Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 103

Did giant mountain ranges provide nutrients in early Earth’s history?

Well, first, about the giant mountain ranges:

Australian researchers have found evidence that supermountains – as tall as the Himalayas and as wide as supercontinents – formed at two critical moments in the evolution of life.

“There’s nothing like these two supermountains today,” says Ziyi Zhu, a PhD candidate at the Australian National University (ANU). “It’s not just their height – if you can imagine the 2,400 km long Himalayas repeated three or four times you get an idea of the scale.”

Lauren Fuge, “Did ancient supermountains turbocharge the evolution of life?” at Cosmos Magazine (February 6, 2022)

The Nuna Supermountain from between 2 billion to 1.8 billion years ago appeared at the same time as the life forms thought to be the ancestors of animals and plants did (eukaryotes).

Curiously, the Transgondwanan Supermountain coincided with the advent of life forms of significant size during the Cambrian Explosion of life forms around 570 to 530 million years ago.

According to the new thesis, the erosion of mountains provided nutrients that were hitherto unavailable, that helped life forms get started. Sounds like a rollout, actually.

The paper requires a subscription.

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At Mind Matters News: Theoretical physicist: Quantum theory must be replaced

Sabine Hossenfelder, impatient with the results of recent experiments, seeks a better theory that is not observer-dependent:

She’s not happy with the outcome of the experiments, offering “If you claim that a single photon is an observer who make a measurement, that’s not just a fanciful interpretation, that’s nonsense.” She thinks that a new theory of quantum mechanics is needed:

So to summarize, no one has proved that reality doesn’t exist and no experiment has confirmed this. What these headlines tell you instead is that physicists slowly come to see that quantum mechanics is internally inconsistent and must be replaced with a better theory, one that describes what physically happens in a measurement. And when they find that theory, that will be the breakthrough of the century.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Has quantum mechanics proved that reality does not exist?” at BackRe(Action) (February 19, 2022)

Now, the interesting thing is that Hossenfelder is comfortable with how strange classical particle physics can be. Take neutrinos, for example:

The neutrinos’ overall behavior, she tells us, is inconsistent with the Standard Model of physics. But that’s a “crazy” situation she finds easier to accept.

One conclusion:

We might conclude that the universe is a stranger place than we have sometimes been led to suspect and that the amount and type of strangeness each of us can tolerate depends, to some extent, on prior commitments. But it is what it is anyway.

News, “Theoretical physicist: Quantum theory must be replaced” at Mind Matters News (February 21, 2022)

Takehome: Sabine Hossenfelder can live with the neutrinos that are inconsistent with the Standard Model of physics but quantum uncertainties are beyond the pale.

You may also wish to read:

Study: Science fiction not as strange as quantum physics fact. At least, that’s what we can assume from a failed effort to disprove physicist Eugene Wigner’s thought experiment. The research (and the QBism that resulted) eliminates the possibility that the mind is just an illusion. Apart from observers’ minds, there is no knowledge.

and

Some elements of our universe do not make scientific sense. Well-attested observations of neutrinos are not compatible with the Standard Model of our universe that most physicists accept. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder walks us through the reasons that neutrinos, nearly massless particles with no charge, confound expectations.

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Forrest Mims has a new paper in the works at Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Forrest Mims III

Readers may well recall Forrest M. Mims III, one of whose principal interests has always been meteorology and environment, though he received notoriety when he was dumped as a columnist by Scientific American because he was not a Darwinist. His current paper can be read online here:

