Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 124

Why we shouldn’t “follow the science”

A heath care tech researcher explains, using ex-New York governor Andrew Cuomo as a stellar example:

The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.

Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”

Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries…

During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.” For what it’s worth, chainsaws don’t care what you believe, either.

Robert F. Graboyes, “Year-End Musings on COVID, Science, and Chainsaws” at [InsideSources] (December 26, 2021)

Science is a human endeavor. Nothing about science causes it to be trustworthy, even with good evidence available, apart from intelligence and character.

You may also wish to read:

Explosive new information about New York’s mass COVID deaths In a video conference, perhaps accidentally, a health official blurted out the deadly policy and the reasoning behind it. Fearing political pushback, New York officials took steps to conceal from the federal government the policy that doomed thousands of seniors.

and

Why did New York State issue a policy that killed elderly patients during the pandemic? For all practical purposes, the government directive was essentially an order to spread COVID to people in nursing homes.
This is the worst thing medical authorities have done in the US since the Tuskegee scandal, when black Americans were not given penicillin to treat disease. (Michael Egnor)

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Jerry Coyne on the war on math, science, in New Zealand – and falling scores

The Woke, as it happens, are not friends of science:

Why should we care about the performance of New Zealand’s primary- and secondary-school students, and what’s happening with it over time? For me, it’s the science that’s important, but science, reading, and math show the same trend over the last fifteen years. Despite a rise in spending per pupil over the last 25 years, performance in these three areas in New Zealand has declined, both absolutely and in comparison to the countries like England, Australia, the U.S., Canada, and Singapore—countries regarded as educational competitors with (and comparable to) New Zealand.

Why does this matter? For science, at least, as I’ve written repeatedly, there’s a big-time initiative in New Zealand to have mātauranga Māori, or Māori “ways of knowing”, taught as coequal to modern science in the science classroom. This initiative, propelled by the desire to buttress an oppressed minority (the native Māori), has good intentions behind it—to get more Māori interested in science—but is a practical disaster. That’s because mātauranga Māori is not only “traditional practical knowledge” (e.g., navigation, growing crops, catching fish), which can be considered “science construed broadly” (but do you need to teach this in science class?) but, worse, a mixture of legends, myths, morality, and philosophy, some of which is palpably false. Much of it is simply not science as the modern world knows it.

Jerry Coyne, “Performance of New Zealand students in math, science, and reading falls dramatically in last two decades” at Why Evolution Is True (December 27, 2021)

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Coyne doesn’t dispute teaching Indigenous beliefs in a cultural class. But he may be at a major disadvantage because – if many years of his blogging are any guide – he wants science taught as a branch of naturalist atheism. Thus, the question arises, why shouldn’t we teach naturalist atheism too as an outcropping of Western culture?

We will need a philosophy of science teaching that is focused on followng theevidence wherever it leads and is not so wholly wedded to one point of view.

You may also wish to read: Maori Creationism Is Okay In New Zealand Schools; Objectors Could Be Booted From NZ’s Royal Society.

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At Mind Matters News: Are the brain cells in a dish that learned Pong conscious?

Eric Holloway: Human-derived organoids learned faster than AI and always outperformed mouse-derived organoids in terms of volley length, raising troubling questions:

A couple other interesting results from the research. First, human-derived organoids always outperform mouse-derived organoids in terms of volley length. Second, even without negative feedback, when the paddle missed the pong ball, the organoids still learn to increase volley length.

The scientists hypothesize that this is because long volleys are more predictable than the random resets generated when the paddle misses the pong ball.

Overall, fascinating research. But, it raises the troubling question, are these brains conscious? The brains certainly are learning, and insofar as the brain has to be conscious in order to learn, then this implies the brains are indeed conscious. And what if this technology becomes mainstream and we have embedded human brains powering our home appliances?

