Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 122

Why (some) physicists think a multiverse exists

As stated by Ethan Siegel, it sounds like nonsense:

We have overwhelming evidence for the hot Big Bang, and also that the Big Bang began with a set of conditions that don’t come with a de facto explanation. If we add in an explanation for it — cosmic inflation — then that inflating spacetime that set up and gave rise to the Big Bang makes its own set of novel predictions. Many of those predictions are borne out by observation, but other predictions also arise as consequences of inflation. One of them is the existence of a myriad of Universes, of disconnected regions each with their own hot Big Bang, that comprise what we know as a multiverse when you take them all together. This doesn’t mean that different Universes have different rules or laws or fundamental constants, or that all the possible quantum outcomes you can imagine occur in some other pocket of the multiverse. It doesn’t even mean that the multiverse is real, as this is a prediction we cannot verify, validate, or falsify. But if the theory of inflation is a good one, and the data says it is, a multiverse is all but inevitable. You may not like it, and you really may not like how some physicists abuse the idea, but until a better, viable alternative to inflation comes around, the multiverse is very much here to stay. Now, at least, you understand why.

Ethan Siegel , “This is why physicists suspect the Multiverse very likely exists” at Big Think (December 30, 2021)

But Siegel makes it sound like physics, which is certainly a feat.

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How do we distinguish between science and pseudoscience?

Sure hard to tell a lot of the time:

Demarcation is built into our funding systems. Applicants need to present their own work as superior to those of wrong-headed competitors, and the panels that evaluate the grants must always reject a large number of proposals as less worthy than the few they endorse. Limited funds set up a ruthless machine for discarding scientific claims, some of which might end up on the fringe. Studying the category of pseudoscience thus yields some insights into how contemporary science works.

The gray area is produced by the fact that almost every significant new scientific claim can potentially be the subject of controversy, the fuel that powers the cycles of credit and reputation. But not all discarded doctrines experience the same fate. Even in a single domain—the scientific properties of water—some of the losers of controversies end up simply as yesterday’s news, sincere science that happened to be mistaken, while others are branded as ignominious and take up residence on the fringes of knowledge.

Michael D. Gordin, “What belongs in the “gray area” between science and pseudoscience?” at Big Think (December 27, 2021)

The link takes you to an excerpt from On the Fringe by Michael D. Gordin (Oxford University Press, 2021).

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Does philosophy make better scientists?

Probably but let’s hear it from one:

Philosophy has expanded my critical and creative thinking. Philosophical arguments often lead to imaginative edge cases and a dive into hypotheticals, which I frequently find creatively stimulating. For my philosophy thesis, for example, I wrote about the metaphysics of identity, the Ship of Theseus (a thought experiment that questions whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object), general relativity and some of the philosophical implications of time travel.

Thinking creatively while maintaining a critical and methodical approach carried over into my research. For example, studying instrumentalism — the philosophical idea that science does not uncover fundamental truths about the world, but merely provides us with tools to help us navigate it — helped me to adopt a more fluid approach to research and look for useful tools wherever I could find them. One thing I’ve done is to repurpose ‘contamination’ in an organism’s sequencing data so that I could look for viruses in its blood.

I also learnt logic. Most of us have a foundational understanding in this area — but, as a philosophy student, I was required to take a structured course in logic. At the start, it was like taking a class in brain-teaser puzzles: A∨B is true if both A and B are true; A∧B is true if either A or B is true.

Rasha Shraim, “” at How philosophy is making me a better scientist Nature (April 23, 2021)

We have less to fear from people ranting from podiums if we keep those things in mind.

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If math is a reality, atheism is dead

This from ScienceAlert:

Earlier this year, researchers discovered what they described as a previously unknown law of nature: a growth pattern which describes how pointed shapes form again and again in nature – from shark teeth and spider fangs to bird beaks and dinosaur horns.

“The diversity of animals, and even plants, that follow this rule is staggering,” evolutionary biologist Alistair Evans from Monash University in Australia said at the time they discovered the mathematical formula, dubbed the ‘power cascade’.

“We found it almost everywhere we looked across the kingdoms of life – in living animals, and those extinct for millions of years.”

Back in 2015, scientists were also delighted to find a classic formula for Pi – the ever-constant ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter – lurking in hydrogen atoms.

In a roundabout way, that discovery leads us back to the idea that mathematics provides a structural framework for the physical world. It’s an interesting idea to entertain – so long as your head doesn’t explode.

Claire Watson, “What if Math Is a Fundamental Part of Nature, Not Something Humans Came Up With?” at ScienceAlert (January 2, 2022)

No head explode. We live in a designed universe. Math proves it.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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A teenager does a good job of explaining the existence of God.

