Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 153

At The Scientist: “Science must combat dogmatism”

What? Such a view was actually aired at The Scientist?:

In light of the accelerating rate of scientific and technological breakthroughs, this ongoing and often frustrating debate of how to incorporate science into public policy is necessary for research to contribute to societal progress. We, as a society, need to learn how to have constructive, evidence-based scientific discussions. It is no secret that a significant slice of the American political spectrum harbors anti-science sentiments, and this segment largely overlaps with the political right. This is certainly an impediment to the formation of evidence-based policies. But the politicizing of science by the right has induced a natural reaction from the left: to blindly trust scientists. This subtle form of scientific dogmatism could inadvertently undermine the credibility of scientific institutions and could similarly challenge rational policymaking. It is as unscientific to blindly trust scientists as it is to dismiss them.

As the pandemic ramped up on American shores in early 2020, the left-leaning public took strong stances on issues such as the origin of the pandemic, hydroxychloroquine, masks, herd immunity, or social distancing, almost always antagonizing the declared positions of the Trump Administration, which occupied the White House at that time. These positions did not appear to be an outcome of a careful study of the underlying information but rather were reactionary and ideological. How many examined the actual data behind the hydroxychloroquine hypothesis before forming an opinion on it? How many repeated headlines about the length of immunity against COVID-19 or the efficacy of vaccines against an emerging variant without examining the data supporting those claims? Are people aware that there is an ongoing scientific discussion about whether the COVID-19 outbreak could have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

Ahmed Alkhateeb, “Opinion: Scientists Must Combat Scientific Dogmatism” at The Scientist (September 23, 2021)

Easier said than done. Sadly, when we are told primly to “trust the science,” it is nearly always the case that the persons demanding the trust means by “the science” whatever science happens to support their position. One thing the COVID pandemic did was make a far greater proportion of the public aware of that meaning of “trust the science” than was the case in the past. For better or worse.

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At Mind Matters News: Longtime skeptic now accepts parapsychology as science

But read the fine print. It’s a matter of determining what can be considered a science statement, whether it is proven or disproven:

At The Skeptic, Chris French muses on the “demarcation problem”: Who decides what is and isn’t science? ESP, for example, poses some unique issues…

It may be that a more correct account of many paranormal claims will turn out to be something like this: The mind, while dependent on the brain for its existence in our frame of reality, is not wholly tethered to it on a one-on-one basis. If the mind is not simply “what the brain does” epiphenomenalism), we can make more sense of these facts and perhaps of many paranormal claims.

Epiphenomenalism is fashionable in science but there is certainly evidence out there to question it and merely being fashionable does not make it correct.

Perhaps this situation is similar to what is happening with unidentified aerial phenomena (UFOs). Carl Sagan (1934–1996), denied tenure at Harvard, was frightened of bringing them up, even though he thought them real. Now Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is free to talk about them. News, “Longtime skeptic now accepts parapsychology as science” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Tolerance as such doesn’t make UFOs or ESP real. But perhaps we are getting past the simple-minded “science vs. pseudoscience” melodrama which gets in the way of actual research.

You may also wish to read:

Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

and

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.

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At Mind Matters News: 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. So, it is suggested, he pretended to be much more skeptical than he really was:

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 that, according to Zabel, was what emerged.]

Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard for being, according to Zabel, a little too “out there.” But today, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb openly discusses his thoughts on ETs and UFOs in popular science venues. And, in what sounds like a helpful move, NASA is seeking standards for ET life claims, rather than just denying or avoiding them altogether.

Perhaps all unidentified aerial phenomena are due to rare natural events. But the only way to honestly evaluate that is to start with the premise that they might — in principle — not be natural events. The need to simply “debunk” is not so much part of science as it is a social phenomenon: the Ingroup vs. Outgroup. Continually proving that one is a member of the Correct group is hardly the spirit that advances science.

