Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 126

The Palmers’ continuing series at YouTube: Micro evolution vs Macro Evolution, Part 2

Important Note: The mutations we discuss in this session are the random mutations that Neo-Darwinists claim to be the driving force of macro-evolution. There is increasing evidence that in fact most mutations aren’t completely random, but are directed to specific areas of the genome where changes can stimulate adaptation. This is additional evidence for design, not random processes.

In Part 1, we look at what mutations are, what they can do, and how that restricts the amount of change possible in an organism. Gene sequencing now makes it possible to match adaptations to specific mutations, so in Part 2 we look at the textbook examples of microevolution in light of gene sequencing. In every example of microevolution used to support Darwinism, mutations only degraded existing genes. No new genes were created. But without new genes, Darwinism is limited to microevolution. Discussion questions

Even MORE important note: The Canadians who work here really like that bear in the picture. Okay, okay. The bear has told us to tell everyone that he is a Boss Bear and that we really like him … if we know what is good for us. He is trying to find fast food kitchen dumpsters owned by people who do not also have rifles. We explained that we don’t know anyone who has either a fast food kitchen dumpster or a rifle. We also explained that it is our moral duty to tell him that dumpster food is not altogether healthy anyway. Then we just ran…

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At Mind Matters News: Can higher dimensions help us understand biblical miracles?

We assume there are only three spatial dimensions because those are the ones we sense. Baylor computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks asks, What if there are four?:

I teach a graduate course entitled Multidimensional Signal Processing. The mathematical treatment of four, five or even an infinite number of dimensions is considered. Visualizing higher dimensions can be aided by understanding what happens in three or fewer dimensions. For example, I teach students how to visualize and play four dimensional tic-tac-toe by interpreting the game as a series of games in three dimensions…

Some Biblical miracles can be explained if there were four spatial dimensions. When the Flatlander was asked to point in the direction of UP, the best he could do was point north. You and I seem similarly constrained. When we are asked to point to a heaven in the fourth dimension, the best we can do is point up to the sky…

Extending this 2D to 3D example to 4D leads to the conclusion that if there were access to the fourth dimension, links of three dimensional chains can be separated without bending or cutting. Learning from the 2D chain, the 3D chain simply needs to be taken to the fourth dimension and separated. No saw or chain cutter is needed.

Such an event is documented in the Bible when the apostle Peter was imprisoned and chained by King Herod:

“ACTS 12: 6b-7. Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and guards in front of the door were watching over the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared and a light shone in the cell; and he struck Peter’s side and woke him up, saying, “Get up quickly.” And his chains fell off his hands.”

Was access to the fourth or higher dimension used in this miracle? Possibly. A fourth dimension explanation is certainly compelling.

Robert J. Marks, “Can higher dimensions help us understand biblical miracles? ” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Some Biblical miracles are better understood if we assume four spatial dimensions. The short novel Flatland (1884) helps us understand.

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Convergent evolution: Cricket ears turn out to be a lot like vertebrate ears

According to a recent study:

Bushcrickets, also known as katydids, are those green grasshopper-like insects that fascinate children because of their leaf-like camouflage. Using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), the European team obtained detailed images of the hearing organs of bushcrickets. The hearing organ on these orthopterans are located on the tibia just below the knee. Called the crista acoustica (CA), this organ, only 0.9 mm long, contains a series of sensory dendrites of decreasing length from the proximal to distal ends of the CA, oriented perpendicular to it. They look like piano strings, and presumably perform a similar function to the hair cells in the Organ of Corti of the mammalian cochlea. The ventral ends of the dendrites in the CA are embedded in the distal wall (DW), analogous to the basilar membrane in the cochlea. The dorsal ends of the dendrites are connected to cap cells which resemble the hair cells in vertebrate cochleae, where acoustic transduction to electric (neural) signals take place.

Other than location (in the heads of vertebrates and on the legs of insects), the functional similarities of the CA to the mammalian cochlea are striking, except that the cochlea is 40 times as long as the insect hearing organ! It’s a remarkable example of convergence already, and there is more to come.

Evolution News, “Hear This: Cricket Ears Evolved Like Vertebrate Ears” at Evolution News and Science Today (December 15, 2021)

The paper is open access.

