Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 134

Rocky exoplanets turn out to feature exotic rocks

Well, okay, by astronomer standards. The astronomers were studying “polluted white dwarfs” — collapsed stars with a bunch of debris from their planets, etc., which crashed into them:

They found that these white dwarfs have a much wider range of compositions than any of the inner planets in our Solar System, suggesting their planets had a wider variety of rock types. In fact, some of the compositions are so unusual that Putirka and Xu had to create new names (such as “quartz pyroxenites” and “periclase dunites”) to classify the novel rock types that must have existed on those planets.

“While some exoplanets that once orbited polluted white dwarfs appear similar to Earth, most have rock types that are exotic to our Solar System,” said Xu. “They have no direct counterparts in the Solar System.”

Putirka describes what these new rock types might mean for the rocky worlds they belong to. “Some of the rock types that we see from the white dwarf data would dissolve more water than rocks on Earth and might impact how oceans are developed,” he explained. “Some rock types might melt at much lower temperatures and produce thicker crust than Earth rocks, and some rock types might be weaker, which might facilitate the development of plate tectonics.”

Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), “Rocky exoplanets are even stranger than we thought” at ScienceDaily (November 2, 2021)

The paper is open access.

Did we ever tell you the one about the gold asteroid? It’s true. Or as true as any of the rest of it:

Could huge chunks of asteroid gold wreck our economy? 16 Psyche’s gold illustrates how AI affects jobs. Not the way many think… “By lowering the price of gold, it would create new, currently nonexistent, markets for other uses of gold,” says Jay Richards. In the same way, AI creates new, currently nonexistent, markets for human time and creativity.

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At Mind Matters News: For Ants, Building a Bridge Is No “Simple” Task

Richard Stevens notes that there is nothing “simple” about designing neural systems and the computer systems to receive and interpret neural sensory inputs:

Researching for my previous Mind Matters article about bird and bee biological software, I came across a short piece at Quanta Magazine entitled “The Simple Algorithm That Ants Use to Build Bridges.” Really, a “simple” insect algorithm? Intriguing.

Eric Cassell’s book, Animal Algorithms (2021), reveals the complex and intricate hardware-software systems enabling bird and insect procedures for migration, building nests and structures, social cooperation, and navigation. Grounded in engineering training and experience, Cassell shows that animal algorithms must be designed top-down starting with a goal, fashioning the data input sensors, developing the necessary procedures, and implementing them in software to direct hardware. Yet the Quanta Magazine piece reported that Panamanian army ants’ procedures for building bridges of living ants is accomplished using a “simple algorithm.”

The problem the army ants must solve: crossing gaps and holes appearing in the path of a migrating ant colony. The Quanta piece reports research suggesting the ants deploy an algorithm with these basic elements:

[…]

Buried within the Quanta piece’s common verbs like “detects” is one whale of a lot of hardware and software. To “detect a gap” requires first the sensory hardware. The army ant needs a fully functional neural system with the sense of touch, probably smell, and perhaps some vision. There is nothing “simple” about designing neural systems and the computer systems to receive and interpret neural sensory inputs. Human scientists and engineers have labored for decades working on how to fashion neural-like hardware.

Richard Stevens, “For ants, building a bridge is no “simple” task” at Mind Matters News (November 30, 2021)

Science media must describe the living ant bridge as “simple.” To deal with the true state of affairs would just raise too many questions.

Here’s an example:

Read the rules of the algorithm at For ants, building a bridge is no “simple” task.

Takehome: The Quanta piece promotes a notion that software algorithms are “simple.” To the contrary, it would take an army of engineers to do what ants do instinctually.

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Ars Technica slams claims re living, reproducing robots

Or “mini-me”s?: You may have heard the claims from breathless sources. Now this:

Scientists on Monday announced that they’d optimized a way of getting mobile clusters of cells to organize other cells into smaller clusters that, under the right conditions, could be mobile themselves. The researchers call this process “kinematic self-replication,” although that’s not entirely right—the copies need help from humans to start moving on their own, are smaller than the originals, and the copying process grinds to a halt after just a couple of cycles.

So, of course, CNN headlined its coverage “World’s first living robots can now reproduce.”

This is a case when something genuinely interesting is going on, but both the scientists and some of the coverage of the developments are promoting it as far more than it actually is. So, let’s take a look at what has really been done.

John Timmer, “Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots” at Ars Technica (November 30, 2021)

We’ll let Timmer tell it:

This is reasonably interesting work, but the researchers involved are a bit excessive in their presentation of it. They call it a “form of perpetuation” that’s “previously unseen in any organism.” Well, yes. It’s not seen in any organisms because it’s not actually a form of perpetuation, since it doesn’t work for more than two generations, much less in perpetuity. And it’s hard to imagine a way of evolving the conditions the humans had to provide here—notably two different culture dishes filled with dissociated cells…

On its own, some aspects of this work are nifty. The researchers used an algorithm to identify a way they could transform a set of odd biological phenomena into the equivalent of an assembly line robot with a finite lifespan. Which is pretty clever.

