Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 133

December 2, 2021

At Mind Matters News: Evolutionary psychology: When we looked in, no one was there…

Nub of the problem: If the question is, what helped prehumans survive, there really aren’t any prehumans around. So we don’t know how they differed from current ones. If the question is how early humans survived, we don’t have a good reason to suppose that their psychology was much different from ours.

Evolutionary psychology likely got started when psychologists wanted to get in on the popularity of findings in evolution. But whatever evolutionary thinking may have done for the tyrannosaur or the trilobite, it can’t really do for humans. So far as we know there has been no real evolution of any kind, of which we have a clear record, in human psychology.

News, “Evolutionary psychology: When we looked in, no one was there…” at Mind Matters News (December 2, 2021)

Takehome: Evo psych likely got started when psychologists wanted to get in on illuminating findings in evolution, like the Cambrian Explosion. Trouble is, there aren’t any prehumans around. And we don’t have a good reason to believe that early humans differed much from us in psychology.

You may also wish to read: Philosopher flattens evolutionary psychology: There is no such thing as a fossil mind. Rejecting evolutionary psychology means realizing that we cannot both claim to represent “Science!” and refuse to be bound by its standards.

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Published on December 02, 2021 18:33

Woke atheist rejects the New Atheists — not Woke enough

We missed this one back in June. In the Wokest of venues, intellectual cannibalism:

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what’s right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

Fast-forward to the present: What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized. This may sound hyperbolic, but it’s not when, well, you look at the evidence. So I thought it might be illuminating to take a look at where some of the heavy hitters in the atheist and “skeptic” communities are today. What do their legacies look like? In what direction have they taken their cultural quest to secularize the world?

Phil Torres, “Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right” at Salon (June 5, 2021)

Forthcoming. Foreword by Dr. Paul Ehrlich.
Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Phil Torres is supposed to be somebody in atheism. He goes after a bunch of people you’ve heard of, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Larry Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman, Steven Pinker …

Well, Torres is probably not on their Santa list either. Did he miss anybody? Maybe…

This is hardly an exhaustive list. But it’s enough to make clear the epistemic and moral turpitude of this crowd. There is nothing ad hominem in saying this, by the way: The point is simply that the company one keeps matters. What’s sad is that the New Atheist movement could have made a difference — a positive difference — in the world. Instead, it gradually merged with factions of the alt-right to become what former New York Times contributing editor Bari Weiss calls the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a motley crew of pseudo-intellectuals whose luminaries include Jordan Peterson, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, in addition to those mentioned above.

Phil Torres, “Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right” at Salon (June 5, 2021)

Take in for a moment that the editors of an allegedly serious publication actually sponsored an article claiming that all of these prominent atheists have “merged with the far right.” Remember that the next time someone starts caterwauling about the need to suppress conspiracy theories. We can direct them to Salon’s website for their best convenience…

Something’s obviously happening in the world of the godlessness that failed — or some people with a platform need the rest of us to believe so.

Hat tip: The Stream

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Published on December 02, 2021 18:06

December 1, 2021

At Mind Matters News: Iron law of complexity: Complexity adds but its problems multiply

(Now how does this affect Darwinism? Any guesses?)

Robert J. Marks, Justine Bui, and Sam Haug discuss how programmers can use domain expertise to reduce the numbers of errors and false starts.:

In “Bad news for artificial general intelligence” (podcast Episode 160), Justin Bui and Sam Haug from Robert J. Marks’s research group at Baylor University joined him for a look at how AI can go wrong — whether it’s an inconsequential hot weather story or imminent nuclear doom. Now, in Episode 161, they start by unpacking the significance of an ominous fact: When we increase complexity by adding things, we multiply the chances of things going wrong. Never mind getting an advanced machine to solve all our problems; it can’t solve its own:

News, “Iron law of complexity: Complexity adds but its problems multiply” at Mind Matters News

Sam Haug: Looking at a little bit more complex system — image recognition software, for example — one of them would be the wolf and dog classification that we talked about last time, where you feed a neural network a picture of either a dog or wolf and it tells you which it is. If you wanted to fully characterize the performance of this system, you would have to test every single combination of pixels in the image size that it’s going to be fed.

