Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 139

At New Atlantis: Manufacturing a science consensus

Mills’s jumping off point is the attempt to discredit the idea that COVID-19 originated in a lab accident (a quite reasonable idea, given the circumstances):

To be sure, the science on this matter is no more settled now than it was before. A report commissioned by President Biden, and released in August, found conflicting assessments from U.S. intelligence agencies about the pandemic’s origin. Many scientists still believe that the virus most likely emerged from human contact with some kind of animal host, and the past few months have not revealed any definitive new evidence to the contrary. What they have revealed is that scientific, political, and media elites have not been entirely forthcoming about the true state of the experts’ knowledge of — and the uncertainty surrounding — the origin of the virus. Some appear to have actively suppressed public scrutiny of the question. At this point, we may never be able to arrive at an answer. But if the lab-leak hypothesis does turn out to be true, this episode will have done more to damage the credibility of scientific experts than any other in recent memory.

Whatever the outcome — whether we learn that the virus jumped to humans from an animal, or that it accidentally escaped from a laboratory, or we remain in a state of ignorance — the lab-leak debacle may become a potent symbol of science’s crisis of legitimacy…

What is worrisome about the lab-leak controversy therefore is not only that our public discussions and political decisions about Covid-19 may have been hampered by the experts’ mischaracterization of scientific knowledge. The long-term danger is that the experts themselves have helped to undermine public trust in scientific expertise and the institutions that depend on it, at a moment when such knowledge is more deeply intertwined with our social and political life than ever before.

M. Anthony Mills, “Manufacturing Consensus” at New Atlantis (Fall 2021)

You may also wish to read: Springer Nature retracts 44 “utter nonsense” papers. As we’ve noted earlier, it’s getting to the point where “Trust the science!” is sounding more ridiculous all the time. It’s like saying “Trust the mountains” or “Trust milk.” It’s not a rational response to a lot of what we face just now.

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Science writer: Extinctions don’t necessarily lead to new diversity

Riley Black’s next book (2022)

The essay is a warning about current extinctions but offers a grand sweep:

Life’s behaviour in the past can give us a hint about what’s to come. We are presently going through what some ecologists have deemed a sixth mass extinction, a time when we’re losing species faster than new ones are evolving. Under the old view, we might expect that whatever species manage to survive humanity’s alterations to the planet will rapidly bounce back in a profusion of new forms. The pressure of extinction would be released into a new biodiversity high. But the emerging picture doesn’t track with such an expectation. The particulars of our choices may alter life’s history for far longer than we’d otherwise expect. Life might not recover in a million years’ time. Instead, whatever biodiversity peak life reaches may rely on the accidental nature of evolution itself. Whatever species survive humanity’s presence will proliferate, interact in new ways, and usher in inconceivable ecosystems.

Whether applied to our mammalian forebears or some of the first animals of 541 million years ago, life’s diversity isn’t reliant on mass extinctions for evolutionary inspiration. Life comes roaring forth when species begin to transcend a boundary – such as plants beginning to grow on land – or when interactions between species nudge biodiversity into new niches, as was the case with beasts in the heyday of the dinosaurs. Instead of moving to a steady beat, punctuated by relatively few record scratches, life’s tempo is full of unexpected and asymmetrical time changes, a cacophonous riot of life.

Riley Black, “This riotous life” at Aeon (November 18, 2021)

It’s also a tribute to “accidental evolution,” as if no serious explanation is required for the complex means by which boundaries are transcended.

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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At Mind Matters News: How even random numbers show evidence of design

Random number generators are actually pseudo-random number generators because they depend on designed algorithms:

Robert J. Marks: There are deterministic aspects of randomness. And this is a difficult concept to explain. But examples are obvious. If you flip a coin a million times, about 50% of the time, it will come up heads if it’s a fair coin. And that is a deterministic output of randomness.

So imagine setting up an evolutionary computing program where you have a specific outcome in mind and you performed this operation a million times. Well, it’s going to converge to that output, just like the coin flip converges to a 50% success rate. And putting together the stochastic framework in order for this to happen is what the people in evolutionary computing do.

News, “How even random numbers show evidence of design” at Mind Matters News

Robert J. Marks: Well, it’s a highly designed thing. And I would also argue that all random numbers generated by computers are themselves deterministic, believe it or not. In fact, they refer to them as pseudorandom number generators. There’s a little algorithm that spits out numbers that look random but underneath, they’re not random.

In fact, I have a student right now who is looking at training a neural network to forecast random numbers. If these random numbers are being generated by a deterministic algorithm, then we should be able to discover what the deterministic algorithm is.

Is there a way we can game that system and literally figure out the next random number? In fact, the only place in the world that randomness exists is in quantum collapse. That’s the only true randomness.