Eric Holloway, “Are the brain cells in a dish that learned Pong conscious?” at Mind Matters News ()December 27, 2021)

Takehome: The ethical dimension of the organoid research — largely ignored in the news — is the reverse light it casts on the value of human life. A number of organoid experiments do use human embryonic stem cells. If we are worried about the consciousness of the derived organoids, are we likewise worried about the consciousness of the beings from whom the stem cells are derived? We dehumanize them through terminology, calling them “fertilized eggs” or “blastocysts.” Yet these little collections of cells are far more likely to turn into conscious human brains than the organoids in the scientific experiments.

You may also wish to read: University of Chicago biochemist: All living cells are cognitive. James Shapiro’s recent paper points out, with examples, that bacteria meet the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “cognitive.” Future debates over origins of intelligence, consciousness, etc., may mainly feature panpsychists vs. theists rather than materialists vs. theists.

Note: Because the organoids are described as a Matrix theme in some quarters, you may also wish to read: The Matrix Resurrections: The studio is making us do this! Mark Zuckerberg, eat your heart out. If there is one word to describe this movie, that word is Meta. Agent Smith — now a cooperate bigwig — informs Neo that they are making the Matrix Trilogy, now a video game, into a new franchise, with or without his consent. (Gary Varner)

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“Darwin’s heir” E. O. Wilson remembered for ants; his sociobiology is sidelined

Edward O. Wilson, pictured in 2012, was considered the world’s leading expert on ants.

In newspaper work, this is called a “buried lede”:

Edward. O. Wilson, the trailblazing US scientist, professor and author whose study of insects and clarion call to protect Earth earned him the nickname “Darwin’s natural heir,” has died at age 92.

Wilson, whose death was announced Monday by his foundation, was an award-winning biologist and longtime Harvard University research professor, considered the world’s leading authority on ants and their behavior…

But his trailblazing work was not without controversy. In much of his 1975 book “Sociobiology,” he laid out his theory of animal behavior, which earned high praise from fellow scientists.

In the final chapter, though, Wilson caused an uproar by proposing that human behavior is largely genetically based, and that humans acquire a predisposition to such matters as the division of labor between genders, tribalism, male dominance and parental-child bonding.

News, “Scientist E.O. Wilson, dubbed modern-day Darwin, dead at 92” at Phys.org (December 27, 2021)

Had Wilson’s career begun fifty years later, it would have been quickly and fatally Woked.

In his book, The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, Richard Weikart tackles the metaphysical naturalism part:

Wilson believes that everything about humans—behavior, morality, and even religion—is ultimately explicable as the result of completely material processes. Even our most deeply held beliefs are simply products of mindless evolutionary processes inscribed on our gray matter: “Perhaps, as I believe, it [religion] can all eventually be explained as brain circuitry and deep, genetic history.”[8] Wilson admits that he is a reductionist, and he exudes optimism that scientists will someday explain everything about human behavior. In Consilience (1998), which is a plea to bring the social and human sciences completely under the sway of natural science, he asks, “Given that human action comprises events of physical causation, why should the social sciences and humanities be impervious to consilience with the natural sciences?” Wilson claims that ultimately every phenomena in the cosmos can be reduced to physical laws, so the human mind is simply physical brain activity, and humans have no free will.[9]

In 2009, on the bicentennial of Darwin’s birthday and the sesquicentennial of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Wilson pronounced Darwin’s Origin of Species the most important book ever written, because for the first time it provided us an understanding of humanity based on science rather than religion. Darwin’s theory, according to Wilson, forms “the best foundation for human self-understanding and the philosophical guide for human action.” Apparently, Wilson has little regard for the is-ought divide. Further, he argues that all organic processes—and here he clearly includes human behavior—are ultimately reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. For Wilson evolution has clearly replaced religion as the source of answers about the purpose and destiny of life. He asserted, “The great questions—“Who are we?” “Where did we come from?” and “Why are we here?”—can be answered only, if ever, in the light of scientifically based evolutionary thought.” What Wilson does not explain is why these questions have any importance if we are nothing more than the result of mindless material processes.[10]

[8] Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 261.

[9] Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), ch. 6, quote at 11; see also E. O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2012), 287-88.

[10] E. O. Wilson, “Foreword,” in Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), vii-viii. Wilson elaborates on these questions further in The Social Conquest of the Earth (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2012).

