Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 117

Today is the 49th annual March for Life in Washington DC, USA.

To be monitored, here is the web site.

Live video feed:

Let us reflect on the ongoing killing of our living posterity in the womb, 800+ million and rising at about another million per week globally.

Developing . . .

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Light carbon another faint hope for past life on Mars?

We never give up hoping, do we? The subhead admits “Dramatically “light” carbon could also be explained by atmospheric reactions or cosmic dust.” Here’s the gist:

Since 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has trundled across Mars, drilling into rocks and running the grit through a sophisticated onboard chemistry lab, aiming to tease out evidence for life. Today, a team of rover scientists announced an intriguing signal, one that may or may not be evidence of past life, but is, at the very least, surprisingly weird. The team found that the carbon trapped in a handful of rocks probed by the rover is dramatically enriched in light isotopes of carbon. On Earth, the signal would be seen as strong evidence for ancient microbial life.

Given that this is Mars, however, the researchers are reluctant to make any grand claims, and they have worked hard to concoct alternative, nonbiological explanations involving ultraviolet (UV) light and stardust. But those alternatives are at least as far-fetched as a scenario in which subterranean microbes emitted the enriched carbon as methane gas.

Paul Voosen, “Mars rover detects carbon signature that hints at past life source” at Science (January 17, 2022)

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Michael Ruse lecture makes interesting admission re Darwinism and atheists, agnostics

In the introduction to a zoom lecture he is to give in Budapest January 28, Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse writes,

Many people, notably Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, argue – or are taken to argue – that the chief effect of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin was to finish off Christianity. I shall argue that the story is more complex – and interesting – than this. Darwin’s chief achievement was to show how the design-like nature of organisms – the hand, the eye, the heart – can be explained by unbroken law, without direct need of a reference to a Designer, a deity like the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus. Having offered up such an explanation, 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.

Not what they usually say themselves.

The lecture is sponsored by Center for Religious Studies at Central European University.

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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.”

The tale of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) is, quite literally, a textbook story of adaptive evolution. Back in the early 19th century, only one form of these now-iconic moths was known: a light variety speckled with dark spots (hence the name). In 1864, though, a naturalist in England first documented an all-dark moth—what seemed at the time to be little more than a curious example of melanin overproduction. Then came the Industrial Revolution, and dark moths took over, their inky wings reducing the odds of the nocturnal insects being eaten while they rested on soot-stained trees during the day. More than a century later, scientists discovered that the genetic tweak underscoring the moths’ dark pigmentation was a transposable element (TE).

About 200 years ago, researchers estimate, nearly 22,000 nucleotides leapt into the first intron of a moth gene called cortex, and in doing so, dramatically…

Christie Wilcox, “Adapting with a Little Help from Jumping Genes” at The Scientist (January 17, 2022)

Sounds like a co-ordinated effort, actually…

Belief that most of the genome is junk is actually a philosophical position, among other things. It is hardly self-evident but for a naturalist atheist, it is something that makes sense to believe.

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Commentator Vox Day has some harsh words for E.O’ Wilson’s detractors at Scientific American

Readers will recall that E. O. Wilson, “Darwin’s heir,” passed away last month at 92. Well, on December 29, an attack on him appeared in Scientific American:

With the death of biologist E. O. Wilson on Sunday, I find myself again reflecting on the complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas and how these ideas came to define our understanding of the world…

After a long clinical career as a registered nurse, I became a laboratory-trained scientist as researchers mapped the first draft of the human genome. It was during this time that I intimately familiarized myself with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.

His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms. Finding out that Wilson thought this way was a huge disappointment, because I had enjoyed his novel Anthill, which was published much later and written for the public.

Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

Even modern geneticists and genome scientists struggle with inherent racism in the way they gather and analyze data. In his memoir A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, geneticist J. Craig Venter writes, “The complex provenance of ideas means their origin is often open to interpretation.”

Monica R. McLemore, “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson” at Scientific American (December 29, 2021)

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 …

Well, Vox Day is having none of it:

Those who have taken the ticket or are celebrated for their utility in building the false case against God had better enjoy their public adulation while it lasts. Even the most famous and well-respected scientists, who were lauded for their brilliance and whose work was absolutely integral in constructing the false scientific edifice of evolution by natural selection, are discovering that they and their work will be discredited and dishonored once the satanic narrative moves beyond them, as demonstrated by this article in Scientific American denigrating the legacy of evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson…

Vox Day, “Evil Always Eats Its Own” at Vox Populi (January 20, 2022)

Once they’ve rejected all their heroes, what will they do?