Abstract: A 30-yr time series (4 February 1990–4 February 2020) of aerosol optical depth (AOD) of the atmosphere, total precipitable water (TPW), and total column ozone has been conducted in central Texas using simple, highly stable instruments. All three parameters in this ongoing measurement series exhibited robust annual cycles. They also responded to many atmospheric events, including the historic volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo (1991), a record El Niño (1998), an unprecedented biomass smoke event (1998), and La Niña that caused the driest drought in recorded Texas history (2011). Reduced air pollution caused mean AOD to decline from 0.175 to 0.14. The AOD trend measured for 30 years by a light-emitting diode (LED) sun photometer, the first of its kind, parallels the trend from 20 years of measurements by a modified Microtops II. While TPW responded to El Niño–Southern Oscillation conditions, TPW exhibited no trend over the 30 years. The TPW data compare favorably with 4.5 years of simultaneous measurements by a nearby NOAA GPS (r2 = 0.78). The 30 years of ozone measurements compare favorably with those from a series of NASA ozone satellites (r2 = 0.78). In 2016, 194 comparisons of Microtops II and world standard ozone instrument Dobson 83 at the Mauna Loa Observatory agreed within 1.9% (r2 = 0.81). The paper concludes by observing that students and citizen scientists can collect scientifically useful atmospheric data with simple sun photometers that use one or more LEDs as spectrally selective photodiodes.

Forrest M.Mims III, A 30-Year Climatology (1990–2020) of Aerosol Optical Depth and Total Column Water Vapor and Ozone over Texas, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-21-0010.1

Note: Here is some more of his work. He was named one of 50 best brains in science by Discover Magazine in 2008, despite the torrent of bigotry over his non-Darwinian approach to nature.

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Jonathan Wells on the fossil record as a problem, not a solution, for evolution theories

The Cambrian Explosion is, of course, the star example:

In 1991, a team of paleontologists concluded that the Cambrian explosion “was even more abrupt and extensive than previously envisioned.”

The abruptness seen in the Cambrian explosion can also be seen on smaller scales throughout the fossil record. Species tend to appear abruptly in the fossil record and then persist unchanged for some period of time (a phenomenon called stasis) before they disappear. In 1972, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould called this pattern punctuated equilibria. According to Gould, “every paleontologist always knew” that it is the dominant pattern in the fossil record.6 In other words, the “inconceivably great” numbers of transitional links postulated by Darwin are missing not just in the Cambrian explosion, but throughout the fossil record.

Jonathan Wells, “Top Scientific Problems with Evolution: Fossils” at Evolution News and Science Today (February 12, 2022)

Where the needed transitional fossils are missing that matters most is researchers’ willingness to be honest about what their absence means.

Here’s Jonathan Wells’s whole series on scientific problems with evolution theory.

You may also wish to read: Evolution problems: “Species” is such a mess of a concept And evolutionary biologists keep looking for examples in nature, with meagre results. One way of attempting to demonstrate speciation is to seize on inconsequential genetic changes and inflate their importance.

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At Mind Matters News: A physicist defends imperfection in our universe: It’s essential

We owe our existence to the fact that our universe is full of lopsided, not balanced, quantities:

Philosopher and physicist Marcelo Gleiser, author of A tear at the edge of creation (2013), sees lack of symmetry — lopsidedness — as essential to the nature of our universe:

Gleiser reminds us that the great French physicist Paul Dirac an ardent devotee of symmetry, used it to predict the existence of antimatter, “the fact that every particle of matter (like electrons and quarks) has a companion anti-particle.”

The problem is, an expectation that the universe will be symmetrical and thus Platonically perfect, is very often disappointed:

The laws that dictate the behavior of the fundamental particles of Nature predict that matter and anti-matter should be equally abundant, that is, that they should appear in a 1:1 ratio. For each electron, one positron. However, if this perfect symmetry prevailed, fractions of a second after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have annihilated into radiation (mostly photons). But that’s not what happened. About one in a billion (roughly) particles of matter survived as an excess. And that’s good, because everything that we see in the Universe — the galaxies and their stars, the planets and their moons, life on Earth, every kind of matter clump, living and nonliving — came from this tiny excess, this fundamental asymmetry between matter and antimatter.