Perhaps it was best for Wilson that he did not live to see pure naturalist atheism start to wither before panpsychism.

See, for example, University of Chicago biochemist: All living cells are cognitive. James Shapiro’s recent paper points out, with examples, that bacteria meet the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “cognitive.” Future debates over origins of intelligence, consciousness, etc., may mainly feature panpsychists vs. theists rather than materialists vs. theists.

Note: There was also the curious a group selection affair.

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At Mind Matters News: Does superdeterminism resolve dilemmas around free will?

The idea seems to be trending in cosmology and it might offer a way out of some dilemmas, according to Michael Egnor:

Superdeterminism is the view that the outcomes of all possibilities — both inanimate nature and the human mind — are “baked in” to nature itself. There are two ways of understanding what that means. The first way is to see nature as a mindless machine running like clockwork without free will. As I’ve said, such a view is incompatible with human reason.

However there is another way to understand how the outcomes of all possibilities in nature are baked into nature itself. This involves the concept of a “block” universe and the Augustinian understanding of nature as a thought in God’s mind.

In general relativity, the universe is understood as a four-dimensional space-time manifold consisting of three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. From this perspective, the passage of time can be understood as a movement through the four space-time dimensions along what physicists call a world-line. The universe itself from its beginning to end can be understood as a four-dimensional block that includes time but is not in time itself. It is in this timeless block that Superdeterminism can be true without denying free will and without viewing the universe as a mindless machine.

Michael Egnor, “Does superdeterminism resolve dilemmas around free will?” at Mind Matters News (December 26, 2021)

Takehome: Michael Egnor: If we lack free will, we have no justification whatsoever to even believe that we lack free will. In a timeless block however, the future exists simultaneously with the past and present — but that does not mean that the future determines the past and present.

Mind Matters News offers a number of articles on free will by neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor including

Can physics prove there is no free will? No, but it can make physicists incoherent when they write about free will. It’s hilarious. Sabine Hossenfelder misses the irony that she insists that people “change their minds” by accepting her assertion that they… can’t change their minds.

Does “alien hand syndrome” show that we don’t really have free will? One woman’s left hand seemed to have a mind of its own. Did it? Alien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t.

But is determinism true? Does science show that we fated to want whatever we want? Modern science—both theoretical and experimental—strongly supports the reality of free will.

How can mere products of nature have free will? Materialists don’t like the outcome of their philosophy but twisting logic won’t change it

Does brain stimulation research challenge free will? If we can be forced to want something, is the will still free?

Is free will a dangerous myth? The denial of free will is a much more dangerous myth

Also: Do quasars provide evidence for free will? Possibly. They certainly rule out experimenter interference.

and

Can free will even be an illusion? Michael Egnor reiterates the freeing implications of quantum indeterminacy

Also, by Baylor University’s Robert J. Marks: Quantum randomness gives nature free will Whether or not quantum randomness explains how our brains work, it may help us create unbreakable encryption codes

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A lot of people are getting right what Dawkins got wrong

The interesting thing is that the blind, pitiless indifference thing isn’t selling as well as it used to:

Famed atheist advocate Richard Dawkins argues that the universe is exactly what should be expected if it is the product of the “blind, pitiless indifference” of purely materialistic forces operating without purpose or plan.

If that vision of the universe and the existence of human beings is accurate, then nobody has anything to look forward to other than living some unknown number of years in which it makes zero difference whether those years are marked by pain, suffering, joy or contentment. After that …. an eternity of …. nothingness.

News, “THINK ABOUT THIS: Three Huge Challenges to Scientific Atheism” at HillFaith

HillFaith was introducing Steve Meyer’s appearance on Prager U’s channel:

Is there any meaning to life? Or is life nothing more than a cosmic accident? Scientific atheists claim the latter, but ironically, it’s science itself that suggests the former.

Meyer’s new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, is clearly having an impact.

Get this: 740,093 views Premiered Dec 20, 2021 A lot of people are getting right what Dawkins got wrong.

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Could newly hatched pterosaurs fly?

