Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 130

Jurassic ammonites at 165 mya used jet propulsion like octopuses

Like modern octopuses:

Researchers have revealed the soft tissues of a 165-million-year-old ammonite fossil using 3D imaging.

They found that the now-extinct molluscs sported hyponomes: tube-like syphons through which water is expelled to jet propel animals forward in water, as found in modern squid and octopuses. They also found strong muscles that ammonites used to retract into their shells to defend against predators…

The findings add insight into how ammonites lived and provide evidence that coleoids, the sub-group of animals containing squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish, might be evolutionarily closer to ammonites than previously thought.

Imperial College, London, “Ammonite muscles revealed in 3D from Jurassic fossil” at ScienceDaily (December 8, 2021) The paper is closed access.

Is “might be evolutionarily closer to ammonites than previously thought” another way of saying that a complex system developed much earlier than thought?

At The Scientist: The spider web as a “giant engineered ear” As Dan Robitzki puts it, they “outsource” their hearing to the web (like the web was a microphone?) Quoted at The Scientist: “Evolutionarily speaking, spiders are just weird animals,” Jessica Petko, a Pennsylvania State University York biologist who didn’t work on the new study, writes in an email to The Scientist. “While it has been long known that spiders sense sound vibration with sensory hairs on their legs, this paper is the first to show that orb weaving spiders can amplify this sound by building specialized web structures.”

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Jurassic ammonites at 65 mya used jet propulsion like octopuses

Like modern octopuses:

Researchers have revealed the soft tissues of a 165-million-year-old ammonite fossil using 3D imaging.

They found that the now-extinct molluscs sported hyponomes: tube-like syphons through which water is expelled to jet propel animals forward in water, as found in modern squid and octopuses. They also found strong muscles that ammonites used to retract into their shells to defend against predators…

The findings add insight into how ammonites lived and provide evidence that coleoids, the sub-group of animals containing squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish, might be evolutionarily closer to ammonites than previously thought.

Imperial College, London, “Ammonite muscles revealed in 3D from Jurassic fossil” at ScienceDaily (December 8, 2021) The paper is closed access.

Is “might be evolutionarily closer to ammonites than previously thought” another way of saying that a complex system developed much earlier than thought?

At The Scientist: The spider web as a “giant engineered ear” As Dan Robitzki puts it, they “outsource” their hearing to the web (like the web was a microphone?) Quoted at The Scientist: “Evolutionarily speaking, spiders are just weird animals,” Jessica Petko, a Pennsylvania State University York biologist who didn’t work on the new study, writes in an email to The Scientist. “While it has been long known that spiders sense sound vibration with sensory hairs on their legs, this paper is the first to show that orb weaving spiders can amplify this sound by building specialized web structures.”

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Casey Luskin on how the fossil record challenges Darwin

Casey Luskin on how “evolution” can mean merely account of what is known about life forms right over to a dogma about how they appear, grow and change. And that Darwinian dogma is coming under fire.

One of the largest difficulties with evolution is the word itself. Supporters of Darwinian theory love to switch the word around so the average person can never be sure what they are talking about. Sometimes evolution means change over time. Other times it can refer to small-scale changes in populations, or common ancestry, or the idea that an unguided mechanism of natural selection acting on random variations is the driver of the history of life. In this bonus interview released as part of the Science Uprising series, geologist Casey Luskin goes over the multiple definitions for evolution and explains how the fossil record relates to the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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At the Scientist: The spider web as a “giant engineered ear”

As Dan Robitzki puts it, they “outsource” their hearing to the web (like the web was a microphone?):

The bridge spider uses its web as an engineered “external ear” up to 10,000 times the size of its body, according to a preprint study posted to bioRxiv on October 18. The discovery, which has not yet been peer reviewed, challenges many assumptions that scientists have held for years about how spiders and potentially other arthropods navigate and interact with the world around them.

“Evolutionarily speaking, spiders are just weird animals,” Jessica Petko, a Pennsylvania State University York biologist who didn’t work on the new study, writes in an email to The Scientist. “While it has been long known that spiders sense sound vibration with sensory hairs on their legs, this paper is the first to show that orb weaving spiders can amplify this sound by building specialized web structures.”

Spiders—both orb-weavers and others—are perfectly capable of hearing at closer distances without their webs thanks to the tiny hairs and organs on their legs that sense vibrations as air flows past. But the majority of spider biologists assumed that they could only hear sounds in their immediate vicinity, senior study author and Cornell University neurobiologist Ronald Hoy tells The Scientist.

