Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 142

Fast evolution linked to extinction

Anyone who hopes for great things from the possibility that evolution can work very quickly needs to read this:

Researchers at the University of Bristol have found that fast evolution can lead to nowhere.

In a new study of lizards and their relatives, Dr. Jorge Herrera-Flores of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences and colleagues have discovered that ‘slow and steady wins the race.’

The team studied lizards, snakes, and their relatives, a group called the Lepidosauria. Today there are more than 10,000 species of lepidosaurs, and much of their recent success is a result of fast evolution in favorable circumstances. But this was not always the case. p1 Mr. Herrera-Flores explained: “Lepidosaurs originated 250 million years ago in the early Mesozoic Era, and they split into two major groups, the squamates on the one hand, leading to modern lizards and snakes, and the rhynchocephalians on the other, represented today by a single species, the tuatara of New Zealand. We expected to find slow evolution in rhynchocephalians, and fast evolution in squamates. But we found the opposite.”

University of Bristol, “Fast Evolution Can Lead to Nowhere: Rapidly Evolving Species More Likely To Go Extinct” at SciTech Daily (November 10, 2021)

“In some cases, they can stabilize and survive well, but in many cases, the species go extinct as fast as new ones emerge, and they can go extinct, just like the napping hare. On the other hand, Simpson predicted that slowly evolving species might also be slow to go extinct, and could, in the end, be successful in the longer term, just like the slow-moving but persistent tortoise in the fable.”

University of Bristol, “Fast Evolution Can Lead to Nowhere: Rapidly Evolving Species More Likely To Go Extinct” at SciTech Daily (November 10, 2021)

Of course, rapid evolution might be the outcome of experiencing greater stress in the first place. Anyway, it isn’t a magic formula.

The paper is open access.

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At Mind Matters News: 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.

Putting the idea of specified complexity to work, how do we measure meaningful information? What if an information-rich entity were scattered as molecules through the universe?

News, “How do we know Lincoln contained more information than his bust?” at Mind Matters News (November 11, 2021)

Michael Egnor: From the standpoint of information theory how does a bust of Lincoln, or statue of Lincoln, differ from Lincoln?

Robert J. Marks: Oh, well, I think they’re two different total worlds. For the bust of Lincoln we’re just only interested in the outside, the external surface. We’re not really interested in what goes on inside. I believe we’re constrained with whatever the physics of the 3D printer is …

Michael Egnor: I kind of like to take the observer out of it. Let’s not consider so much what we’re interested in, but rather, what the actual differences are.

Let’s say that you made the statue in such a way that it you also had a statue of Lincoln’s internal organs. You tried to make it as detailed as you could. How would the most detailed statue that you could imagine, differ from Lincoln himself, information theory-wise.

Robert J. Marks: Well, I think that in terms of meaning, Shannon information, Kolmogorov information, physical information… none of those address, meaning. The only way to address meaning of which I am aware in information theory is to place it into context. Into something which is meaningful. And that context must come through experience…

So in that sense, it is all based on context. I’m not sure, for example, how an alien — a bulbous blob sort of alien with no form — would look at the bust of Lincoln and think that it had any meaning. It would have to have the context of knowing what humans look like. And if it had no idea what humans looked like, it would just sit there and say: “This is just like a moon rock.”

Michael Egnor: As I mentioned in the past, I’m fascinated by the traditional Thomistic and scholastic definition of living things: they are things that strive to perfect themselves. And what Thomas Aquinas meant by that is that there are purposes built into nature, final causes — what he called teleology broadly. And those purposes provide goals for things in nature, that things in nature tend to change in the direction of those goals.

But what is unique about living things is that they act of their own accord to achieve their goals. Whereas nonliving things are acted upon, but don’t act of their own accord. An example would be: No matter how detailed a statue of Lincoln you make, the statue wouldn’t be trying to make itself a better statue of Lincoln.

Whereas Lincoln tried to make himself a better man every day. What made Lincoln alive was that he was always trying to be a better Lincoln. Better in terms of more fully realized or perfectly himself. As we all do, there’s always a striving in living things. And there’s no striving inanimate things. Statues don’t try to become better statues. They can only be made better by something external, but they don’t try it themselves.

