Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 154

September 23, 2021

How animals survive without sexual reproduction

Contrary to widespread assumptions among biologists:

The animal they studied is the beetle mite Oppiella nova. Until now, the survival of an animal species over a geologically long period of time without sexual reproduction was considered very unlikely, if not impossible. However, the team of zoologists and evolutionary biologists from the Universities of Cologne and Göttingen as well as the University in Lausanne (Switzerland) and the University of Montpellier (France), demonstrated for the first time the so-called Meselson effect in animals in the ancient asexual beetle mite species O. nova. The Meselson effect describes a characteristic trace in the genome of an organism that suggests purely asexual reproduction. The results have been published in PNAS.

University of Cologne, “Some animal species can survive successfully without sexual reproduction” at ScienceDaily (September 22, 2021)

It’s apparent that no one really knows how they do it:

The existence of ancient asexual animal species like O. nova are difficult for evolutionary biologists to explain because asexual reproduction seems to be very disadvantageous in the long run. Why else do almost all animal species reproduce purely sexually? Animal species such as O. nova, which consist exclusively of females, are therefore also called ‘ancient asexual scandals.’ Proving that the ancient asexual scandals really do reproduce exclusively asexually, as hypothesized (and that they have been doing so for a very long time), is a very complex undertaking: According to first author of the study Dr Alexander Brandt of the University of Lausanne, ‘There could be, for example, some kind of “cryptic” sexual exchange that is not known. Or not yet known. For example, very rarely a reproductive male could be produced after all — possibly even “by accident.” ” Purely asexual reproduction, however, at least theoretically leaves behind a particularly characteristic trace in the genome: the Meselson effect…

Their efforts were ultimately rewarded: they succeeded in proving the Meselson effect. ‘Our results clearly show that O. nova reproduces exclusively asexually. When it comes to understanding how evolution works without sex, these beetle mites could still provide a surprise or two,’ Bast concluded. The results show: the survival of a species without sexual reproduction is quite rare, but not impossible. The research team will now try to find out what makes these beetle mites so special.

University of Cologne, “Some animal species can survive successfully without sexual reproduction” at ScienceDaily (September 22, 2021)

Hmmm. Another dogma for the museum.

The paper is open access.

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Published on September 23, 2021 18:37

At Mind Matters News 2. 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, Christian surgeon Michael Egnor and atheist broadcaster Matt Dillahunty clash over “Does God exist?” Egnor starts off is opening arguments:

➤ The eighth proof is the Augustinian proof. And that is the proof that concepts such as mathematical concepts and universals like justice and mercy clearly have some kind of real existence that’s independent of human minds. Otherwise, we couldn’t communicate them to one another. The realm in which these exist, Plato called the world of forms. And St. Augustine made the argument — I think a very good argument — that a much more reasonable way to understand this is that universals exist in the mind of God. So they do have a real existence and their existence is in the divine intellect. [00:14:00]

“Augustine [354–430 A.D.] was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence… Platonism in particular remained a decisive ingredient of his thought. ” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

➤ The ninth proof is sometimes called the rationalist proof. And the rationalist proof, which was championed by Leibniz several hundred years ago, is the notion that everything that exists necessarily has some explanation for why it exists the way it does. That is that things don’t exist for no reason. [00:14:30]

That doesn’t mean that we can know the reasons, the reasons may be obscure. But it doesn’t make any sense to say that something exists and there is no reason for it. And that implies that there is an ultimate explanation that is outside of nature and is in itself not in need of explanation. And that is God. [00:15:00]

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a mathematician, was an important figure in the development of calculus.

More at:

News, “2. A neurosurgeon’s ten proofs for the existence of God” at Mind Matters News

Next: Atheist Dillahunty spots fallacies in Christian Egnor’s arguments

Here’s the first segment, where the two debaters tell us why they stand where they do:

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.

You may also wish to read: Gödel says God exists and proves it. Here is a line-by-line explanation of his proof. Gödel is the first of many great scientists and philosophers to present the argument for God’s existence using mathematical logic

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Published on September 23, 2021 17:59

Darwinism’s legacy of confusion in biology

This is probably a feature, not a bug:

Evaluating the legacy of Charles Darwin is a complex task. On the positive side, Darwin helped biologists to appreciate how organisms change with time to better survive in shifting environments. Before his views became popular, many saw species as static entities, so they did not fully appreciate the historical factors shaping such observations as diminished eyes in cave fish.

In addition, Darwin illuminated how variation in populations (e.g., differences in size and coloration) enabled species to better adapt to their surroundings. This insight was later integrated with genetics and mathematics in one of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century, known as population genetics. The resulting set of tools has proven invaluable in such fields as virology and environmental science.

On the negative side, Darwin asserted that adaptation is driven by natural selection, which he portrayed as a creative force that reshaped organisms. This illusion has consistently confused biologists over adaptation’s true nature…

The central problem with such claims is that the environment is not conscious, as depicted, e.g., in the Disney movie Pocahontas. It cannot select, mold, tinker, instruct, or perform any such actions reserved to intelligent agents. The most astute philosophers of science and biologists have called for the purging of such pseudoscientific thinking from biology.

