Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 123

Why people don’t trust science any more

As we enter the new year, full of cranks, quacks, and crackpots with huge power, here is a powerful statement on why people don’t trust Big Science any more (and shouldn’t):

You’re struggling to understand why some people are vaccine hesitant, TRIGGERnometry co-host Konstantin Kisin explains.

There are restrictions on watching this at YouTube – all the more reason to watch it or subscribe to any alternative medium that hosts it.

No conspiracy theories — just an iteration of what we all know has really happened.

Yer news hack, (O’Leary for News), got wiser when they closed the churches but kept the bars open in her own city.

Government Covid police have been raising merry hay with O’Leary’s own church, with no basis in fact.

Result: Old ladies kneeling in the frozen gravel to receive the sacrament because we were locked out of the building (to “protect” us) and couldn’t even legally use the washrooms.

Something’s gotta give. Better it be government.

Science, as traditionally understood, is not at risk here. Masses of government/media science is at risk. What use is it all, really?

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Woke wars: When psychology blew clear from science

People usually find out accidentally when the Woke have moved in. They don’t believe the warnings. But then they discover how deep it is:

My concern is that the APA no longer functions as an organization dedicated to science and good clinical practice. As a professional guild, perhaps it never did, but I believe it is now advancing causes that are actively harmful and I can no longer be a part of it.

I originally became engaged with the APA in a futile effort to “fix from within.” Much of this focused on the APA’s deeply misleading policy statements in my own area of research: violence in video games. The APA maintains a policy statement linking such games to aggression, despite over 200 scholars asking them to avoid making such statements, a reanalysis of the meta-study on which the policy was based finding it to be deeply flawed, and the APA’s own Society for Media and Technology asking them to retract it. Other policy statements related to research areas I’m familiar with such as spanking appear to be similarly flawed, overstating certainty of harmful effects.

In the clinical realm, the APA’s advice has similarly been questionable. A 2017 recommendation highlighted Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT; in which I am myself primarily trained) as treatment of choice for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It remains in effect despite several meta-analyses subsequently finding CBT has little benefit over other therapies. More controversial were practice guidelines for men and boys which drew deeply from feminist theories, dwelled on topics of patriarchy, intersectionality, and privilege, and arguably disparaged men and families from traditional backgrounds. This guideline is actively harmful to the degree it both misguides therapy in favor of an ideological worldview and likely discourages men and families from more traditional backgrounds from seeking therapy.

Christopher J. Ferguson, “My APA Resignation” at Quillette (December 31, 2021)

In so many disciplines, it is coming down to: Do you want to be science or Woke?

Prediction: Most Big Science will buckle and agree to be Woke in defiance of fact. Real science will increasingly depend on the rebellious outliers. Happened before.

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Jerry Coyne defends “Darwin’s heir” from accusations of racism

Unfocused claims of “racism” are a familiar Woke tactic for destroying careers and reputations and they are only beginning to hit Darwinians, so now we read:

Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist.

It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” I usually don’t question someone because of their credentials, but this piece is so stupid, so arrantly ignorant of Wilson’s work, that I can attribute its content only to a combination of ignorance (perhaps deliberate) or a woke desire to take down someone as a racist who wasn’t a racist. Or both.

In fact, the piece below could have been written by any social-justice ideologue, for its real aim is more than smearing Wilson; it;s also to change the nature of science

Jerry Coyne, “Scientific American does an asinine hit job on E. O. Wilson, calling him a racist” at Why Evolution Is True (December 30, 2021)

From the piece:

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.

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

Sharp intake of breath here. Why didn’t anyone see all that before? Don’t say we didn’t warn them. All we got for our trouble was blather about Darwin opposing slavery, as if that were difficult when slavery had been abolished throughout the British Empire for most of his life. Imagine comparing Darwin to the brave white Americans who helped slaves escape despite the Fugitive Slave Laws!

But Coyne is right in thinking that the ultimate Woke goal is that “any social-justice ideologue” will rule over scientists:

I really can’t go on, except to add two things. First, McLemore herself is being unscientific in accusing “problematic” Ed Wilson of racism without mentioning one bit of evidence. And MENDEL??? There is no scholarship involved in this piece, and, in the end defaming Wilson seems like merely an excuse for McLemore to vent her ill-considered antiracist views of science on the readers of Scientific American.

