Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 138

November 20, 2021

Protein tidies cells like sorting a kitchen drawer…

The finding may help in the treatment of genetic disorders:

In a study with lab-grown mouse cells, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have found that a protein that helps form a structural network under the surface of the cell’s “command center” — its nucleus — is key to ensuring that DNA inside it remains orderly…

“Each compartment created by a lamin acts like a kitchen utensil drawer, keeping knives, forks and spoons easy to access, and more rarely used items like serving pieces out of the way until needed,” Reddy says.

Johns Hopkins Medicine, “Mouse cell studies show that correcting DNA disorganization could aid diagnosis and treatment of rare inherited diseases” at ScienceDaily (November 14, 2021)

And the alternative?

The research team found that nuclear DNA in cells lacking lamin B looked nearly the same as normal cells dividing, implying that lamin B may not be essential to reorganizing DNA after cell division. However, nuclear DNA in cells lacking lamins A and C did not reorganize neatly, becoming tangled and unsorted from its normal compartments within the nucleus.

“It looked like there was a rowdy party in the normally well-organized kitchen,” says Reddy, of the cells lacking lamins A and C. “Things were not in their places and the strands of active and inactive DNA were intermingled and separated from the lamins at the edge of the nucleus.”

Johns Hopkins Medicine, “Mouse cell studies show that correcting DNA disorganization could aid diagnosis and treatment of rare inherited diseases” at ScienceDaily (November 14, 2021)

And the high information level needed for all that came into existence randomly, of course, just like kitchen drawers and utensils… Which makes sense if you buy the Darwinian approach to consciousness, which treats it as an illusion (whose?) So tidiers and tidying are random too…

The people who built up Darwinism decades ago probably didn’t expect to find this stuff.

The paper is open access.

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Published on November 20, 2021 19:43

At Mind Matters News: What if ET has morphed into what we now call the laws of nature?

Astrophysicist Caleb Scarf has asked us to consider a daring hypothesis for conundrums around dark matter and dark energy

Columbia astrophysicist Caleb A. Scharf, has proposed that, if advanced technology might look like magic to less technologically advanced viewers, very advanced technology might look like the laws of nature:

News, “What if ET has morphed into what we now call the laws of nature?” at Mind Matters News

Toward the end of Carl Sagan’s 1985 science-fiction novel Contact, the protagonist follows the suggestion of an extraterrestrial to study transcendental numbers. After computing to 1020th places, she finds a clearly artificial message embedded in the digits of this fundamental number. In other words, part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence or is perhaps even life itself.

It’s a great mind-bending twist for a book. Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.

In other words, life might not just be in the equations. It might be the equations.

Caleb Scharf, “Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?” at Nautilus (November 17, 2016)

This is a somewhat different riff from the hypothesis that we are a simulation advanced extraterrestrials have created. That hypothesis assumes that they manipulate natural laws; this one assumes they are the laws, more or less.

More.

Takehome: Scharf’s hypothesis highlights the genuine difficulty of accounting for a universe that comes into existence without any underlying intelligence at all. His thought experiment amounts to an intelligent design hypothesis for the universe in which the creators and the laws of nature turn out to be the same thing. It is much bolder than the usual arguments around fine-tuning of our universe. It highlights the genuine difficulty of accounting for a universe that comes into existence without any underlying intelligence at all.

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Published on November 20, 2021 18:54

A reader reflects on Science Uprising #9: Spot on but the problem is an old one

After watching the film, reader Stephen Batzer kindly writes to reflect:

I’ve read some terrific books on fossils, new and old. Same problems, new and old books.

Peter Ungar’s book from 2010 Mammal Teeth: Origin, Evolution and Diversity is interesting:

The Origin(s) of Teeth – Most researchers believe that teeth first evolved from pharyngeal or skin structures resembling the placoid scales of sharks or rays…Evidence for the first teeth is equivocal, though they surely evolved as early experiments with vertebrate biomineralization … Regardless of when or where teeth first appeared … (p. 223)

So, as attorneys might ask me in a deposition, “The bottom line is, you just don’t know, do you?”

Ungar doesn’t know the mechanism of teeth origin or change. This is just about teeth and the guy (whom I’ve met, great guy) has spent his entire career on “food reduction.” No real knowledge of teeth origin, just description of progression in the fossil record.

Barbarah Stahl’s book, Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, is delightful. Phillip Johnson relied on it heavily, as you know.

If phyletic gradualism were “a thing” then we wouldn’t have “punctuated equilibrium” — the “get rich quick” scheme of evolution. That is why those buzz words were thought up, like, 50 years ago.

Of course there are always new fossil discoveries, but they tend to produce more questions than not. Think “Burgess Shale.”

One thing I always come back to is the “March of Progress” of horses. If we can’t get that one lineage figured out, the topic is hopeless. We have lots of horse fossils across multiple continents. What do we have? A dodge.

