Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 150

At Mind Matters News: Harvard astronomer: Advanced aliens engineered the Big Bang

Avi Loeb

Avi Loeb writes in Scientific American that when we humans are sufficiently advanced, we will create other universes as well:

At Scientific American, Avi Loeb, the longest-serving chair of astronomy at Harvard (2011–2020), tackles the question of what came before the Big Bang. He surveys the conventional explanations for this singularity in time and space (when all points are zero) and comes to a somewhat surprising conclusion: Creation by an alien intelligence is the best way to account for our universe:

News, “Harvard astronomer: Advanced aliens engineered the Big Bang” at Mind Matters News

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

AVI LOEB, “WAS OUR UNIVERSE CREATED IN A LABORATORY?” AT SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (OCTOBER 15, 2021)

Whether or not we warm to his proposal, the main thing to see is that alternative — supposedly more scientific — proposals also include either philosophical assumptions or causes we cannot account for:

“our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation” (What caused the vacuum or the fluctuation?)

“it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion” (in the absence of a history, how would we know that?)

“it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse” (we have no evidence for a string theory landscape or a multiverse)

or

“it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole” (but how did the black hole originate?)

In short, all these claims just shove the problem of the ability to create a universe out of site or off the scene.

Loeb favors the view that the ability to create a universe includes the concentrated use of information that we associate with intelligence (which we know can create things): More:

Just about any hypothesis other than theism is okay with Scientific American. Good to know.

Takehome: Avi Loeb’s hypothesis is not logically stranger than the many hypotheses that attempt to account for the Big Bang without underlying information/intelligence.

You may also wish to read:

The UFOs Carl Sagan was convinced of but couldn’t talk about. Sagan had already been denied tenure at Harvard, a sci-fi screenwriter reflects, and he couldn’t afford to take more chances. Writer Bryce Zabel recalls a dispute with Sagan on the topic in a parking lot 40 years ago, during the Voyager 2 flyby — which changed Zabel’s career.

and

The Pentagon’s UAP (UFO) report signals a sharp attitude change. The brass have committed themselves to going “wherever the data takes us.” No, they didn’t report UFOs. But they reported enough mysteries to stop merely debunking and discrediting… and follow the evidence.

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At Evolution News: Three stunners challenge traditional Darwinism

Here’s one of them:

Scientists at Flinders University in Australia found that our DNA spreads up to a meter around us without even touching anything. We’re leaving breadcrumbs of genetic code everywhere we go!

Evolution News, “Three Stunners Challenge Traditional Darwinism” at Evolution News and Science Today (October 22, 2021)

Shared Code

Scientists at Flinders University in Australia found that our DNA spreads up to a meter around us without even touching anything. We’re leaving breadcrumbs of genetic code everywhere we go!

A person can leave DNA on a surface without directly touching it, a Flinders University study has found, with the longer someone spends in a room the more likely they are to leave a trace of themselves behind.

The researchers placed DNA collection plates half a meter to five meters apart in offices that had been sanitized.

Without anyone directly touching the collection plates, DNA from multiple people was present after only one day, with the DNA profiles stronger the closer the plates were to an individual and the longer they stayed out. [Emphasis added.]

They published their findings in Forensic Science International Genetics. 

This discovery will be alarming to criminals, as they learn that police can follow their trail even without fingerprints. For the rest of us, it illustrates two things: (1) Forensics is an example of intelligent design in action, and (2) Our earth is indeed a privileged planet. It is loaded with complex specified information! What other world in our solar system can boast of such a distinction? Think of it: coded information is everywhere in our world: in clouds, on rock walls, in the soil, and even under the seafloor. Code not only inhabits life; it makes the world habitable, traveling on global transportation systems.

We share our personal CSI everywhere we go, resembling the character “Pig-Pen” in the old Peanuts cartoons, who walked with a cloud of dust around him — except that our dust is the most densely packed information in the known universe. Presumably our whole genome could be reconstructed from invisible particles that float off our skin and breath, as if we are sharing copies of our biography everywhere we go — a biography so information-rich that if printed in 130 volumes would require 95 years to read (University of Leicester).

More.

After presenting the other two stunners, ENST adds,

Shared code, another Cambrian giant, and DNA communication all fit within intelligent design expectations, but challenge traditional Darwinism. The more that design advocates can present better explanations for surprising discoveries like these, the faster some researchers may pay attention to the design revolution that is clearly underway.