If it weren’t for God, you would not know anything at all.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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We’ve all heard about the “fact-checking” nonsense but…

Legacy media want us to believe their crap because it has been “fact-checked”

From O’Leary for News: I dove out the window of the media bus on “fact-checking” many years ago when a “fact check” revealed that late-aborted babies would have died anyway if no one did anything to help them so abortion of viable babies and leaving them to die in soiled utility rooms wasn’t really any big deal…

(I had met a nurse for whom dying babies were the last contact with fellow humans. No one else would touch them in the “soiled utility room” in which — as “medical waste” — they were left to die. She risked her career to hold them while they were dying. She refused to treat them like the garbage they were consigned to.)

Oh, and much later the Babylon Bee got “fact-checked” for an obviously satirical story in which socialist US representative in Congress was supposed to have claimed on The Price Is Right that “everything is free.” Everyone knew it was satire so why fact check it?

That twigged me: Fact-checking merely amounts to ensuring that media are toeing the Correct line. Nothing to do with facts as such, like the nurse risking her career to hold the dying baby.

Now this:

We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ, one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals. We are writing to raise serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook/Meta.

In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.

The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.[1]

But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.[2]

Hey, guys, trust the Science !

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Water bears (tardigrades) create a puzzle re evolution of walking

Explained here:

When they were just strolling around, the water bears generally moved at a rate of about half a body length per second, increasing to two body lengths per second when they loped at full throttle. The team was surprised to note that the water bears did not have distinct gaits for each speed, like horses as they transition from a walk to a gallop. Rather, their locomotion closely resembled that of insects and arthropods, scurrying along faster and faster with no change to the basic step pattern.

Specifically, as the tardigrades sped up, they would transition between having five legs on the ground, then four legs on the ground, then three legs on the ground—just like insects and arthropods, despite a 20-million-year evolutionary gap between them. “What that means is that despite having completely different body structures, body sizes, and environments that they’re moving through, there’s something about this particular coordination scheme that’s efficient across all of these conditions,” Nirody told Live Science.

There are two leading hypotheses for why this might be the case. Perhaps water bears, insects and arthropods share common ancestors that had a common neural circuit. Alternatively, the organisms may have evolved this scurrying gait independently through natural selection.

“If there is some ancestral neural system that controls all of panarthropod walking, we have a lot to learn,” said Nirody. “On the other hand, if arthropods and tardigrades converged upon this strategy independently, then there’s much to be said about what makes this strategy so palatable for species in different environments.”

Jennifer Ouellette, “Tiny tardigrades walk like insects 500,000 times their size” at Ars Technica (December 28, 2021)

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Casey Luskin, geologist, doesn’t make nice with Darwinians

In recent years, the ever-compliant US evangelicals have been making nice with the Darwinians* (nature read in tooth and claw, and all that). Luskin did not get the memo.

In the field, he tells the story, straight up, as this interview illustrates.

*Yer news hack became aware of all that when driving down from Canada to a conference at Cornell U in late 2011.

The pro-Darwin crap in a major evangelical magazine, which the driver handed me (a mag for which I had written), was unbelievable.

I wrote to the editor and received the prim message that if I were a better person, I would understand.

Yer news hack is still not a better person. I do not understand. And I still do not want anything to do with Racism III.

Happy New Year, everybody.

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Casey Luskin, paleontologist, doesn’t make nice with Darwinians

In recent years, the ever-compliant US evangelicals have been making nice with the Darwinians* (nature read in tooth and claw, and all that). Luskin did not get the memo.

In the field, he tells the story, straight up, as this interview illustrates.

*Yer news hack became aware of all that when driving down from Canada to a conference at Cornell U in late 2011.

The pro-Darwin crap in a major evangelical magazine, which the driver handed me (a mag for which I had written), was unbelievable.

I wrote to the editor and received the prim message that if I were a better person, I would understand.

Yer news hack is still not a better person. I do not understand. And I still do not want anything to do with Racism III.

Happy New Year, everybody.

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Well, if the universe is actually a fractal, how can we not live in a designed universe?

The obvious deduction no one wants to deduce:

People have been working to measure the fractal dimension of the Universe for more than three decades now, attempting to decipher whether it can be well described by one simple fractal parameter or whether multiple ones are required. The nearby Universe is not a good place to measure this, as dark energy has already reared its head for the past 6 billion years.

But if we look at objects that are at a redshift of ~2 or greater, we’re looking back in time to an era where dark energy was insignificant: the perfect laboratory for studying just what type of self-similar properties the Universe had. With a new generation of ground-based and space-based observatories coming online over the next few years, we’ll finally get the comparison between theory and observation that we’ve always wanted. The Universe isn’t a true fractal, but even in the realms where it’s only approximately a fractal, there are still some compelling cosmic lessons just waiting to be learned.

Ethan Siegel, “Is the universe actually a fractal?” at Big Think (December 28, 2021)

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