News, “The UFOs Carl Sagan was convinced of but couldn’t talk about” at Mind Matters News

You may also wish to read:

The surprising role that dolphins have played in the search for ET. Dolphins, with their apparent alien intelligence, have been seen by scientists interested in ET as a stand-in. The discovery of dolphin intelligence supported the view that intelligence might evolve in unexpected places among life forms without hands.

and

The UAPs (UFOs) are “not caused by any U.S. advanced technology.” And that’s all the Pentagon probably really knows. Some, including physicist Mark Buchanan, hope we never find out if it’s aliens or not.

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At Big Think: The mystery of life cannot be solved by science

A thoughtful piece from a generally thoughtful science writer:

Reductionism is a successful way to explain the universe, but it cannot replace experience. This is part of the mystery of life.

If the question is, “Can science explain life?” then the answer I think someday will be “mostly yes,” if what we are aiming for are the processes at work in life. Science has already successfully deployed the technique of reduction to see the building blocks of life. Reduction means looking for explanations or successful predictive descriptions of a system by focusing on its smaller-scale constitutive elements. If you are interested in a human body, then reductions lead down from organs to cells to DNA to genes to biomolecules and so on. That approach has obviously been spectacularly successful.

It has not, however, been enough. The frontier now seems to be understanding life as a complex adaptive system, meaning one in which organization and cause occur on many levels. It is not just the atomic building blocks that matter; influences propagate up and down the scale, with multiple connected networks from genes to the environment and back. As I have written before, information may play an essential role here in ways that do not occur in non-living systems.

But the deeper question remains: will this ongoing process of explanatory refinement exhaust the weirdness of being alive or the mystery of life that I described in the opening? I think not.

Adam Frank, “The mystery of life cannot be solved by science” at Big Think

Couple of thoughts: We many never discover how life actually began because — in the absence of many planets whose life forms we can study — we cannot derive universal laws. Thus, the origin of life must be treated as a historical event. Many historical events cannot be definitively understood because key facts are lost to followup.

It’s not a question of what science can do, as one complacent textbook put it. The information still available to science may not enable us to draw a firm conclusion.

In any event, as Frank says, life turns out to be a complex, adaptive system, among other things, which resists the kind of “explanation” that many researchers used to seek.

What is the “explanation” for Tokyo or New York City? Of course there are many explanations on many levels but no single explanation exhausts everything or lays the question to rest. Or ever could. And that’s part of the nature of life.

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L&FP, 47: The credibility of the concept and existence of God

I see from News, that Egnor and Dillahunty have had a debate on the reality of God. Egnor has put on the table ten arguments to God and Dillahunty has rebutted, as News reports. Some of this caught my eye and I took pause from an ongoing life crisis to comment on some things that are key. I believe these are worth headlining as addressing logic and first principles questions.

First, on the general concept and credibility of God:

[KF, 4] >>I see:

[MD:] since I’m dealing with someone who’s a Catholic, I think we can begin with at least the qualities generally associated with the God of classical theism. We’re talking about some sort of agent that is timeless, materialless, or spaceless, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent, or whatever excessive degree of knowing power and benevolence there is within there. [00:25:30]

The problem is that I don’t know how we could demonstrate any of those. If someone came up to you and said, “I know everything,” the only thing you would ever be able to demonstrate is that they know more than you . . .

Instantly, we see utter ignorance of logic of being and modes of being related to root of reality. Scientism peeks out, backed by a philosophical fail. First, the claim that “Science” monopolises knowledge-seeking and contents is NOT a claim of science but of epistemology a branch of the obviously dismissed philosophy. It refutes itself and fails at outset. Linked, ever so many philosophical points are far more certain than any scientific theory, once the pessimistic induction is reckoned with. Where of course inductive reasoning is a matter of logic, another branch of philosophy. The department of knowledge and investigation that explores hard questions using fundamental methods of thought. Where, there is a sub branch called phil of sci which investigates science, its methods and knowledge claims.

Next, returning to the main point, notice how MD casts the question in negative terms, as though piling up conundrums and unknowns? Not only a strawman caricature but a rhetorical tactic of fostering needless doubts.