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Owen Strachan offers some thoughts on Craig’s book on the historical Adam

Since we’re here anyway:

Adam Was the First Human and Genesis 1-11 is Not Mythical

In one of the most confusing articles I’ve read, William Lane Craig—an esteemed Christian philosopher—tells us that Adam is both historical and figurative (or metaphorical)…

Craig: When we turn to the New Testament, we find the figure of Adam widely deployed, most importantly by Paul. Many scholars have attempted to distinguish between the literary Adam and the historical Adam. The literary Adam is a character in a story, specifically the stories of Genesis 2–3. The historical Adam is the person, if such there be, who actually existed—the actual individual whom the stories are allegedly about.

Commentary: There is no such distinction in the New Testament. Every time the “figure of Adam” is “deployed” by NT authors, they are referring to the historical Adam. If you use this admittedly simple reading key, you will save yourself a great deal of confusion and the real possibility of one day investing in one of those “Faith Deconstruction Seminars” that former evangelical personalities now offer for the low, low price of $299.

Owen Strachan, “A Response to William Lane Craig on the Historical Adam” at Substack (September 22, 2021)

If William Lane Craig’s Quest of the Historical Adam. succeeded, would he recognize Adam? Hmm.

You may also wish to read: Kenneth Kemp’s review of William Lane Craig’s book on Adam and Eve. Kemp: An evolved body might be both functional as a mere animal body and capable of receiving the rational soul that would make it human.

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Kenneth Kemp’s review of William Lane Craig’s book on Adam and Eve

That one, In Quest of the Historical Adam, at First Things:

Was Adam’s body entirely the product of evolution? Craig thinks that it was not. On his view, God selected two out of a larger population of evolved hominins and made them human by “biological and spiritual renovations” (emphasis mine). Since this could have been done “miraculously,” “there is no problem here.” Such a mixed view has been proposed before—by A. R. Wallace, who thought that evolution simply could not have produced a brain capable of higher mathematics, and by Zeferino Cardinal González, who thought that Scripture strongly favored God’s direct involvement in the formation of Adam’s body. It is not clear whether Craig’s reasons for positing biological renovation are scientific or theological. In a very recent article in Scientia et Fides, I gave reasons for thinking that perhaps no such renovation would in fact be scientifically or philosophically necessary. An evolved body might be both functional as a mere animal body and capable of receiving the rational soul that would make it human.

No one could write about this topic without generating, or at least participating in already existing, controversy. Nevertheless, Craig’s book remains an excellent treatment of its topic.

Kenneth Kemp, “The Science of Adam” at First Things (December 13, 2021)

We expect the controversy William Lane Craig jumped into will be around for a while.

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Mixing science with politics is like mixing mustard and ice cream

Okay, Marcelo Gleiser, who seems to be a fairly smart guy, didn’t quite put it that way but he did say:

Beginning roughly in the 1960s, scientists started to use their findings to caution people and governments about the dangers of certain products or of unchecked industrialization and population growth. Cigarettes are bad for you. There will be a shortage of energy and water as more and more humans fill up the world. Climate change is going to create hell on Earth. Plastics are evil. Pollution of waterways, oceans, and the atmosphere will make people sick, kill animals, and destroy natural resources. Meanwhile, we, as a species — even if we claim to be the most intelligent on this planet — cannot act collectively to change what we are doing to our own environment…

Scientists sounded the alarm, denouncing how the tobacco and fossil fuel industries developed a corrosive strategy to undermine science’s credibility, attacking scientists as opportunists and manipulators. Politicians aligned with these industries jumped in, and a campaign to politicize science took over the headlines. Scientific knowledge became a matter of opinion, something that Francis Bacon fought against almost 400 years ago. The media helped, often giving equal weight to the opinion of the vast majority of scientists and to the opinion of a small contrarian group, confusing the general public to no end. The growth of social media compounded the damage, as individuals with no or little scientific training jumped in ready to make a name for themselves as defenders of freedom and liberty, conflating lies with the American ideal of individual freedom.

Marcelo Gleiser, “When science mixes with politics, all we get is politics” at Big Think (December 8, 2021)

Wait, just a minute here. So far so good until we got to the part about “often giving equal weight to the opinion of the vast majority of scientists and to the opinion of a small contrarian group,” …

There’s actually nothing unusual about the “small contrarian group” being right.

That’s why independent media give such groups attention. It’s like buying raffle tickets. Most of them are just donations to a cause. One of them wins us the eight-foot stuffed bear … oh NO!!

Okay, okay, it’s not necessarily as bad as that. Sometimes it’s “The idea everyone rejected won me the Nobel Prize.” But you never win if you don’t play.