More.

Takehome: Claims for randomness in, say, evolution don’t withstand information theory scrutiny.

Here are all the episodes in the series. Browse and enjoy:

How information becomes everything, including life. Without the information that holds us together, we would just be dust floating around the room. As computer engineer Robert J. Marks explains, our DNA is fundamentally digital, not analog, in how it keeps us being what we are.Does creativity just mean Bigger Data? Or something else? Michael Egnor and Robert J. Marks look at claims that artificial intelligence can somehow be taught to be creative. The problem with getting AI to understand causation, as opposed to correlation, has led to many spurious correlations in data driven papers.Does Mt Rushmore contain no more information than Mt Fuji? That is, does intelligent intervention increase information? Is that intervention detectable by science methods? With 2 DVDs of the same storage capacity — one random noise and the other a film (BraveHeart, for example), how do we detect a difference?How do we know Lincoln contained more information than his bust? Life forms strive to be more of what they are. Grains of sand don’t. You need more information to strive than to just exist. Even bacteria, not intelligent in the sense we usually think of, strive. Grains of sand, the same size as bacteria, don’t. Life entails much more information.Why AI can’t really filter out “hate news.” As Robert J. Marks explains, the No Free Lunch theorem establishes that computer programs without bias are like ice cubes without cold. Marks and Egnor review worrying developments from large data harvesting algorithms — unexplainable, unknowable, and unaccountable — with underestimated risks.Can wholly random processes produce information? Can information result, without intention, Some have tried it with computers…
Dr. Marks: We could measure in bits the amount of information that the programmer put into a computer program to get a (random) search process to succeed.How even random numbers show evidence of design Random number generators are actually pseudo-random number generators because they depend on designed algorithms. The only true randomness, Robert J. Marks explains, is quantum collapse. Claims for randomness in, say, evolution don’t withstand information theory scrutiny.Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
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Neil Thomas’s next book will examine Darwinism as a modern creation myth

British humanities prof Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), explains:

After seeing my recent book through to publication, I began to experience the gnawing feeling that, although I had undoubtedly given it my best shot, I had not completely “nailed” the puzzling phenomenon of just why the Western world had come to accept ideas of evolution and natural selection which I personally had come to see as little but Victorian fables or, more politely phrased, cosmogenic myths for a materialist age. I therefore decided to embark on a companion volume, provisionally titled False Messiah: Darwin’s Origin of Species as Cosmogenic Myth. Here I will make the attempt to drill down even further to the root causes of what appeared to be the Western world’s unprecedented rejection of tried-and-tested philosophers and scientists such as Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, and the physician Galen in a strange capitulation to “out there” philosophic fantasists like Epicurus and his Roman disciple, Lucretius.

Neil Thomas, “How I Came to Take Leave of Darwin: A Coda” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 15, 2021)

Darwin came along and made it all sound like… modern science!

That makes a lot of sense. The best way to understand Darwinism is as the creation myth of naturalism: Nothing Randomly Produced Things That Don’t Matter. And Thinking About It Is an Illusion. So Trust the Science.

You may also wish to read: Privileged Address: An excerpt from Neil Thomas’s Taking Leave of Darwin

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At Mind Matters News: Can wholly random processes produce information?

Can information result, without intention, from a series of accidents? Some have tried it with computers…

Michael Egnor: Many evolutionary biologists claim that all of the information present in living things got there by natural selection of randomly assorted variation. Is that true? It’s very clear that living things contain a lot of information. Is it possible for the Darwinian process of random heritable mutation and natural selection to generate all that information in biology or even any of it?

Robert J. Marks: My background is not in biology but in computer science and computer engineering. And one of the things we do is artificial intelligence. And I think maybe your question — translated to artificial intelligence — is: Can anything happen in artificial intelligence from totally random, unguided mutations and processes? And the answer is absolutely not. We did a lot of work.

Winston Ewert and design theorist William Dembski did a lot of work analyzing programs that were purported to generate information.

With the advent of the computer, people said, evolution is such a slow process. It’s going to take us years and years in the laboratory to do anything. But if we have a computer, we can take these Darwin algorithms, simulate them on a computer, and show that indeed it works. And so people tried that. And there were people jumping up and down and saying, “Yes, we have proven Darwinian evolution.”

News, “Can wholly random processes produce information?” at Mind Matters News (November 16, 2021)

Robert J. Marks

Robert J. Marks: There was a problem, though, with their simulations. Number one is that all of the simulations were guided to be successful … You have the three steps of evolution: random mutation, killing off the weak, and the survival of the fittest.

The key step in those three steps is survival of the fittest. How do you determine what the survival of the fittest is? In order to do that, you have to have something called a fitness function or an objective function.