God is not merely a speculative entity, nor is he an it, a mere thing. Much to DM’s discredit lies in that little piece of unwillingness to acknowledge, He. Personhood. Rhetorical stunts and fails.

Next, God is not addressed in a vacuum, he is addressed in the context of required roots of reality involving rational, responsible, significantly free morally governed creatures [including on first duties of reason such as to truth, right reason, warrant and broader prudence, sound conscience etc.]. Multiplied by the four modes of possible being and non being: Possible vs impossible being, crossed with contingent vs necessary being, applied to here roots of reality thus of possible and actual worlds. With things like fine tuning evidence of design and the use of digitally coded algorithms in cell based life [DNA] . . . so language and goal-directed stepwise processes . . . relevant.

[I insert, a chart:]

Candidates for being may be possible or impossible. We exist and are possible, square circles cannot be in any possible state of affairs of a possible world due to contradictory core characteristics. Similarly, we are contingent and dependent on any number of causal factors, whilst there is no world in which the number 2 is not present, or begins to exist or may cease from existing. Twoness is a necessary, world-framework entity, closely connected to logic of being of worlds and to laws of logic starting with distinct identity. For that matter, this necessary being character shown by 2 is also responsible for the pervasive universality and power of core mathematics in actual and possible worlds. And I doubt that MD would so easily dismiss 2 and associated mathematical entities and properties as “timeless, materialless, or spaceless” as though such entities are ghosts extracted from denial of the contingent, concrete material entities he is familiar with.

Speaking of, MD cannot reduce his mind to a dynamic-stochastic computational substrate without fatally undermining freedom to reason and decide freely; which invites dismissing his assertions as so much accident of what happened psychosocial and genetic programming with an addition of blind chance. Minds may use brains but have dramatically diverse characteristics, on pain of fatal self-refutation pointed out by J B S Haldane:

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain [–> taking in DNA, epigenetics and matters of computer organisation, programming and dynamic-stochastic processes] I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. Cf. here on (and esp here) on the self-refutation by self-falsifying self referential incoherence and on linked amorality.]

The point is, to explain our existence in our world, we need an adequate, finitely remote — we cannot traverse any imagined transfinite past in finite stage causally connected steps [years, for convenience] — reality root. One, of necessary, world framework being character and one adequate to ground our moral government. Mind is required, and morally adequate mind.

Thus, we see why the framework is put on the table as candidate reality root: the inherently good, utterly wise creator God, a necessary, maximally great being. One, worthy of loyalty and of the responsible, rational, freely given service of doing the good that accords with our evident nature. This is the God of ethical theism, and he is familiar in the history of thought in our civilisation and from pages of the foundational book of that civilisation, The Holy Bible. Someone, we should not be playing rhetorical stunts of not knowing what is meant by the concept, God as Supreme Being and Creator.

Now, God is obviously a serious candidate necessary being. The real issue, then, is that the atheist has an unmet burden of proof to show God impossible of being. As, if possible, such a candidate would exist in at least one possible world as a part of its in-common framework as a world feasible of actuality. Therefore, present in any world and so too in ours. Indeed, the full panoply of possible worlds would be eternally contemplated by God.

Until recent decades, many atheists imagined that the logical problem of evils was adequate but 50 years past Plantinga shattered that and tamed the inductive form in one swoop. That is why we see the sort of stunts that are now on the table and similarly, attempts to raise the Euthyphro false dilemma to a similar state. Euthyphro fails as God is the root of reality and inherently good exponentiated by being utterly wise and maximally great. So, he expresses the good (which is intelligible to us in key part) and is its fountainhead. Good is not independent of his being nor is it arbitrary whims or diktats.

