Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 116

January 23, 2022

Nathan Lents argues that the human eye refutes design

Readers may remember Nathan Lents, author of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. In 2015, he was holding forth about the poor design of the human eye: “The human eye is a well-tread example of how evolution can produce a clunky design even when the result is a well-performing anatomical product.”

Perhaps thinking that that assertion does not quite make sense, Cornelius Hunter responds:

For Lents’s “junk design” argument is too good. He correctly points out very significant problems with what is probably the most important human sense; at least insofar as evolution is concerned. Vision is crucial in evolution’s calculus of reproductive fitness. Even Lents admits his own vision would have rendered him an evolutionary loser. Such problems, as Lents eagerly points out, are both significant and common. Lents thinks he has refuted design, but in fact this terrible human vision system never would have survived evolution’s ruthless natural selection filter. Its very existence refutes evolution.

Lents has made a powerful argument against evolution rather than intelligent design, for evolutionary theory predicts no such failure would survive evolutionary history. This certainly is a strange way to formulate an argument against intelligent design. How is it that Lents concludes evidence that contradicts evolutionary theory refutes design?

We have already seen, above, the answer to this question. It lies in Lents’s view of what an intelligent designer would and would not do. Lents concludes this “bad design” evidence refutes design because he believes an intelligent designer would not allow for a vision system that has the problems Lents describes.

Simply put, Lents’s argument entails an assumption about the designer. This brings us to the second problem with his argument — it is not based on empirical science, but rather on metaphysics. There is no scientific experiment one could perform to test Lents’s claim because it is not scientific in the first place. Instead, it is based on theological utilitarianism, a metaphysical position on which ID is agnostic, but evolution requires.

Cornelius Hunter, “Did Nathan Lents Refute Design?” at Evolution News (January 21, 2022)

Well, if we want to get theological about it, Moses was a man slow of speech. Why didn’t the Lord, who had chosen him to free the people, make him eloquent? (Or cure his speech impediment, if that’s what it was.) All we know is, he did free the people anyway. The trouble is, as Hunter notes above, trying to figure out what God should or should not do, apart from the record, is not science.

From the science record, the human eye is very well adapted to what it needs to do.

Incidentally, Lents believes that he would have failed as a (Palaeolithic?) hunter, due to poor eyesight and therefore the eye is poorly designed. There’s another way of looking at it: Problems like that spurred the development of agriculture. Agriculture does not need everyone to have the strength and skills of a hunter. Plenty of people can plant and harvest grain and grind it in a mill. Overall, the human race is probably better off with a mix of strengths and weaknesses, for creativity and innovation.

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Published on January 23, 2022 09:29

String theory again: Will a correction to Einstein save it?

String theory is one of those propositions that, for many cosmologists, somehow has to be true, perhaps because the idea that all elementary particles are vibrating loops and strings is itself attractive or perhaps because string theory is part of a theoretical structure for multiverse theory, which has everything going for it except evidence. Now, a hope is discerned:

Recently, three physicists calculated a number pertaining to the quantum nature of gravity. When they saw the value, “we couldn’t believe it,” said Pedro Vieira, one of the three…

Gravity’s quantum-scale details are not something physicists usually know how to quantify, but the trio attacked the problem using an approach that has lately been racking up stunners in other areas of physics. It’s called the bootstrap.

To bootstrap is to deduce new facts about the world by figuring out what’s compatible with known facts — science’s version of picking yourself up by your own bootstraps. With this method, the trio found a surprising coincidence: Their bootstrapped number closely matched the prediction for the number made by string theory. The leading candidate for the fundamental theory of gravity and everything else, string theory holds that all elementary particles are, close-up, vibrating loops and strings.

Natalie Wolchover, “In a Numerical Coincidence, Some See Evidence for String Theory” at Quanta (January 21, 2022)

It means reworking Einstein’s math a bit.

At times, the advocacy for string theory begins to sound a bit like a religion:

Some physicists hope to see string theory win hearts and minds by default, by being the only microscopic description of gravity that’s logically consistent. If researchers can prove “string universality,” as this is sometimes called — a monopoly of string theories among viable fundamental theories of nature — we’ll have no choice but to believe in hidden dimensions and an inaudible orchestra of strings.

Natalie Wolchover, “In a Numerical Coincidence, Some See Evidence for String Theory” at Quanta (January 21, 2022)

But, in an important sense, it is a religion. They’re trying to make sense of the universe and eventually, that shades into metaphysics.