Marcelo Gleiser, “Symmetry is beautiful, but asymmetry is why the Universe and life exist” at Big Think (February 9, 2022)

It’s a fundamental question, he says, what created this asymmetry we experience — but we owe our existence to it.

News, “A physicist defends imperfection in our universe: It’s essential” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Great physicist Paul Dirac discovered antimatter by assuming symmetry (a quality of perfection). But in the details, the wheels came off.

You may also wish to read:

Physicist: Why extraterrestrials couldn’t look much like us. Except in films. They follow the same natural laws but conditions differ on each planet. Marcelo Gleiser explains, there is a “staggering diversity of worlds” out there and that diversity would shape life forms in many different ways

and

Physicist: Science, by nature, can’t have a theory of everything.
Such a theory is a sort of religious quest that has united philosophers, theologians, and scientists, But is it possible? As Marcelo Gleiser puts it, “The very process of discovery leads to more unknowns.” And they may be smaller or larger than our current knowns.

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Swamidass, Rana, and Ross debate origins

That’s right, Joshua Swamidass of Washington University and Peaceful Science, Fuz Rana of Reasons to Believe, and Marcus Ross of Liberty University debated “Origins: Science and Faith” at Rethink 315, at Grace Union Church in St. Louis, streamed live on Feb 18, 2022:

Essentially, theistic evolution vs. old Earth creationism, vs. young Earth creationism. A chance to find out from spokesmen, not Twitter, what people really think.

We’re hosting a very special events looking at the creation of the world and origins of humanity. Rethink 315 has arranged 3 wonderful apologist to discuss different points of views of how everything started!

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Richard Weikart: Scientific racism is more virulent than religious racism

Richard Weikart, author of Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism, offers meticulous research on that score:

So, if the vast majority of scientists reject racism, one might conclude that scientific racism is no longer a problem. However, this ignores the elephant in the room.

What elephant? Well, how about examining the white nationalist scene today to see what they actually believe? To be sure, white nationalism is a fringe movement, albeit a vocal fringe. Nonetheless, how do they justify their racist ideology? While researching my book, Darwinian Racism, I examined the websites and publications of many neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and alt-right individuals and organizations. What I discovered was that most white nationalists and white supremacists today embrace a social Darwinist version of scientific racism and vehemently oppose Christianity…

Many white nationalists claim that Darwinism directly supports their ideology, because they think that races have evolved to different levels. They are convinced that races are pitted in a merciless struggle for existence. Their penchant for white supremacy is their bid to win the Darwinian struggle for existence.

Those doing battle against the religious roots of racism do often uncover vestiges of racism and this can be helpful. However, sometimes they seem to be letting the most flagrant proponents of racism off the hook. Could it be that they are uncomfortable recognizing that most white nationalists today are thoroughly secular and are inspired by Darwinism and science, rather than religion?

Richard Weikart, “Anti-Racists Often Ignore This Non-Religious Source of Racism” at Townhall (February 19, 2022)

To ask such a question is to answer it, of course. No official science sources do not want to recognize that current racism is largely Darwinian in character because then they’d have to critically examine the fundamental tenets of Darwinism.

You may also wish to read: E. O. Wilson and racism: The smoking gun is found. Some have dismissed the findings but others say they fit a pattern. From Schulson’s story: “I don’t really care that Wilson had racist ideas, because I know pretty much all of the people that I dealt with, when I was coming up through the science system, had racist ideas,” said [evolutionary biologist Joseph] Graves, who in 1988 became the first Black American to receive a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. “Wilson was just one of many.” Oh.

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Palmer Study Course On Intelligent Design: Human Exceptionalism 6, Part 2

In this session, we explore the best known “Just-So” story of all, “Ape-to-Man”. Part 1 begins with the “Ape to Man” narrative, then reviews existing hominid fossils. We look at the circular reasoning Darwinists use to claim that the existence of ancient primate fossils proves humans are descended from apes. In Part 2, we consider the alleged genetic similarity between chimps and humans. Then we look at what makes humans unique in the created order.