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.

John Timmer, “Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots” at Ars Technica (November 30, 2021)

Recent statistics from the COVID-19 pandemic don’t suggest that trust in science is at an alltime low. We’ll hear more about that here at UD later.

The problem is, what kind of “trust” is it? Trust in the face of obvious hype, contradiction, obfuscation, conflicting interests, and persecution of dissenters who offer embarrassing but correct information is usually a superstitious trust: That is, trust that all will be well if we just blindly follow these rules… rules whose relationship to the facts of the case is forever conveniently obscure.

The people who lose trust in science as a result of repeated blows tend to be more intelligently skeptical to begin with. And those are the ones you would want on your side.

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Latest Sokal Hoax is a beaut

Look on the bright side. At least the money we spend supporting “higher education” is paying for entertainment:

Ever since Alan Sokal hoaxed Social Text more than 20 years ago, and Peter Boghossian and his two compatriots punked several postmodern journals with total gibberish just a couple years back, you’d think academic journal editors and reviewers would be on guard against similar hoaxes. But apparently not Higher Education Quarterly (a Wiley publication) which is just out with a howler entitled “Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy.”

The study purports to demonstrate that “right wing” money is having a significant effect in pushing colleges to the right.

The first sign this is a hoax is that the article says the two authors, Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III, are on the economics faculty at UCLA, but I can find no record of their existence at UCLA or anywhere else, and no record of other publications by either author. I believe they do not exist. My suspicion is that the “authors” may be conservatives, or at least anti-leftists, who decided to see whether an article that flatters the deep biases of academia could get past peer review and into print.

Steven Hayward, “Latest Academic Hoax Is a Doozy ” at PowerLine (November 29, 2021)

Abstract: This paper uses a standardized, randomized survey instrument to investigate how whether faculty and professional staff at four-year universities and colleges perceive themselves to be subject to various kinds of illicit pressures, and then investigates how such perceived pressures correlate with donations from both right-wing and left-wing sources. receiving funding from right-wing sources has not only a statistically significant positive effect on perceived pressure to promote “right-wing” causes and candidates, but the effect size is large to very large. Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators—including those who self-identify as members of the right—to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates, to promote ideas they regard as poor, and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior. The paper is closed access. More.

Owens, S., & Avers-Lynde, K. (2021). Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy. Higher Education Quarterly, 00, 1– 24. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12360

Much more sleuthing at the link.

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Sabine Hossenfelder explains why antimatter doesn’t fall up

Sabine Hossenfelder is always entertaining and her latest vid/blog post doesn’t disappoint:

One of the lesser known facts about me is that I’m one of the few world experts on anti-gravity. That’s because 20 years ago I was convinced that repulsive gravity could explain some of the puzzling observations astrophysicists have made which they normally attribute to dark matter and dark energy. In today’s video I’ll tell you why that didn’t work, what I learned from that, and also why anti-matter doesn’t fall up…

But if there is so little anti-matter around us and it lasts only for such short amounts of time, how do we know it falls down and not up? We know this because both matter and anti-matter particles hold together the quarks that make up neutrons and protons.

Inside a neutron and proton there aren’t just three quarks. There’s really a soup of particles that holds the quarks together, and some of the particles in the soup are anti-particles. Why don’t those anti-particles annihilate? They do. They are created and annihilate all the time. We therefore call them “virtual particles.” But they still make a substantial contribution to the gravitational mass of neutrons and protons. That means, crazy as it sounds, the masses of anti-particles make a contribution to the total mass of everything around us. So, if anti-matter had a negative gravitational mass, the equivalence principle would be violated. It isn’t. This is why we know anti-matter doesn’t anti-gravitate.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Does Anti-Gravity Explain Dark Energy?” at BackRe(Action) (November 29, 2021)

Much more at the link.

She learned, by the way, that she ought to listen to her own advice from time to time. She incorporated some of that in her book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.

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At Mind Matters News: 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:

Last Monday, writing about a classical atheist naturalist who was attacking panpsychism, I reflected on the difficulties with which panpsychism presents him. Briefly, naturalism, often called “materialism,” posits that nature is all there is. Panpsychismdoesn’t dispute that. But the panpsychist also thinks that consciousness is real — present in all nature (or all living nature) but especially developed in humans.

The naturalist is hostile to the panpsychist because one of his underlying bedrock assumptions is that human consciousness will, in due course, be explained away. If it is not disposed of as an illusion, then it will be explained away as an aid to survival among early humans or perhaps as a spandrel (in evolution theory, a useless accompaniment of useful traits). So what we thought was our means of understanding the world is just another part of the world. It’s not a place we can stand that gives us some insight.

