolated and closed quantum systems. Recently, it was predicted that in the thermodynamic (N → ∞) limit of large quantum many-body systems, canonical density matrices emerge for small subsystems from almost all pure states. This notion of canonical typicality is assumed to originate from the entanglement between subsystem and environment and the resulting intrinsic quantum complexity of the many-body state. For individual eigenstates, it has been shown that local observables show thermal properties provided the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis holds, which requires the system to be quantum-chaotic. In the present paper, we study the emergence of thermal states in the regime of a quantum analog of a mixed phase space. Specifically, we study the emergence of the canonical density matrix of an impurity upon reduction from isolated energy eigenstates of a large but finite quantum system the impurity is embedded in. Our system can be tuned by means of a single parameter from quantum integrability to quantum chaos and corresponds in between to a system with mixed quantum phase space. We show that the probability for finding a canonical density matrix when reducing the ensemble of energy eigenstates of the finite many-body system can be quantitatively controlled and tuned by the degree of quantum chaos present. For the transition from quantum integrability to quantum chaos, we find a continuous and universal (i.e., size-independent) relation between the fraction of canonical eigenstates and the degree of chaoticity as measured by the Brody parameter or the Shannon entropy.

Kourehpaz M, Donsa S, Lackner F, Burgdörfer J, Březinová I.
Canonical Density Matrices from Eigenstates of Mixed Systems.
Entropy. 2022; 24(12):1740. https://doi.org/10.3390/e24121740

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by MDPI (Basel, Switzerland). Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

The delicious irony is that the Laws of Thermodynamics are emergent laws from the underlying chaos of the quantum universe and thus utterly refute their mindless chant, "You can't get order from chaos!". The Second Law of Thermodynamics is what you often see squawked by Creationists like a parrot squawks words and phrases without the slightest understanding of the noises it makes, because their cult has told them they mean evolution can't happen, despite the fact that it does, and can be observed.

Creationism can only continue to exist if it can recruit enough intellectually dishonest and arrogant people into the cult who are ignorant of most of science and intend to stay that way, believing that ignorance is a short-cut to expertise.

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Order From Chaos in Space - Science Exlains it

An alien magastructure?
Surely there must be an intelligence behind such an ordered structure! Read on!

Left: false-colour JWST/MIRI Imager observations of WR 140 taken with the F770W, F1500W and F2100W filters that correspond to blue, green and red, respectively. Eight symmetric diffraction spikes are seen around the saturated core of WR 140 (at the origin) that exhibit bluer colours than the dust emission. Right: JWST/MIRI MRS spectral data cube images of WR 140 from Channel 2 at 8.01 μm taken at two different positions that cover the central binary and shell 1 (Offset 1, top) and shells 1 and 2 (Offset 2, bottom) shown in a square-root stretch. The central binary and bright dust emission features are labelled in the MRS data cube images.

Alien megastructures? Cosmic thumbprint? What's behind a James Webb telescope photo that had even astronomers stumped

One of the Creationist cult's articles of faith is the demonstrably false assertion that you can't get order from chaos, although how they imagine raindrops form, or even more subtly, how an internal combustion engine works without the operation of the gas laws which are emergent laws from the chaotic mass action of gas molecules, is anyone's guess.

A moment's thought should tell them that, with a directional force involved, there can be no such thing as true randomness in nature. One such force is of course gravity which turns a cloud of randomly distributed gas particles into an ordered sun and maybe a planetary system. Another example is the process of natural selection which gives a non-random progress towards assorted genes in a species from the random occurrence of genetic mutations.

And here is yet another example of structure emerging naturally from chaotic dust particles in an article from The Conversation by Professor Peter Tuthill, an Astrophysicist at the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia. The article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The force in this instance is the complex pattern of gravity generated by two stars in elliptical orbit around each other in a binary system and the intense solar winds each gives off which drives regular pulses of dust from their surfaces.

The original article can be read here:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Show How Large Molecules Self-Assemble - No Gods Required Again

Attraction between the dipoles of several macromolecules leads to their mesomorphic assemblies, in contrast with typical polyelectrolyte behavior.

Credit: Shibananda Das

Game-changing New Theory Upends What We Know About How Charged Macromolecules Self-assemble : UMass Amherst

The recent rum of bad news for Creationism just got worse, with the news that scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered how large molecules such as proteins and DNA can self-assemble with nothing more than the laws of chemistry and physics. As always when one of Creationism's favourite gaps is snapped shut by science, no gods were found and the 'mystery' required nothing more than the operation of the natural laws of chemistry and physics.

