Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 13

February 11, 2023

Sabine Hossenfelder has lost faith in science?

Particle physics division anyhow.

Maybe not altogether but Sabine Hossenfelder sure sounds unhappy. She asks in her vid intro: “Why do particle physicists constantly make wrong predictions? In this video, I explain the history and status of the problem.” She also notes her list of problems in the foundations of physics (2019) which doubtless sheds some light.

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Published on February 11, 2023 06:48

What science media make of the 3 million year old tool assembly, recently found

It wasn’t made by “our ancestors.” What?

Archaeologists have revealed what could be the oldest stone tools ever found, and they think someone other than our closest Homo ancestors may have made them.

Unearthed in 2016 at Nyayanga, Kenya, on the banks of Lake Victoria, the ancient implements fit with the design of the Oldowan toolkit, the name given to the earliest kinds of stone tools made by human-like hands.

According to dating estimates, the newly discovered tools were made between 2.6 and 3 million years ago, before being buried for eons in silt and sand. In total, 330 artifacts were found among 1,776 fossilized animal bones that showed signs of butchery.

Before this, the oldest known Oldowan tools dated to 2.6 million years ago.

While the age of the newfound tools may be further refined, their creation coincides with a time when ancestors of Homo sapiens roamed alongside other early humans, signaling a huge technological milestone for their creators – whomever they might have been. – Clare Watson, February 10, 2023, ScienceAlert

One suspect is Paranthropus:

Along with the bones and tools, the team, led by anthropologist Thomas Plummer at City University of New York, found two teeth – an upper and lower left molar, one fractured in half, the other nearly complete – which the researchers identified as Paranthropus, a distant cousin of humans. – Clare Watson, February 10, 2023, ScienceAlert

Note: “distant cousin” Paranthropus. The idea seems to be that sophisticated human tool use is nothing special. It’s like saying that if your great uncle won the Nobel Prize, that has nothing to do with your family. He isn’t a “selfish gene” direct ancestor…

Of course, the true makers of these tools will never be known, with any claims on their creators’ identity likely to come under much scrutiny by other scientists or with new finds.

“The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools,” says Potts. “But finding Paranthropus alongside these stone tools opens up a fascinating whodunnit.” – Clare Watson, February 10, 2023, ScienceAlert

Some of us suspect that it is long past time someone shone a light on how these classifications of early humans are really created. How much is evidence and how much is underlying assumption?

You may also wish to read: At Smithsonian Magazine: Who made the first stone tool kits? The basic difference between any type of human and other animal life forms seems to have been evident three million years ago.

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Published on February 11, 2023 06:06

February 10, 2023

At Smithsonian Magazine: Stone tool kits from 3 million years ago?

From Brian Handwerk:

”A nearly three-million-year-old butchering site packed with animal bones, stone implements and molars from our early ancestors reignites the debate”

The dead hippo represented a stroke of luck to our early human ancestors. Three million years ago, such a huge animal promised an enormous amount of fat-rich food to the group living along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria. And the hungry crew knew exactly how to take advantage. Armed with a prehistoric stone tool kit they’d made by hand, they went to work on the beast. They likely cut meat from bone, broke those bones to consume the rich marrow within, and—since the site predates the regular use of fire by some two million years—may have sliced up and pounded the meat into a type of hippo tartare…

And two molars from the extinct hominin genus Paranthropus at the site present a mystery: Just who made and used these tools? The advanced Oldowan tool kit is typically associated with our own genus Homo, the ancestors of modern humans. But the find suggests that our big-toothed, smaller-brained Paranthropus cousins just might have crafted rocks for their use, or co-opted them from Homo contemporaries who also lived in East Africa during this key evolutionary period when the two lineages diverged. – February 9, 2023

The basic difference between any type of human and other animal life forms seems to have been evident three million years ago.

Evident and obviously inconvenient for theory.

The molars?

“It’s weird how Paranthropus keeps rearing its head, or its teeth, wherever there is Oldowan technology,” Potts adds. “What in the world are these Paranthropus teeth doing at the site? We don’t know the answer, and that’s bound to reopen the question of who was the earliest toolmaker.”

