I have a friend from my early days as a Christian youth growing up in Hallock, Minnesota. I had looked to him as an extra-churchory adviser on matters related to prayer and integrating fun into the practice of everyday religion. I had lost touch with him after he graduated from high school.  Alden and I both shared a love of sixties rock music, and he assured me that a Christian needn’t trap his ears in the Christian music aural ghetto.  Mutually, our favorite secular band was The Guess Who, and I still remember late evenings singing the song “F-I-D-D-L-I-N-G” outside of a nearly-abandoned Baptist Church in Hallock.

It is a song that celebrates drinking and gambling.

Alden found me as the result of a blog post I wrote four years ago regarding the northern lights and their frequent appearances in northern Minnesota.  I mentioned his name because he had bragged to a pair of missionaries from the Baptist church to Hallock, and he said that “The northern lights practically live here.”  The funny part of the story was that in the two months that the missionaries spent in Hallock, the northern lights didn’t light.

Alden happened to be googling his name four years ago and found my post.

Over the years since then, Alden and I have traded friendly yet pointed barbs on each other’s blogs.  When I needed help desperately last fall, Alden was among those who generously answered the call.

Here’s the main point of our disagreement.  Alden is a strong Christian who thinks that modernism has had a disastrous effect on our culture and our individual abilities to determine the answers to important questions.  As an atheist, I am unable to see where religious belief and faith yield any sort of objective understanding of the nature of life and origins.  In his mind, I have succumbed to the prejudice of natural methodology, and in my mind, he is all too willing to accept the writings of anybody who displays a philosophical skepticism over the historical explanatory power of cosmology and evolution.

It may be that as the days stretched on without being able to blog at Tangled Up in Blue Guy, I was suffering withdrawal and was more likely to lash out at ludicrous and ill-informed attacks on the settled science of evolution.  It may be that he didn’t correct one of his peanut gallery commenter’s inane statements that “evolution is scientists’ subconscious way to deny the Living God that they hate” and that evolution wasn’t necessary for understanding biology in the seventies and that Skell is right that it is still unimportant.

I lost my cool and lashed out.

Steve, you just blew my irony meter.

How well do you then understand biology? Enough to get by?

What you both ignore is that the battle over evolution and religion was hashed out in the 19th century and evolution was unearthed and investigated by people who were creationists trying to prove the accuracy of the bible and the creation story. You should take the time to acquaint yourself with the full development of the theory before you start insulting the motives of people who have been unearthing nature’s secrets as some sort of justification for affirming their “hatred of the living god.”

It is just your sort of thinking and talking that drove me away from religion in the first place. If I have to suspend my disbelief in science so much so in order to practice religion, and if the things that religion teaches contradict what I can see with my own eyes, then religion loses out.

If Augustine wrote one thing that makes sense, then it is his statement that misstating the facts of the natural world in order to promote religion is a fool’s game.

Your continued denialism in the face of the evidence of evolution leads me to the conclusion that you will never be interested in anything that contradicts your “faith.” Instead you will continue to follow the lead of those who don’t understand that the process of science is a matter of investigation and not faith.

And Alden, I am still trying to figure out how a method of science that includes the supernatural is supposed to work in yielding objective information.

Finally, as to the accusation that scientists are only interested in protecting their money, power and authority; I would suggest that religion is lashing out on this issue because of its fear of losing hegemony.

I invite readers to to the full exchange over at Alden’s blog, because my intention is not to provide a rehash here at Quiche Moraine. In reference to Augustine, I had in mind this passage:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. (1 Timothy 1.7)

[Saint Augustine (A.D. 354–430) in his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim) provided excellent advice for all Christians who are faced with the task of interpreting Scripture in the light of scientific knowledge. This translation is by J. H. Taylor in Ancient Christian Writers, Newman Press, 1982, volume 41.]

Evolution is not what turned me against religion. I was able to reconcile evolution with my faith. Honestly, I didn’t give it a lot of thought, this contradiction between faith and evolution. I knew for dang sure that the literal belief in the 6,000-year-old creation was not to be taken seriously, but a form of “guided evolution” was something I could accept until I started thinking more deeply about the role death, disease and starvation play in the development of a diverse tangled bank.