[image error]The image shows a flock Pterodaustro guinazui/Dr Mark Witton

This story, from last July, is said to be trending at Eurelert:

In the study, published in Scientific Reports, the researchers modelled the flying abilities of hatchlings using previously obtained wing measurements from four established hatchling and embryo fossils from two pterosaur species, Pterodaustro guinazui and Sinopterus dongi. They also compared these wing measurements with those of adults from the same species and compared the strength of the humerus bone, which forms part of the wing, of three hatchlings with those of 22 adult pterosaurs.

Study co-author Dr Mark Witton from the University of Portsmouth said: “Although we’ve known about pterosaurs for over two centuries, we’ve only had fossils of their embryos and hatchlings since 2004. We’re still trying to understand the early stages of life in these animals. One discussion has centred around whether pterosaurs could fly as hatchlings or, like the vast majority of birds and bats, they had to grow a little before they could take wing.

“We found that these tiny animals – with 25 cm wingspans and bodies that could neatly fit in your hand – were very strong, capable fliers. Their bones were strong enough to sustain flapping and take-off, and their wings were ideally shaped for powered (as opposed to gliding) flight. However, they would not have flown exactly like their parents simply because they were so much smaller: flight capabilities are strongly influenced by size and mass, and so pterosaur hatchlings, being hundreds of times smaller than their parents, were likely slower, more agile fliers than the wide-ranging, but less manoeuvrable adults.”

University of Portsmouth, “Newly-hatched pterosaurs may have been able to fly” at Eurekalert (July 22, 2021)

The big mystery isn’t why early, easy escape would be an advantage but why birds and bats never found a way to do it. But we shall see.

The paper is open access.

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At National Geographic: A million to one odds that the universe’s expansion mystery is a statistical fluke

Hubble is still in business and provides a mystery that maybe James Webb can help with:

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.

Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.

Michael Greshko, “The universe is expanding faster than it should be” at National Geographic December 17, 2021

It’ll be no surprise if James Webb creates bigger mysteries than Hubble as well as solving some.

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The James Webb Telescope launched today, to study primordial galaxies

And many other secrets of the universe:

NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope on Saturday, after years of delays and budget hikes.

Webb is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope and expected to revolutionize astronomy.

The telescope must first unfold itself in space, travel 1 million miles, and calibrate its instruments.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen, “NASA launches its long-awaited $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, kicking off a cosmic revolution” at MSN (December 25, 2021)

The collaborative project is looking for primordial galaxies, those that existed less than 400 million years after the Big Bang, and will also conduct many other projects.

They now have new technology for studying them:

It became obvious that another, even grander, space observatory will be needed to get to those early stars and galaxies — those that had lit up the universe after hundreds of millions of years of darkness that followed the Big Bang when the expanding space was only filled with hydrogen atoms…

This missing piece of technology was infrared detectors that would be able to collect the faint light coming from those early stars and galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away.

Tereza Pultarova, “James Webb Space Telescope: The scientific mysteries no other observatory could unravel” at Space.com (December 24, 2021)

.

It is bound to shed light on many current mysteries and controversies — and to create new ones instead.

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Can giant ichthyosaur fossil shed light on whale development?

At 246 million years ago, cymbospondylus youngorum was “the size of a large sperm whale.” The en-Permian extinction is considered the worst ever. Ow, the connection to whales?

Paleontologists believe the ichthyosaurs grew exponentially within several million years, and that their growth was due in part to a massive increase in its prey, which included ammonoids and eel-like conodonts. These species’ populations boomed after a mass extinction called the end-Permian Extinction. “That’s one way this study stands out, as it allowed us to explore and gain some additional insight into body size evolution within these groups of marine tetrapods,” said Dr. Jorge Velez-Juarbe, an associate curator of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Alexandra Larkin, “Large ocean fossil discovered in Nevada could hold key to aquatic evolution” at CBS News (December 23, 2021)

Really, the only connection is that youngorum is another life form that grew very large in a comparatively short period of time. Maybe a number of unrelated examples will point to a general rule but the story doesn’t shed light on the peculiar history of whales.

The paper is open access.

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