Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Creation Moment 8/7/2018 - Mitochondria erodes Evolutionary Belief

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
Psalm 8:4
"Evolutionary Biology: A New Home for the Powerhouse? (Current Biology). In this Dispatch article, Ryan Gawryluk has some bad news to share. Contrary to a long-held belief, “mitochondria do not descend from within Alphaproteobacteria, as typically thought, but from a still undiscovered sister lineage.Once again, we see evidence that contradicts evolution, and yet evolution itself is never questions. This author comes close, though. The take-home quote from this paper is where Gawryluk says,
The study presented here is certain to spur significant discussion, controversy and further research; but perhaps above all it highlights the power of species discovery in questioning evolutionary dogma. Our understanding of microbial life is heavily biased towards easily cultured organisms, and species associated with human health and
disease. Yet, most microbes are refractory to laboratory culture, and exist in environments that are foreign to us. High throughput — and low input — sequencing technologies are dramatically enhancing our capacity to reconstruct high quality genomes from microbial communities and single cells. And in one stroke, Martijn et al. have expanded a relatively well-studied class of prokaryotic life, and challenged a widely held view on mitochondrial origins. This work will not represent the final word on the provenance of mitochondria, but it does emphasize that mitochondria may have been forged in the undiscovered prokaryotic majority, of which there is much left to explore.
Mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells, are the home of ATP synthase—the incredible rotary engines used by all life that creationists tout as an icon of intelligent design."
CEH