So for a small 100 by 100 pixel image, that’s 10,000 pixels that you need to test. And each of those pixels has 256 gray levels and three color choices, which is the RGB, which is red, green, and blue values for each pixel. In this still relatively small design example, if you wanted to fully test the performance of any image classification software you’re designing, you would have to test it 1029,000 times. That number is so large, it’s difficult to imagine.

As a bit of a ballpark estimate here, the number of atoms in the known universe is estimated to be around 10 80 which is an incredibly large number. But the number of contingencies with this small 100 by 100 image is just unfathomably larger than that: 1029,000, which is just bigger than anything we could probably imagine.

Obviously, shortcuts are used but that requires intelligence.

See the paper where Haug and colleagues unpack the problem: Haug, Samuel, Robert J. Marks, and William A. Dembski. “Exponential Contingency Explosion: Implications for Artificial General Intelligence.” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (2021).

Here are Parts 1 and 2 of Episode 159, featuring Robert J. Marks and Justin Bui

If not Hal or Skynet, what’s really happening in AI today? Justin Bui talks with Robert J. Marks about the remarkable AI software resources that are free to download and use. Free AI software means that much more innovation now depends on who gets to the finish line first. Marks and Bui think that will spark creative competition.

Have a software design idea? Kaggle could help it happen for free. Okay, not exactly. You have to do the work. But maybe you don’t have to invent the software. Computer engineer Justin Bui discourages “keyboard engineering” (trying to do it all yourself). Chances are, many solutions already exist at open source venues.

In Episode 160, Sam Haug joined Dr. Marks and Dr. Bui for a look at what happens when AI fails. Sometimes the results are sometimes amusing. Sometimes not. They look at five instances, from famous but trivial right up to one that nearly ended the world as we know it. As AI grows more complex, risks grow too.

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Published on December 01, 2021 19:55

FYI: In quantum mechanics, time may flow differently

Artistic illustration of a gondolier trapped in a quantum superposition of time flows./© Aloop Visual & Science, University of Vienna, Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Because the entropy is minimal, researchers say:

n physics, this propensity of certain phenomena to occur in only one time’s direction is linked to their production of ‘entropy’, which is the physical quantity defining the amount of disorder in a system. In nature, processes tend to evolve spontaneously from states with less disorder to states with more disorder, and this propensity can be used to identify an arrow of time. Thus, if a phenomenon produces a large amount of entropy, observing its time-reversal is so improbable as to become essentially impossible. However, when the entropy produced is small enough, there is a non-negligible probability of seeing the time-reversal of a phenomenon occur naturally. Thinking back to the toothpaste example, if we were to squeeze the tube only gently and only a very small part of the toothpaste came out, it would not be so unlikely to observe it re-entering the tube, sucked in by the tube’s decompression. On the other hand, as the tube is squeezed with more strength, the toothpaste will spread out in an irreversible way, requiring a much greater effort if one were to put all it back in…

“In our work, we quantified the entropy produced by a system evolving in quantum superposition of processes with opposite time arrows. We found that this most often results in projecting the system onto a well-defined time’s direction, corresponding to the most likely process of the two” explains Gonzalo Manzano, a co-author of the study. And yet, when small amounts of entropy are involved (for instance, when there is so little toothpaste spilled that one could see it being reabsorbed into the tube), then one can physically observe the consequences of the system having evolved along the forward and backward temporal directions at the same time. As pointed out by Giulia Rubino, lead-author of the publication, “although time is often treated as a continuously increasing parameter, our study shows that the laws governing its flow in quantum mechanical contexts are much more complex. This may suggest that we need to rethink the way we represent this quantity in all those contexts where quantum laws play a crucial role.”

University of Vienna, “In quantum mechanics, not even time flows as you might expect it to” at Eurekalert (November 29, 2021)

Cue time travel — but only if you are very, very small.

The paper is open access.

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Published on December 01, 2021 19:33

At Mind Matters News: Would cognition in bacteria “dethrone” humans?