In the words of one of the researchers:

The significance of the discovery that dipoles drive the assembly of polymers is immense because it throws new light on one of the fundamental mysteries of life’s processes, [how biological materials know how to self-assemble into coherent, stable structures]. The theory changes the paradigm of how we think about these systems, and highlights the unacknowledged role that dipoles play in the self-assembly of biological materials.

Professor Murugappan Muthukumar, senior author
Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

What is a dipole? Dipole Definition in Chemistry and Physics

As the University of Massachusetts Amherst news release explains:

God of the Gaps News - Creationism's Little Skrinking God Just Got a Lot Smaller

Olivine basalt

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Scientists announce a breakthrough in determining life's origin on Earth—and maybe Mars

The basic problem with Creationism's favourite 'argument' - 'the God of the Gaps' - is not only that it is based on two fallacies - the argument from ignorant incredulity and the false dichotomy fallacies, but also that it tends to disappear every time the gap is subjected to scientific scrutiny.

That's exactly what has just happened with one of their favourite gaps - the origin of living organisms, which they always conflate with the theory of evolution of which it is not and never was a part. Evolution is what happened after ‘life’, or more precisely, self-replication, got started.

Essentially, living organisms can trace their origins back to a self-replicating molecule because once that had arisen, everything else follows naturally by Darwinian natural selection acting on small variations in the copies (the sieve of natural selection acting on each generation to filter out the best at producing copies of themselves and remove those least able to). Just such a molecule known to exist is a short length of RNA which has been shown to self-catalyse copies of itself in a mixture of nucleotides, by nothing more complex than the operation of the basic laws of chemistry.

But the question is, how did such a molecule first assemble?

Quantum Evolution - How A Quantum Fluctuation Can Cause Mutation

The Double Helix of DNA

Getty Images

Quantum mechanics could explain why DNA can spontaneously mutate | University of Surrey

Another of creationism’s central dogmas was unintentionally laid to rest by science yesterday, when three scientists from Surrey University's Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre, which includes the famous science broadcaster, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, published a paper which showed that DNA can spontaneously mutate due to nothing more than a random quantum fluctuation. Creationist dogma insists, with no evidence to support it and in spite of evidence to the contrary, that no new information can arise in the genome without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics [sic]. Don't ask! It's based on some half-baked notion that information is like energy and can't be created, or rather, in creation world, can only be created by magic.

But, as the Surrey University team say in their open access Communications Physics paper:

Due to the significance of the quantum tunnelling even at biological temperatures, we find that the canonical and tautomeric forms of G-C inter-convert over timescales far shorter than biological ones and hence thermal equilibrium is rapidly reached. Furthermore, we find a large tautomeric occupation probability of 1.73 × 10−4, suggesting that such proton transfer may well play a far more important role in DNA mutation than has hitherto been suggested.

The Surrey University news release explains what that means:

Abiogenesis News - Science Is Closing the Gap - Still no God(s) Found or Magic Needed

New Study Sheds Light on Origins of Life on Earth | Rutgers University

A team of researchers led by scientists from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, have brought us a little closer to understanding how the first self-replicating organisms arose on earth. And it didn't need magic supernatural deities to make it happen.

The Rutgers-led team have discovered the structures of proteins that may be responsible for the origins of life in the primordial soup of ancient Earth. They have published their findings, open access, in Science Advances
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Writing in Rutgers Today, John Cramer explains:

Malevolent Designer News - A Nasty Little Trick for Making Malignant Melanomas

Melanoma

VAI Study reveals source of DNA mutations in melanoma - VAI

Creationist mode:

Back in 2014 I wrote an article about malignant melanoma, inspired by a holiday on the Côte d'Azur, explaining why people with pale skin are at risk because of poor 'design' creating the need for a balance between getting melanoma and producing enough Vitamin D in the skin to avoid rickets due to Vitamin D deficiency. In Eurasia, where the sun is lower in the sky, meaning it has more atmosphere to travel through, and the weather is more cloudy, than in our ancestral homelands in Africa, pushed this balance towards pale skin and therefore an increased risk of melanomas.

Now, however, judging by the way creationists seem to admire the many examples of malevolence in their beloved, putative intelligent [sic] designer, there may be another reason - mendacity and delight in watching us suffer, if we buy into this childish explanation for a moment...