You may also wish to read: Could we all get together and evolve as a group? (Wilson on group selection.)

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

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L&FP, 48m: The legitimate authority of knowable moral truth in service to justice, thriving and prudence

In the current thread on an unfortunate event with a newborn, there is an exchange of comments:

BA, 45: Suppose the overwhelming majority regarded dumping newborns in dumpsters as good. Would it then be good?

Sev, 56: 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.

This, of course reflects the core relativist thesis that rejects objective, warranted, generally knowable moral truth, and so I commented, 57: “thereby hangs the fatal error of relativising and undermining knowable, warranted, objective moral truth reducing it to clash of opinions backed by power. Justice evaporates.”

Such brings us back to a core issue, legitimate, morally anchored authority (thus, too, leadership and especially reformation leadership). As Dallas Willard remarked in his 2010 talk, associated notes (and he has said much the same elsewhere):

What is knowledge and what does it do? Knowledge is the capacity to represent something as it is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. It and it alone confers the right and perhaps the responsibility to act, direct action, formulate policy and supervise its implementation, and teach. This helps us see what disappears along with “moral knowledge.”

We may compare Plato, 2360 years ago, in The Laws, Bk X:

[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [i.e the classical “material” elements of the cosmos — the natural order], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . . [Thus, they hold] that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.-

These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might, and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions, these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is, to live in real dominion over others, and not in legal subjection to them [–> nihilistic will to power not the spirit of justice and lawfulness].

We may thus see that evolutionary materialism is ancient and has consistently opened the door to nihilistic, lawless factionalism when it has become a dominant strain of thought. It is inherently relativistic and amoral (having no IS that can properly ground OUGHT), opening the door to to the twin notions that might/manipulation makes ‘right’ — the nihilist’s credo — and that authority of whatever ‘moral’ or ‘justice’ principles are prevailing in a given time or place is a matter of power and associated manipulation. So, naturally, it invites the ambitious to engage in lawless factionalism to gain power to move the community as they will. Where, the same will extend to fellow travellers who may not actually adhere to outright evolutionary materialism but enable it.

Further, kindly note: the issue here is not whether communities or civilisations “have clay feet.” In a world where we are finite, fallible, morally struggling and too often ill willed, that will inevitably be a challenge. The issue is, instead, that we are addressing an ideology and its fellow travellers that in principle undermine legitimate authority, justice and knowable moral truth. In short it is anti-civilisational.

Lewis Vaughn similarly notes:

Cultural relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one’s culture approves of it. The argument for this doctrine is based on the diversity of moral judgments among cultures: because people’s judgments about right and wrong differ from culture to culture, right and wrong must be relative to culture, and there are no objective moral principles. This argument is defective, however, because the diversity of moral views does not imply that morality is relative to cultures. In addition, the alleged diversity of basic moral standards among cultures may be only apparent, not real. Societies whose moral judgments conflict may be differing not over moral principles but over nonmoral facts. Some think that tolerance is entailed by cultural relativism. But there is no necessary connection between tolerance and the doctrine. Indeed, the cultural relativist cannot consistently advocate tolerance while maintaining his relativist standpoint. To advocate tolerance is to advocate an objective moral value. But if tolerance is an objective moral value, then cultural relativism must be false, because it says that there are no objective moral values. Like subjective relativism, cultural relativism has some disturbing consequences. It implies that cultures are morally infallible, that social reformers can never be morally right, that moral disagreements between individuals in the same culture amount to arguments over whether they disagree with their culture, that other cultures cannot be legitimately criticized, and that moral progress is impossible. [Doing Ethics, 3rd Edn]

Here is a picture of my wider context:

That, is, I am concerned that the marginalisation of generally knowable, warranted truth about duty to right conduct etc can help pave the way for lawless ideological oligarchy. As a needed reminder, here is George Orwell warning, in the voice of Winston Smith in 1984, on doublethink:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

No sane person wants to go there, no community imagines it could end there, but that is precisely what happened with the big dictatorships of the last century.

In The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, Dallas Willard observes:

One can easily see why it has been thought we would do better to
have knowledge of the moral life. In any area of human activity, knowledge brings certain advantages. Special considerations aside, knowledge authorizes one to act, to direct action, to develop and supervise policy, and to teach. It does so because, as everyone assumes, it enables us to deal more successfully with reality: with what we can count on, have to deal with, or are apt to have bruising encounters with. Knowledge involves assured truth, and truth in our representations and beliefs is very like accuracy in the sighting mechanism on a gun. If the mechanism is accurately aligned—is “true,” it enables those who use it with care to hit an intended target. Correspondingly, if our representations and beliefs about virtue and duty are accurate, one might think, that would enable us to succeed in doing and being what is right and good—though it would not guarantee that. This would be a desirable outcome. (No one, regardless of their theories, finds just any and every thing in human character and behavior acceptable.) Furthermore, if we know that those representations and beliefs are accurate, we will count on them, effectively communicate them to others, and—in the light of them—successfully coordinate our efforts toward the right and the good. This is how things are in every area of human endeavor. How could it be otherwise in moral matters?