Despite the weight of a science establishment behind it, over many decades, that approach has just not caught on. It can’t. Because, for one thing, it ends the pursuit of science as a road to understanding.

On that view, there is nothing that understands. It’s just what happened on the African savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago when the human species learned to hunt better.

Or maybe not.

A friend has asked me to account for why I think panpsychism is a growing trend in science. Here are some observations…

➤ Panpsychism eliminates the crudities of Darwinism. For example, if consciousness is assumed to be a natural development in the most complex life forms, human consciousness would have happened, whether it improved survival or not. Darwinian controversies on the topic become pointless or anyway, much less significant. Perhaps that’s why a classical Darwinian, who needs to see human consciousness as a simple but controversial accident, views panpsychism with hostility.

Denyse O’Leary, “Why panpsychism is starting to push out naturalism” at Mind Matters News (November 29, 2021)

Takehome: Panpsychism is not dualism. By including consciousness — including human consciousness — as a bedrock fact of nature, it avoids naturalism’s dead end.

You may also wish to read: A Darwinian biologist resists learning to live with panpsychism. Jerry Coyne makes two things quite clear: He scorns panpsychism and he doesn’t understand why some scientists accept it. The differences between panpsychism and naturalism are subtle but critical. As panpsychism’s popularity grows, insight will be better than rage and ridicule.

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Christian Darwinists must now backtrack re Adam and Eve

Why were they so determined that humanity could not have originated with a single pair? Casey Luskin, who has been reviewing In Quest of the Historical Adam by William Lane Craig notes,

In the previous installment of my review of William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam we saw that many evangelical intellectuals had accepted arguments that Adam and Eve could not have existed. These arguments, in particular the claim that human genetic diversity is too great to have been reduced to a single pair, were forcefully promoted by theistic evolutionists aka evolutionary creationists (TE/ECs) affiliated with BioLogos. Prominent among these critics was Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, who compared modern-day belief in Adam and Eve with adhering to the long-refuted geocentric model of the solar system. But the arguments turned out to be wrong, as even BioLogos and Venema now admit.

To his credit, William Lane Craig is among those evangelicals who have been willing to question arguments against a historical Adam and Eve. In his book he cites the work of Ann Gauger, Ola Hössjer, and Joshua Swamidass who performed analyses showing that humanity could have originated from a single pair at least 500,000 years ago. Gauger and Hössjer noted that Adam and Eve could have lived even more recently if additional evolutionary assumptions are questioned.

When I was reading the rhetoric used by evangelical elites who advocated abandoning a historical Adam and Eve, I was struck by how much of it seemed driven by fear — fear of looking foolish before the world because you challenged evolution and were shown to be wrong. As I discussed, the lesson from this story is that it should not be taboo for evangelicals to challenge evolutionary arguments. We need not live in fear that doing so is “anti-science” or will “bring disrepute on the Christian faith” or “shame upon the name of Jesus Christ” — as some evangelical elites have argued.

Casey Luskin, “Lessons Not Learned from the Evangelical Debate over Adam and Eve” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 23, 2021)

As he goes on the show, some in the Christian evangelical elite are just slow learners in these matters. Maybe being right, sticking with their tradition, would have been a bigger problem for them.

You may also wish to read: William Lane Craig on Adam and Eve as less intelligent than us Whatever else Craig’s view is, as Luskin notes, it is a far cry from the Scriptural traditional assumption that the unfallen Adam and Eve were our betters and that we have all deteriorated as a result of sin. Adopting Craig’s view is bound to have worldview consequences.

Casey Luskin: The mytho-history of Adam, Eve, and William Lane Craig. Long a defender of orthodoxy, Craig seems to want to prune the orthodoxies he is expected to defend. But the pruning process in which he is engaged can never really stop. The “sensible God” is most likely the one looking back at us from our medicine cabinet mirrors.

and

Why did the evangelical Christian world go nuts for Christian Darwinism a decade ago? Contra Trendy Christians: It makes sense that all humans would descend from a single couple. If you had to account for something like, say, human consciousness, isn’t it easier to address if we all belong to the same family of origin? Would you prefer to explain the development of human consciousness assuming that we come from multiple different ones? Darn good thing if someone can prove its true genetically.

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Part 2 of New introduction to intelligent design: Recognizing Design Part 2

Here’s the next installment of that online lay-friendly course in understanding intelligent design theory:

In Part 1, we look at evidence that the universe had a beginning, therefore it had a Beginner – a Creator. We look more deeply at the information in DNA that makes life possible. Part 2 applies the core concepts of irreducible complexity and functional coherence to one of the most important functions in each cell – energy production.