So, the atheist is in fact the one who has an unmet burden of proof. It would be interesting to see MD et al actually take it up.>>

Then, on the issue of God as all-knowing:

[KF, 5] >>MD belabours the concept of an all-knowing deity, further showing his failure to understand logic of being applied to root of reality. The answer is simple, maximally great, utterly wise, inherently good mind knows to the supreme possible degree compossible with other attributes of said greatness and goodness. That is not incoherent nor does it require proof by exhaustion of empirically investigated possible points of knowledge. That is yet another strawman stunt as MD knows just as well as we do, that we are finite, fallible and cannot complete the composition of such an examination, much less grading it. He knows or should know that the omniscience of God was not derived on that plodding inductive basis but refuses to acknowledge that Big-S Science is not the colossus dominating the field of knowledge. Appeal to prejudice of Scientism, which is self-refuting from the outset (its thesis is an epistemological claim in a lab coat), fails.>>

I think there is need to have a fresh conversation on God, one duly informed by the logic of being. END

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At Evolution News and Science Today: Arthropod architects amaze engineers

Spider webs are a remarkable technology:

Bioengineers already envy spider silk for its exceptional strength and flexibility. A lesser-known but enviable quality is web architecture. Orb webs are admirable for their symmetry, but what about the irregular “tangle webs” that look chaotic, with silk strands going every which way? The tangle web, it turns out, is functionally beautiful; “it filters in prey and protects the spider from predators.” It is also well-built to be strong and resilient.

Seven researchers at MIT and one from Berlin investigated “In situ three-dimensional spider web construction and mechanics” and wrote up their findings in PNAS. Calling spiders an “evolutionary success” but also “nature’s engineers,” they say,

“Learning how spiders used their silks and webs to adapt to environmental pressures have fascinated many fields of research such as biomedicine, biology, and engineering. Because of silk’s nanoscale size and the complex web architecture, little is known about the architecture and mechanics of three-dimensional (3D) spider webs during construction. This work comprehensively investigates the structure, mechanics, and functionality of a 3D spider web under construction, using consistent imaging and computational simulations methods. This work could inspire efficient spider-inspired fabrication sequences or fiber geometries in engineered materials, as demonstrated here for 3D-printed prototype materials.”

Of interest to them was a spider’s ability to build “lightweight and high-performance web architectures often several times their size and with very few supports.” This ability would be helpful for spacecraft, for instance, where light weight is a priority. Human construction often takes advance planning, collection of materials and a large team of workers to put a structure together. A spider does all the work herself.

Evolution News, “Arthropod Architects Amaze Engineers” at Evolution News and Science Today (September 22, 2021)

The paper is closed access.

You may also wish to read: In what ways are spiders intelligent? The ability to perform simple cognitive functions does not appear to depend on the vertebrate brain as such.

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Oldest footprints in North America —children’s — made at 22,500 years ago

In what is now New Mexico. That was thousands of years before humans were generally held to have settled in North America:

The dates raise questions about when and how humans from Siberia settled in the region, with evidence growing that they skirted the Pacific coast while inland routes were entrenched in ice. The authors of the study say the footprints give credence to contentious evidence of even earlier signs of settlement in the Americas…

For decades, archaeologists associated the earliest Americans with 11,000–13,000-year-old stone spear points and other vestiges of ‘Clovis’ culture (named after another New Mexico site, but found throughout North America). The dates coincide with the recession of a continent-size glacier, which created an ice-free corridor through central Canada…

Research journals are dotted with claims of even earlier sites, including a controversial Nature paper that put humans in California 130,000 years ago2. But many of these claims have been discounted because of the equivocality of the evidence: rocks potentially mistaken for tools, marks on animal bones that might have been made by natural processes — or diggers, in the case of the California claim — rather than butchery.

Ewen Callaway, “Ancient footprints could be oldest traces of humans in the Americas” at Nature The paper is closed access. (September 23, 2021)

It shows that humans lived in North America at the height of the Ice Age:

Scholars have long been aware of the tracks, which are known as “ghost prints” because they are only visible under particular weather conditions. But the new study is the first to clearly date them to such an early era. The researchers determined when the footprints were made through radiocarbon dating of dried ditchgrass seeds found in layers both above and below the impressions…

Ciprian Ardelean, an archaeologist at Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico who co-authored one of the earlier studies of ancient tools but was not involved in the new research, tells the Times that the paper provides definitive support for the idea that humans lived in North America at the height of the Ice Age.