The paper is open access.

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Published on January 23, 2022 08:19

Did Victorian sexism influence Darwin’s theory of sexual selection? Of course it did.

It proposes simple explanations that don’t hold up in the biological complexity of the natural world:

according to a new paper, published in Science, Charles Darwin’s patriarchal world view led him to dismiss female agency and mate choice in humans.

He also downplayed the role of female variation in other animal species, assuming they were rather uniform, and always made similar decisions. And he thought there was enormous variation among the males who battled for female attention by showing off stunning ranges of skills and beauty. This maintained the focus on the dynamics of male dominance hierarchies, sexual ornamentation and variation as drivers of sexual selection, even if females sometimes did the choosing.

But do Darwin’s ideas on sexual selection hold up today?

Matthew Wills, “Evolution: how Victorian sexism influenced Darwin’s theories – new research” at The Conversation (January 20, 2022)

Wills offers a number of thoughts as to why they don’t, adding,

Inevitably, Darwin’s world view was shaped by the culture of his time, and his personal writings make it difficult to mount a particularly robust defence. In a letter from 1882, he wrote “I certainly think that women, though generally superior to men to [sic] moral qualities are inferior intellectually; & there seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance … in their becoming the intellectual equals of man”.

He also deliberated over the relative merits of marriage, famously noting: “Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — but terrible loss of time”.

Matthew Wills, “Evolution: how Victorian sexism influenced Darwin’s theories – new research” at The Conversation (January 20, 2022)

Eye candy: The male pipefish incubates the eggs:

By the way, how could the pipefish’s behavior possibly have evolved without some underlying intelligence in the universe?

We hope this sort of discussion won’t lead to efforts to “deplatform” Darwin because there are lots of discussions we need to have. The good news is that, after all these years, it looks like we are beginning to have some of them.

The paper is closed access.

You may also wish to read: Commentator Vox Day has some harsh words for E. O. Wilson’s detractors at Scientific American. The thing is, when Wilson was alive, Darwinians denied the racism or insisted it was irrelevant and that Darwin’s sacred cause was to oppose slavery, yada yada …

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Published on January 23, 2022 06:54

January 22, 2022

At Mind Matters News: Physicist: Why extraterrestrials couldn’t look much like us

Except in films. They follow the same natural laws but conditions differ on each planet:

“Combined, the staggering planetary diversity and the historic contingencies for life’s evolution have an amazing consequence: there cannot be two planets with identical life forms. Furthermore, the more complex the life form, the lower the odds it will be replicated — even approximately — in another world.

It follows that we are the only humans in the Universe. Yes, there could (at least in principle) be other biped intelligent species with left-right symmetry out there, but they will not be like us. – MARCELO GLEISER, “WHAT IS LIFE LIKE ELSEWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE?” AT BIG THINK (DECEMBER 22, 2021)”

Star Trek featured many extraterrestrial beings who are really just dress-up humans — and was all the better a series for that. If the extraterrestrials were completely different from humans, mentally and emotionally, because of different planetary developments, the story might fall apart. In science fiction, we need the extraterrestrials to be enough like us that the interactions make sense. That’s just good storytelling:

News, “Physicist: Why extraterrestrials couldn’t look much like us” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Marcelo Gleiser explains, there is a “staggering diversity of worlds” out there and that diversity would shape life forms in many different ways.

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Published on January 22, 2022 19:11