Finally, the really problematic people today are not Ed Wilson; they are people like McLemore herself, who simply ignores evidence, makes misleading statements about scientists, and accuses science of being structurally racist in a way for which only she knows the cure. It is people like her who are not only defacing and distorting history, but trying to change the face of science from being a set of tools to investigate nature into a set of ideological practices to achieve Social Justice.

Jerry Coyne, “Scientific American does an asinine hit job on E. O. Wilson, calling him a racist” at Why Evolution Is True (December 30, 2021)

Yes, Jerry. Exactly.

Piano, piano, piano drop head. And you helped set the tone.

Sadly, the readers of Scientific American may be fighting tooth and claw to be first to lap it all up.

Some of us predict that most Darwinians will roll over and beg. They don’t really believe in truth anyway, not in an ultimate sense. They believe in what survives. And Woke is thriving just now compared with truth.

We’d like to be wrong. But let’s see.

You may also wish to read: “Darwin’s heir” E. O. Wilson remembered for ants; sociobiology is sidelined. Had Wilson’s career begun fifty years later, it would have been quickly and fatally Woked.

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Understanding the engineering of living systems requires acceptance of the design of life

A recent article at Evolution News featured three major advances for intelligent design: Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis, the “waiting times” paper in Journal of Theoretic Biology, and the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS)

Now, on that last point:

Conference on Engineering in Living System

A third highlight has been the impact of the Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS). Biologists, engineers, and other academics convened to examine how employing engineering principles to the study of biology yields deeper insight into the organization and operations of living systems. Presenters addressed the revolution occurring in systems biology, which resulted from systems engineers partnering with biologists in their research. The engineers’ experience and insights have forced evolutionary assumptions to be supplanted by design-based assumptions, language, and methods (here, here, here).

Systems biologists increasingly recognize that they must incorporate the core intelligent design concepts into their analyses, albeit using different language, to advance their understanding of biological systems. Michael Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity is implicit in the tenet of holism. William Dembski’s formulation of specified complexity encompasses biologists’ understanding of functional modules. And more generally, the heuristic of intelligent design is simply a more general rubric for the application of engineering principles to the study of life.

Speakers described how engineering-based models better explain adaptation than natural selection (here,here, here, here). And they detailed how the predictions of these models are being confirmed by a torrent of recent research on adaptation in diverse species, including model organisms (here, here, here). In addition, presentations demonstrated the explanatory power of applying the design models to such topics as ecological interactions and molecular machines.

The ripple effects of the conference will continue for years to come. Participants with training in different engineering domains have partnered with biologists to apply their expertise to specific biological systems to further reveal their underlying design logic. We expect the projects to generate publications in leading journals over the next few years that should significantly advance biologists’ understanding of life. We will not immediately advertise the progress of the research teams to protect the careers of the investigators, but over the long term their work will showcase the necessity of design-based approaches.

Brian Miller, “The Year in Review:” at Evolution News and Science Today (December 28, 2021)

After a while, expecting randomness to develop exquisite machinery within a fixed time frame becomes ridiculous. The big question is, how much more might we learn if we assume it isn’t random?

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At Mind Matters News: New AI learns to simulate common sense

The GPT-3 program can get through grammatical issues on which others stumble, says Robert J. Marks. It is a simulation because the AI can perform the task but does not “understand” what the concepts mean:

The classic test for AI common sense is resolution of Winograd schema. Winograd schema contain vague, ambiguous pronouns. Common sense resolves the ambiguity. An example is:

“John is afraid to get in a fight with Bob because he is so tall, muscular and ill-tempered.”

Does the vague pronoun “he” refer to John or Bob? Common sense says Bob is the tough guy and John is the scared dude. Another Winograd schema example is

“John did not ask Bob to join him in prayer because he was an atheist.”

Common sense says that Bob was the atheist. Solving Winograd schema requires common sense.

Can AI parse these and other Winograd schema to identify the person behind the vague pronoun? Until recently, Winograd schema AI contests resulted in a per cent accuracy not much better than a coin flip. But AI innovators, led by OpenAI’s amazing GPT3, program are scoring upwards of 90% accuracy. In testing, care was taken to avoid Winograd schema whose resolution could be googled. These results are remarkable.

Robert J. Marks, “New: AI learns to simulate common sense” at Mind Matters News (December 30, 2021)

That doesn’t mean that AI has common sense. It means that clever programming can crack the problem of the correct reference back to a previous subject.