So, if you've been taken in by the Intelligent Design Hoax and believe that nothing of this sort ever happens without the positive intervention of a magic designer to make it happen, and that this magic designer is an omniscient god, then you must accept that the recent findings of a research group at the Van Andel Institute (VAI), Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, point to deliberation and not accident - which is excluded by the dogma of omniscience.

The Very First Structures in the Universe

The results of the simulation show the growth of tiny, extremely dense structures very soon after the inflation phase of the very early universe. Between the initial and final states in the simulation (top left and right respectively), the area shown has expanded to ten million times its initial volume, but is still many times smaller than the interior of a proton. The enlarged clump at the bottom left would have a mass of about 20kg.

Photo: Jens Niemeyer, University of Göttingen

The very first structures in the Universe - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Never having been especially interested in physics which, compared to biology, I found dry and uninteresting - probably wrongly - this subject is not something I can claim any great understanding of, but this simulation addresses the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, in the instance before the larger structures such as elementary particles came into existence.

It has been said that the initial density of the universe at this time was some trillion times that of water. Just how dense can be judged from the fact that, according to this computer simulation, some 10^-24 seconds after the BB, bodies smaller than a proton had a mass of about 20 Kg! These 'inflaton halos' were responsible for the rapid inflation of the nascent Universe.

The simulation was done by theoretical physicists at the Universities of Göttingen, Germany and Auckland, New Zealand. The press release from Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen gives the details:

Abiogenesis News - Creationism's Favourite God-Shaped Gap Just Got Smaller Again

“Protocells” containing bubble-like compartments formed spontaneously on a mineral-like and encapsulated fluorescent dye. This could have been what happened 3.8 billion years ago when cells first began to form.

Image: Karolina Spustova.

Evidence That Earth’s First Cells Could Have Made Specialized Compartments

No wonder Creationists often come across as paranoid. At times it must feel as though their favourite dogmas and god-shaped gaps are under siege by science and constantly in danger of being overthrown or closed altogether, like so many former gaps in which they sat their favourite god(s); all found to be empty when science shone a light in them.

One of their favourites, and often their only fall-back position, is that abiogenesis hasn't been explained by science, and that easily becomes a claim that it can't be explained without resort to magic by a magic man because living things contain special god-magic called 'life' that can't be identified or even explained.

Then along comes another paper, like this one from scientists at the University of Oslo, published by the Biophysics Society, that chips away a little more at this dogma, by showing not only how simple cells got started but by showing how 'life' is simply chemical and physical processes, all understandable as properties of matter, with no magic involved.

This paper is yet another in a long line of papers all reducing the size of creationism's god-shaped abiogenesis gap, and deals with how proto-cells became internally organised, in this case, with the formation of 'bubbles' or vacuoles that are a fundamental part of living cells today.

The Biophysical Society press release explains:

Evolution News - Evolution Before Abiogenesis

Fig. 1.
Templated ligation of random sequence DNA 12-mers. (A) Before cells evolved, the first ribozymes were thought to perform basic cell functions. In the exponentially vast sequence space, spontaneous emergence of a functional ribozyme is highly unlikely, therefore preselection mechanisms were likely necessary. (B) In our experiment, DNA strands hybridize at low temperatures to form three-dimensional complexes that can be ligated and preserved in the high temperature dissociation steps. The system self-selects for sequences with specific ligation site motifs as well as for strands that continue acting as templates. Hairpin sequences are therefore suppressed. (C) Concentration analysis shows progressively longer strands emerging after multiple temperature cycles. The inset (A-red, T-blue) shows that, although 12-mers (88,009 strands) have essentially random sequences (white), various sequence patterns emerge in longer strands (60-mers, 235,913 strands analyzed). (D) Samples subjected to different number (0 to 1,000) of temperature cycles between 75 °C and 33 °C. Concentration quantification is done on PAGE with SYBR poststained DNA.

© 2021 The authors

Did Darwinian evolution begin before life itself? | News - LMU München

News today that research physicists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany (LMU) may have solved one of the key questions relating to abiogenesis - how did order begin to emerge from the chaos of random organic chemicals? It appears that this was the result of Darwinian evolution of molecules!