January 21, 2022

Researchers propose trying different recipes for prebiotic soup

Abstract: “Prebiotic soup” often features in discussions of origins of life research, both as a theoretical concept when discussing abiological pathways to modern biochemical building blocks and, more recently, as a feedstock in prebiotic chemistry experiments focused on discovering emergent, systems-level processes such as polymerization, encapsulation, and evolution. However, until now, little systematic analysis has gone into the design of well-justified prebiotic mixtures, which are needed to facilitate experimental replicability and comparison among researchers. This paper explores principles that should be considered in choosing chemical mixtures for prebiotic chemistry experiments by reviewing the natural environmental conditions that might have created such mixtures and then suggests reasonable guidelines for designing recipes. We discuss both “assembled” mixtures, which are made by mixing reagent grade chemicals, and “synthesized” mixtures, which are generated directly from diversity-generating primary prebiotic syntheses. We discuss different practical concerns including how to navigate the tremendous uncertainty in the chemistry of the early Earth and how to balance the desire for using prebiotically realistic mixtures with experimental tractability and replicability. Examples of two assembled mixtures, one based on materials likely delivered by carbonaceous meteorites and one based on spark discharge synthesis, are presented to illustrate these challenges. We explore alternative procedures for making synthesized mixtures using recursive chemical reaction systems whose outputs attempt to mimic atmospheric and geochemical synthesis. Other experimental conditions such as pH and ionic strength are also considered. We argue that developing a handful of standardized prebiotic recipes may facilitate coordination among researchers and enable the identification of the most promising mechanisms by which complex prebiotic mixtures were “tamed” during the origin of life to give rise to key living processes such as self-propagation, information processing, and adaptive evolution. We end by advocating for the development of a public prebiotic chemistry database containing experimental methods (including soup recipes), results, and analytical pipelines for analyzing complex prebiotic mixtures.
Vincent, L.; Colón-Santos, S.; Cleaves, H.J., II; Baum, D.A.; Maurer, S.E. The Prebiotic Kitchen: A Guide to Composing Prebiotic Soup Recipes to Test Origins of Life Hypotheses. Life 2021, 11, 1221. https://doi.org/10.3390/life11111221

The paper is open access.

How would they know — assuming they came up with something that worked — that that’s what actually happened?

Really, this is a life-in-the-lab experiment, not a recreation of the steps to life.

You may also wish to read: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.

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Published on January 21, 2022 18:27

BioLogos hopes to calm the fears of ignorant Christians about “evolution”

In a podcast:

102. Reconciling Evolution | Part One

January 20, 2022

Though the theory of evolution has revolutionized the biological sciences, bringing the theory into the classroom still causes some fear and trembling—from teachers, students, parents. Last fall we spent some time with a group of people who have been researching how to teach evolution better, in a way that acknowledges the emotional and religious tensions that comes into the classroom and attempts to help students understand the science of evolution while retaining—even bolstering—their faith. In this episode we talk about the history of teaching evolution and introduce some of the research from the team.

A friend thinks that the whole Biologos approach is past its sellby date, writing to say,

This is the most tedious thing I’ve ever heard. Would probably be better informed listening to Jerry Coyne or PZ Myers. 100% of it was “waaahhhh – poor indoctrinated church people can’t really understand science until they get past their prejudices”. Then there’s the “every time you have an antibiotic there’s evolution at work!” Oh, and then there is the golden “questioning any part of science is the same as questioning science as a whole!” And then they end with, “we know that if you come to understand evolution, you will also eventually come to accept it.” This sort of stuff is insufferable. How do they still have podcast listeners?

What some of us find curious is that Christian evolutionists so seldom want to grasp the fact that the problem for most Christians is Darwinism, which is an explicitly materialist and naturalist theory of everything. The problem is not “evolution” as in antibiotics.

You may also wish to read: Michael Ruse lecture makes interesting admission re Darwinism and atheists, agnostics. Darwin’s theory, Ruse writes meant that ” the way was opened for sound non-belief, although almost always non-believers – agnostics and atheists – take their stance less on science and more on grounds of theology and philosophy.”

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Published on January 21, 2022 18:01

At Evolution News: Darwin in the schools campaigner got it all wrong on pseudogenes

Readers may remember Eugenie Scott, who for many years spearheaded the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby, National Center for Science Education. As Casey Luskin tells it:

In 2007, Eugenie Scott, a leading anti-ID activist, gave a lecture at the American Museum of Natural History titled “What Do Creationists Believe about Human Evolution?” …

“Perhaps the best rebuttal to the design argument is the existence of something called pseudogenes,” Scott states. “Pseudogenes are screwed-up genes,” she says in her first argument. She then proceeds to cite the beta-globin pseudogene — the example used by leading theistic evolutionist biologist Kenneth Miller in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.

Scott confidently asserts that because of mutations the beta-globin pseudogene “isn’t going to do diddly. It’s just going to sit there” and “not do a thing.” She goes on to say this pseudogene is “not going to function. It’s not going to do anything” because it is an “inert gene.” Her slide, which she borrowed (with permission, she notes) from Ken Miller’s slide deck at the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, calls the beta-globin pseudogene “non-functional.” …

It’s a nice tidy story. But a 2013 study in Genome Biology and Evolution showed it is false. Titled, “Evolutionary Constraints in the β-Globin Cluster: The Signature of Purifying Selection at the δ-Globin (HBD) Locus and Its Role in Developmental Gene Regulation,” the paper reported the beta-globin pseudogene is functional. And as we’ll see below, a 2021 paper in Developmental Cell found that this pseudogene—which Dr. Scott claimed does “diddly”—has “essentiality” and “indispensability” for human red blood cell formation.