A cognition researcher’s approach to the question helps account for the growing popularity of panpsychism — as an alternative to hers:

Adelaide University cognition researcher Pamela Lyon offered an interesting thesis at Aeon last month: “Cognition did not appear out of nowhere in ‘higher’ animals but goes back millions, perhaps billions, of years.” Given that several scientists have recently made claims for cognition in single-celled entities, her contention is not all that surprising. But her approach to the topic prompts some thought:

Lyon, who has little time for doubters, invokes Charles Darwin in calling for a “Copernican” shift in thinking on the subject…

Classically, Lyon tells us,

“There is grandeur in this view of life,’ Darwin writes, and he is correct. We can now see ourselves – with scientific justification and with no need for mystical overlay or anthropomorphism – in a daffodil, an earthworm, perhaps even a bacterium, as well as a Chimpanzee. Pamela Lyon, “On the Origin of Minds” at Aeon (October 21, 2020)”

Please. We can see ourselves as a river, a quarter after four, or the embodiment of liberty if we want. But the daffodil, the earthworm, the bacterium can’t see themselves as us — or as anything other than what they are. The chimpanzee may imagine life as a human but that wouldn’t include thinking like a human, which is just what he doesn’t do. To the extent that all these life forms are sentient, they are sentient within their bounds.

Denyse O’Leary, “Would cognition in bacteria “dethrone” humans?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Of course we can “see ourselves” as an earthworm. But it doesn’t work in reverse. And Pamela Lyon sheds no light on that fact, apart from denigrating humans.

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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Published on December 01, 2021 19:17

Science journal editor warns, humans are going extinct

Henry Gee is both a paleontologist and editor at Nature. He has a book out, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth (St. Martin’s Press, 2021) and he also has a message for all of us: “Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse:”

Another preoccupation of the 1960s, apart from nuclear annihilation, was overpopulation. Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, a year when the rate of world population growth was more than 2 percent—the highest in recorded history.

Henry Gee, “Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct” at Scientific American (November 30, 2021)

That was then. Now, underpopulation is wearing out the worry beads.

Gee frets, we are a dead species walking:

“The species most at risk are those that dominate particular habitat patches at the expense of others, who tend to migrate elsewhere, and are therefore spread more thinly,” Gee posited. “Humans occupy more or less the whole planet, and with our sequestration of a large wedge of the productivity of this planetwide habitat patch, we are dominant within it.”

Victor Tangermann, “Scientist says that humans are almost certainly going extinct” at Futurism (November 30, 2021)

Question: If Paul Ehrlich was wrong, why shouldn’t we just assume that Henry Gee is too?

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Published on December 01, 2021 18:24

Eric Holloway: Frog stem cells are NOT self-reproducing robots

Stem cells naturally reproduce themselves. The researchers working with frog stem cells merely found, via algorithms, one configuration that works better:

Recently, the sci-fi dream of self-replicating robots has been in the news, thanks to the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. A recent experiment with frog cells was hailed by news outlets as disparate as CNN (“World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say”) and Daily Wire (“American Universities Create First ‘Self-Replicating Living Robots’”). And it was also debunked by Ars Technica: (“Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots”).

So what’s really happening?

Self-replication is a very tricky problem of information. To truly self-replicate, an organism must completely copy the information necessary for function. Seems simple enough but it introduces a conundrum. For the organism to copy its information, it must also copy the ability to copy its information. Solving this problem of self-reference is very difficult.

The easiest realm in which we can solve the problem of self-reproduction so far is computer code. John von Neumann (1903–1957), one of the inventors of the modern computer, designed a self-replicator known as the Von Neumann Universal Constructor. The Constructor is a genius piece of insight, anticipating the discovery of naturally self-reproducing code in DNA.

However, this is not the same scenario with the xenobots that are making the news. They are robots in only the loosest sense of the word. The term “robot” refers to a complex mechanical and computational entity that engineers have carefully crafted. These xenobots are actually stem cells from an African frog (Xenopus laevis):

Eric Holloway, “Is the age of the living, self-replicating robot at hand? No.” at Mind Matters News (December 1, 2021)

Takehome: Calling these stem cells “self-reproducing robots” is like saying that humans create catbots when a pet cat produces a litter of kittens.

You may also wish to read: Ars Technica slams claims re living, reproducing robots At Ars Technica: But the paper buried this in language that, at best, is overhyped, and the researchers aren’t even being technically accurate when describing this work to the press. At a time when trust in science seems to be at an all-time low, this isn’t likely to be helpful.

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Published on December 01, 2021 18:17

More on Dr Kojonen’s Darwinist evolution is an expression of deeper design thesis,

as, it is worthy of further consideration (which is not the same as an endorsement).