Brian Miller, “Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection Has Left a Legacy of Confusion over Biological Adaptation” at Evolution News and Science Today (September 20, 2021)

Miller cites Jerry Fodor in this, as well he should. See Fodor’s What Darwin Got Wrong (2010).

He quotes, “Indeed the language of neo-Darwinism is so careless that the words ‘divine plan’ can be substituted for ‘selection pressure’ in any popular work in the biological literature without the slightest disruption in the logical flow of argument. – Robert G. B. Reid, Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment, Pp. 37-38”

That’s a devastating indictment, given that the whole point of Darwinism was to demonstrate that life could come into existence purely by random processes.

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Published on September 23, 2021 06:53

September 22, 2021

Huge sandstone camel sculptures in Saudi Arabia are much older than thought

At one time, they were thought to be roughly 2000 years old. At 7,000–8,000 years old, they predate the domestication of camels (so far as we know):

Their age makes them even older than such ancient landmarks as Stonehenge (5,000 years old) or the Pyramids at Giza (4,500 years old). They even predate the domestication of camels, a catalyst for economic development in the region.

At the time of their creation, Saudi Arabia looked very different, with plains of grass dotted with lakes rather than the deserts of today.

It is not clear why the camel sculptures were created, but the researchers have suggested that they could have provided a meeting point for nomadic tribes.

News, “Saudi Arabia camel carvings dated to prehistoric era” at BBC News (September 15, 2021)

Ancient people get smarter every time we run into them.

You may also wish to read: World’s oldest art raises question: Is it art? Researchers would not be asking if it is art if it were not so old (between 169,000 and 226,000). The underlying assumption seems to be that humans did not think imaginatively in those days. The evidence seems to contradict the evolutionary assumption.

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Published on September 22, 2021 19:26

Paper on bacterial mobility (motility) doesn’t invoke “evolution”

A friend notes that these biophysicists just explain what they have learned and do not gas off about Darwinian “evolution”:

Bacteria have developed a large array of motility mechanisms to exploit available resources and environments. These mechanisms can be broadly classified into swimming in aqueous media and movement over solid surfaces. Swimming motility involves either the rotation of rigid helical filaments through the external medium or gyration of the cell body in response to the rotation of internal filaments. On surfaces, bacteria swarm collectively in a thin layer of fluid powered by the rotation of rigid helical filaments, they twitch by assembling and disassembling type IV pili, they glide by driving adhesins along tracks fixed to the cell surface and, finally, non-motile cells slide over surfaces in response to outward forces due to colony growth. Recent technological advances, especially in cryo-electron microscopy, have greatly improved our knowledge of the molecular machinery that powers the various forms of bacterial motility. In this Review, we describe the current understanding of the physical and molecular mechanisms that allow bacteria to move around.
Wadhwa, N., Berg, H.C. Intro: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4157...″ target=”another”>Bacterial motility: machinery and mechanisms. Nat Rev Microbiol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-021-00... The paper is closed access.

Which raises a question: How much outgassing about “evolution” is intended to stifle curiosity and make it sound like we know things we don’t?

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Published on September 22, 2021 19:03

At Mind Matters News: Debate: Former atheist neurosurgeon vs. former Christian activist

In a lively debate at Theology Unleashed, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and broadcaster Matt Dillahunty clash over the existence of God. Each gets a chance to state his case and interrogate the other:

First, each participant was given a chance upfront to state where he is coming from and why. Michael Egnor, representing the Yes side, went first. How did a medic, formerly an atheist, who cuts open people’s brains for a living, come to be sure there is a God? And how did a fundamentalist Christian come to be hosting The Atheist Experience?

[From] Michael Egnor’s opening statement

“I never disliked Christians. I always thought they were nice people, but that what they believed didn’t make a lot of sense. I thought it was just a fairy tale. I majored in biochemistry in college. I love science. I went on to medical school. I became a neurosurgeon. I still love science. I still think science is fascinating. And I believed that in order to be a Christian specifically or to believe in God in general, I had to leave my brain at the door, basically. That if I went to church, I couldn’t really be a thinking person. [00:02:00]

“I came to feel very differently about that over time for a whole bunch of reasons. I had a Damascus road experience related to the illness of one of my children. But I also investigated the questions about God’s existence in considerable detail. I read a lot of Thomistic philosophy. I read and watched a lot of debates between Christians and atheists. And I must say that, repeatedly, I was amazed at how little atheists had to say about the question of God’s existence. I was shocked actually that the atheist arguments were as weak as they were. And that the arguments for God’s existence were remarkably strong. [00:02:30]”

and

[From] Matt Dillahunty’s opening statement

“I’ve been hosting the Atheist Experience for the last 16 years, but I didn’t start off anywhere near there. I was raised primarily a Southern Baptist. I did go to Pentecostal churches on a couple of occasions, but we were pretty much Southern Baptist. And my mom’s side of the family was Catholic, but Catholics were Mary worshiping, Saint worshiping, evolution accepting, drinking people. And so that was forbidden for us. And yet curiously, I always had a lot more fun and, and had more pleasant times around my Catholic relatives. [00:04:30]

“And at some point that kind of changed. wonder actually — me being a former Baptist and with Dr. Egnor being a current Catholic — if that’s going to cause more conflicts in thoughts than whether or not I’m an atheist. But I walked down [00:05:00] the aisle at the age of five at a revival and accepted Jesus into my heart.”