Study Questions

Includes: “2. Because of the visible white surrounding the iris, the human eye is uniquely expressive. We never see the whites of animal eyes. Even though eyes aren’t preserved in fossils, all hominid illustrations include eyes with white that look human. What makes good stories and good illustrations a convincing substitute for proof?”

You may also wish to see:

Palmer Study Course On Intelligent Design: Human Exceptionalism, Part 1

From that course unit: Darwin claimed that bipedality would have been the first indication of apes evolving into humans. But after searching for evidence of increasing bipedality, the best scientists can do is claim that hominids were facultatively (optionally) bipedal. All apes today are facultatively bipedal. Is that a convincing argument that humans and apes are closely related? What other fossil evidence shows us the distinct difference between apes and humans?

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At Mind Matters News: Some elements of our universe do not make scientific sense

The usually commonsensical Sabine Hossenfelder admits that this one stumps physicists: Well-attested observations of neutrinos are not compatible with the Standard Model of our universe that most physicists accept. Much about neutrinos is weird and it does not appear to be an artifact of bungled experiments:

Neutrinos would need mass in order to mix but, Hossenfelder says, we don’t know how they get mass. Other elementary particles get mass from the Higgs boson, which couples a left-handed version of the particle with a right-handed one. But all neutrinos appear to be left-handed.

But that still isn’t the weirdest part. The weirdest part is what happened when physicists tried to run a lengthy experiment to fit all the data together for a coherent picture:

By 2005, researchers had got all the parameters correct except for one experiment which “did not make sense”: the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (1993–1998). Couldn’t it just be discounted? The trouble was, as Hossenfelder points out, “In particle physics, the discovery threshold is 5 sigma. The 3.8 sigma of the LSND anomaly wasn’t enough to get excited, but too much to just ignore.”

Well then the physicists tried again, starting in 2003 with a long running experiment with neutrinos at Fermilab called the MiniBooNE experiment (the Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment). It’s been running ever since because neutrinos interact only rarely.

Did all the new data erase the rogue findings?

Not at all. In 2018 MiniBooNE, which had accumulated more data, confirmed the findings from LSND. “Yes, you heard that right,” Hossenfelder reports. “They confirmed it with 4.7 σ, and the combined significance is 6 σ.” Not just 5 σ but 6.

News, “Some elements of our universe do not make scientific sense” at Mind Matters News (February 19, 2022)

Takehome: Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder walks us through the reasons that neutrinos, nearly massless particles with no charge, confound expectations.

You may also wish to read:

You may also wish to read: Philosopher: We can’t prove that we aren’t living in a simulation. David Chalmers looks at the issues, step by step, in an excerpt from his new book Reality+ and rules out proving that it is false. The question isn’t as simple as that, of course. We are not obliged to take something seriously because we cannot prove it isn’t true.

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Amazing horizontal gene transfer lets desert bacterium acquire photosynthesis

Gemmatimonas phototrophica is said to be unique among photosynthetic bacteria:

Sometime during the bacterium’s history, it stole a whole suite of photosynthesis-related genes from a more ancient proteobacterium – a completely different phylum of bacteria.

This shows off the power of bacteria’s horizontal gene-transfer skills (notorious for easily spreading antibiotic resistance), allowing an entirely different type of organism to obtain sunlight-eating powers.

This new-to-science, highly stable, sunlight-capturing complex of molecules has a central reaction center, an inner sunlight-capturing ring seen before in other bacteria, and a new type of outer ring…

“This structural and functional study has exciting implications because it shows that G. phototrophica has independently evolved its own compact, robust, and highly effective architecture for harvesting and trapping solar energy,” says University of Sheffield structural biologist Pu Qian. Tessa Koumoundouros, “A Mysterious Desert Bacterium Has Evolved Its Own, Unique Ability to Photosynthesize” at Science News Alert (February 20, 2022)

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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