Maybe some unfortunate diners lost the teeth to tough meat/bones?

Anyway, the Darwinism on display is amazing: “Common scientific thinking suggests that because Homo had small teeth, they turned to making tools to enhance their ability to process various foods. After all, Homo is the group that ultimately grew bigger brains and became the prehistoric world’s primary stone toolmaker. Paranthropus, on the other hand, used a different method to expand their diet. They developed big teeth and muscular jaws to grind tougher foods like nuts or roots into palatable forms. The two lineages look so different after their split, it seems unlikely that they occupied the same ecological niche. Of course, none of that precludes Paranthropus from also making tools.”

Like Neanderthal Man, Paranthropus is obliged to be stupid for the cameras?

You may also wish to read:

From Frontiers Science News: Neanderthals ate crabs too We are all expected to be slack-jawed in amazement when what we might have expected – that is, if we didn’t buy into that Darwinian Ascent of Man stuff – turns out to be true. We are paying more for Darwinism than we might sometimes think.

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Published on February 10, 2023 20:49

Killer whale mommies are not good DarwinMoms, it turns out

We’ll let ScienceDaily tell it (February 8, 2023):

“We’ve known for over a decade that adult male killer whales relied on their mothers to keep them alive, but it had never been clear whether mothers pay a cost to do so,” said Michael N. Weiss (@CetaceanMike) of the University of Exeter, UK, and the Center for Whale Research in the US …

So whale researchers studied it.

Their analysis of the existing data found a strong negative correlation between females’ number of surviving weaned sons and their annual probability of producing a viable calf. Those costs didn’t get any smaller as their sons grew older, either.

The costs couldn’t be explained by lactation or group composition effects, which they say supports the hypothesis that caring for sons into adulthood is reproductively costly. They say that the findings offer the first direct evidence for lifetime maternal investment in any animal, revealing a previously unrecognized life history strategy.

“The magnitude of the cost that females take on to care for their weaned sons was really surprising,” Weiss said. “While there’s some uncertainty, our best estimate is that each additional surviving son cuts a female’s chances of having a new calf in a given year by more than 50 percent. This is a huge cost to taking care of [adult] sons!”

The findings suggest that there are significant benefits to keeping adult sons alive and well, he added.

“Females gain evolutionary benefits when their sons are able to successfully reproduce, and our results indicate that these benefits are enough to outweigh a large direct cost,” Weiss explained.

This seems like a clear example of Darwinthink getting in the way of understanding what is happening. First, no female gains any “evolutionary benefit” for doing anything. She can only gain a benefit in her own lifetime. Second, it’s not clear that the whales, as a group, gain an “evolutionary benefit” either:

The findings also may have important conservation implications, the researchers say. The southern residents are critically endangered, with one major concern being their low reproductive rates. The new findings reveal a major and previously unrecognized determining factor in a female’s reproductive success, which may help to inform future population viability analyses.

So no. The characteristic behavior isn’t promoting selfish gene survival. Any farmer knows that if you want the herd to grow rather than shrink in size, you encourage females, not males.

Okay, here’s a thought: Group dynamics like this may be one reason that a species becomes critically endangered or goes extinct. Yes, human activities drive many extirpations/extinctions.* But others may be due to the adoption of behaviors that result in fewer than the needed number of offspring. Not easy to change.

In future work, they hope to learn more about the nature of the costs to mother whales. They suspect mothers may not eat enough themselves as they continue sharing food with their full-grown sons. He noted that the southern resident killer whales are “very food-stressed.” As such, a primary conservation goal for the whales is to recover the population of Chinook salmon they rely on.

Here’s another thought: Mom needs to live in a group. She is likely dominant over her sons. If she kicked the sons out and took up with a strange guy whale, would she still be dominant?

Not that she is thinking it out of course – but the current arrangement may not be performing that badly for her, even though it isn’t good for overall whale numbers. So she is under no overwhelming pressure to alter her behavior.

This may be an opportunity to study how extirpations and extinctions can happen naturally.

The paper is open access.

*If human behavior were all that mattered, we wouldn’t be dealing with so many rats, feral cats, cockroaches, wild hogs, etc., that — far from going extinct — thrive on what humans do. It really depends on how human behavior affects a given life form.