Evolution News, “Three Stunners Challenge Traditional Darwinism” at Evolution News and Science Today (October 22, 2021)

Darwinism is, increasingly, a political and theological cause. It doesn’t need to make sense. It needs to make Darwinists feel okay about their world.

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Physicist Marcelo Gleiser: Beauty in the universe is an “illusory consequence of our human mathematics”

So that would mean that even the beauty and symmetry people find in mathematics is an illusion.

Is everything all right here?

However, asymmetries and imperfections are everywhere and are essential to how nature works. The asymmetry of time, for example, the all-too-obvious fact that time only flows forward from past to future, giving us history and cause and effect. The origin of this unique directionality remains unknown. Confusingly, the fundamental equations of motion that model how particles move in space tells us that time could flow either way. But how fundamental are they if they tell something we don’t see? The usual answer invokes the complexity of the system: large systems made up of many interacting parts somehow force time to move forward. There are many ways that an egg can be scrambled, but only one that a scrambled egg can be unscrambled to its original shape. But that’s not proof, it’s evidence. If we dig deep into the argument, we see a few hidden assumptions that remain unjustified. Worse, from a cosmic perspective, time asymmetry is built into the properties of the very early universe: to be what it is today, the universe had to be much simpler in the past (or, in more appropriate jargon, have lower entropy). What set that stage? We don’t know.

Or take the elusive neutrinos, particles forged at the heart of the sun that hit you trillions of times per second. While particles like the electron or the proton spin either clockwise or counterclockwise, the neutrino is what we call a “left-handed” particle, only spinning in one direction. This asymmetry is essential for the workings of stars and radioactivity. Another one is the matter-antimatter asymmetry, the fact that even though the laws of physics state that particles of matter and of antimatter should exist in equal numbers, they don’t. If they did, the universe would be mostly filled with radiation, and we wouldn’t be here asking questions. Why the neutrino only spins one way? Why is there more matter than antimatter and what sets the value of the asymmetry? We don’t know. The models we have of particle physics add these asymmetries by hand to make things work. Not too beautiful anymore, at least not in a “perfect” sense of mathematical order and symmetry.

Asymmetry is the engine of change.

Marcelo Gleiser, “Physics needs an aesthetic revolution” at IAI.TV (October 4, 2021)

Right. Asymmetry allows the timeless to function in time. Of what would Marcelo Gleiser like to disabuse us?

Nature has its own aesthetics of the imperfect. To pretend otherwise and try to impose mathematical perfection as the only path to the truth impoverishes the many facets of nature’s beauty and leads, ironically, to a worldview as false and illusory as that depicted on Plato’s cave wall.

Marcelo Gleiser, “Physics needs an aesthetic revolution” at IAI.TV (October 4, 2021)

So what, exactly, is this “false and illusory” view? Is this short essay another veiled “correct” assault on the fact of the fine-tuning of the universe for life? There seems to be a lot of that out there these days:

Orthodox science is now in a deadly conflict with facts… There can only be one outcome.

You may also wish to read: Another shot in the campaign against the Big Bang. Bento’s theory sounds convincing — compared to the Easter Bunny. The question we should be asking is, why is the Big Bang so unpopular with these people?

Ethan Siegel makes another paper assault on the Big Bang Is the Big Bang the least popular widely accepted science theory? Theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel wishes it out of existence by positing a cosmic inflation that wipes out all possibility of knowledge.

and

Physicist Brian Miller reflects on claims that the universe had no beginning Miller: Sutter asserts that Bento and Zalel’s article offers a credible response against the evidence for a cosmic beginning. Yet this claim is only based on what might be possible in the realm of the imagination.

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Researchers study why many life forms discard pieces of their DNA as they develop

Because the phenomenon is quite common, they are looking for a selective advantage:

A surprisingly wide array of creatures, all the way up to some vertebrates, dump significant stretches of DNA during early development, so the stretches don’t end up in most of their body cells.

To date, scientists have observed the phenomenon in various insects, in lampreys and hagfish, in hairy one-celled life forms called ciliates, in parasitic roundworms and tiny crustaceans called copepods. They’ve seen it in rat-like marsupials called bandicoots and in songbirds — probably all songbirds, according to recent work. And they expect to find many more cases.