In the words of the LMU New release:

Before life emerged on Earth, many physicochemical processes on our planet were highly chaotic. A plethora of small compounds, and polymers of varying lengths, made up of subunits (such as the bases found in DNA and RNA), were present in every conceivable combination. Before life-like chemical processes could emerge, the level of chaos in these systems had to be reduced. In a new study, LMU physicists led by Dieter Braun show that basic features of simple polymers, together with certain aspects of the prebiotic environment, can give rise to selection processes that reduce disorder.

In common with many researchers in this field, the LMU team placed abiogenesis in "narrow, water-filled chambers within porous volcanic rocks on the sea bottom", in other words in the porous rocks around deep ocean hydrothermal vents.

These studies showed that, in the presence of temperature differences and a convective phenomenon known as the Soret effect, RNA strands could locally be accumulated by several orders of magnitude in a length-dependent manner. “The problem is that the base sequences of the longer molecules that one obtains are totally chaotic“, says Braun. Evolved ribozymes (RNA-based enzymes) have a very specific base sequence that enable the molecules to fold into particular shapes, while the vast majority of oligomers formed on the Early Earth most probably had random sequences. “The total number of possible base sequences, known as the ‘sequence space’, is incredibly large,” says Patrick Kudella, first author of the new report. “This makes it practically impossible to assemble the complex structures characteristic of functional ribozymes or comparable molecules by a purely random process.” This led the LMU team to suspect that the extension of molecules to form larger ‘oligomers’ was subject to some sort of preselection mechanism.

Science Has Confirmed a Theory Explaining the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe

Optical image of the Abell 3391/95 system

© Reiprich et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics

Longest intergalactic gas filament discovered — Universität Bonn

I don't normally write about cosmology and astro-physics because they are not subjects in which I have any particular expertise but the findings of a team of researchers from Bonn, Germany, are interesting from a general science point of view in that they confirm our ideas about the early formation of the Universe are correct. It's also good to have a theory I described in What Makes You So Special? From the Big Bang To You confirmed by science.

In particular, the scientists confirm models which explain why the Universe is grainy, with stars, galaxies and super-clusters, and not smooth and amorphous as a simple understanding of mathematics that ignore quantum fluctuations seems to predict.

In this simplistic model, atoms should be evenly distributed so there would be no reason for gravity to pull it into clumps to form denser regions. However, small differences produced by quantum fluctuations should produce small areas of increased density where gravity was higher than the surrounding space, so nearby matter would tend to move towards these centres.

Computer simulations predict that this would leave the Universe looking somthing like a sponge with large 'empty' spaces connected by thin filaments of rarified gas forming a basic matrix, and this is exactly what the researchers have found.

Creationism's Abiogenesis God-Shaped Gap Just Got Smaller

From the mixture of all four nucleobases, A:T pairs emerged at about 100 degrees Celsius and G:C pairs formed at 200 degrees Celsius.

Credit: Ruđer Bošković Institute, Ivan Halasz

DESY News: Searching for the chemistry of life - Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY

It's been one of those awful weeks for Creationists again.

Not only did we have those lovely wasps embedded in 25-million-year-old amber, and then their beloved Covidiot In Chief, Donald Trump being laid low with the virus he had pronounced to be a hoax and a mild illness that would all be over by April, but now we have another shovel-full thrown into their favourite god-shaped hole, abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is the current fall-back of every creationist who runs out of arguments against evolution, and to which they cling like a fool to a deck-chair in the face of an on-rushing tsunami.

This time we have news that a team led by Ivan Halasz from the Ruđer Bošković Institute and Ernest Meštrović from the pharmaceutical company Xellia have shown just how easy it must have been to create DNA by perfectly natural processes in conditions which would have been found on the early Earth. Their findings were published a few days ago in the journal Chemical Communications, regrettably behind a paywall. However, the news release from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), A Research Centre of the Helmholtz Association, explains the problem and the team's findings:

Signals From the Dawn of Time!

The animation shows a computer simulation of an oscillon, a strong localized fluctuation of the inflaton field of the early universe. According to the calculations of Prof. Stefan Antusch and his team, oscillons produced a characteristic peak in the otherwise broad spectrum of gravitational waves.

© Department of Physics, University of Basel

Ancient signals from the early universe | University of Basel News.

The early universe sent out signals with information about its formation. All we need to do is look in the right place and in the right way to find these ancient signals. Scientists working at the University of Basel believe they have at last shown what we should be looking for.

The signals are tiny fluctuations in the gravity wave field. Although Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravity waves they were only detected at the end of 2015. Already science is moving on to make use of this new technological ability and so to look further back into the formation of the Universe.