An arrangement of fossil horses is put in size order, and the reader is invited to “connect the dots.” However, as far as I know, no reputable anybody claims that the small horse to the left is the ancestral species to the marginally larger horse to the right. Remember, there is no genetic tree of life. If there isn’t, then there is no common ancestor. Full stop.

Schindewolf’s Basic Questions in Paleontology” is wonderful.

St. Mivart’s On the Genesis of Species is worth reading. It is, however, very much a product of its time.

Carroll’s book, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, is an absolute delight.

So, we’ve had, plus or minus, two centuries of fossil studies. Right now we’re getting revolutionary findings that fundamentally change our understanding of the whole enterprise I call nonsense. An appeal to secret knowledge: “Yes, I can see how you could reach those conclusions by reading these antiquated and obsolete manuscripts, but if you were familiar with the current literature, etc.?

Pffft. Species don’t change substantially, and we know why, genetically. If they departed indefinitely from type, we could breed a dog into a cat. As Phil J queried, if we can’t do this using skill and persistence, what makes us think that blind natural processes can do it?

I’ll tell you what makes some people think this, their philosophical allegiance to naturalism. It’s nature or nature.

You may also wish to read: Science Uprising # 9: Unvarnished fossil record is bad news for Darwin. Fossils, we are told, demonstrate the Truth of Darwinism as the history of life. But that’s only if you don’t look too closely. Science Uprising #9 looks too closely.

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Published on November 20, 2021 18:36

November 19, 2021

Chemist: Biology points to intelligent design

Gregory J. Rummo offers an anecdote by way of explanation:

I recently attended the inauguration ceremony of our university’s new president, delayed a year and a half by social distancing restrictions due to Covid19. One of the speakers, Dr. John Patrick, served as a medical missionary in Jamaica and Sub-Saharan Africa, where he studied malnutrition in children. He shared a story from when he had been invited as a guest lecturer of ethics at one of Cuba’s medical universities. The school’s director noticed how alert the students were during Dr. Patrick’s lectures and in order to better understand why this was, he challenged Dr. Patrick to a debate on the origins of life.

Dr. Patrick, always up for a good challenge, wrote on the board (in Spanish) “This sentence wrote itself.” The group of doctors and medical students debated the nonsense of such a statement for several minutes until finally Dr. Patrick erased the phrase This sentence and replaced it with DNA, adding “But you all believe this statement, don’t you?”

There was complete silence in the room, the point having been elegantly made.

Gregory J. Rummo, “Guest Post – Latest Discoveries in the Field of Structural Biology Point to Intelligent Design” at Christian Scholars Review (November 19, 2021)

You may also wish to read: Robert J. Marks: Can wholly random processes produce information? We showed that in all cases, that yes, [design] was required, and that there’s mathematics behind it. The mathematics is based on the No Free Lunch Theorem, which was popularized in the IEEE transactions on evolutionary computing in 1997. There, David Wolpert and W. G. Macready showed something which astonished the area of genetic programming and evolutionary programming.

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Published on November 19, 2021 21:01

Eric Holloway at Mind Matters News: Can the “physical world” be wholly physical? Physical at all?

Not if you follow the logic of Epicurean materialist thinking:

Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 BC – ca. 55 BC) — a Roman poet and philosopher

Let’s wind the clock back to the first century BC, when a Roman poet and philosopher named Lucretius wrote the poem On the Nature of Things.” In this poem, Lucretius outlines a philosophy known as Epicureanism in order to demonstrate the world can be explained without reference to a deity. In the Epicurean philosophy, only three things exist: atoms, the void, and the universe. Consequently, everything we see in the physical world can be reduced to atoms bumping into each other.

You may notice that Epicurean philosophy sounds similar to modern day physics. This is not an accident. Through the influence of chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and the Royal Society, the view, directly derived from Epicurean philosophy, that the physical world could be reduced to atoms became the dominant view. However, the moderns made different assumptions about atoms. They did not consider them eternal, for example, as Lucretius did.

Eric Holloway, “Can the “physical world” be wholly physical? Physical at all?” at Mind Matters News (November 19, 2021)

You may notice a problem. It is a very big problem. We now know that the physical world consists of more than atoms bumping into each other. There is energy. There is gravity. There is magnetism. There are electrical fields. None of these physical phenomena can be reduced to atoms bumping into each other.

In fact, atoms do not even bump into each other. Instead, they are repulsed by field effects. Nothing ever physically touches anything else in the physical world.

So, taken seriously, simple Epicurean materialism would show that almost all of nature is non-physical. That’s not really where an Epicurean would want to end up.

Takehome: The Epicurean philosophy of pure physicalism is attractive to many but the logic of it, followed consistently, refutes itself.