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Published on February 10, 2023 06:51

From Frontiers Science News: Neanderthals cooked and ate crabs too

Ninety thousand years ago, Neanderthals liked the big ones better:

Proof that Neanderthals ate crabs is another ‘nail in the coffin’ for primitive cave dweller stereotypes

Scientists studying archaeological remains at Gruta da Figueira Brava, Portugal, discovered that Neanderthals were harvesting shellfish to eat – including brown crabs, where they preferred larger specimens and cooked them in fires. Archeologists say this disproves the idea that eating marine foods gave early modern humans’ brains the competitive advantage.

In a cave just south of Lisbon, archeological deposits conceal a Paleolithic dinner menu. As well as stone tools and charcoal, the site of Gruta de Figueira Brava contains rich deposits of shells and bones with much to tell us about the Neanderthals that lived there – especially about their meals. A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs. – Angharad Brewer Gillham, February 7, 2023

But wait. Why are theories like “eating marine foods gave early modern humans’ brains the competitive advantage” over Neanderthals so persistent and prevalent? What if we started from scratch with no need to assemble evidence for an Ascent of Man thesis of “brute to bro”?

Well, that’d never do. We are all expected to be slack-jawed in amazement when what we might have expected – that is, if we didn’t buy into that Darwinian Ascent of Man stuff – turns out to be true. We are paying more for Darwinism than we might sometimes think.

Every form of refuge has its price.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: At Smithsonian Magazine: Neanderthals hunted and butchered massive elephants. Just a minute here. Popular culture did NOT get that idea that Neanderthals were just stupid brutes from thin air. It was carefully inculcated by science popularizers because it tied in with Darwinian Ascent of Man stuff. If it’s not true, let’s be honest about how the correct information affects the current establishment science narrative.

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Published on February 10, 2023 05:51

At Big Think: The weirdness of quantum mechanics forces scientists to confront philosophy

The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning by [Marcelo Gleiser]

Physicist and philosopher Marcelo Gleiser is always worth reading:

The world of the very small is like nothing we see in our everyday lives. We do not think of people or rocks being in more than one place at the same time until we look at them. They are where they are, in one place only, whether or not we know where that place is. Nor do we think of a cat locked in a box as being both dead and alive before we open the box to check. But such dualities are the norm for quantum objects like atoms or subatomic particles, or even larger ones like a cat. Before we look at them, these objects exist in what we call a superposition of states, each state with an assigned probability. When we measure many times their position or some other physical property, we will find it in one of such states with certain probabilities.

Without philosophy, there is no way forward from here.

As it happens, Gleiser, author of The Island of Knowledge (Basic Books, 2014) anticipates the publication of a new book with Adam Frank and Evan Thompson, The blind spot (MIT Press, 2024) on the theme: “It’s tempting to think science gives a God’s-eye view of reality. But we forget the place of human experience at our peril.” The current link is to a 2019 Aeon essay by all three authors setting forth that view.

Meanwhile, at Big Think, Gleiser introduces QBism, which seems to anticipate the book:

Due to space, I will only mention one more epistemic interpretation, Quantum Bayesianism, or as it is now called, QBism. As the original name implies, QBism takes the role of an agent as central. It assumes that probabilities in quantum mechanics reflect the current state of the agent’s knowledge or beliefs about the world, as he or she makes bets about what will happen in the future. Superpositions and entanglements are not states of the world, in this view, but expressions of how an agent experiences the world. As such, they are not as mysterious as they may sound. The onus of quantum weirdness is transferred to an agent’s interactions with the world.

A common criticism levied against QBism is its reliance on a specific agent’s relation to the experiment. This seems to inject a dose of subjectivism, placing it athwart the usual scientific goal of observer-independent universality. But as Adam Frank, Evan Thompson, and myself argue in The Blind Spot, a book to be published by MIT Press in 2024, this criticism relies on a view of science that is unrealistic. It is a view rooted in an account of reality outside of us, the agents that experience this reality. Perhaps that is what quantum mechanics’ weirdness has been trying to tell us all along. (February 8, 2023)

One to watch for.