“I think this is probably the biggest discovery about the peopling of America in a hundred years,” he says. “I don’t know what gods they prayed to, but this is a dream find.”

Livia Gershon, “Prehistoric Footprints Push Back Timeline of Humans’ Arrival in North America” at Smithsonian Magazine

Our ancestors keep confuting the best theories with irritating evidence.

You may also wish to read: Huge sandstone camel sculptures in Saudi Arabia are much older than thought. At 7,000–8,000 years old, they predate the domestication of camels (so far as we know). Ancient people get smarter every time we run into them.

and

Shell beads from Morocco found at 142,000 years ago. It’s fair to say that all clothing is a form of communication. True, we need clothing for warmth and protection but few people would wear tea cozies or aluminum siding, even if they theoretically work. Even back when most clothing was animal products, the type of skin or leather and any adornments thereon could probably tell us a lot. And beads? They serve no purpose except communication.

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At Mind Matters News: 3. Atheist Dillahunty spots fallacies in Christian Egnor’s views

Egnor, for “Yes, God exists” went first. But now it is Matt Dillahunty’s turn:

“Does God exist?”Earlier this month, Christian neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and atheist broadcaster Matt Dillahunty began to debate the question at Theology Unleashed. As they briefly explain in the first episode, Egnor was an agnostic and became a Christian, based on his experiences; Dillahunty went the opposite route. In the second episode, Egnor set out his position briefly, offering ten proofs of the existence of God. Now it is Matt Dillahunty’s fifteen minutes — to spot weaknesses in Egnor’s arguments and offer his own, beginning at 20:30 min. He begins by remarking on Egnor’s speed of presentation:

Matt Dillahunty: Never in the entire history of doing debates has someone come in and, in 15 minutes, presented 10 different arguments [00:20:30] and six questions all in a 13-minute opening statement. I wonder… We’ll get there! I look forward to answering all of those questions to the best that I can.

News, “Atheist Dillahunty spots fallacies in Christian Egnor’s views” at Mind Matters News

Matt Dillahunty: As soon as people start giving a definition of the God they believe in and talking about the characteristics and qualities of that God, we can begin to look at the world and see if the world is compatible or consistent with that. [00:25:00] So if we define God, what are its qualities? What are its attributes?

Well, since I’m dealing with someone who’s a Catholic, I think we can begin with at least the qualities generally associated with the God of classical theism. We’re talking about some sort of agent that is timeless, materialless, or spaceless, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent, or whatever excessive degree of knowing power and benevolence there is within there. [00:25:30]

The problem is that I don’t know how we could demonstrate any of those. If someone came up to you and said, “I know everything,” the only thing you would ever be able to demonstrate is that they know more than you.

They’re able to teach you things. They’re able to show you things that you didn’t know beforehand. And so they are more knowledgeable than you. but how could you ever show that they know everything? Or that they know everything that is knowable? Which is an even more complicated problem. Because if I say I know everything well, that means I know how many atoms are in that pencil over there. But if I say, I know that everything is knowable, I still know that, but there might be things that I don’t know. But how do we determine which things are knowable and which things aren’t? We are limited fallible beings that are just beginning to stand on the shoulders of the people who thought about these questions before us, who did the investigation, and led to these discoveries. [00:26:30]

I find it arrogant to presume that any individual could conclude that there is a being that knows everything and that they know who it is.

News, “Atheist Dillahunty spots fallacies in Christian Egnor’s views” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Dillahunty: We can’t conclusively disprove an unfalsifiable proposition. And that is what most “God” definitions, at least as far as I can tell, are.

Next: Now it’s Mike Egnor’s turn to rebut Dillahunty… stay tuned.