Dan Robitzki, “Spider Uses Its Web Like a Giant Engineered Ear” at The Scientist (October 29, 2021)

If it weren’t for massive computers, one might be tempted to say there isn’t anything humans have invented that the design of some life form hasn’t embodied first.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: In what ways are spiders intelligent? The ability to perform simple cognitive functions does not appear to depend on the vertebrate brain as such.

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Can gravitational waves help account for why there is more matter than antimatter?

Some researchers hope Q-balls are the answer:

The reason humans exist is because at some time in the first second of the Universe’s existence, somehow more matter was produced than anti-matter. The asymmetry is so small that only one extra particle of matter was produced every time ten billion particles of anti matter were produced. The problem is that even though this asymmetry is small, current theories of physics cannot explain it. In fact, standard theories say matter and anti matter should have been produced in exactly equal quantities, but the existence of humans, Earth, and everything else in the universe proves there must be more, undiscovered physics.

Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, “Gravitational waves could be key to answering why more matter was left over after Big Bang” at ScienceDaily (December 8, 2021)

That’s a problem. Design usually entails making some decisions that create an apparent imbalance. So what might rule design out?

“A Higgs particle exists when the Higgs field is excited. But the Higgs field can do other things, like form a lump. If you have a field that is very like the Higgs field but it has some sort of charge — not an electric charge, but some sort of charge — then one lump has the charge as one particle. Since charge can’t just disappear, the field has to decide whether to be in particles or lumps. If it is lower energy to be in lumps than particles, then the field will do that. A bunch of lumps coagulating together will make a Q-ball.”

“We argue that very often these blobs of field known as Q-balls stick around for some time. These Q-balls dilute slower than the background soup of radiation as the Universe expands until, eventually, most of the energy in the Universe is in these blobs. In the meantime, slight fluctuations in the density of the soup of radiation start to grow when these blobs dominate. When the Q-balls decay, their decay is so sudden and rapid that the fluctuations in the plasma become violent soundwaves which leads to spectacular ripples in space and time, known as gravitational waves, that could be detected over the next few decades. The beauty of looking for gravitational waves is that the Universe is completely transparent to gravitational waves all the way back to the beginning,” said White.

Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, “Gravitational waves could be key to answering why more matter was left over after Big Bang” at ScienceDaily (December 8, 2021)

“not an electric charge, but some sort of charge”? Okay… At least we are still in the world of hard science here.

One thing: They had better trademark the name Q-ball. If their idea takes off, they will be glad they did. Go Q-balls!

The paper is open access.

Wasn’t Sabine Hossenfelder talking about this recently?: Sabine Hossenfelder asks, why do we think antimatter asymmetry is a problem? Hossenfelder: “[o]nce you insist that the ratio was actually one, you have to come up with a mechanism for how it ended up not being one. And then you can publish papers with all kinds of complicated solutions to the problem which you just created. ” Isn’t she overlooking something?

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At Claremont Review of Books: “The God Hypothesis should be considered as a possible explanation for our universe.”

From a review of Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis:

As Meyer explains, the materialist assumption—the convention that scientific explanation means explanation without recourse to God—has not always been part of the scientific method. It gained primacy after Darwin in order to facilitate scientific discovery. Today, the hegemony of the materialist assumption is complete. The textbooks presuppose it. The mainstream takes it for granted. But what if it is not true? Meyer argues that the materialist assumption now poses an obstruction to understanding, compelling scientists to embrace implausible and untestable hypotheses as a defense against the God hypothesis.

Meyer is not the first writer to recognize that science has bitten its own tail (to quote Nietzsche’s apt phrase in The Birth of Tragedy): that science has created dilemmas which cannot be answered by science. Nine years ago, New York University professor of philosophy Thomas Nagel published Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Nagel, an atheist, noted that most materialists simply assume the universe consists of nothing more than matter, energy, space, and time. But this claim is an assumption, not a fact. Citing earlier work by Dr. Meyer among other sources, Nagel argued that the available evidence strongly suggests there must be a fifth element in the universe which Nagel called Mind, whether immanent or transcendent. Reviewing Meyer’s previous book, Darwin’s Doubt (2013), in these pages, Yale professor of computer science David Gelernter agreed that the current materialist assumptions regarding neo-Darwinian evolution simply can no longer stand in light of the overwhelming evidence (“Giving Up Darwin,” Spring 2019). Gelernter was pilloried in the popular media for praising Meyer’s book, even though Gelernter specifically disavowed intelligent design. But Gelernter and Nagel make a good case that religious zealotry, and a refusal to debate the facts honestly, now characterize Meyer’s opponents more than they do Meyer and his supporters.