You may also wish to read: Why physicalism is failing as the accepted approach to science. The argument that everything in nature can be reduced to physics was killed by the philosophical Zombie, as Prudence Louise explains. Physicalism which depends on a mechanistic view of the universe, was challenged by observer-dependent quantum mechanics. Then the Zombie started walking…”

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Published on November 19, 2021 20:47

A picture gallery of a visit to the Smithsonian makes clear: All Darwin all the time

From the moment you walk in:

We know that it is Darwinian because the only statue in Fossil Hall is one of Charles Darwin. No other biologist is on display: not John Ray, not Georges Cuvier, Louis Agassiz, not Richard Owen, not Louis Pasteur, or any other great biologist or paleontologist who believed in a creator. It’s all Darwin, and only Darwin, everywhere in the museum. Smithsonian Magazine confirms this purpose:

The quote is a unifying theme of the hall and centers around the idea that life on Earth is forever changing, was changing in the past and will change again. That’s also why a bronze statue of Charles Darwin sits at the center of the exhibition. With his notebook in hand, the sculpture of Darwin is seated on a bench, as if he’s just exhausted himself touring the show. Sit down beside him and take a look at the open page of his journal. There you’ll find recreated his first-ever sketch that he made of his “tree of life.” With ancient creatures branching off to modern-day animals, this was the catalytic moment when Darwin realized with all certainty that all plants and animals are related.

Evolution News, “At the Smithsonian, the Nation’s Museum, It’s All Darwin, All the Time” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 17, 2021)

This is hagiography, to be sure. But do the hagiographers know what time it is?

Even now, Darwin’s bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) is threatened with Cancellation:

At The Times of London: “Charles Darwin will be next if his great defender is toppled” Huh? What? If Huxley (or Darwin) is cancelled, “the practice of science itself no longer matters.” Well, that’s true but for Cancel Culture, that’s a feature, not a bug. It shows their immense power, generally in the robes of victimhood. Has none of these people been paying attention to the war on math and the war on science?

All we know here is that when the Cancel crowd comes for Darwin (and why shouldn’t they? That’s what they do), there’s going to be quite the Hubbub at the Smithsonian as curators try to Woke all that stuff…

We TOLD them not to make a religion out of their opinions on the history of life.

Get your ID coffee mug while you can and pour a brew and watch…

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Published on November 19, 2021 20:08

At Mind Matters News: Why so many neuroscientists are unreflective materialists

It’s part of a larger commitment to the belief that materialism will one day refute dualism by explaining away all of the apparent immaterial aspects of the mind:

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has contributed a chapter of The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021): “Have science and philosophy refuted free will?” (Ch 18) and “Can materialism explain human consciousness?” (Ch 19). In it, he notes a reality of modern neuroscience: Materialism (the mind is simply what the brain does) is not a discovery so much as a pledge of allegiance:

News, “Why so many neuroscientists are unreflective materialists ” at Mind Matters News (November 19, 2021)

One might think that the logical problems with materialism would insulate 21st-century neuroscience from its influence, but that is not so. Most contemporary neuroscientists work from an implicitly materialist perspective — in part because they’re unreflective, in part because materialism is the metaphysical correlate of the atheistic scientism that infests modern science, and in part because public admission of a dualist perspective is perceived (correctly) to be a career impediment in neuroscience. I recently had a friend (a tenured and accomplished neuroscientist) who is a devout Christian tell me privately that if he ever publicly questioned materialism, he would never get another grant.

MICHAEL EGNOR, “DUALISM AND MATERIALISM IN MODERN NEUROSCIENCE” AT EVOLUTION NEWS AND SCIENCE TODAY (NOVEMBER 16, 2021), P. 215 IN THE BOOK

Takehome: In his chapter of a new anthology, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021), neurosurgeon Michael Egnor looks at the growing evidence that the mind is not simply what the brain does and defends a dualist view.

You may also wish to read:

Dualism is the best option for understanding the mind and the brain. Theories that attempt to show that the mind does not really exist clearly don’t work and never did. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor reviews the mind-brain theories for East Meets West: Theology Unleashed. He think dualism makes the best sense of the evidence.

and

Trying to disprove free will shows that materialism doesn’t work Michael Egnor: If you have a metaphysical theory and it contradicts science, logic, and everyday experience, then your metaphysics should be abandoned. To deny free will, biologist Jerry Coyne tries, once again, to defeat the implications of quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and logic.

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Published on November 19, 2021 18:59

Professional skeptic Michael Shermer gets it about what’s going wrong at the new Woke Scientific American

It turns out, Michael Shermer has his own sad story about how he got dumped by Scientific American after a long career as a columnist there (since April 2001) — as he tells us in “A case study in how identity politics poisons science.”

