Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 112

Jerry Coyne begins dimly to perceive something…

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is discovering that progressivism is antithetical to any concept of free expression:

Last September, a surprising article in the New York Times reported on how the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seemed to be losing its mission of defending civil liberties, moving more and more towards “progressive” politics. Part of this transformation involved suddenly prioritizing what speech to defend based on its perceived “harm.” More harmful speech (e.g., speech offending minorities or other oppressed groups) was to be given lower legal priority.

This was a complete reversal of the history of the ACLU, an organization that was one of my favorites. (They gave me pro bono legal help when I took the government to court over being illegally called up for alternative service as a conscientious objector.) Now, it seems, they think that some people deserve more civil rights than others. This was all documented in one of my posts and in an article on Tablet that quoted secret ACLU documents.

Jerry Coyne, “The ACLU reverses course once again in the interest of wokeness” at Why Evolution Is True (January 30, 2022)

It’s hard to figure out why Coyne thinks the ACLU’s move to crack down on freedom of speech is a surprise. All progressive organizations consider any claims for human dignity a tactical manoeuver until they are in a position to start dictating their agenda.

You may also wish to read: Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is getting mugged by reality Again, it would seem. All: Unplug the TV. Those people can no longer afford to be friends of truth in any meaningful sense. That includes anything to do with evolution controversies.

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At Mind Matters News: The deadly dream of Human+ Look at the price tag…

Some are prepared to sacrifice actual humans now for the hope of future immortality:

But will this dream of Human+ end in nightmare? If we accept neo-Darwinian biology as the unimpeachable starting point for defining human personhood, transhumanists like Warwick are committed to some form of the following argument:

Premise 1: Evolving biological systems are the natural explanation for human personhood

Premise 2: Evolving biological systems are indeterminate

Premise 3: All emergent properties (mind, consciousness, soul, etc.…) are contingent on the evolving biological system

Premise 4: Any emergent property that is contingent on an indeterminate biological system is itself indeterminate

Premise 5: Human personhood is a contingent property of the human body

Conclusion: Therefore, human personhood is indeterminate

In premises 1 through 5, human personhood is taken as a contingent property tied to the process of evolution. If these premises are sound, then the definition of “human person” can freely evolve with each new phase in the transhumanist program of self-enhancement.

The moral implications are significant. Without a fixed and final definition of human personhood, there is no foundation for a fixed and final ethic of “human” rights. After all, writes Michael Tennison, “arguments for the moral impermissibility of enhancement fail when morality itself is the capacity to be enhanced.”1 Tennison’s admission may be jarring, but transhumanists consider the evolution of morality as a strength — not a limitation — of their mission.

J. R. Miller, “The deadly dream of Human+ Look at the price tag…” at Mind Matters News (January 30, 2022)

Takehome: Without a fixed and final definition of human personhood, there is no foundation for a fixed and final ethic of “human” rights.

You may also wish to read: Is transhumanism really a form of liberation? The central transhumanist doctrine is that the body can be dispensed with. What are the consequences? Post Millennial editor Libby Emmons asks, what horrors will we inflict on others if we have forgotten what it means to inflict pain and to suffer?

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Everything is Coming Up “Non-Random”!

On January 12, 2022, Phys.Org had a PR on an article documenting “non-random” mutations found in wild tobacco plants, published by a team from UC Davis. Now, three weeks later (Feb 1, 2022), we have another paper, working with human populations in Africa, and which, according to a team from the University of Haifa, “surprisingly” turns up “non-random” mutations.

From the PR on the first paper:

The scientists found that the way DNA was wrapped around different types of proteins was a good predictor of whether a gene would mutate or not. “It means we can predict which genes are more likely to mutate than others and it gives us a good idea of what’s going on,” Weigel said.

The findings add a surprising twist to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection because it reveals that the plant has evolved to protect its genes from mutation to ensure survival.

And from the PR for the second paper:

“For over a century, the leading theory of evolution has been based on random mutations. The results show that the HbS mutation is not generated at random but instead originates preferentially in the gene and in the population where it is of adaptive significance,” said Prof. Livnat. Unlike other findings on mutation origination, this mutation-specific response to a specific environmental pressure cannot be explained by traditional theories. . . . . . . .
“Mutations may be generated nonrandomly in evolution after all, but not in the way previously conceived. We must study the internal information and how it affects mutation, as it opens the door to evolution being a far bigger process than previously conceived,” Livnat concluded.

What do you know!! There’s “information” in the genome. Lots of it!! What a surprise!!!