Alla Katsnelson, “The curious case of the shrinking genome” at Knowable Magazine (October 21, 2021)

The reproductive cells retain all of their genes and the retained genes in other cells are all active. Thus, one hypothesis is that discarding is a way of preventing inactive genes from hanging around and causing trouble. But then, why don’t these life forms use gene silencing tags, as other life forms do?

Another weird thing researchers discovered is that the fungus gnat has an extra genome, apparently that of another species, inside its germ cells.

Overall, it’s not nearly as simple as we might have expected.

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Design theorist Eric Anderson on claims for a self-replicating machine

Made at YouTube:

Anderson writes:

The Cornell molecubes didn’t build themselves. Instead, they were built by intelligent researchers using other tools and systems — by a separate “factory” so to speak — that was, in turn, built by other tools and systems, and so on. Yet beyond the observation of this uncomfortable regress, there are several additional instructive issues we need to examine if we are to really appreciate what self-replication entails.

The “Self” Isn’t Optional

If we’re serious about self-replication, then we have to take the self part of the equation seriously. After all, all kinds of things can be replicated. If I find a widget and am able to create a copy by hand, I could end up with multiple copies, but it certainly wouldn’t mean that the original widget self-replicated. I could add tools to the process, perhaps replicating the widget more quickly and with more precision, but that wouldn’t mean we could ignore my involvement in the process and ascribe the replication to the widget. I might even go on to design and build a sophisticated automated factory, with identical copies of the widget rolling off the assembly line in rapid succession, but that wouldn’t mean that the first widget had self-replicated into multiple copies.

True self-replication requires not simply that the widget be replicated (note the passive voice) by an intelligent agent or engineer (whether directly or by using tools and processes), but that the widget replicate itself. In the one case the replication capability and process resides entirely outside of the widget; in the other case the capability and process takes place within. Although challenging in its own right, the former is quite doable and is something we see happening in human technology on a regular basis. The latter is a much more onerous task, one that’s still far beyond the capability of any human-built system.

This isn’t to argue that self-replication is inherently impossible. But we had better understand the scope of the task if we are ever to achieve anything close to this remarkable engineering feat.

Eric H. Anderson, “Self-Replication? Not Even Close” at Evolution News and Science Today (October 21, 2021)

The distinction, while critical, may be lost on many.

Anderson also notes Sewell’s comments here.

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Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne learns s thing or three about censorship – when he’s not doling it out

Remember Dorian Abbot, whose talk on exoplanets was canned at MIT due to pressure from the Woke (political issues), who gave the talk at Princeton instead?

Nobody is as vicious and systematic as the Woke. Noting that Berkeley’s David Romp has resigned on account of Berkeley’s refusal to host Abbot (catering to the Woke), Jerry Coyne notes,

It was especially egregious because Abbot wasn’t going to talk at MIT about DEI or the like, but about global warming and other planets. In other words, he was being punished for saying things in other venues that offended people. More than that: there is a valid debate about the methods of DEI initiatives, though their intent is admirable. I accept the need for some affirmative action as a means of reparation, but others don’t, and none of us should be punished or cancelled for our views.

Now both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have published new pieces on Abbotgate, which you can access by clicking below. The NYT piece is an article by Michael Powell, and seems to me pretty favorable by way of making Abbot seem unfairly treated by MIT. (He’s not biased, but the facts do indict MIT.) The op-ed in the WSJ is by Lawrence Krauss, and also deals with Abbot, further describing how DEI initiatives are stifling science and swallowing up academia.

Jerry Coyne, “Abbotgate hits the mainstream media and Quillette: MIT gets egg on its face” at Why Evolution Is True (October 21, 2021)

Larry Krauss? Yes, back from being deplatformed by MeToo, the atheist cosmologist is repositioning himself as an academic freedom champion. At least he’ll be offending the right people this time.

Meanwhile, at Evolution News and Science Today, David Klinghoffer comments on an irony:

The Times reports, “M.I.T.’s Choice of Lecturer Ignited Criticism. So Did Its Decision to Cancel.” The lecturer is Dorian Abbot, “a scientist who has opposed aspects of affirmative action.” Well, that’s enough to get you canceled.