That needs to be imposed by the programmer. The programmer is telling you how the organism can better itself. That is necessary in order to perform evolution on the computer. In our book, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. We looked at a number of computer programs that purported to perform Darwinian evolution… based on publications in prestigious journals and conferences.

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.

Their conclusion — and their mathematical proof — was: If you have no idea about the direction that you’re going, you’re never going to get there. In accomplishing a goal, one search algorithm is as good on average as another one. And this astonished the computer science field, especially those in evolutionary computing. But it caught on. We took this up, and it’s covered in the Evolutionary Informatics book, for example.

We showed that, not only was this true, but we could measure the degree to which people infused information into the search process. We could measure in bits, the amount of information that a search process the programmer put into a computer program in order to get it to succeed…

More.

Takehome: Dr. Marks: We could measure in bits the amount of information that the programmer put into a computer program to get a (random) search process to succeed.

Here are all the episodes in the series. Browse and enjoy:

How information becomes everything, including life. Without the information that holds us together, we would just be dust floating around the room. As computer engineer Robert J. Marks explains, our DNA is fundamentally digital, not analog, in how it keeps us being what we are.Does creativity just mean Bigger Data? Or something else? Michael Egnor and Robert J. Marks look at claims that artificial intelligence can somehow be taught to be creative. The problem with getting AI to understand causation, as opposed to correlation, has led to many spurious correlations in data driven papers.Does Mt Rushmore contain no more information than Mt Fuji? That is, does intelligent intervention increase information? Is that intervention detectable by science methods? With 2 DVDs of the same storage capacity — one random noise and the other a film (BraveHeart, for example), how do we detect a difference?How do we know Lincoln contained more information than his bust? Life forms strive to be more of what they are. Grains of sand don’t. You need more information to strive than to just exist. Even bacteria, not intelligent in the sense we usually think of, strive. Grains of sand, the same size as bacteria, don’t. Life entails much more information.Why AI can’t really filter out “hate news.” As Robert J. Marks explains, the No Free Lunch theorem establishes that computer programs without bias are like ice cubes without cold. Marks and Egnor review worrying developments from large data harvesting algorithms — unexplainable, unknowable, and unaccountable — with underestimated risks.Can wholly random processes produce information? Can information result, without intention, Some have tried it with computers…
Dr. Marks: We could measure in bits the amount of information that the programmer put into a computer program to get a (random) search process to succeed.How even random numbers show evidence of design Random number generators are actually pseudo-random number generators because they depend on designed algorithms. The only true randomness, Robert J. Marks explains, is quantum collapse. Claims for randomness in, say, evolution don’t withstand information theory scrutiny.Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
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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:

Not so fast, as paleontologist Günter Bechly, geologist Casey Luskin, biologist Richard Sternberg, and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer explain. The masked narrator of Science Uprising series asks, “Just how bad is the fossil record for Darwin’s theory?” The answer is that, with all the jumps and explosions, the abrupt transitions and rapid developments of form where Darwin and his followers expected only slow change, the fossil record is nothing less than awful for evolution. It’s simply not what Darwinian theory would have expected. As University of Pittsburgh anthologist and evolutionist Jeffrey Schwartz has put it, “We are still in the dark about the origin of most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus — full-blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin’s depiction of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless infinitesimally minute variations.”

David Klinghoffer, “New Science Uprising Episode Asks, “Just How Bad Is the Fossil Record for Darwin’s Theory?”” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 17, 2021)

Schwartz better watch his step. Asking too many questions… gets people Cancelled.

You may also wish to read: Five more species of bacteria use alternate genetic codes

At The Scientist: “The genetic code has been set in stone for 3 billion years,” study coauthor Yekaterina Shulgina, a Harvard University graduate student in systems biology, tells The Scientist. “The fact that some organisms have found a way to change it is really fascinating to me. Changing the genetic code requires changing ancient, important molecules like tRNAs that are so fundamental to how biology works.”

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Book excerpt: Navigational genius of insects

The bees’ waggle dance:

When a scout bee locates a good feeding source, it navigates back to the hive and communicates the location of the feeding source through what is known as a waggle dance. 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. Honey bee brains are less than one cubic millimeter in size.6 That is, a thousand of their brains together wouldn’t amount to even a single cubic centimeter. A curiosity is that honey bees have brains only about half the volume of bumble bee brains, yet exhibit a larger repertoire and more complex behaviors than bumble bees.7

While the details of the waggle dance are still not completely understood, a significant amount of research, starting with Karl von Frisch, has revealed the basic methodology. The behavior develops in adult honey bees who have emerged from the pupa stage and chewed through the protective cell to join the colony. Honey bees are able to interpret the dance after about one week. The development includes electrophysiological changes in brain neurons, evident when comparing mature foragers with newly emerged bees.8 Therefore, the behavior appears to be a combination of innate capabilities and pre-programmed learning.