Casey Luskin, “Blast from the Past: Eugenie Scott’s Failed Prediction on Pseudogenes” at Evolution News and Science Today (January 20, 2022)

When you think about it, it’s a better long-term strategy to predict that something has function than that it doesn’t.

You may also wish to read: At The Scientist: Giving jumping genes their due Subtitled “Long lambasted as junk DNA or genomic parasites, transposable elements turn out to be contributors to adaptation.” (Times change.)

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Published on January 21, 2022 17:34

Weikart’s new book on Darwinian racism drops February 1, free webinar February 3

Historian Richard Weikart’s new book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism drops February 1 and is available for preorder.

From the publisher:

To hear some tell it, Adolf Hitler was a Christian creationist who rejected Darwinian evolution. Award-winning historian Richard Weikart shows otherwise. According to Weikart, Darwinian evolution crucially influenced Hitler and the Nazis, and the Nazis zealously propagated evolutionary theory during the Third Reich. Inspired by arguments from both Darwin and early Darwinists, the Nazis viewed the “Nordic race” as superior to other races and set about advancing human evolution by ridding the world of “inferior” races and individuals. As Weikart also shows, these ideas circulate today among white nationalists and neo-Nazis, who routinely use Darwinian theory in their propaganda to advance a racist agenda. Darwinian Racism is careful history. It is also a wake-up call.

You can register for a webinar with Weikart, with John West as host here.

Richard Weikart

Given the recent influx of social unrest, are you seeking some clarity on the historical roots of Western racism? Are you looking for a solid, evidence-based rebuttal to the naturalist argument that evolutionary theory has done no evil? Don’t pass up this spectacular opportunity to get answers from a reputable and well-researched scholar. Buy the book today so you can be prepared in time for the webinar.

Join us on Thursday, February 3rd, at 6 PM PT (9 PM ET)

(Time zones.)

You may also wish to read: Historian Richard Weikart On Acceptance Of Darwinian Evolution And Racism … In connection with the Scientific American op-ed claiming that “denying evolution” is a form of white supremacy, Weikart, whose specialty is racist politics, notes, among other things, “Now what happens if we examine the real white supremacists today? Are they creationists? I have done a good deal of research on this topic, and as it turns out, the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy.”

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Published on January 21, 2022 16:57

L&FP, 48n: The Fair Havens/Malta model for community change

The events recorded in Ac 27 (a ship getting caught in an early winter storm due to imprudence and defiance of counsel) are a historical micro case study on how key changes too often have to happen in a community:

Shipwreck at Malta, c. AD 59

Ac 27:8 Coasting along it [the south coast of Crete, in the second ship for the voyage] with difficulty, we came to a place called Fair Havens, near which was the city of Lasea.

9 Since much time had passed, and the voyage was now dangerous because even the Fast [Yom Kippur] was already over, Paul advised them, 10 saying, “Sirs, I perceive that the voyage will be with injury and much loss, not only of the cargo and the ship, but also of our lives.”

11 But the centurion paid more attention to the pilot and to the owner of the ship than to what Paul said. 12 And because the harbor was not suitable to spend the winter in, the majority decided to put out to sea from there, on the chance that somehow they could reach Phoenix, a harbor of Crete, facing both southwest and northwest, and spend the winter there.

13 Now when the south wind blew gently, supposing that they had obtained their purpose, they weighed anchor and sailed along Crete, close to the shore. 14 But soon a tempestuous wind, called the northeaster, struck down from the land. 15 And when the ship was caught and could not face the wind, we gave way to it and were driven along. 16 Running under the lee of a small island called Cauda, we managed with difficulty to secure the ship’s boat. 17 After hoisting it up, they used supports to undergird the ship. Then, fearing that they would run aground on the Syrtis, they lowered the gear [–> likely, a sea anchor], and thus they were driven along.

18 Since we were violently storm-tossed, they began the next day to jettison the cargo. 19 And on the third day they threw the ship’s tackle overboard with their own hands. 20 When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned.

21 Since they had been without food for a long time, Paul stood up among them and said, “Men, you should have listened to me and not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss. 22 Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. 23 For this very night there stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship, 24 and he said, ‘Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar. And behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.’ 25 So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. 26 But we must run aground on some island.”