Robert J. Marks: What you are describing, this intent to better yourself, is non-algorithmic. I would maintain that it is beyond the scope of naturalism, beyond the scope of information theory to capture, at least as I know it right now.

More.

Takehome: 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.

Here are the previous episodes in the series:

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?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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Five more species of bacteria use alternate genetic codes

Bringing the known number to twelve:

The genetic code that dictates how genetic information is translated into specific proteins is less rigid than scientists have long assumed, according to research published today (November 9) in eLife. In the paper, scientists report screening the genomes of more than 250,000 species of bacteria and archaea and finding five organisms that rely on an alternate genetic code, signifying branches in evolutionary history that haven’t been fully explained…

“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.”

As such, the code was thought to be largely preserved across all forms of life, with scientists finding the occasional exception during the past several decades of research. In addition to finding five new alternate genetic codes, the team also verified seven others that had been discovered one-by-one in the past, bringing the total number of known exceptions in bacteria to 12.

Dan Robitzski, “Screen of 250,000 Species Reveals Tweaks to Genetic Code” at The Scientist (November 9, 2021)

Apparently, it was not set in stone. Not only was it very complex very early but it can be complex and different and still work. By now, Darwinian dogmatism is beginning to sound ridiculous.

The paper is open access.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. SteakUmm on the philosophy of science

We missed this one last April: Readers will remember astronomer and TV personality Neil deGrasse Tyson and perhaps also know of SteakUmm frozen meats…

Someone who writes at HuffPost was rather put out that SteakUmm’s social media team talked back to Tyson on social media:

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently found himself in a bizarre Twitter beef with, of all things, Steak-umm.

Even stranger: Many experts took the side of the processed meat product.

It all started on Sunday after Tyson tweeted out, “The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.”

Although the tweet attracted more than 128,000 likes, it didn’t get much love from Steak-umm on Monday night.

Steak-umm then added a little more meat to its contention, saying that, ironically, Tyson’s tweet “may influence people to be more skeptical” of science “in a time of unprecedented misinformation.”

“Science is an ever refining process to find truth, not a dogma,” Steak-umm said, adding, “no matter his intent, this message isn’t helpful.”

David Moye, “Steak-umm Starts Bizarre Twitter Beef With Neil DeGrasse Tyson” at HuffPost (April 13, 2021)

Some of us suspect that, after more than a year of COVID crazy, some people were starting to think that — just maybe — the boundary between science and lunacy is becoming a bit porous…

The background to science vs. steak:

In 2018, their brief beef started and ended when the Twitter account for Steak-Umm goaded, “who cares,” following a random factoid tweeted by deGrasse Tyson. The fun fact revealed that the “thirteen letters of ‘eleven plus two,’ when rearranged, also spells ‘twelve plus one,’ ” all of which amounts to the number 13.

Despite more than 76,000 likes on the anagram, Steak-umm was unimpressed with the 62-year-old astrophysicist — and still is, particularly with his professorial rhetoric.

Their retort was praised with likes from more than 19,000 on Twitter — as one follower responded in a gustatory double entendre, “I rarely say this about steak, but well done!”

Hannah Sparks, “Steak-umm’s Twitter beef with Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘Log off bro’” at New York Post (April 14, 2021)

The thing is, the saucy social media team at Steak-Umm have a point: What does it mean to say that science is “true”? Was all the contradictory nonsense barked at us during the COVID pandemic “true”? That isn’t even possible. Yet all the barkers will insist that whatever stuff they said was “science” and we will, it seems have to believe them on that one. But with what outcome… we shall see.

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At Mind Matters News: Neuroscientist: Mind is not just brain? That’s career limiting!

Neuropsychologist Mark Solms and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agreed that clinical experience supports a non-materialist view of the mind but that the establishment doesn’t:

Now, Solms talks about the reality that discussing the fact that the brain is not the mind can be a career-limiting move.

The bigger point is, if you do address these big questions, you’re in trouble… What is the relationship between me and my body? These are fantastically important questions. And so, one pursues a career in neuroscience. You would think that’s one of the obvious places to go if you’re wanting to understand questions like this.