Eric Cassell, “Navigational Genius — Not Just for the Birds” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 16, 2021)

The book is Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts (2021).

All just happened randomly, of course.

You may also wish to read: At Mind Matters News: The intelligence birds and bees naturally have — and we don’t. Richard W. Stevens: You’re aiming to find your childhood friend’s home in a new city. A map helps; GPS is better. Accessing all that previously-acquired mapmakers’ knowledge, employing all of that satellite, radio and computing technology, you’ll probably (although not certainly) reach your goal. Could some “dumb bird” do any better? Way better, actually.

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At The Scientist: Why, contra Darwin, do male snakes eat female snakes?

Presumably because they didn’t study Darwinism at school. Then they would know it’s supposed to be the other way around (and only after mating).

Okay, seriously, that behavior is noted among Montpellier snakes and evolutionary biologists need to come up with explanations:

TS: What is shocking or counterintuitive about these instances of cannibalism in the Montpellier snakes that you reported on? XG: Most of us biologists think that an adult male feeding on an adult female is kind of counterintuitive. I think it probably comes from the fact that the old paradigm was that generally a male would try to mate with as many females as he can to just increase his fitness. The males typically do not take care of the offspring. He is not the one that’s being pregnant. So, for him it would pay off to actually try to mate with every single female he encountered. . . . But recently, in the last few decades, the paradigm has been shifting, if you will, just because we realize that males—they can also be choosy in some ways about the females they mate with.

At first you think it is counterintuitive. And then when we wrote the paper, we just realized [that] in fact there may be many reasons for a male to eat a female. And that could be adaptive—in other words, it could actually benefit the male’s fitness to do that. We do highlight a few of those reasons that we think could potentially explain [these observations].

Chloe Tenn, “Male Snakes Cannibalizing Females Present Evolutionary Puzzle” at The Scientist (November 15, 2021)

It turns out that Darwinism can (sort of) explain anything. Even eating the bride before the honeymoon.

The paper is closed access.

You may also wish to read: Can sex explain evolution?

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Rob Sheldon on life from the lab: “Information first” is essential

A propos an interesting recent article by George T. Javor at Geosciences Research Institute on why the century (and more)-old dream of synthesizing life in the lab hasn’t yielded the confidently hoped for results, experimental physicist Rob Sheldon writes to say,

All these people are talking about “chemistry-first” OOL, where you put non-living chemicals in a jar and shake them and out pops life.

I think what ID is showing is that you must do “information first” OOL. It isn’t the chemicals, it’s the information that comes first.

No, this means it can never be random, just as OOL in the lab is not random. But that doesn’t mean that info-first cannot produce OOL. I’ve written a paper on the info-first OOL problem.

It would be nice if it got included in the list of OOL mechanisms.

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II .

You may also wish to read: Why isn’t life being synthesized in a laboratory? Synthesis of life in a laboratory is intelligent design. But using intelligent design only means we’ve left the world of fantasy (“it all just sort of happened a long time ago… ”). Here’s an example of a typical real problem: Living cells cannot reach equilibrium because their metabolisms would stop. They must dance till the music stops.

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Human neurons are strangely more efficient than animal ones

Researchers did not expect to find that human neurons have fewer — not more — ion channels than eight other mammal species do.:

What makes humans different should be straightforward, right? We should, at least, have more complex neurons than ferrets and macaques. But we don’t. We have simpler ones:

News, “Human neurons, brain, much more efficient than animal ones” at Mind Matters News (November 16, 2021)

Neurons communicate with each other via electrical impulses, which are produced by ion channels that control the flow of ions such as potassium and sodium. In a surprising new finding, MIT neuroscientists have shown that human neurons have a much smaller number of these channels than expected, compared to the neurons of other mammals.

The paper requires a subscription.

MIT, “A Striking Difference Between Neurons of Humans and Other Mammals” at Neuroscience News (November 10, 2021)

In the most extensive study of its kind, nine other mammals were studied. Larger mammals have larger neurons. And in every case but one, they found that “as the size of neurons increases, the density of channels found in the neurons also increases.” Except in humans:

[and the researchers were surprised]

More.

Also: What was formerly thought to be “junk DNA” differs between humans and chimpanzees and plays a role in brain development

You may also wish to read: There is no escape from human exceptionalism. Author Melanie Challenger thinks we should embrace our true animal nature. But that’s impossible. Animals can’t reason but humans can’t NOT reason. We just become bad humans by not reasoning. That’s why we are and will remain an exception.

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