27 When the fourteenth night had come, as we were being driven across the Adriatic Sea [then, used for waters in the c. Mediterranean E of Sicily], about midnight the sailors suspected that they were nearing land. [–> likely, breakers at Koura point]

28 So they took a sounding and found twenty fathoms.4 A little farther on they took a sounding again and found fifteen fathoms.5 29 And fearing that we might run on the rocks, they let down four anchors from the stern and prayed for day to come.

30 And as the sailors were seeking to escape from the ship, and had lowered the ship’s boat into the sea under pretense of laying out anchors from the bow, 31 Paul said to the centurion and the soldiers, “Unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved.” 32 Then the soldiers cut away the ropes of the ship’s boat and let it go.

33 As day was about to dawn, Paul urged them all to take some food, saying, “Today is the fourteenth day that you have continued in suspense and without food, having taken nothing. 34 Therefore I urge you to take some food. For it will give you strength,6 for not a hair is to perish from the head of any of you.” 35 And when he had said these things, he took bread, and giving thanks to God in the presence of all he broke it and began to eat. 36 Then they all were encouraged and ate some food themselves. 37 (We were in all 2767 persons in the ship.) 38 And when they had eaten enough, they lightened the ship, throwing out the wheat into the sea.

39 Now when it was day, they did not recognize the land, but they noticed a bay with a beach, on which they planned if possible to run the ship ashore. 40 So they cast off the anchors and left them in the sea, at the same time loosening the ropes that tied the rudders. Then hoisting the foresail to the wind they made for the beach. 41 But striking a reef,8 they ran the vessel aground. The bow stuck and remained immovable, and the stern was being broken up by the surf.

42 The soldiers’ plan was to kill the prisoners, lest any should swim away and escape. 43 But the centurion, wishing to save Paul, kept them from carrying out their plan. He ordered those who could swim to jump overboard first and make for the land, 44 and the rest on planks or on pieces of the ship. And so it was that all were brought safely to land.

The context is, a cold front’s approach and warm air flowing over it as it wedges in, as we can see with sand-loaded air coming from the Libyan desert in a more recent case:

The air mass movements:

Of course, in 59 AD they did not have satellites nor any clear understanding of cold fronts and associated storms. However, the professional seamen would know typical wind and wind shift patterns, so a warm south wind [from the Libyan desert] could be a sign of an approaching winter storm. So, the technicos — bought and paid for by the Merchant-Owner — were imprudently gambling with the ship, cargo and passengers, that they could beat the cold front to Phoenix, 40 miles away. We can readily reconstruct how the Kubernetes [Sailing Master] likely posed on his expertise and derided that Jew in Chains talking nonsense about risks. Mix in hope for a more comfortable wintering port, and we readily see the way the decision to embark on a voyage of folly was entertained.

The big lesson is, too often communities only learn from pain, especially if those they would naturally look to for leadership are manipulative. But in the end, folly will have damaging consequences.

So, there must be a willingness to take up a counterculture stance, even knowing that at first it will be derided and dismissed. That is the first step to being the good man or woman in the storm. So, it is likely to be, with the restoration of sound moral knowledge.

And, it is obvious that we are in early phases of a civilisation level storm. END

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Published on January 21, 2022 07:47

Materialists Know What They Say is False. They Say it Anyway

Otherwise, they would have to give up their materialism.

Recently I posted about a woman who was charged with attempted murder when she put a newborn baby in a garbage bag and tossed him in a dumpster to die. Here is an exchange I had with Seversky regarding that post:

Barry:

Is it objectively evil to put a baby in a garbage bag and throw him in a dumpster or is it just your subjective preference not to do so?

Seversky:

the overwhelming majority regard dumping newborns in dumpsters as being evil

Barry:

Suppose the overwhelming majority regarded dumping newborns in dumpsters as good. Would it then be good?

Seversky:

Presumably, it would be good in the minds of the majority who approved of it. It would not be a good thing from my perspective.

There you have it. Sev’s position is this: They would prefer tossing babies in dumpsters and I would not. There is no basis on which to determine which preference is superior. Therefore, the preferences are objectively equal.

As I have said before, no sane person actually lives their life as if materialism is true. But Sev’s religious commitments compel him to pretend he believes it is true. Which leads him to say that he holds an outrageous position that we can be certain he does not truly hold. Sad that.

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Published on January 21, 2022 05:18

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