Among those weighing in on the topic was, of all people, our Censor of the Year from 2014, atheist and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago. A pioneer of cancel culture, Coyne earned that distinction by using his own clout to squash a young physicist, Eric Hedin, who was then teaching at Ball State University. Hedin’s thoughtcrime (Orwell’s term) was to introduce his students to intelligent design. Acting in concert with the bullies at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Coyne got Hedin canceled. The idea was to put the less powerful scientist down the memory hole (Orwell again), but they didn’t entirely succeed. Hedin is still teaching, though no longer at Ball State, and he tells his story in a recent book, Canceled Science: What some atheists don’t want you to see

Cut to 2021 and here is the same Jerry Coyne, now presented without irony as a free speech advocate! From the Times story:

“I thought scientists would not get on board with the denial-of-free-speech movement,” said Jerry Coyne, an emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago. “I was absolutely wrong, 100 percent so.”

Coyne, who punched down, canceled Eric Hedin, and never apologized, deplores what he calls the “denial-of-free-speech movement.” Try to wrap your mind around that one. George Orwell had the perfect word. In 1984, he called it “doublethink” …

David Klinghoffer, “Doublethink: Censor of the Year Calls for Free Speech” at Evolution News and Science Today (October 21, 2021)

The explanation for Coyne’s sudden support for academic freedom might be fairly simple: He thought that Cancel Culture would only ever be deployed against people who think that nature shows evidence of design. He never expected it to come for people he values.

He mustn’t have noticed that it is coming for literacy and numeracy as well. See, for example, the war on math.

Incidentally, yer news hack (O’Leary for News) signed into the Zoom meet. Interesting. Two big takeaways:

The telescopes we need to resolve many interesting exo issues won’t be along till the ‘40s or ‘50s.

but more

U.S. academia is over if MIT doesn’t get loads of pushback for Canceling this talk.

Listen to much more Woke bellyaching and it’s fast backward to the Dark Ages.

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Is it the “junk DNA” that makes us human?

Skin cells repurposed into brain cells were studied:

Our DNA is very similar to that of the chimpanzee, which in evolutionary terms is our closest living relative. Stem cell researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now found a previously overlooked part of our DNA, so-called non-coded DNA, that appears to contribute to a difference which, despite all our similarities, may explain why our brains work differently. The study is published in the journal Cell Stem Cell…

Using the stem cells, the researchers specifically grew brain cells from humans and chimpanzees and compared the two cell types. The researchers then found that humans and chimpanzees use a part of their DNA in different ways, which appears to play a considerable role in the development of our brains.

“The part of our DNA identified as different was unexpected. It was a so-called structural variant of DNA that were previously called “junk DNA,” a long repetitive DNA string which has long been deemed to have no function. Previously, researchers have looked for answers in the part of the DNA where the protein-producing genes are — which only makes up about two per cent of our entire DNA — and examined the proteins themselves to find examples of differences.”

The new findings thus indicate that the differences appear to lie outside the protein-coding genes in what has been labelled as “junk DNA,” which was thought to have no function and which constitutes the majority of our DNA.

“This suggests that the basis for the human brain’s evolution are genetic mechanisms that are probably a lot more complex than previously thought, as it was supposed that the answer was in those two per cent of the genetic DNA. Our results indicate that what has been significant for the brain’s development is instead perhaps hidden in the overlooked 98 per cent, which appears to be important. This is a surprising finding.”

Lund University, “What makes us human? The answer may be found in overlooked DNA” at ScienceDaily (October 8, 2021)

The question “What makes us human?” is problematic in principle. It seems as if researchers are looking for a switch: Click! Now it’s human. There’s a lot that that approach won’t account for.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: Term “junk DNA” critiqued at journal. But now remember the history! “The days of ‘junk DNA’ are over…”? So the house is clearly supporting this move away from the Darwinian position. Oh yes, let’s not forget that “junk DNA” was very much a Darwinian position. Most or all of the Darwinian Bigs signed onto junk DNA as part of their thesis about the unguided nature of life. The big question will doubtless be put off for now: Why does it only count if Darwinian predictions are right but never if they are wrong?