But my experience, upon entering the graduate program in order to pursue these questions, [was that] my professors — kindly they thought — counseled me not to ask questions like this. “It’s bad for your career.” And so, you get the sense of wonder, the naive wonder, which makes us become scientists and neuroscientists in particular in the first place, you get a beaten out view. [00:28:00]

And I’m not sure how many people realize that, that science is an incredibly rigid… sort of… it’s like a mafia. You have to go along with the rules of the Don, otherwise you’ve had it. So that’s the big thing I wanted to say in response to what Michael was saying: He’s expressing hard-won conclusions that he has come to as a result of struggling with the biggest questions that there are. And it’s not universally admired to do that. It’s considered… It’s something worse than a maverick, that’s it’s sort of unscientific even anti-scientific to express opinions based on the evidence on these big questions. And so when he said… that in neuroscience we have tons of answers, but we’ve forgotten what the questions are… nothing could be closer to my own experience than that statement. [00:29:30]

News, “Neuroscientist: Mind is not just brain? That’s career limiting!” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Mark Solms: “science is an incredibly rigid… sort of… it’s like a mafia. You have to go along with the rules of the Don, otherwise you’ve had it.”

Here’s the first portion of the debate, where neuropsychologist Mark Solms shares his perspective: Consciousness: Is it in the cerebral cortex — or the brain stem? In a recent discussion/debate with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, neuropsychologist Mark Solms offers an unconventional but evidence-based view, favouring the brain stem. The evidence shows, says Mark Solms, author of The Hidden Spring, that the brain stem, not the cerebral cortex is the source of consciousness.

And Michael Egnor responds:

Neurosurgeon and neuropsychologist agree: Brain is not mind Michael Egnor tells Mark Solms: Neuroscience didn’t help him understand people; quite the reverse, he had to understand people, and minds, to make sense of neuroscience. Egnor saw patients who didn’t have most of their frontal lobes who were completely conscious, “in fact, rather pleasant, bright people.”

You may also wish to read: Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

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Evangelical scientists getting it wrong…

Stop the presses. No, wait. Geologist and fossil digger Casey Luskin offers some thoughts on William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam:

Evangelical intellectuals often assume that challenging evolution is what brings disrepute upon the church. Even some evangelical leaders push this view, hoping to bully evangelicals into staying silent about doubts about Darwin. But recent debates over Adam and Eve have turned this stereotype on its head. Over the past decade it has been evangelical scientists who embraced mainstream evolutionary ideas and told the church that they must reject 2,000-year-old doctrines on Adam and Eve, that got the science wrong. This led to nearly a decade of leading theistic evolutionists wrongly pushing the idea that Adam and Eve as historical individuals are false. Only after Darwin-doubting scientists in the intelligent design camp were willing to challenge the status quo did the truth become clear that science has not refuted Adam and Eve.

Evangelical Christians who continue to embrace evolutionary ideas in the absence of confirming evidence continue to bet on the wrong horse, and threaten to repeat these mistakes. This is the moral of the story over recent debates over Adam and Eve — and it isn’t emphasized by Craig because he still thinks it is unwise to challenge biological evolution. Indeed, Craig continues to rely upon BioLogos arguments that pseudogenes are “broken” and non-functional junk DNA that we share with apes, thereby demonstrating our common ancestry. Those arguments are increasingly contradicted by evidence presented in highly authoritative scientific papers which find that pseudogenes are commonly functional, and they ought not be assumed to be genetic “junk.” In relying upon dubious evolutionary arguments that are increasingly refuted by the technical literature, Craig may be repeating the very mistake that led previous evangelicals to think Adam and Eve did not exist.

Casey Luskin, “Coming Attraction: My Review of William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam” at Big Think (November 9, 2021)

Luskin intends a multi-part series on the topic.

Some of us definitely believe in the Historical Adam. Who else, we ask you, could possibly be the ancestor of the Historical Jesus?

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Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel tries banishing the Kalam Constant

To do that, he posits an “acausal, indeterminate, random Universe”:

It remains possible that the Universe does, at all levels, obey the intuitive rule of cause-and-effect, although the possibility of a fundamentally acausal, indeterminate, random Universe remains in play (and, arguably, preferred) as well. It is possible that the Universe did have a beginning to its existence, although that has by no means been established beyond any sort of reasonable scientific doubt. And if both of those things are true, then the Universe’s existence would have a cause, and that cause may be (but isn’t necessarily) something we can identify with God. However, possible does not equate to proof. Unless we can firmly establish many things that have yet to be demonstrated, the Kalam cosmological argument will only convince those who already agree with its unproven conclusions.

