The Source Field Investigations (31 page)

If we want to understand this new concept of evolution even further, we must be aware that some species can rearrange their own DNA without the use of any outside electrostatic fields—such as we saw in the Ciba-Geigy experiments. As of April 2009, a Rockefeller University study revealed that a parasite known as
Trypanosoma brucei
, which creates African sleeping sickness, is able to spontaneously rearrange its own DNA so it cannot be defeated by the body’s immune system. Amazingly, the parasite is able to dice up and rearrange both strands of its DNA, changing its outer coat so it can continue to avoid being detected. Though the scientists involved in this study suspected the parasite was doing this as early as 2007, they didn’t find the proof until 2009. According to their press release, adapted for
Science Daily
, this “suggested a common mechanism by which parasites and humans rearrange their DNA. “It was unbelievable,” Dr. Oliver Dreesen says. “One experiment after another and it just worked.”
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These scientists were apparently unaware of a similar effect that was discovered by Dr. Robert Pruitt, a geneticist with Purdue University, in 2005. Pruitt and his associates were studying a mustardlike plant called
Arabidopsis
, which is commonly used in laboratory experiments. Specifically, they were exploring a mutation in one of the genes that made the flowers clump together in an odd, misshapen way. What they found was that even when the plants inherited this mutation from both of their parents, over a three-year period of study, fully 10 percent of them reverted back to normal. They rewrote their own DNA, and fixed the mutation. The startled scientists examined the plants’ DNA and confirmed that it had been transformed back into its original, healthy form.
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This is a spontaneous DNA rewrite to fix a mutation—and it deals another critical blow to the Darwinian model. If DNA has an underlying wave component that can correct mutations, Darwin may have just lost his job. According to Dr. Elliott Meyerowitz, a plant geneticist from the California Institute of Technology, Pruitt’s finding “looks like a marvelous discovery.”
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I also like this study because it proves that no giant industrial company can ever create true “terminator seeds” that will always destroy themselves after a single generation. Nature always finds a way to repair the damage.

Another example of “marvelous” genetic repairs comes from Francis Hitching’s 1982 book
The Neck of the Giraffe—Where Darwin Went Wrong.
Hitching reported on his experiments with the fruit fly, technically known as
Drosophila,
which is one of the most common living organisms studied in biology experiments. Even though various scientists have used radiation to try to dramatically speed up the rate of mutation, “Fruit flies refuse to become anything but fruit flies under any circumstances yet devised.”
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Even more interestingly, when Hitching took away all the genetic codes from both sets of parents that would build eyes for the fruit fly, they nonetheless regrew their eyes—in roughly five generations. According to Hitching, “Somehow the genetic code had a built-in repair mechanism that reestablished the missing genes.”
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Of course, that makes us ask a much deeper question: What is the “genetic code”?

More and more, we are seeing evidence of a guiding intelligence that can somehow modify the genetic code in ways that will benefit the organism. Are there other examples where organisms rewrite their own DNA to adapt to changes in their environment? Dr. John Cairns was one of the first to discover this sort of an effect in 1988. Cairns studied a type of bacteria that cannot digest lactose, and then put them in an environment where that’s all there was. Of course, the vast majority of the bacteria starved and went into a suspended-animation state. However, after a day or two, several of his bacterial cells spontaneously evolved—rewriting their own DNA to digest lactose. And this was not a random event—if there wasn’t any lactose in the area, the “adaptive mutation” did not happen.
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Dr. Barry Hall continued this work with a study he published in 1990—and he found that if he deprived bacteria of certain key nutrients, such as the amino acids tryptophan and cysteine, some of their offspring ended up being able to synthesize these nutrients within their own bodies.
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Whatever the bacteria needed to survive was provided for them—by the hidden laws of Nature. Hall also suspects that this same effect explains how dangerous bacteria are able to adapt to new antibiotics so quickly.
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In 2008, another study proved that organisms can quickly rearrange their own DNA to help them adapt to the challenges of their environment. Back in 1971, biologists moved five breeding pairs of Italian wall lizards from their barren island home in the South Adriatic Sea, where they survived on insects, to a neighboring island that was lush and tropical. Up until this point, these species had never existed on the neighboring island. When the biologists returned to the tropical island beginning in 2004, they were shocked to find that the descendants of these original parents had experienced substantial evolution in a short time.