No, this ancient Christian philosopher got at least one thing right if nothing else. It was an insistence that religion should have prima nocta over any understanding of nature that finally drove me away. If it came down to a dispute over whether or not tiktaalik was a transitional fossil (which I can plainly see to be the case) or a denial that evolution is a valid historical science that yields current insights into the modern study of biology based on the religious authorities’ insistence that I should deny evidence, I would have to discard religion.

The progenitors of intelligent design creationism have clearly not thought through the theological implications of teaching their stance. By inserting an insistence that there is more to evolution than can be learned through the scientific method, and then by deliberately misstating science in ways that can be easily fact-checked, they are setting up a situation through which students will learn to distrust religious authority. By drawing a direct relationship from the natural methodology used to study evolution to atheism they are paving a road towards atheism for kids who might not otherwise have even considered it.

For me, the value of inserting religion into science is that we can see we are inserting an extraneous variable into our statistics and our mathematical equations. The formula most beloved by people who are interested in science is the famous “e = mc².”  It is useful in understanding the relationship between energy, mass and the conversion thereof.  It has been tested and verified through the observation of matter and light in the labs and in astronomy’s galactic lenses.

My friend insists that through denying the role of faith in understanding, modern scientific practice has limited itself.  By eliminating the role of the supernatural in science, modernism is unnecessarily stultifying my thinking and the thinking of those of us who are no longer open to a supernatural creator/designer.

When I look at the equation “e + God = mc²,” I see the same result as the equation “e = mc²,” and I don’t see the value of the extraneous variable “God” in explaining the relationship between energy and matter.  With the insistence of inserting that variable, creationists of whatever stripe are making things worse for their cause when the thinkers of tomorrow consider the implications of their folly.  They should leave science for science and stop meddling.  As an atheist, I should be happy that they are weakening their argument better than I possibly could on my own.

For my friend’s sake, I am actually a bit saddened.

The Great Leap Forward for Energy Metabolism

Abiogenesis has been a sticking point for naturalists and creationists in the argument over the necessity for a creator. Biologists are often careful to point out that evolution and natural selection begin where abiogenesis sets the table, and I disagree on that. I have maintained that the process of abiogenesis was a matter of a continuum of change in chemistry over a period of millions of years way back about 4 billion years ago and that the whole process wavered back and forth over some threshold before natural selection, adaptation and flow among proto-life and life finally took hold.

It was all an evolutionary process, as various means of energy metabolism proved stronger and more successful than others, leading to a strategy that allowed self-sufficiency and the maintenance of individual self-contained cells that we would all agree are living. The definition of “life” is fuzzy, so much so that the argument belongs as much to philosophers of science as it does to biologists.

So when did life begin? We will never be able to pinpoint a fossil or genetic “first life,” but we can say a few things about what is common to all life here and now. Cells have membranes to contain all of their functioning parts, filter those molecules that should enter from those that should stay outside. Cells have DNA, which provides the framework for the proteins and organelles which make up the cells. Cells have RNA, which carries the message from the DNA through the cytoplasm to determine the characteristics of the organelles within the cytoplasm. This, of course, is a very general description.

Cells also contain mitochondria, and this is one of the puzzles of early evolution. Mitochondria are symbiotic, originally a form of self-sufficient bacteria, which when integrated with eukaryotic cells, gain and provide benefit to the host cell. Mitochondria have their own set of DNA, and this DNA provides the basis for some of its key structures, and the unique tools that the mitochondria use to convert sugar into the energy it shares with its host.

As a symbiotic feature, mitochondria have safe homes inside the cells, and they pay rent by using the Krebs Cycle to provide much more energy than the hosts would be able to produce without them. Mitochondria are perhaps the most successful example of how cells work in tandem to assure mutual survival. Mitochondrial DNA is also passed, in sexually reproducing life, through the female’s DNA line, which yields data on lineage. This is unique and helpful, but not the issue in this post. I only mention it here because this is the way that mitochondria have entered the vernacular. I am sure that my readers are aware of the “Mitochondrial Eve,” a woman who lived on the order of 200,000 years ago and is thought to be the ancestor of all humans now alive.