Leonard Sax, “The Ambiguity of the Evidence” at Claremont Review of Books (Fall 2021)

Actually, never mind intelligent design, panpsychism is also gaining ground on Darwinian naturalism.

You may also wish to read: Why panpsychism is starting to push out naturalism. A key goal of naturalism/materialism has been to explain human consciousness away as “nothing but a pack of neurons.” That can’t work. Panpsychism is not dualism. By including consciousness — including human consciousness — as a bedrock fact of nature, it avoids naturalism’s dead end.

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Bryozoa add to Cambrian Explosion’s impact: 35 million years earlier than thought

Bryozoa are mosslike animals:

Long thought to have first appeared in the Ordovician (485 mya, the oldest fossils from China), bryozoans have now been confirmed in the early Cambrian. In Nature News and Views, Andrej Ernst and Mark A. Wilson write, “Bryozoan fossils found at last in deposits from the Cambrian period.” They had been “conspicuously absent” till now. Why so? Thinking Darwinly, Ernst and Wilson point out that “bryozoans have a complex form (morphology), and must therefore have already had a long evolutionary history.” Molecular studies had also suggested to evolutionists an earlier emergence,

That emergence is now confirmed at least 35 million years earlier in the evolutionary timescale, or 44 million years according to the molecular clock…

These Cambrian bryozoans were not exactly simple. Except for skeletal parts, they look remarkably similar to Ordovician species. They possessed a holdfast, “suggesting an erect, self-supported colony anchored to the substrate.” Nor does the new species qualify as a common ancestor of bryozoans, because it already contained features of other families. Indeed, “the last common ancestor of total-group Bryozoa remains enigmatic,” the authors confess.

News, “More Cambrian Woes for Evolution” at Evolution News and Science Today (December 6, 2021)

So they are complex and that much closer to the dawn of life. Actually, even if fossil rabbits were found in the Cambrian, they would just be fitted into a Darwinian narrative that raises more questions than it answers about the history of life. It was like that in Darwin’s day and nothing has changed or can change if no design can be considered.

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At Mind Matters News: Nautilus offers a primer on panpsychism

Noting the growth in interest from science writers as well as neuroscientists and philosophers, Templeton’s magazine Nautilus offers four essays discussing current approaches. Panpsychists argue that their approach can help resolve not just the hard problem of consciousness but hard problems associated with matter.

Recently, we’ve been discussing the way panpsychism is creating competition for naturalism in the sciences. Where naturalism sees cognition/consciousness as an illusion that happen to aid survival, panpsychism sees it as part of the substrate of nature, more obviously present in more complex entities like humans than in less complex ones. Neither view appeals to the supernatural in principle but to the panpsychist, information is as much a part of nature as matter or energy. Its effects are pervasive and real. And consciousness is not something to just be explained away. Such a view may change the way many see nature on topics ranging from the environment to evolution.

News, “Nautilus offers a primer on panpsychism” at Mind Matters News

Note the reaction from a typical Darwinian naturalist:

… naysaying philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci:

Consciousness probably evolved for specific reasons because, after all, it costs a lot metabolically to maintain the kind of brain that can engage in conscious thoughts. There must be a reason and it must be advantageous from the point of view of natural selection. I don’t see any reason to think that inert things are conscious. I don’t even see a particular reason to think that a lot of other biological things, like plants, bacteria, things like that, are conscious. But that’s just one perspective and one way to look at it.

KEVIN BERGER AND BRIAN GALLAGHER, “A CLASH OF PERSPECTIVES ON PANPSYCHISM” AT NAUTILUS

What’s really interesting about Pigliucci’s comments is that even a decade or so ago, his was an utterly conventional view. Now he feels he must qualify it by saying “But that’s just one perspective and one way to look at it.” It seems that fewer researchers today expect the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” to suddenly yield to a new research finding — a situation that leaves many looking with interest and sympathy at a non-naturalist approach like panpsychism.