Ethan Siegel, “Does modern cosmology prove the existence of God?” at Big Think (November 3, 2021)

Physicist Brian Miller replies at Evolution News and Science Today:

Siegel begins his piece by outlining the Kalam cosmological argument for God that Meyer detailed in The Return of the God Hypothesis:

“Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

The Universe began to exist.

Therefore, the Universe has a cause to its existence.”

Siegel then attempts to challenge the first premise by arguing that quantum phenomena appear to occur without causes:

“…there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable. In fact, there are many other quantum phenomena that display this same type of randomness, including entangled spins, the rest masses of unstable particles, the position of a particle that’s passed through a double slit, and so on.”

This claim is highly misleading since it confuses determinism with causality. Quantum mechanics is not deterministic since it describes only the probabilities that certain events could occur such as the paths a photon could take in the double slit experiment. But the laws of quantum mechanics act in our universe as the causal agent for all such events.

Brian Miller, “Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Again Desperately Attempts to Avoid a Cosmic Beginning” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 8, 2021)

Siegel may be confusing the Kalam Constant with the Shazzam! Constant. What’s really interesting is that he thinks he must answer Meyer’s arguments at all.

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At Mind Matters News: The intelligence birds and bees naturally have — and we don’t

An exploration of the stunning findings in Eric Cassell’s new book, “Animal Algorithms”:

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.

Baked-in Brain Power

A bird born near Wales (UK) knows how to fly over 6,200 miles (10,000 km) south in the winter, following the west coastlines of Europe and Africa, then crossing the Atlantic Ocean to land in Argentina. The same bird knows how to return to its original home a few months later. She flies north along the east coasts of South and North America, then crosses the Atlantic back to her birth location. No education or training, no YouTube teaching video, not even a mentor shows the bird, a Manx shearwater, how to accomplish this navigational feat. How does she know the way and what tools does she use?

The Manx shearwater’s extraordinary story of innate intelligence is just one that Eric Cassell, an engineer of aircraft navigation systems, explores in his book, Animal Algorithms (2021).

Richard W. Stevens, “The intelligence birds and bees naturally have — and we don’t” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Cassell observes that it would take deep thought and sophisticated design techniques to build a robot to accomplish what the bees, ants and termites can do

Here’s an excerpt from the just-published book, Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts (2021):

Complex programmed behaviors are evident throughout the animal kingdom, but in these pages the focus will primarily be on less advanced animals. The reason is that more advanced animals, such as primates, have significant cognitive ability, so they exhibit much more of a combination of programmed and learned behaviors, and in such cases the two are not always easily disentangled. It is easier to discriminate between programmed and learned behaviors in less advanced animals, such as bees and butterflies.

Explaining the origin of these programmed animal behaviors in evolutionary terms is challenging because the behaviors themselves are, in many cases, quite complex and likely undergirded by an extraordinarily sophisticated neurological substrate. Animal behaviors are also strikingly diverse, arguably just as diverse as the breathtaking diversity of physical characteristics we find in the animal kingdom. Those factors alone do not mean the explanatory task is impossible. But it does mean that something more than breezy just-so stories are required to provide a causally adequate explanation for their evolution.

Eric Cassell, “Genius in Lilliput” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 9, 2021)

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Author of Taking Leave of Darwin on common descent of humans and apes

Taking Leave of Darwin (2021)

Neil Thomas will be presenting a series of excerpts from his book:

Simian Ancestry?

Darwin’s major hypothesis concerning the idea of a biological continuum with its Ascent of Man narrative from ape to Homo sapiens (which I, in the company of doubtless numberless others, had previously accepted by dint of little more than passive osmosis) had, I now discovered, been cast into considerable doubt on a whole host of fronts by recent discoveries. In particular, the idea invoked of a crossover from one species to another appears highly problematical in view of the practical experience of animal husbandry, where selective breeding has considerably greater success in bringing about minor changes than major ones (which in fact remain unheard of to date). For it is now thought that the genetic code possesses what might for convenience be termed an inbuilt fail-safe system to ensure genetic homeostasis and the integrity of the species.