You may also wish to see:

New introduction to intelligent design at YouTube Part 1. Palmer: Part 1 begins with the basic concepts of Darwinian Evolution. Darwin’s theory related to heredity, but the science behind genetics was a mystery in his day. Darwin’s assumptions about heredity have proven to be mistaken.

New introduction to intelligent design at YouTube, Part 2: Molecular biology Part 2 introduces the foundational concepts of Intelligent Design. Evidence from molecular biology over the past 60 years completely upends Darwinism.

Part 2 of New introduction to intelligent design: Recognizing Design, Part 1 Palmer: Part 2 applies the core concepts of irreducible complexity and functional coherence to one of the most important functions in each cell – energy production.

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At Mind Matters News: Can quantum physics, neuroscience merge as quantum consciousness?

Marcelo Gleiser

Physicist Marcelo Gleiser looks at the pros and cons of current theories:

Physicist and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser offers some thoughts as to the light quantum mechanics — as opposed to classical physics — can shed on consciousness. The problem, he thinks, is that both quantum mechanics and consciousness are mysteries and adding them two mysteries together doesn’t produce simple answers:

News, “Can quantum physics, neuroscience merge as quantum consciousness?” at Mind Matters News (November 28, 2021)

The truth is that despite the tremendous success of quantum physics when it comes to its applications — the digital and nuclear technologies that define much of modern life — its interpretation remains uncertain, a target of heated debate among physicists. We know how to use quantum physics, but we do not know what it is telling us about the nature of reality.

Marcelo Gleiser, “Can quantum mechanics explain consciousness?” at Big Think (November 24, 2021)

It’s the same with the brain and the mind:

In a nutshell, the issue here is that tagging neuronal activity is the easy part of the task. The hard part is understanding how active neurons conspire to create the sense of who we are — that is, translating bioelectrical activity and blood flow into self-awareness.

Marcelo Gleiser, “Can quantum mechanics explain consciousness?” at Big Think (November 24, 2021)

Indeed. For example, in a recent discussion, neuropsychologist Mark Solms and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agreed that, while neuroscientists tend to see the prefrontal cortex of the human brain as the seat of consciousness, clinical experience points to portions of the brain stem, which we share with other vertebrates, of varying degrees of intelligence or self-awareness. [Not much help.]

[Wethinks they’ll be at this a long time.]

Takehome: The problem is, if we assume that “the mind is nothing more than the brain,” there may be nothing we can discover about how it works. Gleiser wishes we could prove that that’s wrong but he can’t.

You may also wish to read: Does science disprove free will? A physicist says no. Marcelo Gleiser notes that the mind is not a solar system with strict deterministic laws. Apart from simple laws governing neurons, we have no clue what laws the mind follows, though it does show complex nonlinear dynamics. (Michael Egnor)

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Bill Dembski offers some thoughts on the current state of Christian apologetics

William Dembski

He asks, Is truth enough?: A look at the unfulfilled promise of Christian apologetics

A significant aspect of my work on intelligent design can be understood as falling under Christian apologetics, arguing that the science underlying design refutes atheism and agnosticism, and thus creates room for Christian theism. Moreover, as a professor at three seminaries, I often taught courses in apologetics, some even having that word “apologetics” in the course title. The non-apologetics courses that I taught were on the philosophy of religion, the relation between science and faith, rhetoric, logic, and critical thinking, all of which were also conducive to apologetics.

With this background, you might expect me to be an avid supporter of Christian apologetics, and so I am. But I give this talk as one who is also disappointed with the impact that apologetics has had to date and think that the discipline of apologetics needs to be expanded and upgraded if it is to fulfill its promise, which is to reclaim for Christ the life of the mind (compare 2 Corinthians 10:5).

I say Christian apologetics needs to be expanded and upgraded rather than reconceptualized or reimagined. What Christian apologists have accomplished in this and the last generation has been admirable and even crucially important. Except for a John Warwick Montgomery challenging the god-is-dead theology of the 1960s, except of a Norman Geisler articulating and defending biblical inerrancy, and except for subsequent vigorous challenges by Christian apologists against the nihilism, relativism, scientism, skepticism, materialism, and the other isms ravaging the intellectual world, where would we be? Fideism, with its intellectual bankruptcy, would rule the day.

William Dembski, “What makes arguments for God convincing — or not?” at Mind Matters News (November 28, 2021)

Dembski: Christian apologetics has, in my view, mainly been in the business of playing defense when it needs to be playing offense.

Note: This is a serialized reprint from Dembski’s site. You can read the whole essay at once there.

You may also wish to read: How informational realism subverts materialism Within informational realism, what defines things is their capacity for communicating or exchanging information with other things. In substituting information for perception, informational realism is able to preserve a common-sense realism that idealism has always struggled to preserve.

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