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John West explains why Discovery Institute will start speaking up about science totalitarianism around COVID

It’s a powerful piece so read it all. Here are some snippets:

COVID-19 has been used as the rationale for an extraordinary expansion of government power in the name of science: lengthy “lockdowns” of businesses and churches, vaccination mandates, government-imposed discrimination against people based on their medical choices, government-encouraged censorship of dissenting scientific views, and more. Perhaps you support some of these policies as necessary. Perhaps you don’t. But even if you support each and every one of the policies adopted, you ought to be concerned by how they have been imposed. Almost none of the policies were enacted by legislative bodies after an open public debate. Almost all of the policies were enacted unilaterally by executive branch officials asserting emergency powers or by unelected public health officials immune from public accountability.

COVID has shown government officials how to do an end-run around the normal system of checks and balances. They simply need to invoke “science” and declare an emergency — and then extend their emergency orders time and again. Anyone who dares challenge the emergency orders will be stigmatized as “anti-science,” or they will be told they aren’t scientists so they have no right to be heard. Regardless of your view of specific anti-COVID policies, policymaking during the pandemic has set a terrible precedent for the future…

Lost in current debates is the fact that much so-called “misinformation” targeted for suppression actually represents legitimate differences of opinion held by scientists and policy experts. Other pieces of so-called “misinformation” are in reality true facts that those in charge would rather not be forced to address.

For example, it is fact, not fiction, that the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has had more adverse reaction reports filed for the COVID-19 vaccines than for any other vaccine since VAERS started collecting data in 1990. Indeed, as of mid-January, 55 percent of all adverse reactions, 59 percent of all hospitalizations, and 71 percent of all deaths reported to VAERS are from the COVID-19 vaccines. What these data mean is subject to legitimate differences of opinion. But the fact that the data exist is unquestionable. Yet if you spend much time discussing VAERS in social media or on YouTube, you are likely to be banned. John West, “The Rise of Totalitarian Science, 2022 Edition” at Evolution News and Science Today (January 31, 2022)

And if you go along with all that, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

In Canada, the natives* are very restless indeed. Lockdown protests have been going on for days. Few reports of violence, just large numbers of people fed up with crackpot medical totalitarianism:

That’s from the national anthem: “O Canada, our home and native land”

You may also wish to read: Royal Society: Don’t censor misinformation; it makes things worse While others demand crackdowns on “fake news,” the Society reminds us that the history of science is one of error correction. It’s a fact that much COVID news later thought to need correction was in fact purveyed by official sources, not blogs or Facebook or Twitter accounts.

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At Mind Matters News: Can animal behavior simply be transferred into the genome?

A second part of the discussion between Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts (2021), and Casey Luskin on such questions as how do Monarch butterflies from Canada get to the same trees in Mexico as their great-grandparents landed in?

Casey Luskin: We already talked about this a little bit, the idea of path integration, where animals keep track of their compass heading and distance traveled so they can fly directly home — but not necessarily along the path that they took. And you say that they can do this without necessarily following landmarks. You talk about honeybees and their ability to navigate using the sun’s angle. So they can learn how to navigate using the sun’s angle at different times of day to find their way home, regardless of what time it is. Or they can use polarized light by studying different regions of the sky to determine the position of the sun. (21:23)

This requires doing trigonometry, spherical geometry, and other complex math. They [insects] have a brain with a million neurons and I have supposedly a hundred billion neurons in my brain. And I don’t think I can do those kinds of calculations in my brain. I find this all incredible.

There are cases that seem to require inherited know-how. How does a sea turtle “innately” know how to swim to its feeding area hundreds of miles through murky water and return to its exact nesting beach 35 years later? How do chicks of the Pacific golden plover find the Hawaiian Islands, mere specks in the trackless ocean, never having been there before? How do monarch butterflies in Canada get to the same trees in Mexico their great-grandparents wintered on? Some of these natural miracles cannot be dismissed easily with other labels like a “map sense” or other terms of art.

Evolution News, “Uncannily Organic: Navigation Is More than Genes” at Evolution News and Science Today (January 26, 2022)

Casey Luskin: So the fact that these kinds of features evolved really just makes me wonder, how could they arise by an unguided, stepwise Darwinian process. I’d love to see a stepwise evolutionary explanation for this, if it exists. And I’m wondering, are you aware of attempts to explain behaviors like this through a standard typical Darwinian model? (21:58)

Eric Cassell: The short answer is no. I have not come across any name in the literature about those kinds of behaviors and how they could have evolved. I think it’s such a daunting task to try to explain how something is sophisticated as an algorithm, particularly a mathematical type of algorithm, could have evolved in the first place. It has to be in the genome somehow. And then that information that’s in the genome has to be encoded in a neural network when the brain develops, and then it all has to be run, as the animal is performing the behavior. So there’s a lot of unanswered questions about how all that takes place. (22:42)

News, “Can animal behavior simply be transferred into the genome?” at Mind Matters News (January 31, 2022)

—

Takehome: Navigator Eric Cassell thinks that the hundreds of thousands of genetic changes that turn solitary insects into social ones cannot be random mutations.