Takehome: Unlike understanding, creativity and sentience, common sense could be computable. There is no indication that common sense is non-algorithmic.

You may also wish to read: What did the computer learn in the Chinese Room? Nothing. Computers don’t “understand” things and they can’t handle ambiguity, says Robert J. Marks. Larry L. Linenschmidt interviews Robert J. Marks on the difference between performing a task and understanding the task, as explained in philosopher John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment.

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Will science media’s slow descent into the Woke crazy empower competition?

Cameron English

Covered at American Council on Science and Health:

Last week I highlighted four disturbing trends in science journalism that are destroying the public’s trust in mainstream academic and public health institutions. It’s time to add a fifth bromide to the list: science publications that prize “social justice” activism over evidence-based analysis.

Scientific American may be the worst offender in this respect, publishing groundless opinion pieces such as “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” and “Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past.” Biologist Jerry Coyne and science writer Michael Shermer have taken apart both articles in great detail, but Scientific American hasn’t stopped there. The magazine’s coverage of crop biotechnology has tragically devolved into social justice foolishness as well.

On December 27th, SciAm published a story so ridiculous it could have been written by a Greenpeace activist: “How Biotech Crops Can Crash—and Still Never Fail.” American Council on Science and Health (December 29, 2021)

Cameron English, “‘Woke’ Scientific American Goes Anti-GMO” at American Cou

Yes, English notes that Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne denounced the unhinged claim in a Scientific American op-ed earlier this year that creationism was a form of white supremacy: “Sure, there may be racists among creationists—there has to be given the connection between Evangelical Christianity and the South—but you’d have to essentially make things up to argue that creationism comes from white supremacy and that its connection with religion is ‘a lie.’”

Okay. But — Cameron, Jerry, are you listening?: Just making things up and enforcing belief in their fantasy is a privilege the Woke give themselves. As we enter the new year, we need to soberly assess the fact that Wokeness is claiming some science media the way cancer claims a body.

On the bright side: In a still-free society, Wokeness will create a space for a new popular science magazine. Lots of Woke-weary folk who value evidence over ideology would likely support it. That magazine should allow evidence-based criticism of Darwinian theory — which is treated with considerable skepticism anyway once you get outside the venue of the very people who blew up SciAm with their Wokeness.

Hey! We have stories. No rants, no picket signs. Lots of stories.

You may also wish to read: Cameron’s Four awful science journalism trends that should die.

Yer news hack (O’Leary for News) is so old that she remembers when science journalists started to denounce the idea of listening to both sides, some time early in the millennium. And here we are today…

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100 million years before the dinosaurs, the biggest known bug

The giant millipede was a fluke discovery in northern England:

The fossilized remains of the creature, named Arthropleura, dated from the Carboniferous Period about 326 million years ago. That’s over 100 million years before the rise of the dinosaurs.

When alive, the creature was estimated to have been 55 centimeters (22 inches) wide and up to 2.63 meters (8.6 feet) in length, weighing 50 kilograms (110 pounds). That would make it the largest-known invertebrate of all time — larger than ancient sea scorpions that previously held this title, the statement said. Invertebrates are animals with no backbone.

Katie Hunt, “Fossil of a giant millipede reveals ‘the biggest bug that ever lived’” at CNN

It took four paleontologists to carry the fossil up the cliff.

Imaginative but gives the basic idea:

A fluke discovery. And we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the remarkable stuff that’s out there.

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When fossil hunters get it wrong or are stumped…

It’s a tricky business and ScienceAlert offers some famous examples, including Dickinsonia:

Dickinsonia has had one long identity crisis since it was first described in 1947. It hails from the Ediacaran era, prior to the Cambrian, before the emergence of the major phyla we know today. The Ediacaran biota were mostly soft-bodied organisms, and very few of them resemble any living or extinct organism. So they’ve been very hard to contextualize.

Dickinsonia looks a lot like a strangely ribbed oval, and it could be anything, really. On its discovery, it was classified as a type of jellyfish. Scientists have also thought it could be a worm, a polyp, or a mushroom or lichen. It’s even been proposed that Dickinsonia belonged to some unknown, extinct kingdom that was neither animal, plant, nor fungus.