So, it is pivotal that restore confident access to objective, generally knowable, warranted truths about right conduct etc, especially branch on which we all sit first principles such as the Ciceronian first duties of responsible reason:

1st – to truth,
2nd – to right reason,
3rd – to prudence [including warrant],
4th – to sound conscience,
5th – to neighbour; so also,
6th – to fairness and
7th – to justice
[ . . .]
xth – etc.

As has been noted, these duties are readily recognised as self evident due to their branch on which we sit first principle character. The objector (as we have seen so many times here at UD) is found to be already appealing to them to gain persuasive traction, as would be the one commending a proof (which appeals to 1, 2, 3). It is not wise to saw off the branch on which one is sitting . . . and on which the whole civilisation sits, too. But of course, mere common good sense will never deter the determined ideologue or hyperskeptic; we duly note that such exist, correct for record out of decent respect for the watching world and move on. Where, the yardstick cases such as a kidnapped, sexually tortured and murdered child (heartlessly destroyed for “fun”) or the holocaust should suffice to show relevance of such duties.

Going further, we must recognise these principles and the underlying legitimacy of moral knowledge and its legitimate authority if we are to have sound reformation. END

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Cambrian Explosion appears even more explosive now

Because more compressed:

In a third research effort, a team of 14 geochemists and geophysicists led by Ulf Linnemann discovered a way to obtain a precision date for the launch of the Cambrian explosion. They found a composite geological section in southern Namibia of the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary that provided biostratigraphic and chemostratigraphic data that was bracketed by radiometric dating.5 Their measurements constrained the date for the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary to no earlier than 538.99 ± 0.21 million years ago and no later than 538.58 ± 0.19 million years ago. Therefore, they concluded that the faunal transition from Ediacaran to Cambrian biota occurred within less than 410,000 years.6 …

A time window for the Cambrian explosion briefer than 410,000 years is far too brief for any conceivable naturalistic model for the history of life. It would be far too brief even for the appearance of just one new phylum, let alone 30+ phyla.

* 6. Linnemann et al., “New High-Resolution Age Data,” 49.

Hugh Ross, “Cambrian Explosion Becomes More Explosive” at Reasons (January 17, 2022)

Or, as Gunter Bechly put it last year,

Recently, I stumbled upon a paper from 2018 that I had previously overlooked, and it proved to be dynamite. It is a study by a research group from the University of Zurich about the transition from the Ediacaran organisms to the Cambrian animal phyla in the Nama Basin of Namibia (Linnemann et al. 2018). What they found is truly mind-blowing. The window of time between the latest appearance date (LAD) of the alien Ediacaran biota and the first appearance date (FAD) of the complex Cambrian biota was only 410,000 years. You read that correctly, just 410 thousand years! This is not an educated guess but based on very precise radiometric U-Pb dating with an error margin of only plus-minus 200 thousand years. This precision is truly a remarkable achievement of modern science considering that we are talking about events 538 million years ago.

The authors of the study fully realized that their finding documents an unexpected “extremely short duration of the faunal transition from Ediacaran to Cambrian biota.” Therefore, they speculated about ecologically driven reasons for this rapid onset of the Cambrian Explosion. Of course, no ecological factors whatsoever could solve the information problem of the origin of the new animal body plans in the Cambrian Explosion, as was elaborated by Stephen Meyer in his book Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer 2013). With this new and very precise time frame, the population genetic waiting time problem for the origin of animal body plans is lifted to a whole new level and suggests that no unguided process could ever plausibly explain these data. The Cambrian Explosion has gone nuclear and simply evaporates neo-Darwinism as a brilliant and beautiful but failed scientific theory, as it was recently called by Yale University professor David Gelernter (2019).

Günter Bechly, “The Cambrian Explosion Has Just Gone Nuclear” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 8, 2021)

The strongest argument for Darwinism today is that it is believed by all the right people.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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A good idea: Teach philosophy of science in high school

At The Scientist:

We need to improve K–12 STEM education. But improving STEM education is not simply a matter of adding lesson plans on microbiology and immunology, nor emphasizing hands-on laboratory work. What we need to do is to teach students about the fundamental nature of scientific practice—its strengths and limitations—and how science can both affect and be affected by society. In other words, we need to introduce students to the philosophy of science.