Here’s the earlier portion of the episode, with transcript and notes.

Neuroscience mystery: How do tiny brains enable complex behavior? Eric Cassell notes that insects with brains of only a million neurons exhibit principles found only in the most advanced manmade navigation systems. How? Cassell argues in his recent book that an algorithm model is best suited to understanding the insect mind — and that of many animals.

You may also wish to read: A navigator asks animals: How do you find your way? The results are amazing. Many life forms do math they know nothing about. The question Eric Cassell: asks is, how, exactly, is so much information packed into simple brain with so few neurons?

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How Newton’s model of mechanical universe paved the way for uncritical acceptance of Darwinism

Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), comments on how the approach to the world taken by Isaac Newton made it easier to accept Darwinism as an account of the history of life, ignoring its limitations:

Once the Newtonian paradigm in cosmology had won acceptance, there then followed a predictable amount of follow-my-leaderism as it came to be thought that all scientific explanations should henceforth remain congruent with that paradigm. After all, did not Darwinian theory dovetail satisfyingly with those other naturalistic approaches to the universe which had been gathering momentum in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and which, cumulatively but sometimes insensibly, were edging Britain towards a post-Christian era? Newton having satisfactorily explained the starry heavens above, and Lyell having explained the inanimate, geological realm, the sights of scientific research were now refocused on organic life by use of the same methodological means. The direction of the scientific quest now turned to finding a solution to the riddles of the terrestrial world in wholly natural terms: how had its plant and animal life developed?

It was at just this time that Darwin made his grand entrance on to the public stage to give people the kind of answer they would have wanted at precisely the time they would have wanted to hear it. He could not have timed it better, for now Darwin came to be seen as marching in triumphantly to provide a crowning consummation of Newton and Lyell. So it was that by the mid to late 1860s, Darwin’s theory began its irresistible integration into that great, overarching metanarrative of the age which reduced all things to natural causes, his intervention in history commonly viewed as “a completion of the unfinished Cartesian revolution that demanded a mechanical model for all living processes.”2

Neil Thomas, “Darwin and the Newtonian Metanarrative” at Evolution News and Science Today (January 29, 2022)

The thing about such models is that they receive a great deal of social support and a person who diligently enquires into the evidence, exposing defects, is treated with — at best — suspicion. Not a healthy situation for honest inquiry.

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What Sabine Hossenfelder hopes the James Webb telescope will do

You will need to look at the vid to make sense of some of the text. Basically, infrared light enables astronomers to see through dust:

All of this is pretty cool, but I am personally most excited about the observations on young galaxies, at extremely high redshifts, early in the universe. The youngest galaxy that the Hubble telescope has seen has been estimated to date back to about 400 million years after the big bang. Webb should be able to see back to about 100 million years after the big bang.

That’s very interesting because the way that galaxies form tells us something about the matter in the universe, in particular about dark matter and its role in structure formation. In the currently most widely accepted theory for cosmology, the large galaxies we see today build very gradually by merging smaller galaxies.

This figure shows how astrophysicists think this works. All the symbols here are galaxies and the larger the symbol the larger the galaxy. Time increases from the bottom up. At the beginning you have all these tiny galaxies, and then they join to increasingly larger ones.

What you can see from this graph is that if this theory is correct there basically shouldn’t be any large galaxies at very early times. But is this correct? This figure shows the predictions from the millennium simulation in comparison to data. You can see two things here. One is that there isn’t a lot of data at the moment. But also that it seems like the data is way off the simulation…

If the Webb telescope sees large galaxies anyhow, then that’s going to be very difficult to explain with dark matter. That, in my opinion would be the most interesting discovery the telescope could make. Though, I guess oxygen and water on an exoplanet would be a close second.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “What may the new James Webb telescope discover?” at BackRe(Action) (January 30, 2022)

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At Mind Matters News: Will religions crumble if we find extraterrestrial life?

Some seem fixated on the idea so NASA funded a group of theologians to try to assess the probable reaction of religious people to extraterrestrial life or intelligent aliens:

One of them, Andrew Davison, has been talking about it of late, not only because of the active pursuit of fossil microbes on Mars but because he is set to publish a book this year, currently titled Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine.

He doesn’t foresee any particular angst among religious believers.

“The headline findings are that adherents of a range of religious traditions report that they can take the idea in their stride,” Davison wrote in “Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine,” a forthcoming book that touches on his time during the program, reported The Times, which obtained portions of the book.

