Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 15

Why we keep seeing hexagons in nature

An oldie but fun: First, why bees use them in honeycombs:

Why hexagons, though? It’s a simple matter of geometry. If you want to pack together cells that are identical in shape and size so that they fill all of a flat plane, only three regular shapes (with all sides and angles identical) will work: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons. Of these, hexagonal cells require the least total length of wall, compared with triangles or squares of the same area. So it makes sense that bees would choose hexagons, since making wax costs them energy, and they will want to use up as little as possible—just as builders might want to save on the cost of bricks.

Philip Ball, “Why Nature Prefers Hexagons” at Nautilus (March 25, 2016)

And in general, hexagons are everywhere:

If you blow a layer of bubbles on the surface of water—a so-called “bubble raft”—the bubbles become hexagonal, or almost so. You’ll never find a raft of square bubbles: If four bubble walls come together, they instantly rearrange into three-wall junctions with more or less equal angles of 120 degrees between them, like the center of the Mercedes-Benz symbol.

Evidently there are no agents shaping these rafts as bees do with their combs. All that’s guiding the pattern are the laws of physics. Those laws evidently have definite preferences, such as the bias toward three-way junctions of bubble walls. The same is true of more complicated foams. If you pile up bubbles in three dimensions by blowing through a straw into a bowl of soapy water you’ll see that when bubble walls meet at a vertex, it’s always a four-way union with angles between the intersecting films roughly equal to about 109 degrees—an angle related to the four-faceted geometric tetrahedron.

Philip Ball, “Why Nature Prefers Hexagons” at Nautilus (March 25, 2016)

Like all of mathematics, the hexagons are all just a big accident, right?

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Denis Noble debates Richard Dawkins: Is Dawkins 20-30 years behind?

From Evolution 2:

LIVE DEBATE Oxford professor Denis Noble locked horns with Richard Dawkins in June at the How the Light Gets In UK conference. Is The Selfish Gene holding back medicine and cancer cures? The world’s most incendiary evolutionary biologist asks if we need to rethink DNA.

The debate was both cordial and revealing. One thing that is quite clear from this debate is that Dawkins’ knowledge of biology and genetics lags 20-30 years behind current research.

“Denis Noble Debates Richard Dawkins (full video)” at Evolution 2 (December 22, 2022)

Here’s an excerpt:

Here’s the whole debate.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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Claim: Language originated in hand gestures. How do we know?

Researchers say, because humans can interpret chimp hand gestures:

Graham’s St. Andrews colleague Catherine Hobaiter built a similar body-language dictionary by observing the East African chimpanzees at the Budongo Central Forest Reserve in Uganda. The gestures of both species, which are humans’ two closest relatives, are more complex and varied than their vocalizations, which mainly reflect urgent needs such as finding food or spotting predators.

By contrast, the apes’ gestures serve as a deliberate way of conveying specific everyday goals, leading some scientists to believe that these signals are the precursors to human language. “They are using gestures in a way that is more languagelike, and so there’s this theory that human language might have evolved from this gestural basis,” Graham says.

In a paper published today in PLOS Biology, Graham and Hobaiter provide startling evidence that this ancestral ability may persist in modern humans. They show that our species can make a pretty good guess of the meanings of chimp and bonobo gestures, another hint that language may have evolved from an elaborate system of hand and body signals.

Ingrid Wickelgren, “Humans Can Correctly Guess the Meaning of Chimp Gestures” at Scientific American (January 24, 2022) The paper is open access.

No, sorry. There is lots of info out there featuring people making nice with octopuses and interpreting their gestures. But at least no one claims that human language evolved from that. It was closer to the other way around, actually…

You may also wish to read: Octopuses get emotional about pain, research suggests. The smartest of invertebrates, the octopus, once again prompts us to rethink what we believe to be the origin of intelligence. The brainy cephalopods behaved about the same as lab rats under similar conditions, raising both neuroscience and ethical issues.

You may also wish to read: But, in the end, did the chimpanzee really talk? A recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine sheds light on the motivations behind the need to see bonobos as something like an oppressed people, rather than apes in need of protection.

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Are crows really as smart as 7 year old children?

Pro:

Con:

The second video introduces comprehensive information theory (CIT).

Yes, crows are smart but humans are in a different dimension. What’s really interesting is that anyone actually counters the statement.  In a materialist society, people take for granted that that is true  without ever wondering why crows are sitting on OUR telephone poles….   

You may also wish to read:

We knew crows were smart but they turn out to be even smarterWe are only beginning to scratch the surface of the mysteries of animal intelligence.

and

Crows can be as smart as apes. But they have quite different brains. The intelligence doesn’t seem to reside in the details of the mechanism.

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L&FP, 65: So, you think you understand the double slit experiment? (HT, Q & BA77)

So, here we go:

And, the rise of solid state laser pointers makes this sort of exercise so much easier, BUT YOU MUST BE CAREFUL NOT TO GET SUCH A BRIGHT SOURCE INTO YOUR EYE AS THIS MAY CAUSE RETINAL BURNS THUS BLIND SPOTS. (I recall, buying and assembling a kit He-Ne laser to have this exercise for my High School students. We had a ball, using metre sticks stuck to a screen with blu-tack, to observe and measure effects from several metres away.)

So, now, what about, electrons:

Notice, the pattern here builds up statistically, one spot at a time.