A study a few years ago into the way the organism grew seems to have solved it. According to the scientists’ analysis, Dickinsonia is an animal, belonging either to Placazoa, which are among the simplest of animal organisms, or Eumetazoa, which are a step up from sponges.

Michelle Starr, “The Famous Fossils Scientists Got Incredibly Wrong” at ScienceAlert (December 28, 2021)

Gunter Bechly would take issue with the contention that Dickinsonia is an animal. See: Gunter Bechly: Dickinsonia Is NOT Likely An Animal Dickinsonia does not seem to have the bilateral symmetry of an animal. Also, some life forms other than animals produce cholesterol, Bechly says.

Well, if Dickinsonia doesn’t have bilateral symmetry, maybe “animal” is a flag of convenience? Call it an animal and close the file? These stories remind us why dogmatism is not an asset in science.

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Michael Egnor at Mind Matters News: Political website’s Christmas gift to readers: promoting abortion

Michael Egnor tells us, FiveThirtyEight asked readers to share their abortion stories and got something it hadn’t bargained on: Many were glad it didn’t happen. He also offers,

I do a fair amount of prenatal counseling. While I always tell the families the truth about their baby’s prognosis, most of the patients I evaluate are essentially normal babies who have prenatal ultrasound/MRI findings that show minor brain variants that don’t impact their lives. Even for children with serious diagnoses, the outlook is often much better than the abortion-happy medical profession tells families in crisis.

Just recently, I saw a 10 year old girl in the office for whom I’ve cared since she was in the womb. When her spina bifida was diagnosed by prenatal testing, the doctor basically insisted that she be aborted. It was relatively late in the pregnancy, and the doctor gave them the name of George Tiller, a notorious late-term abortionist in Kansas who aborted babies at an age when even the most callous of other abortionists refuse to kill. Her family declined, and sought me out as a second opinion. I told them the truth about their daughter’s prognosis — which was guarded but by no means hopeless.

As it turned out, I was wrong. She did indeed have spina bifida and I operated on her the day she was born. But she has done much better than any of us even dreamed. She walks, runs, and loves to dance. She is bright and charming, and is the love and light of her mom, dad, and her doting older brothers. I give talks to medical professionals about neurosurgical prenatal diagnoses and at the end of the talks I show a video clip of her dancing.

Shame on FiveThirtyEight for publishing this abortion endorsement on Christmas Day of all days.

News, “Political website’s Christmas gift to readers: promoting abortion” at Mind Matters News (December 29, 2021)

Takehome: I am a pediatric neurosurgeon, and every day I treat kids (and adults) who were prime candidates for abortion, but by the grace of God escaped the abortionist.

You may also wish to read: Do babies really feel pain before they are self-aware? Michael Egnor discusses the fact that the thalamus, deep in the brain, creates pain. The cortex moderates it. Thus, juveniles may suffer more. Jonathan Wells recalls, from when he was a lab technologist, how very premature infants would scream when he took a drop of blood for tests.

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Why is it claimed that the Neanderthals were “not fully human”?

In a Smithsonian Magazine yearender offering seven new things we are thought to have learned about human evolution in 2021, we read:

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa and eventually made it to every corner of the world. That is not news. However, we are still understanding how and when the earliest human migrations occurred. We also know that our ancestors interacted with other species of humans at the time, including Neanderthals, based on genetic evidence of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans alive today—an average of 1.9 percent in Europeans.

Remains of some of the earliest humans in Europe were described this year by multiple teams, except they were not fully human. All three of the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe exhibit evidence of Neanderthal interbreeding (admixture) in their recent genealogical past. In April, Kay Prüfer and a team from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History described a human skull from Zlatý kůň, Czechia, dating to around 45,000 years old. This skull contains roughly 3.2 percent Neanderthal DNA in the highly variable regions of the genome, comparable with other humans from around that time. Interestingly, some of these regions indicating Neanderthal admixture were not the same as modern humans, and this individual is not directly ancestral to any population of modern humans, meaning they belonged to a population that has no living descendants. [emphasis added]

Briana Pobiner and Ryan McRae, “Seven New Things We Learned About Human Evolution in 2021” at Smithsonian Magazine (December 28, 2021)

In the Big Evolution Narrative, we need the Neanderthals to both be capable of living and producing children with earlier humans but “not fully human.” What function does this combo serve in the story? What if someone tried applying the same criterion to a group today?

You may also wish to read: Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents

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