I headline a comment:

[[Kojonen develops his case further:

I will . . . argue in this book that the teleological order of biological organisms can still, in a rationally permissible way, be understood as a sign of the divine reality, even in an evolutionary cosmos. [ –> a if not necessarily the main thesis] . . . .

According to [American Botanist, Asa] Gray (1860), evolution actually “leaves the question of design just where it was before,” because the biological design argument does not in any way depend on whether God created living organisms directly, through miracles, or through a secondary cause such as evolution. Seeing the end result, Gray claims, is still enough to create a compelling case for design . . . .

Many now believe that the scientific data also supports belief in at
least some directionality in evolution. It seems to me that now, with new work in the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of religion, and the natural sciences, it is again plausible to understand biological order as the supreme manifestation of the “wider teleology,” and thus as also indirectly revelatory of the Creator. The idea that biological nature provides us with evidence of design can thus be reclaimed for use within a theistic evolu-tionist understanding of nature. This promises to transform the debate over design and evolution, not only providing a defense of the logical compatibility of evolution and creation, but also moving beyond this mere compatibility by rehabilitating the idea of evidence for design . . . .

Mats Wahlberg (2012, 182), one of the contemporary defenders of the revelatory potential of biology, comments: “If it takes more wisdom to create through an evolu-tionary process than by hands-on-design, and if structures created by hand-on-design by humans are expressive of human intent and intelli-gence, why could not structures created by God in that more wisdom-demanding way reflect divine intent and intelligence?” . . . .

If we adopt the popular conception of science as methodologically naturalistic, then the question of design should be understood as nonscientific. Nevertheless, the features of the natural world, as studied by the natural sciences, will still be relevant for the argument. Some readers might even question whether philosophical and theological analysis could have anything to contribute to the discussion beyond what the natural sciences have to say . . . .

Questions like “when does one explanation eliminate
another,” “could the order of the world even in principle reveal a Creator” and “how does suffering fit with the idea of design” are necessary for the debate and require moving beyond just scientific considerations, to con – sidering the nature of explanation and broader metaphysical story we believe about the world. Moreover, the position that evolution and divine design do not fit together is also a philosophical and even a theological (or antitheological) conclusion, requiring just as much philosophical justifica – tion as the conclusion of compatibility . . . .

Suppose that the evolutionary mechanisms biologists study really
are able to generate the wonders of biology from hummingbirds to human brains. Is the production of such results then more plausible if those mechanisms were purposefully designed, or if they were not? Could the products of an indirect evolutionary process even in principle tell us some-thing about the rationality of the cosmos and the wisdom of its Creator? [Ch 1, p. 16 ff] . . . .

the fine-tuning design argument is based on the observation that
the laws, constants, and starting conditions of the cosmos allow for the existence of complex life. It appears that the requirements for the emer-gence of complex life are very stringent, requiring the right kind of forces to exist in the right portions (Geraint and Barnes 2016). While there is some amount of leeway, in many cases even very small changes would make the existence of life as we know it (or even the existence of stable elements) impossible. Four main types of evidence can be recognized (Collins 2009). First (1), the suitable types of laws and forces need to exist. If, for example, one of the four basic forces of physics were missing, then fine-tuning the rest would not suffice. Forces that interfere with these to prevent life should also not exist. Second (2), the strengths of the basic forces in relation to each other must be suitable for life. Third (3), the matter and anti-matter of the early cosmos must have the correct type of properties and proportion. Fourth (4), the result of these factors, then, should be the type of elements that are suitable to be “building blocks” for life. In addition to these factors, many other considerations important for life and scientific discovery have been cited, such as the features of the cosmos that allow for scientific discovery (Collins 2018). [p. 76, Ch 3]

It is obvious that Kojonen is a theistic evolutionist, but much of his biological argument is essentially a front loading argument, tied to cosmological design. Design that manifests itself indirectly through built in potentials and constraints that guide OoL band of Body plans down to our own is still design, and signs of design in life forms are real. In that context, the pivotal evidence is that of the fine tuned cosmos, set up in ever so many just so ways that facilitate C-Chemistry, aqueous medium, cell based, terrestrial planet in circumstellar and spiral galactic habitable zone life. While he aptly points to Gray, he would be even more tellingly able to point to a co-founder of evolutionary theory, Wallace, in his The World of Life, where we read in the preface:

. . . the most prominent feature of my book is that I enter into a popular yet critical examination of those underlying fundamental problems which Darwin purposely excluded from his works as being beyond the scope of his enquiry.