Davison also wrote in the book, which is set to be released in 2022, that the nonreligious community tended to “overestimate the challenges that religious people” might face if evidence of extraterrestrial life were discovered. Erin Snodgrass, “How would humans respond to the discovery of aliens? NASA enlisted dozens of religious scholars to find out.” at Insider (December 29, 2021)

That makes sense. The most likely find would be fossil (or even living) microbes somewhere but it’s not clear what they would prove or disprove. Evangelical Christian astronomer Hugh Ross believes, for example, that we will find fossil microbes on Mars but that they probably came from Earth when the planets were less solidly formed and were exchanging materials. It’s not clear that there are any theological implications for that.

News, “Will religions crumble if we find extraterrestrial life?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Theologian and astrobiologist Andrew Davison reports in his forthcoming book that religious acceptance of extraterrestrials is strong and goes back a long way.

You may also wish to read:

Harvard astronomer: Hunt for ET can unify science and religion. Avi Loeb told The Hill that the Galileo Project, which looks for physical evidence of extraterrestrials, could answer religious questions as well as science ones. Fewer scientists seem to think we can do without any source of intelligence for the creation of the universe. Hence the idea that advanced ET created it.

and

Harvard astronomer: Advanced aliens
Avi Loeb writes in Scientific American that when we humans are sufficiently advanced, we will create other universes as well. Avi Loeb’s hypothesis is not logically stranger than the many hypotheses that attempt to account for the Big Bang without underlying information/intelligence.

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Palmer Study Course on intelligent design: Part 5 Origin of Life Part 2

Headlines generated by Origin of Life researchers are misleading. In Part 1, we look at how scientists have redefined “life” so they can search for solutions to much simpler problems. In Part 2, we consider some of the reasons Origins research has achieved so little success over the past 70 years.

Discussion questions are here.

Example of a study question:

According to Harvard chemist, George Whitesides: Most chemists believe, as I do, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic earth. How? I have no idea.”

If you believe in something you don’t know much about, isn’t that “blind faith”? What is the difference between blind and informed faith? What informs your faith in God?

Here’s Part 5 1: Palmer Study Course on intelligent design: Part 5 Origin of Life Part I Headlines generated by Origin of Life researchers are misleading. In Part 1, we look at how scientists have redefined “life” so they can search for solutions to much simpler problems.

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William Lane Craig’s non-historical Adam — and marriage and divorce

William Lane Craig has taken a lot of heat for his In Quest of the Historical Adam, where he tries to sidestep historical issues. Jason Lisle at the Biblical Science Institute offers an eight part series on the topic; this is from the wrap-up, where he addresses Craig’s suggestion that Jesus did not take Genesis literally re Adam and Eve:

Craig: He [Jesus] then cites Genesis 1:27, “male and female he created them,” and weds this statement with Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” This forms the basis for Jesus’s teaching on divorce. Jesus is interpreting the story of Adam and Eve to discern its implications for marriage and divorce, not asserting its -historicity.

Lisle: Hardly. Jesus is not referencing an allegorical or mythical story to illustrate marriage. Rather, Jesus is citing the historical basis for marriage! The very text Jesus quotes specifically says this, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5; Genesis 2:24). That is, the reason people get married today is because God created Eve from Adam’s rib as a helper suitable for him (Genesis 2:20-22).

A non-historical story cannot have “implications for marriage and divorce” in the real world. If Jesus were referring to a non-historical, allegorical, or mythical story, then He made a bad argument; fiction cannot explain why marriage is what it is. Only history can do that. But, of course, Jesus is God and would therefore never make a bad argument. Matthew 19 shows that Jesus believed in the literal historical details of the creation of Adam and Eve as recorded in Genesis 1 and 2, and that such details are the reason why marriage is what it is today.

As I illustrated in a previous article, imagine someone said, “The reason we celebrate Independence Day on July 4th is because that is the day David Levinson and Steve Hiller saved the world from invading extra-terrestrials in the movie Independence Day.” That would be absurd because the fictional events in a movie do not affect the real world. Rather, The United States celebrates Independence Day on July 4th because that is historically when the final draft of the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress. Many other nations celebrate their Independence on a different date because of the various events that actually happened in their respective histories.

Jason Lisle, “The Historical Adam – Part 8: Closing Remarks” at Biblical Science Institute (January 7, 2022)

Life might be easier for Craig if he just became a theistic evolutionist, embraced Darwinism, and sidestepped issues around what the Bible says about human history.

You may also wish to read: Casey Luskin: The mytho-history of Adam, Eve, and William Lane Craig. Long a defender of orthodoxy, Craig seems to want to prune the orthodoxies he is expected to defend. But the pruning process in which he is engaged can never really stop. The “sensible God” is most likely the one looking back at us from our medicine cabinet mirrors.

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