You may also wish to read: Why panpsychism is starting to push out naturalism. A key goal of naturalism/materialism has been to explain human consciousness away as “nothing but a pack of neurons.” That can’t work. Panpsychism is not dualism. By including consciousness — including human consciousness — as a bedrock fact of nature, it avoids naturalism’s dead end.

Panpsychism, if it continues to gain adherence in science, philosophy of science, and science communications, will likely change the nature of the intelligent design controversy.

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Proving that they are genuine “sceptics,” British group takes on the pieties of climate change

With a motto to live up to like “Question Everything. Stay Sane. Live Free,” they must sometimes tackle the Establishment’s fondest commitments:

Many eminent scientists, sometimes at great career cost, insist the proposition that humans cause the climate to change must be subject to debate and not treated as dogma. Former MIT physicist Professor Richard Lindzen observed that there is no data trend towards extreme temperatures and in his view “an implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct knowledge and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilisation”.

In Italy, the discoverer of nuclear antimatter Emeritus Professor Antonio Zichichi recently led 48 science professors in stating that human responsibility for climate change is “unjustifiably exaggerated and catastrophic predictions are not realistic”. In their scientific view, “Natural variation explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850.”

Chris Morrison/Luke Perry, “Great Climate Conspirators of Our Time” at Daily Sceptic (December 7, 2021)

The response has been to delegitimize the asking of questions, even by experts:

Last month IpsosMori produced a report on conspiracy theories and defined them as the “belief that an event or situation is the outcome of a secret plan”. Among those conspiracy theories considered by the report was the belief that “climate change is not due to human activity”. That’s right, challenging the climate emergency hypothesis means you’re an irrational troglodyte who probably believes the earth is flat and 9/11 was a false flag operation carried out by the Israeli secret service. In Italy, the discoverer of nuclear antimatter Emeritus Professor Antonio Zichichi recently led 48 science professors in stating that human responsibility for climate change is “unjustifiably exaggerated and catastrophic predictions are not realistic”. In their scientific view, “Natural variation explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850.”

Chris Morrison/Luke Perry, “Great Climate Conspirators of Our Time” at Daily Sceptic (December 7, 2021)

Nothing promotes confidence in authorities like this sort of behavior:

To counter all these inconvenient facts, the Guardian newspaper is now mandating the use of “global heating” in place of “global warming” because… well, it sounds hotter. Elsewhere in the mainstream media, the concept of a “climate emergency” – sometimes upgraded to “climate breakdown” – is in full swing. To promote this agenda, bad weather has been rebranded “extreme weather” and every fire, flood, drought, heatwave, and so forth, is used to argue that Thermogeddon is just around the corner.

Chris Morrison/Luke Perry, “Great Climate Conspirators of Our Time” at Daily Sceptic (December 7, 2021)

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

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Retraction Watch co-founder on the lab leak theory re COVID

According to Ivan Oransky, “If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, labels get in the way of facts and make the truth that much harder to find.:

First, what is the “lab leak” theory? The idea is that the virus was either developed in a lab or brought to a lab for study without enough precautions, then it accidentally infected a lab worker, who somehow spread it in the community. Many in the media, as well as some scientists, quickly labeled it a conspiracy theory, designed to shift focus away from the missteps of their own countries. But, like everyone else involved in the discussions about the lab leak theory, scientists have something at stake: If SARS-CoV-2 did escape from a lab, it could further shake trust in research, and threaten funding…

I co-founded the science watchdog site Retraction Watch more than a decade ago, and faced with some truly awful scientific papers that made me and co-founder Adam Marcus wonder how they were ever published, we frequently would use such phrases as “anti-vaxxer” and “conspiracy theory” in our critiques. It was one way we dismissed ideas as unworthy of discussion.

But we’ve stopped doing that, in no small part because we’ve seen how this kneejerk dismissal — from both “sides” — has played out time and time again during the pandemic.

In the last 18 months, for example, practically no one could have a dispassionate discussion of the evidence — or the lack thereof — for using various older drugs, usually approved to treat parasites, against Covid-19.

Ivan Oransky, “Question the ‘lab leak’ theory. But don’t call it a conspiracy.” at MercatorNet (December 6, 2021)

By now, any astute human being should see that the main reason for dumping on the lab leak theory is that workers in the field do NOT want an audit of what they are actually doing and how it aligns with safety goals — especially when they know that China will do what it wants anyway but no one is ready for a rational discussion of that fact.

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