As revealed in a
Daily Galaxy
article, “Striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard’s digestive tracts were noted after only 36 years, which is an extremely short time scale,” remarks Duncan Irschick, a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.”
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Each of these changes was tailor-made to help the lizards eat plants. Thanks to a very rapid DNA rewrite, their digestive systems developed cecal valves—which were never before seen in this species. These organs create fermentation that breaks down plant material. Less than one percent of all lizard species in the world have this unique feature. Their heads became longer, wider and taller, which gave them a substantial increase in bite strength—so they could more easily chew through plant fibers. Interestingly, they also stopped defending their own territory, now that they were eating by browsing rather than hunting. According to Dr. Irschick, “Our data shows that evolution of novel structures [within an organism] can occur on extremely short time scales.”
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Another classic study was performed by Rosemary and Peter Grant, who spent twenty years on an island in the Galapagos, studying and identifying every single individual bird there—beginning with four hundred when they first arrived, and surging to over a thousand during their stay. Throughout these twenty years, they continuously observed about twenty generations of finches. To their amazement, individual species made genetic changes in remarkably short periods of time. The majority of these improvements involved a change in the size and shape of their beaks. As one example, when the island went through a period of extended drought, seeds became tinier and harder to reach—so the birds evolved longer and sharper beaks to be able to eat them. The Grants also found that the birds had actually rewritten their own DNA to produce these changes. According to Jonathan Weiner, author of
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time,
“Darwin . . . vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.”
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In 2009, ornithologists announced another discovery of rapid evolution in forest birds. Soon after the forests were cut down, the birds’ wingtips became pointier—but if the forests expanded, their wing tips became more round.
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In 2009,
National Geographic
reported that a never-before-seen “monster fish” had been found in the Congo River, which moves through several countries in Africa. Dr. Melanie Stiassny, a fish biologist at the American Museum of Natural History, said, “What we’re seeing here is kind of evolution on steroids.”
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When we go out into the oceans, we find that the “immortal jellyfish” can completely rewrite its own DNA in the presence of starvation, physical damage or other types of crisis. According to Maria Pia Miglietta, a Pennsylvania State University researcher, “instead of sure death, [the immortal jellyfish] transforms all of its existing cells into a younger state.” The jellyfish convert their own tissues and genetic material back to their earliest stage of growth, and “the jellyfish’s cells are often completely transformed in the process. Muscle cells can become nerve cells or even sperm or eggs.” Another interesting fact was that every jellyfish of this species they found, worldwide, was genetically identical—even though the tropical jellyfish had only eight tentacles, whereas those in cooler waters could have as many as twenty-four. Drifting ocean currents could not explain how this species ended up appearing identically in so many different places around the world. Dr. Miglietta speculated that the jellyfish must be hitching rides on long-distance cargo ships.
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In 1997, another seemingly impossible genetic mystery was discovered in the oceans. In this case, Dr. Lingbao Chen and his associates found that fishes in the Antarctic and several species of northern cods had evolved nearly identical antifreeze proteins, even though there is abundant evidence from paleontology, paleoclimate research and the species’ own physical appearance that they must have evolved separately. The conclusion was that these proteins had to have appeared through what they called convergent evolution, where this seemingly random process of Darwinian mutation is now doing the same exact thing—in two totally isolated environments.
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I was particularly amazed by a
National Geographic
news story that appeared on February 15, 2009. The International Census of Marine Life is making a focused effort to identify and assess all species in the ocean—past, present and potential future. In the process of assembling this vast body of data, the scientists found something astonishing—at least 235 different identical species have been discovered at the North and South Poles, and they do not exist anywhere else on earth. This includes swimming snails, whales, worms and crustaceans. There is simply no way that all these species could have been transported from one pole to the other—there are no shipping routes that go that way, and they could not survive a trip through warmer water. The scientists admitted that they were startled by this mystery.
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In 2002, Richard Pasichnyk released both volumes of
The Vital Vastness—
and I was particularly struck by his discussion of the so-called Lazarus Effect, which shows how species can spontaneously reappear after millions of years of extinction.

A recently dead rodent with a long, fluffy tail called
Laonastes
was found for sale in a meat market in Laos. The only problem was that this creature had been extinct for 11 million years. This was reported in
Science
journal in 2006.
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Mary Dawson of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History was quite surprised.

Another example concerns a strange-looking elephant called a gompothere. Its trunk and tusks point straight forward, and it also has two teeth that stick out from its lower jaw. They were believed to have gone extinct some 1.788 million years ago, but recently their fossils were found among ruins from early settlers of North America, known as the Clovis people. This was again referred to as the Lazarus Effect in action, and the Houston Museum of Natural Science Web site said, “This find has major implications.”
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I also found an MSNBC article discussing French scientists who found a crustacean from the Glyphea group (genus Neoglyphea) some four hundred meters down in the Coral Sea, northwest of New Caledonia. Philippe Bouchet, a marine biologist, described it as “halfway between a shrimp and a mud lobster.” The problem, again, is that according to the fossil record, this species has been extinct for 60 million years.
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And in 2005, a UPI press release reported the discovery of a Wollemi pine tree within a small grove of trees in Australia. This tree can grow up to 120 feet high and has a three-foot-wide trunk. The problem is that this tree went extinct 200 million years ago—in the Jurassic period.
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Security is so high that even the scientists who are working on the site are blindfolded before they are flown in. Specimens have been taken from this secret location and are being sold by auction to insure the survival of the species. As we see in the other cases, there are no examples of this tree anywhere in the fossil record from 200 million years ago until the present. According to UPI, “Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens told the newspaper the discovery is ‘the equivalent of finding a small dinosaur still alive.’ ”
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The Lazarus Effect may be caused by existing species rearranging into earlier versions on the DNA level, perhaps in the presence of unusual energetic stimulation—similar to what we saw in the Ciba-Geigy patent. Korean scientist Dr. Dzang Kangeng published a remarkable discovery in 1993 that demonstrates how this could happen. In this case, Kangeng found he could transfer the genetic code from one species into another through nothing more than an energy wave.
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Kangeng placed a duck inside a five-sided, pentagon-shaped container, and covered it with a domed mirror roof. Each of the five sides of the container had a hole with a funnel mounted in it—and then each funnel had a pipe that fed into a neighboring room, where there was a pregnant mother hen. For five days, the duck was zapped with a high-frequency electrostatic generator. Amazingly, when the hen laid her eggs, what hatched out of them were not baby chicks—they were half-duck, half-chicken hybrids. Though they came from a chicken’s body, they had the typical features of a duck—a flat beak, a longer neck and larger internal organs—such as the heart, liver, stomach and bowels. After one year, the hybrid birds weighed 70 percent more than a normal chicken.
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