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At Mind Matters News: In an infinity of universes, is another “you” reading this article?

Maybe. But the recent science evidence is not especially encouraging for that.

It is generally believed that the early universe widely inflated. So, reporting on a recent article submitted to Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Stony Brook astrophysicist Paul Sutter points out:

First off, they found that eternal inflation wasn’t nearly as common as originally thought. Their explanation for why cosmologists had thought eternal inflation was generic was because those earlier cosmologists had studied only a limited set of models. They found that many viable inflation models (“viable” here means they didn’t obviously contradict observations) didn’t lead to an eternally inflating scenario. PAUL SUTTER, “HOW REAL IS THE MULTIVERSE?” AT SPACE.COM (DECEMBER 16, 2021)

Takehome: Maybe it is much easier for us to imagine an infinite number of ourselves than for nature to make it happen. Works the same with money… – News, “In an infinity of universes, is another you reading this article?” at Mind Matters News (December 18, 2021)

You may also wish to read: In an infinity of universes, countless ones are run by cats… Daniel Díaz notes that most of the talk about the multiverse started to appear once it was realized that there was fine-tuning in nature. Robert J. Marks points out that even 10 to the 1000th power of universes would only permit 3,322 different paths. Infinity is required but unprovable.

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Does the American Scientific Affiliation still matter?

Used to be a big name for Christians in science. Their executive director Randy Isaac was a big name in randomness as a source of information for many years:

Physicist Randy Isaac recently wrote a critique of our book The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy, arguing that it fails to persuasively demonstrate that life could not have originated through natural processes or that life demonstrates clear evidence of design. Isaac is Executive Director Emeritus of the American Scientific Affiliation, which is a scientific society for Christians interested in the intersection of faith and science. His review is noteworthy in that nearly every argument he offers demonstrates that he failed to honestly engage with the book’s contents. His failings are not entirely his fault. Instead, they reflect the philosophical filter that distorted his comprehension of the evidence.

Brian Miller, “Randy Isaac’s Critique Demonstrates the Power of Philosophical Bias” at Evolution News and Science Today (December 13, 2021)

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Scientism as a mistake

Adam Frank seems to be a fairly sensible science writer and here’s something he wrote that bears a look:

There are in fact many philosophical positions — many kinds of metaphysics — that you can adopt about reality and science depending on your inclinations. The good ones illuminate critical aspects of what is happening as human beings collectively go about trying to make sense of their experiences. Scientism claims to be the only philosophy that can speak for science, but that is simply not the case. There are lots of philosophies of science out there.

It is really important to distinguish between science as a method and scientism as metaphysics. The point is that a lot has happened since the metaphysics underpinning scientism emerged a few hundred years ago under very specific historical pressures. History has moved on, and that metaphysics — that view of the relationship between humans and their world — is no longer up to the challenge of meeting the most pressing issues of today.

Adam Frank, “What is scientism, and why is it a mistake?” at Big Think (December 9, 2021)

Some of us knew something was going wrong when — due to “science” — local government shut down the churches but kept the bars open. So drunks were staggering around doing whatever they wanted but grannies were kneeling on the frozen gravel in the teeth of the wind in the church parking lot…

Yay science.

No, seriously. None of that has been a banner moment for science. They’re sure not making converts.

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Science is no more a “road to truth” than is art or religion

At least not in principle. There is too much nonsense talked about “Science” today. Glad someone is noticing:

You’ve heard it: “What does the science say? Have you heard about the latest scientific study? If we are ever to solve the problem of fill-in-the-blank, we must follow the science and keep politics and religion out of it!”

In this view, science speaks as a kind of oracle—communicating in a monolithic, impersonal voice the true reality of things. Our primary responsibility is simply to listen carefully to this trustworthy voice and then do all we can to follow where it leads.

Not everyone speaks of science so reverentially. In fact, virtually all modern philosophers and sociologists of science do not speak of science in this way. And we would know. Two of us have a combined 63 years of studying and teaching the philosophy of science. And we can assure you that the gap between the consensus among those who have carefully studied the logic and methods of scientific research and this more popular view of science could not be more cavernous.

There are at least three things we would love for people to see and understand more clearly about science today:

Jacob Z. Hess, “The Fantasy Story Americans Love to Tell About Science” at Public Square Magazine (November 23, 2021)

Read more and enjoy…

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