Egnor’s rebuttal: No, the burden of proof is on all of us…

The debate to date:

Debate: Former atheist neurosurgeon vs. former Christian activist. At Theology Unleashed, each gets a chance to state his case and interrogate the other. In a lively debate at Theology Unleashed, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and broadcaster Matt Dillahunty clash over the existence of God.A neurosurgeon’s ten proofs for the existence of God. First, how did a medic, formerly an atheist, who cuts open people’s brains for a living, come to be sure there is irrefutable proof for God? In a lively debate at Theology Unleashed, Michael Egnor and Matt Dillahunty clash over “Does God exist?” Egnor starts off.

You may also wish to read: COVID-19: Atheism went viral as well. Atheists are uniquely unsuited to accuse others of devaluing human life. Professor Steven Pinker’s quickly deleted tweet provides a window into anti-religious hate. In health and medicine, he is entirely mistaken. (Michael Egnor)

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Shell beads from Morocco found at 142,000 years ago

The researchers are commendably thoughtful about what it means (without going overboard):

The necklace, nametag, earrings or uniform you chose to put on this morning might say more than you realize about your social status, job or some other aspect of your identity.

Anthropologists say humans have been doing this — finding ways to communicate about themselves without the fuss of conversation — for millennia.

But shell beads recovered from a cave in western Morocco, determined to be between 142,000 and 150,000 years old, suggest that this behavior may go back much farther than previously thought. The finding, detailed Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, was made by a team of archaeologists that includes Steven L. Kuhn, a professor of anthropology in the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The beads, Kuhn and his colleagues say, are the earliest known evidence of a widespread form of nonverbal human communication, and they shed new light on how humans’ cognitive abilities and social interactions evolved.

“They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing,” Kuhn said. “They’re the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait. They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family.”

University of Arizona, “Those earrings are so last year – but the reason you’re wearing them is ancient” at ScienceDaily (September 22, 2021)

The paper is open access.

It’s fair to say that all clothing is a form of communication. True, we need clothing for warmth and protection but few people would wear tea cozies or aluminum siding, even if they theoretically work. Even back when most clothing was animal products, the type of skin or leather and any adornments thereon could probably tell us a lot.

And beads? They serve no purpose except communication.

So that means we can trace abstract thought back that far into human history.

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Trust in science: How the replication crisis got started

And why it matters:

The most basic level of trust in science is trust that the reported experiment actually happened. Joe Hilgard described his efforts to report scientific misconduct at the level of fabricated trials, and found that the journals mostly weren’t interested. Moreover, the fraudulent researchers would simply change their tactics once he pointed out their fraud. For example, after Hilgard pointed out that a trial with over 3,000 subjects was unlikely to have occurred, the researcher in question now sets his sample sizes at a believable couple hundred.

Another level of trust is the idea that a citation to a source accurately reports the information there. In my experience, it is the norm, rather than the exception, for cited claims in popular science books and review papers to misstate the claims of their sources. The popular science book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, for example, was eviscerated for its misleading citations by Alexey Guzey in a review, but this did not result in any institutional action toward Walker or public acknowledgement of the flaws in the book. Walker was defended as promoting an important message, even if he got a few things wrong in shady ways. (One reviewer, aware of the Guzey criticisms, said that Walker can be forgiven for his errors, because his exuberance comes from the right place.)

The term “pious fraud” is usually used to refer to religious people who knowingly promote hoaxes while believing in the underlying religious message of the hoax; it was a term commonly used in the skeptical movement of the 1990s to refer to people like stigmatics, faith healers, and the creator of the Shroud of Turin. Similar to pious frauds, researchers who believe in the truth of the message of “sleep is good for you” or “social behavior is automatic” or the like may produce or promote silly findings they know to be false or meaningless, because these findings support an important message.

Sarah Perry, “How trust undermines science” at Works in Progress (September 14, 2021)

And more. Actually, there is probably better evidence for the Shroud of Turin than for many claims made in science journals today — if only because the claims must weather much more skepticism.

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