The concept of teaching philosophy in high school might seem strange. Philosophy often gets a bad reputation, conjuring up images of dense, impenetrable writing and of academics who care more about winning verbal disputes than discussing tangible issues. Admittedly, academic philosophy can often be esoteric and inaccessible, and the field has historically been guilty of vastly underrepresenting female and minority perspectives. But over the past several years, a wave of enthusiasm has emerged to expand whose voice is heard and to engage the broader public in philosophical discourse.

Little attention has been given, however, to expanding access to philosophy of science education. Philosophy of science examines how the scientific process works, when and why we should accept new scientific findings, and how scientific knowledge progresses over time. The discipline also explores the role of different stakeholders in science, how biases and values can influence the process, and how ethical considerations figure into research. These issues—not how to balance chemical equations or how to calculate the trajectory of a projectile—are what Americans are asked to grapple with every day as we are confronted with news on the pandemic. And recent studies suggest that knowledge about the nature of science may improve trust and acceptance of its findings.

Nicholas Friedman and Stephen Esser, “Opinion: Teach Philosophy of Science in High School” at The Scientist (January 17, 2022)

It’s too bad if the concept seems “strange” to some. Philosophy of science is to science what civics is to politics. It helps people make sense of what we are doing and why: What is science as a way of knowing? What can it tell us and not tell us? The alternative is that science becomes a Magic Answer Machine with no clear understanding of what the answers really mean.

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At Mind Matters News: Prof: Fine-tuning in nature is due to the mind of the universe

Panpsychism’s take on intelligent design, as expressed in the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe for life, is an interesting new approach:

Here’s a fascinating essay from 2018 by philosophy prof Philip Goff, author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019). He discusses the fine-tuning of the universe as an argument for cosmopsychism (a form of panpsychism) in which the universe is thought to have a mind.

Ideas like his are becoming respectable in mainstream science venues:

In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is an incredibly narrow slice of all the possible values those numbers can have. It is therefore incredibly unlikely that a universe like ours would have the kind of numbers compatible with the existence of life. But, against all the odds, our Universe does. –

Philip Goff, “Is the Universe a conscious mind?” at Aeon (February 8, 2018) Quoted in News, “Prof: Fine-tuning in nature is due to the mind of the universe” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Panpsychists (or cosmopsychists) are permitted to make arguments that would be banned if made by, say, intelligent design advocates. Some change is afoot.

You may also wish to read: Nautilus offers primer on panpsychism. Noting the growth in interest from science writers as well as neuroscientists and philosophers, the magazine offers four essays discussing current approaches.

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New discovery: Insect larvae can jump

Okay, you hate insect larvae, but get a load of this:

The previously unrecorded behavior occurs in the larvae of a species of lined flat bark beetle (Laemophloeus biguttatus). Specifically, the larvae are able to spring into the air, with each larva curling itself into a loop as it leaps forward. What makes these leaps unique is how the larvae are able to pull it off.

North Carolina State University, “Scientists find previously unknown jumping behavior in insects” at Phys.org (January 19, 2022)

A team of researchers has discovered a jumping behavior that is entirely new to insect larvae, and there is evidence that it is occurring in a range of species – we just haven’t noticed it before. The previously unrecorded behavior occurs in the larvae of a species of lined flat bark beetle (Laemophloeus biguttatus). Specifically, the larvae are able to spring into the air, with each larva curling itself into a loop as it leaps forward. What makes these leaps unique is how the larvae are able to pull it off. Credit: Matt Bertone, NC State University

“Jumping at all is exceedingly rare in the larvae of beetle species, and the mechanism they use to execute their leaps is—as far as we can tell—previously unrecorded in any insect larvae,” says Matt Bertone, corresponding author of a paper on the discovery and director of North Carolina State University’s Plant Disease and Insect Clinic.

While there are other insect species that are capable of making prodigious leaps, they rely on something called a “latch-mediated spring actuation mechanism.” This means that they essentially have two parts of their body latch onto each other while the insect exerts force, building up a significant amount of energy. The insect then unlatches the two parts, releasing all of that energy at once, allowing it to spring off the ground.

“What makes the L. biguttatus so remarkable is that it makes these leaps without latching two parts of its body together,” Bertone says. “Instead, it uses claws on its legs to grip the ground while it builds up that potential energy—and once those claws release their hold on the ground, that potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, launching it skyward.”

North Carolina State University, “Scientists find previously unknown jumping behavior in insects” at Phys.org (January 19, 2022)

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