Note: This is a weird situation for a meaningless universe to be in. Isn’t it? Or, wait…

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Published on February 10, 2023 05:11

L&FP, 65e: Imaging light as a “wavicle” — both wave and particle

. . . using standing waves of light, vid:

Here is a snapshot:

[image error]

By setting up standing waves and using an electron beam to interact with it, a map could be imaged on photon location and waves. As an article explains:

Until now [–> c 2015], scientists have only ever been able to capture an image of light as either a particle or a wave, and never both at the same time. But a team from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have managed to overcome the obstacles that stood in the way of previous experiments by using electrons to image light in this very strange state.

The key to their success is their unusual experiment design. First they fire a pulse of laser light at a single strand of nanowire suspended on a piece of graphene film. This causes the nanowire to vibrate, and light particles – or photons – are sent travelling along it in two possible directions. When light particles that are travelling on opposite directions meet and overlap on the wire, they form a wave. Known as a ‘standing wave’, this state creates light that radiates around the nanowire . . . . by feeding a stream of electrons into the area nearby the nanowire, they could force an interaction between the electrons and the light that had been confined on the nanowire.

This interaction caused the electrons to either speed up or slow down, and the team used an ultrafast electron microscope to capture this exact moment, so they could visualise the standing wave, “which acts as a fingerprint of the wave-nature of light,” the press release explains. Publishing their results in Nature Communications, the team discusses how this collision between the photons and electrons and the consequential speed-change experienced by the electrons appears as an exchange of energy, which can be visualised by the microscope.

So the top part of the image is the standing wave, while the bottom shows where the photons are located.

“This experiment demonstrates that, for the first time ever, we can film quantum mechanics – and its paradoxical nature – directly,” one of the team, physicist Fabrizio Carbone, said in a press release. “Being able to image and control quantum phenomena at the nanometer scale like this opens up a new route towards quantum computing.”

More food for (humbling) thought. KF

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Published on February 10, 2023 02:55

February 9, 2023

L&FP 65d: Superposition and the wave function

Here

Hossenfelder is an instrumentalist, and emphasises that the superposition is an expression of a probability wave thus a prediction of observations not ultimate truth. Bonus, she brings in entanglement and the concept that it discusses correlated states, using radioactive decay as a case. However, all of this can help us address things like alleged clashes between Quantum Theory and Logic, cf our weak arguments discussion here. Q-Mech, of course, humbles us all. KF

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Published on February 09, 2023 03:49

February 8, 2023

Whistling into the wind: There is no consciousness problem!

At IAI News, Riccardo Manzotti, author of The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (2018), notes that consciousness is the “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” then tells us,

Can we do better? Yes, but only if we challenge our main premise that we are separate from the world. This is what MOI does. The hypothesis is simple: there is a world of physical objects that take place relative to your body – the laptop, the mug, and all the rest. There is no inside and no outside. There is no here and no there. There is just your existence, you, as one would expect in a physical world. Your ‘conscious experience’ of the laptop and the mug is nothing other than the laptop and the mug as they take place relative to your body. So what is your experience? It is the subset of physical objects taking place relative to your body. The mind is identical with the (relative) object. Hence the name of Mind-Object Identity.

So your mind is the laptop, the mug, maybe the toaster you are looking at. There, that solves the problem!

Wait…

You may also wish to read: Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself

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Published on February 08, 2023 17:55

Trust the science? Covid mask mandates were sciencey rubbish, it turns out

From the Cochrane Library database of science studies:

Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory confirmed influenza/SARS CoV 2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low certainty evidence).

These findings go to the heart of the case for mask mandates, a policy that generated much resentment and acrimony during the pandemic. They also show that the CDC, which has repeatedly exaggerated the evidence in favor of masks, cannot be trusted as a source of public health information.

In September 2020, then‒CDC Director Robert Redfield described masks as “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.” He claimed masks provided more protection against COVID-19 than vaccines would. Reason

We live in strange times. It would be good to be “pro-science” except that, so often now, it means being “pro-nonsense.” And how can that change?

The only answer many Canadians could think of was:

Convoy. Convoy. Convoy.

We wish science could be a source of truthful information again.

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Published on February 08, 2023 17:41