Such are, the nature and causes of Life itself ; and more especially of its most fundamental and mysterious powers growth and reproduction. I first endeavour to show (in Chapter XIV.) by a care-ful consideration of the structure of the bird’s feather; of the marvellous transformations of the higher insects ; and, more especially of the highly elaborated wing-scales of the Lepidoptera (as easily accessible examples of what is going on in every part of the structure of every living thing), the absolute necessity for an organising and directive Life-Principle in order to account for the very possibility of these complex outgrowths.

I argue, that they necessarily imply first, a Creative Power, which so constituted matter as to render these marvels possible ; next, a directive Mind which is demanded at every step of what we term growth, and often look upon as so simple and natural a process as to require no explanation ; and, lastly, an ultimate Purpose, in the very existence of the whole vast life-world in all its long course of evolution throughout the eons of geological time.

This Purpose, which alone throws light on many of the mysteries of its mode of evolution, I hold to be the development of Man, the one crowning product of the whole cosmic process of life-development ; the only being which can to some extent comprehend nature; which can perceive and trace out her modes of action ; which can appreciate the hidden forces and motions everywhere at work, and can deduce from them a supreme and over-ruling Mind as their necessary cause.

For those who accept some such view as I have indicated, I show (in Chapters XV. and XVI.) how strongly it is sup-ported and enforced by a long series of facts and co-relations which we can hardly look upon as all purely accidental coincidences. Such are the infinitely varied products of living things which serve man’s purposes and man’s alone not only by supplying his material wants, and by gratifying his higher tastes and emotions, but as rendering possible many of those advances in the arts and in science which we claim to be the highest proofs of his superiority to the brutes, as well as of his advancing civilisation.

From a consideration of these better-known facts I proceed (in Chapter XVII.) to an exposition of the mystery of cell-growth ; to a consideration of the elements in their special relation to the earth itself and to the life-world ; while in the last chapter I endeavour to show the purpose of that law of diversity which seems to pervade the whole material Universe. [ The World of Life: a manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose, pp. vi – vii, preface, 1914 UK Edn.]

That said, I think design theorists ever since Thaxton et al in TMLO (now re-issued as a 2nd edition), have carefully distinguished between an inference to design as key causal factor of phenomena such as functionally specific complex organisation and/or associated information [FSCO/I] in the world of life and the ontological status of designers of observed life. As I have put it over the years here at UD, a molecular nanotech lab several generations beyond our state of the art per Venter et al, would account for what is in the cell. Namely, coded, complex, algorithmic information in R/DNA, i.e. language and goal-directed stepwise processes with associated molecular nanotech execution machinery. It is in fact origin of a fine tuned, finitely old cosmos that definitely points to an extra cosmic designer, just as our responsible, rational, morally governed freedom and associated pervasive first principles/duties point to the moral nature of the necessary being root of reality. This last point is an argument that goes beyond science to logic of being.

Such noted, I think it is appropriate to also note that there is no good reason per empirical warrant, to hold that blind chance and/or mechanical necessity accounts for the copious FSCO/I in the cell and in body plans including our own. Once complexity exceeds 500 – 1,000 bits, a sol system of 10^57 atoms or an observed cosmos — the only actually observed cosmos BTW — of 10^80 atoms and ~ 10^17s with chemical interaction rates for organic reactions generously topped out at 10^-14s, just does not have enough resources to credibly search more than a negligible fraction of relevant configuration spaces. 2^500 = 3.27*10^150 and 2^1000 = 1.07*10^301.

Design inference in regards to the cell and major body plans requiring 10 – 100 million base pairs of incremental information, is well warranted. Whatever the ideologues trying to straight-jacket science through question begging, institutionally embedded a priori evolutionary materialism may imagine. As for the even grosser error of scientism, suffice to note that the claim that science [as straight-jacketed] monopolises or dominates knowledge, is a fallacious philosophical or even ideological assertion. It refutes itself.