Darwin envisioned the momentous ontological change from ape to man occurring gradually by way of “transitional forms.” Pressing far too heavily on time itself as a causal agent, he advanced the untestable hypothesis that the changes will have taken place during the billions of years separating our present day from the supposed time of the first appearance of a simian species on our planet. Since this theory is beyond the reach of any possible empirical test, it requires alternative evidential back-up. Unfortunately for Darwin there is a dearth of any fossil evidence establishing the claimed evolutionary “missing links,” a large lacuna which Darwin was aware of but still hoped might be remedied in finds after his day (vainly to date, it must be added, and the notorious Piltdown fraud only served to underscore the evidentiary gap)

Neil Thomas, “Darwin on Trial (Again)” at Evolution News and Science Today (November 6, 2021)

Hmm, yes. The thing about the Piltdown story was the trouble that was undergone to keep people from getting a really good look at it. Presumably, people would feel the need for such deception because they didn’t think a solution was just around the corner.

You may also wish to read: Was the exposed Piltdown fraudster framed?

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At Mind Matters News: Does Mt Rushmore contain no more information than Mt Fuji?

As Jeffrey Shallit claims? 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? Robert J. Marks, one of the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics thinks so:

In Define information before you talk about it, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed engineering prof Robert J. Marks on the way information, not matter, shapes our world (October 28, 2021). In the first portion, Egnor and Marks discussed questions like: Why do two identical snowflakes seem more meaningful “https://mindmatters.ai/2021/11/how-in...” target=”another”>more meaningful than one snowflake. Then they turned to the relationship between information and creativity. Is creativity a function of more information? Or is there more to it? Now, they ask, does human intervention make any difference? Does Mount Rushmore have no more information than Mount Fuji?

News, “Does Mt Rushmore contain no more information than Mt Fuji?” at Mind Matters News

Michael Egnor: Dr. Jeffrey Shallit, a mathematician at the University of Waterloo near Toronto, claims that Mount Rushmore doesn’t have any more information than Mount Fuji. I’d like to ask my guest today Dr. Robert Marks to answer that question.

Robert J. Marks: In terms of meaningful information I think it’s obvious. Michael, they used to say that it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to answer this or it doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Well, it turns out you’re a brain surgeon. And I’ve done work for NASA. And I got a NASA tech brief award. I guess that makes me a rocket scientist. So I think for both of us, the answer is obvious. Mount Rushmore contains more information than does Mount Fuji.

Mt. Rushmore/Winkelvi (CC BY 4.0)

There’s more meaningful information on Mount Rushmore. There’s Lincoln and Roosevelt and Washington. And yeah, what do we get with Mount Fuji? We just get a big chocolate gumdrop.

Michael Egnor: Can we say what type of information the additional information on Mount Rushmore is?

Robert J. Marks: Yeah, this is an interesting question. I’m going to give an explanation, then dovetail into the answer. We can ask ourself the definition of two DVDs, both of which have the same storage capacity. One has the movie Braveheart. One has just random noise. And both of them take out the same amount of bytes.

Robert J. Marks: Can we say that the DVD of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart has more information than the noise? Yes, absolutely. If you talk about meaningful information, and as we talked about before, it depends on your definition of information. Certainly in the case of Shannon information, or possibly Kolmogorov information yeah, they’re the same. But neither one of those measures meaning. And so one has to go to specified complexity, the mathematics of specified complexity, specifically algorithmic specified complexity.

And I’ll give a little pitch here, in case people want to read more about it. It’s in Chapter Seven, of the book that I co-authored with design theorist William Dembski and Winston Ewert called Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.

And the cool part about the book is that it references a lot more nerdy papers that have been published in archival prestigious journals and conferences. So you can read it there at kind of a layperson’s level, or you can dig deeper and go into the papers.

Here are the previous episodes in the series:

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.

You may also wish to read:

Jeffrey Shallit, a computer scientist, doesn’t know how computers work. Patterns in computers only have meaning when they are caused by humans programming and using them. (Michael Egnor)

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