My question remains on the origin of the mitochondrial integration with eukaryotic cells. A recent commenter made the claim that evolution can’t explain how mitochondria came to be included in the cellular structure of eukaryotes, and I did some checking. Guess what I found with a quick search through PubMed? Don’t sweat it too much, cause I’ll just blurt it out. I found a paper from 2001 that explains the likely integration. I just wish creationists wouldn’t get so cocky, because it is so easy to burn down their strawmen.

The paper I found is The Origin and Early Evolution of Mitochondria. The chief authors are Michael W. Gray, Gertraud Burger and B. Franz Lang. ¹

Here is the abstract:

Complete sequences of numerous mitochondrial, many prokaryotic, and several nuclear genomes are now available. These data confirm that the mitochondrial genome originated from a eubacterial (specifically α-proteobacterial) ancestor but raise questions about the evolutionary antecedents of the mitochondrial proteome.

Recent debates about eukaryotic cell evolution have been closely connected to the issue of how mitochondria originated and have evolved [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. These debates have posed such questions as the following: Did the mitochondrion arise at the same time as, or subsequent to, the rest of the eukaryotic cell? Did it originate under initially anaerobic or aerobic conditions? What is the evolutionary relationship between mitochondria and hydrogenosomes (H₂-generating and ATP-producing organelles that are found in eukaryotes lacking mitochondria)? Is the amitochondrial condition in these organisms a secondary adaptation or is it evolutionarily primitive – or, in other words, did any organisms diverge from the main line of eukaryotic evolution before the advent of mitochondria? Whereas the issue of how the eukaryotic cell arose remains controversial [8,9], current genomic data do allow us to make a number of reasonably compelling inferences about how mitochondria themselves originated and have since evolved.

Now, I have a confession to make on this paper. Because I am not a trained biologist, I only understood portions of the study. I read through it and ran into many concepts with which I am not familiar. So why would I write about this?

I wanted to point out that an important pathway leading to the emergence of eukaryotes from their prokaryotic ancestors includes the integration of mitochondria, and in this study, the authors examined the relationships between the genomes of yeast and mitochondria to show how this integration likely occurred. Examination of genomic sequences has become nearly as important as the study of fossils into determining the early pathways of evolution, and it will likely assist biology in answering these questions to a degree that paleontology can’t match.

I don’t mean to say that examining genomes can replace paleontology. I mean that they are complementary tools of science.

Further, since we all as eukaryotic beings carry mitochondria in all of our cells (even sperm cells carry a tiny fragment of mitochondrial DNA), we have an answer to the creationist objection, “Were you there?”

We can answer, “Yes, we were there. Almost. We were there sometime shortly after abiogenesis.” Yes, it was likely some hundreds of millions of years after life passed the abiogenesis threshold once and for all, but in the geological timeframe, it was a very short time indeed.

Okay, so today is Charles Darwin’s birthday. The claim is that natural selection only earned its wings once the first cell arrived and began its differential reproductive success. This “natural selection” thing and the publication of On the Origin of Species are well worth celebrating, because although there had been sketches and inklings prior to Darwin’s formulation, there was no serious explanation for how evolution could work. Darwin broke the ice, so to speak, and encouraged biologists to explore natural means of species creation.

This is why we celebrate Darwin. His work was not the beginning of the idea of evolution, and more importantly his work was not the end nor the summit of evolutionary thought. We celebrate because he took the first steps of serious investigation into the pathways of evolution. He showed us the tools that we could use to explore our common heritage in a way that provides answers—and questions.

This geologist was the Newton of biology. Just as our understanding of physics has grown immensely since Newton, so to our understanding of biology has bloomed since Darwin. His was the seed that led to the flowering and the study of such tools as genomics. Funny that he wasn’t even aware of genetics, but there you have it. And so do we.

1. Genome Biol. 2001; 2(6): reviews1018.1–reviews1018.5. Published online 2001 June 5.

   PMCID: PMC138944

   Copyright © 2001 BioMed Central Ltd
   The origin and early evolution of mitochondria
   Michael W Gray,¹ Gertraud Burger,² and B Franz Lang²

   ¹Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4H7, Canada

   ²Département de biochimie, Université de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec H3C 3J7, Canada

   Correspondence: Michael W Gray. E-mail: M.W.Gray@dal.ca
   Corresponding author.

   Michael W Gray: M.W.Gray@dal.ca