So, the design inference can stand on its own two feet and trade punches.]]

Food for thought. END

PS: It is also worth considering what William Paley went on to say in Ch 2 of his Natural Theology (which tends to be overlooked), starting with the thought exercise of a self-replicating watch:

Suppose, in the next place, that the person who found the watch [in a field and stumbled on the stone in Ch 1 just past, where this is 50 years before Darwin in Ch 2 of a work Darwin full well knew about] should after some time discover that,in addition to

[–> here cf encapsulated, gated, metabolising automaton, and note, “stickiness” of molecules raises a major issue of interfering cross reactions thus very carefully controlled organised reactions are at work in life . . . ]

all the properties [= specific, organised, information-rich functionality] which he had hitherto observed in it, it possessed the unexpected property of producing in the course of its movement another watch like itself [–> i.e. self replication, cf here the code using von Neumann kinematic self replicator that is relevant to first cell based life] — the thing is conceivable [= this is a gedankenexperiment, a thought exercise to focus relevant principles and issues]; that it contained within it a mechanism, a system of parts — a mold, for instance, or a complex adjustment of lathes, baffles, and other tools — evidently and separately calculated for this purpose [–> it exhibits functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information; where, in mid-late C19, cell based life was typically thought to be a simple jelly-like affair, something molecular biology has long since taken off the table but few have bothered to pay attention to Paley since Darwin] . . . . The first effect would be to increase his admiration of the contrivance, and his conviction of the consummate skill of the contriver. Whether he regarded the object of the contrivance, the distinct apparatus, the intricate, yet in many parts intelligible mechanism by which it was carried on, he would perceive in this new observation nothing but an additional reason for doing what he had already done — for referring the construction of the watch to design and to supreme art

[–> directly echoes Plato in The Laws Bk X on the ART-ificial (as opposed to the strawman tactic “supernatural”) vs the natural in the sense of blind chance and/or mechanical necessity as serious alternative causal explanatory candidates; where also the only actually observed cause of FSCO/I is intelligently configured configuration, i.e. contrivance or design]

. . . . He would reflect, that though the watch before him were, in some sense, the maker of the watch, which, was fabricated in the course of its movements, yet it was in a very different sense from that in which a carpenter, for instance, is the maker of a chair — the author of its contrivance, the cause of the relation of its parts to their use [–> i.e. design]. . . . . We might possibly say, but with great latitude of expression, that a stream of water ground corn ; but no latitude of expression would allow us to say, no stretch cf conjecture could lead us to think, that the stream of water built the mill, though it were too ancient for us to know who the builder was. What the stream of water does in the affair is neither more nor less than this: by the application of an unintelligent impulse to a mechanism previously arranged, arranged independently of it and arranged by intelligence, an effect is produced, namely, the corn is ground. But the effect results from the arrangement. [–> points to intelligently directed configuration as the observed and reasonably inferred source of FSCO/I] The force of the stream cannot be said to be the cause or the author of the effect, still less of the arrangement. Understanding and plan in the formation of the mill were not the less necessary for any share which the water has in grinding the corn; yet is this share the same as that which the watch would have contributed to the production of the new watch . . . .

Though it be now no longer probable that the individual watch which our observer had found was made immediately by the hand of an artificer, yet doth not this alteration in anywise affect the inference, that an artificer had been originally employed and concerned in the production. The argument from design remains as it was. Marks of design and contrivance are no more accounted for now than they were before. In the same thing, we may ask for the cause of different properties. We may ask for the cause of the color of a body, of its hardness, of its heat ; and these causes may be all different. We are now asking for the cause of that subserviency to a use, that relation to an end, which we have remarked in the watch before us. No answer is given to this question, by telling us that a preceding watch produced it. There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance, without a contriver; order [–> better, functionally specific organisation], without choice; arrangement, without any thing capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose, without that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end, and executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it. Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to a use, imply the presence of intelligence and mind. No one, therefore, can rationally believe that the insensible, inanimate watch, from which the watch before us issued, was the proper cause of the mechanism we so much admire m it — could be truly said to have constructed the instrument, disposed its parts, assigned their office, determined their order, action, and mutual dependency, combined their several motions into one result, and that also a result connected with the utilities of other beings. All these properties, therefore, are as much unaccounted for as they were before. Nor is any thing gained by running the difficulty farther back, that is, by supposing the watch before us to have been produced from another watch, that from a former, and so on indefinitely. Our going back ever so far brings us no nearer to the least degree of satisfaction upon the subject. Contrivance is still unaccounted for. We still want a contriver. A designing mind is neither supplied by this supposition nor dispensed with. If the difficulty were diminished the farther we went back, by going back indefinitely we might exhaust it. And this is the only case to which this sort of reasoning applies. “Where there is a tendency, or, as we increase the number of terms, a continual approach towards a limit, there, by supposing the number of terms to be what is called infinite, we may conceive the limit to be attained; but where there is no such tendency or approach, nothing is effected by lengthening the series . . . ,