Then, HT BA77 way back, here is Dr Quantum:

Now, if you think you have it all figured out, think again, and again, and again. KF

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Os Guinness: The Magna Carta of Humanity — our civilisation’s roots lie in Jerusalem/Mt Sinai too (not just Athens and Rome)

A video discussion with Eric Metaxas:

After telling of his experiences in China where he was born in the 1940’s, Guinness speaks of a moment when a civilisation loses touch with its roots. He suggests, there then are three alternatives: renewal, replacement or decline.

As the modern jacobins rise up again, our civilisation faces that choice, at kairos; with lawful, ordered freedom in the stakes as 1776 [not, 1619 — a toxic slander driven distraction] clashes with 1789, so, too, frankly, 1917 – 49. And we need to recall the challenge to not throw out the baby with the bath water. END

PS, ponder

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Harvard Astronomer: The wonders of the universe point to a creator

Well, yes but she’s not supposed to admit that:

The wonders we see in the universe “should draw us out of ourselves,” an Ivy League scientist said last week, “looking out not just towards the wonders themselves and towards the truths they reveal, but also towards the source of all truths and the ultimate Creator of all things.”

Karin Öberg, professor of astronomy and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University, said her work as a scientist has helped her to appreciate that we live in a universe that “has a beginning, a middle, and an end that’s unfolding over time.”

She also said that belief in God, far from being an impediment to scientific inquiry, actually can be helpful for scientists because of the “sure foundation” that belief in a Creator provides. Öberg herself is a convert from atheism.

Philip McKeown, “Harvard scientist: The wonders of the universe point to a Creator” at Catholic News Agency (January 21, 2023)

In a recent talk, she mentions Georges Lemaitre , the Belgian priest who first proposed the Big Bang theory. The theory has long been opposed by atheists who have thought of an impressive variety of alternatives. But not one of those alternatives — not a single one — became a famous sitcom.

You may also wish to read: The Big Bang: Put simply,the facts are wrong.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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John Lennox on debating Richard Dawkins

Also on atheism, God, and science:

Prof John Lennox talks to Justin Brierley about the way science and faith fit together in his new book ‘Cosmic Chemistry’. They also talk about the evidence for God and Christianity and about his debates with leading atheists, including Richard Dawkins. Video shared with permission of Lion Hudson.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd.

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Physicists: Our universe might not be special, merely “probable”

Any old port in a storm?:

Our universe is the way it is, according to Neil Turok of the University of Edinburgh and Latham Boyle of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, for the same reason that air spreads evenly throughout a room: Weirder options are conceivable but exceedingly improbable.

The universe “may seem extremely fine-tuned, extremely unlikely, but [they’re] saying, ‘Wait a minute, it’s the favored one,’” said Thomas Hertog, a cosmologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

“It’s a novel contribution that uses different methods compared to what most people have been doing,” said Steffen Gielen, a cosmologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.

The provocative conclusion rests on a mathematical trick involving switching to a clock that ticks with imaginary numbers. Using the imaginary clock, as Hawking did in the ’70s, Turok and Boyle could calculate a quantity, known as entropy, that appears to correspond to our universe. But the imaginary time trick is a roundabout way of calculating entropy, and without a more rigorous method, the meaning of the quantity remains hotly debated. While physicists puzzle over the correct interpretation of the entropy calculation, many view it as a new guidepost on the road to the fundamental, quantum nature of space and time.

Charlie Wood, “Why This Universe? Maybe It’s Not Special—Just Probable” at Wired (January 22, 2023)

With – in the real world – only one actual universe to go on, how do we determine what is “probable”?

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Has string theory really fallen this time?

Some of us remember when superCool string theory — just around the corner — was going to give us the multiverse that would prove all naturalist concepts right — and then some!

But if you go by this at Ars Technica:

After 50 years of work on a theory of everything, we’re left with approximate theories that seem so tantalizingly close to explaining all of physics… and yet always out of reach. Work continues on finding the underlying dualities that link the different versions of string theory, trying to suss out the mysterious M-theory that might underlie them all. Improvements to perturbation theory and approximation schemes provide some hope for making a breakthrough to link the dimensional structure of the extra dimensions to predictable physics. Routes around the damage caused by the LHC’s lack of evidence for supersymmetry continue to be laid.

In response to our inability to choose which Calabi-Yau manifold corresponds to our Universe—and more importantly, why our Universe has that manifold rather than any of the other ones—some string theorists appeal to what you might call the landscape. They argue that all possible configurations of compact dimensions are realized, each one with its own unique universe and set of physical laws, and we happen to live in this one because life would be impossible in most or all of the others. That’s not the strongest argument to come out of physics, but I’ll save a dissection of the idea for another day.

We don’t have a string theory, so we can’t test it. But it might be possible to perform experiments on string theory-adjacent ideas, and there’s been some progress on that front. Perhaps the event of inflation, which occurred immediately after the Big Bang, can teach us about string theory (or the formation of Universe-spanning cosmic strings). And perhaps there’s more to the dualities than we initially thought.

Paul Sutter, “Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything” at Ars Technica (January 27, 2023)

But just because string theory can’t be tested, is that a reason it should be abandoned, when it gives so much comfort to naturalists? Look at what else they accept in defiance of evidence…

You may also wish to read: Post-modern physics: String theory gets over the need for evidence

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