In one of his columns, he had cited the research provided by a well-known social psychologist Carol Tavris, to the effect that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children, and that most abusive parents were not abused as children.” The editor made him rewrite it, admonishing,

… we’re unwilling to publish a piece that suggests—even in a quote attributed to someone else [Carol Tavris]—that sexual harassment and the phenomenon of abused children growing up to be abusers are less of a problem than most people imagine. Heuristics are all very well, but unlike with spooky deaths related to horror movies, these involve real harm to real people.

Michael Shermer, “Scientific American Goes Woke” at Substack (November 17, 2021)

The editor’s demands, of course, amounted to misrepresenting the research evidence but he had to rewrite the column.

Then he made the mistake of suggesting that there had been progress over the decades in addressing violence against minority groups, women, etc. The editor responded:

I’m afraid I’m going to have to reject your December column. It’s not really well argued, and leaves a couple of enormous holes that any critic could drive a large truck through.

Michael Shermer, “Scientific American Goes Woke” at Substack (November 17, 2021)

Apparently, history is a hole one can drive a large truck through. Anyway, Shermer was let go as a columnist shortly afterward, with his last column appearing in January 2019.

Read the whole thing. There was a time when this sort of thing only happened to people like Forrest Mims, who doubts Darwinism.

Interesting to note that Shermer is writing for Substack, a rapidly growing non-legacy media subscription-based outlet.

Substack? Newsletter group creates alarm plus demands for censorship Substack is getting a lot of ink these days — raising both hope from readers and hand wringing from old media. The surprising thing about “controversial” Substack is that it is a restoration of the very old idea that we should pay a small amount for the content we want.

Also: At Scientific American: “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” Wow. Has the Darwin lobby hired itself a PR firm that recommended getting someone on board to accuse everyone who doubts Darwin of being a “white supremacist”? Quite simply, Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man is surely by far the most racist iconic document ever to be lauded by all the Right People! And getting someone to holler about “white supremacy” among Darwin doubters is, ahem, just a cheap shot, not a response to the stark raving racism in print of the actual document. Guys, try another one.

Hat tip: Jerry Coyne (who thinks the same way)

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Published on November 19, 2021 18:34

November 18, 2021

Snake with four legs — paleontologists’ dream come true — turns out not to be a snake

Hopes dashed:

Filling in the links of the evolutionary chain with a fossil record of a ”snake with four legs” connecting lizards and early snakes would be a dream come true for paleontologists. But a specimen formerly thought to fit the bill is not the missing piece of the puzzle, according to a new Journal of Systematic Palaeontology study led by University of Alberta paleontologist Michael Caldwell.

“It has long been understood that snakes are members of a lineage of four-legged vertebrates that, as a result of evolutionary specializations, lost their limbs,” said Caldwell, lead author of the study and professor in the departments of biological sciences and earth and atmospheric sciences.

“Somewhere in the fossil record of ancient snakes is an ancestral form that still had four legs. It has thus long been predicted that a snake with four legs would be found as a fossil.”

In a paper published in the journal Sciencein 2015, a team of researchers reported the discovery of what was believed to be an example of the first known four-legged snake fossil, an animal they named Tetrapodophis amplectus.

Taylor & Francis Group, “Paleontologists debunk fossil thought to be missing link between lizards and first snakes” at ScienceDaily (November 18, 2021)

This was the story in 2015:

So what happened?

“There are many evolutionary questions that could be answered by finding a four-legged snake fossil, but only if it is the real deal. The major conclusion of our team is that Tetrapodophis amplectus is not in fact a snake and was misclassified,” said Caldwell. “Rather, all aspects of its anatomy are consistent with the anatomy observed in a group of extinct marine lizards from the Cretaceous period known as dolichosaurs.”

Taylor & Francis Group, “Paleontologists debunk fossil thought to be missing link between lizards and first snakes” at ScienceDaily (November 18, 2021)

In any event, inconveniently, there is also a snarl about removing the fossil from Brazil.

So researchers are still looking for a snake with legs.

The paper is open access.

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Published on November 18, 2021 20:13

Register for a webinar with Eric Cassell on remarkable animal algorithms

Here:

Join Eric Cassell, interviewed by Casey Luskin, in this webinar event, where Cassell will explain just how perplexing these “animal algorithms” are and what this implies about their origin. After an interview between Luskin and Cassell, the cyber-floor will be opened for the audience to ask Cassell questions about his ideas. You will not want to miss this opportunity!

Dec 9, 2021 04:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada) (Time zones.)

More on/from Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts (2021):

Book excerpt: Navigational genius of insects Eric Cassell: The Goulds call this curious dance “the second most information-rich exchange in the animal world,”5 second only to human language. That is quite a statement considering the communication is by insects with only 950,000 neurons, compared to humans with about eighty-five billion.

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Published on November 18, 2021 19:37

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