And the question which irresistibly presses upon our thoughts is. Whence this contrivance and design ? The thing required is the intending mind, the adapted hand, the intelligence by which that hand was directed. This question, this demand, is not shaken off by increasing a number or succession of substances destitute of these properties; nor the more, by increasing that number to infinity. If it be said, that upon the supposition of one watch being produced from another in the course of that other’s movements, and by means of the mechanism within it, we have a cause for the watch in my hand, namely, the watch from which it proceeded — I deny, that for the design, the contrivance, the suitableness of means to an end, the adaptation of instruments to a use, all of which we discover in the watch, we have any cause whatever. It is in vain, therefore, to assign a series of such causes, or to allege that a series may be carried back to infinity; for I do not admit that we have yet any cause at all for the phenomena, still less any series of causes either finite or infinite. Here is contrivance, but no contriver; proofs of design, but no designer. [Paley, Nat Theol, Ch 2]

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Published on December 01, 2021 03:26

November 30, 2021

Origin of life: Could biopolymers just sort of happen by accident?

This just in: No

We’re often told that origin of life experiments have simulated the production of life’s building blocks under conditions that mimicked the early earth. Or at least that’s what many textbooks say. But is this really true? This video deals with one particular challenge to evolving life from chemicals: forming biopolymers under natural conditions. Watch this video to appreciate how origin of life experiments don’t come anywhere close to accounting for the vast complexity of biology. This is the second of several episodes about the origin of life presented as part of the Long Story Short series.

James Tour had a hand in this, didn’t he?

Here’s the earlier long Story Short on origin of life:

We’re often told that origin of life experiments have simulated the production of life’s building blocks under conditions that mimicked the early earth. Or at least that’s what many textbooks say. But is this really true? This video shows how origin of life researchers “cheat” by using purified chemicals that don’t reproduce actual natural conditions. Another dirty little secret is that prebiotic synthesis experiments often don’t report the bulk of the product: toxic garbage that destroys the building blocks’ ability to form more complex molecules. Watch this video to appreciate how origin of life experiments don’t come anywhere close to accounting for the vast complexity of biology. This is the first of several episodes about the origin of life presented as part of the Long Story Short series.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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Published on November 30, 2021 19:51

Two new papers support Michael Behe’s thesis in Darwin Devolves

That much evolution consists in dumping rather than adding complexity:

In the first study, in the journal Nature Microbiology, the researchers found that in Africa, where “most rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for falciparum malaria recognize histidine-rich protein 2 antigen,” the malaria parasite has repeatedly evolved a way to sometimes elude detection, giving it a selective advantage, since this sneakier form of the parasite is less likely to be treated with anti-malaria drugs and eliminated. But what gets lost in the media hype is that the trick is managed by deleting histidine-rich protein 2 (pfhrp2) and 3 (pfhrp3) genes — devolution.

A similar story unfolds in a Current Biology article focused on the yeast S. cerevisiae. Behe says the thinking used to be that, as an earlier and simpler evolutionary form, it was no wonder this yeast had fewer introns than later, more sophisticated organisms higher up the evolutionary tree. But as Behe underscores and as this recent paper argues, it looks instead like the yeast devolved, tossing off genetic information to achieve a niche advantage while sacrificing functionality outside the niche.

Two Recent Papers Buttress Michael Behe’s Thesis in Darwin Devolves, “Two Recent Papers Buttress Michael Behe’s Thesis in Darwin Devolves” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 27, 2021)

Details, details. Subtraction is just addition with minus numbers, right?