Casey Luskin reflects on the “official” demise of the term “junk DNA.” Luskin: “these authors remember a day when ‘the common doctrine was that the nonprotein coding part of eukaryotic genome’ consisted of ‘“useless sequences, often organized in repetitive elements.’” Good. Keep the history alive. It won’t be very long before Darwinians start claiming that they never thought it was junk. Then they will start insinuating that WE said it was junk. No, that doesn’t make any sense but if the history is forgotten, it doesn’t need to either.

and

And now … Transposable elements (junk DNA) shape the evolution of mammalian development. No wonder people are backing away from the Darwinian staple of junk DNA. We wonder, when will the pop science articles start to appear, claiming that junk DNA was never really an argument used by Darwinian evolutionists in support of their cause and that, in any event, they were right to use such an argument.

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At Cosmos Magazine: Why viruses are considered non-living

The topic of whether viruses are alive has been debated, Port tells us, since viruses were discovered in 1898:

In order to replicate, viruses must first hijack the reproductive equipment of a host cell, redirecting it to ‘photocopy’ the genetic code of the virus and seal it inside a newly formed container, known as the capsid. Without a host cell, they simply can’t replicate.

They fail the second question for the same reason. Unlike other living organisms that can self-divide, splitting a single cell into two, viruses must ‘assemble’ themselves by taking control of the host cell, which manufactures and assembles the viral components.

Finally, a virus isn’t considered living because it doesn’t need to consume energy to survive, nor is it able to regulate its own temperature.

Jake Port, “Why are viruses considered non-living?” at Cosmos Magazine (October 15, 2021)

It doesn’t help settle the ongoing debate that there is no single definition of life. Or that giant viruses like the mimivirus blur the line. Or that viruses share some genetics with host cells.

Also, we often hear about the “strategies” of viruses. Which raises the question: If information had a physical form, would it be like viruses?

You may also wish to read: Mimivirus discoverer doubts Darwin, banned from publication in France

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Oldest human-like footprints are 2.5 million years older than the ones attributed to “Lucy”

The famous fossil. We are told that the paper on this new set of footprints, found in Crete, is “controversial”:

Believed to be left by hominins, the footprints could upend scientists’ understanding of how early humans evolved, moving the group’s starting point from Africa to the Mediterranean Sea, reports Ruth Schuster for Haaretz. Researchers say it’s possible the bipedal creature who made the marks was a member of Graecopithecus freyberg, an early human ancestor discovered in 1944 and nicknamed “El Graeco.”

“The tracks are almost 2.5 million years older than the tracks attributed to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) from Laetoli in Tanzania,” says study co-author Uwe Kirscher, an expert on paleogeography at the University of Tübingen, in a statement.

David Kindy, “New Research Suggests Human-Like Footprints in Crete Date to 6.05 Million Years Ago” at Smithsonian Magazine (October 18, 2021)

Good pix here:

Crete? The Mediterranean? Hmm? Let’s see how this plays out.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: Oldest Footprints In North America —Children’s — Made At 22,500 Years Ago

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New findings on the devolution of tuskless elephants

It’s probably the only thing that will save them from poachers. Both sides in the civil war in Mozambique (1977–1992) slaughtered elephants to finance their war efforts. Before the war, only a fifth of females lacked tusks. After the war, half did, likely due to differential survival rates:

After the war, those tuskless surviving females passed on their genes with expected, as well as surprising, results. About half their daughters were tuskless. More perplexing, two-thirds of their offspring were female…

Christina Larson, “Why no tusks? Poaching tips scales of elephant evolution” at AP News(October 21, 2021)

A bit of sleuthing later:

Because the tuskless elephants were female, they focused on the X chromosome. (Females have two X chromosomes; males have one X and one Y chromosome.)

They also suspected that the relevant gene was dominant – meaning that a female needs only one altered gene to become tuskless — and that when passed to male embryos, it may short-circuit their development.

“When mothers pass it on, we think the sons likely die early in development, a miscarriage,” said Brian Arnold, a co-author and evolutionary biologist at Princeton.

Their genetic analysis revealed two key parts of the elephants’ DNA that they think play a role in passing on the trait of tusklessness. The same genes are associated with the development of teeth in other mammals.

Christina Larson, “Why no tusks? Poaching tips scales of elephant evolution” at AP News(October 21, 2021)

Overall, tusklessness is not an advantage to elephants except that, unusually, the alternative is extinction. The pattern points to tusklessness as a good example of devolution, the dropping of an overall useful trait because, in a specific difficult situation, it endangers survival.

You may also wish to read: Devolution: Elephants survive by shedding their tusks

and

Devolution: Getting back to the simple life

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