[But that didn’t last.]

More.

Next: A neurosurgeon’s 10 proofs of the existence of God

You may also wish to read: How Orwell’s 1984 can be seen as an argument for God’s existence Atheism is not only fundamental to the power of the Party in 1984 but is also its central weakness.

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Published on September 22, 2021 18:19

New find: Cell growth processes are coupled

So the cell grows in a co-ordinated manner:

When cells move or grow, they must add new membrane to those growth regions, says Vavylonis. The process of membrane delivery is called exocytosis. Cells also must deliver this membrane to a specific location in order to maintain a sense of direction?called “polarization”?or grow in a coordinated manner.

“We demonstrated that these processes are coupled: local excess of exocytosis causes some of the proteins attached to the membrane to move (‘flow’) away from the growth region,” says Vavylonis. “These proteins that move away mark the non-growing cell region, thus establishing a self-sustaining pattern, which gives rise to the tubular shape of these yeast cells.”

This is the first time that this mechanism for cell patterning?the process by which cells acquire spatial nonuniformities on their surfaces?has been identified…

“Our work shows that patterns in biological systems are generally not static,” says Rutkowski. “Patterns establish themselves through physical processes involving continuous flow and turnover.”

Lehigh University, “How do cells acquire their shapes? A new mechanism identified” at ScienceDaily (September 17, 2021)

The paper is open access.

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Published on September 22, 2021 08:33

Sabine Hossenfelder asks, what’s up with neutrinos?

The physics anomaly no one talks about:

I really don’t understand why some science results make headlines and others don’t. For example, we’ve seen loads of headlines about the anomaly in the measurement of the muon g-2 and the lepton anomaly at the Large Hadron Collider. In both of these cases the observations don’t agree with the prediction but neither is statistically significant enough to count as a new discovery, and in both cases there are reasons to doubt it’s actually new physics.

But in 2018, the MiniBooNE neutrino experiment at Fermilab confirmed an earlier anomaly from an experiment called LSND at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The statistical significance of that anomaly is now at 6 σ. And in this case it’s really difficult to find an explanation that does not involve new physics. So why didn’t this make big headlines? I don’t know. Maybe people just don’t like neutrinos?

But there are lots of reasons to like neutrinos. Neutrinos are elementary particles in the standard model of particle physics. That they are elementary means they aren’t made of anything else, at least not for all we currently know. In the standard model, we have three neutrinos. Each of them is a partner-particle of a charged lepton. The charged leptons are the electron, muon, and tau. So we have an electron-neutrino, a muon-neutrino, and a tau-neutrino. Physicists call the types of neutrinos the neutrino “flavor”. The standard model neutrinos each have a flavor, have spin ½ and no electric charge.

So far, so boring. But neutrinos are decidedly weird for a number of reasons.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “The physics anomaly no one talks about: What’s up with those neutrinos?” at Back(Re)Action

Hossenfelder has stumbled on a telling fact about science journalism. Often, the genuinely puzzling problem is ignored in favour of some a big whoop de do about an incidental find that doesn’t amount to much and may prove an artifact of data collection.

For example, every other week, it seems, we bump into a new theory of consciousness but, never mind, it’s glitzy and that’s what counts. Oh and that time machine and a cure for aging are just around the corner… Well, it’s somebody else’s subscription so…

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Published on September 22, 2021 07:59

September 21, 2021

Rob Sheldon: “It from bit” is winning the cosmology wars

At Big Think, there was a discussion between cosmologists Ethan Siegel and Lee Smolin on whether we are approaching quantum gravity all wrong:

Gravitation, governed by General Relativity, and the Standard Model, governed by quantum physics, are fundamentally incompatible. It’s possible, however, that the incompletenesses plaguing both theories are related, and that by completing both, together, we may discover quantum gravity. Lee Smolin, a pioneer in that endeavor, shares his thoughts about how we might find the best way forward to solve this conundrum.

Ethan Siegel, “Are we approaching quantum gravity all wrong?” at Big Think (September 16, 2021)

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon responds:

It’s a rambling interview that only a physics geek will love, but I had to reprint this dialogue, because it captures so much of what ID is about:

“Ethan Siegel: …So far, everyone I know who’s tried to come up with a concept of “gravity is emergent” or “space is emergent” or some other quantity that we normally look at as fundamental is in fact emergent, takes something that in typical physics thought we view as emergent and makes that fundamental. I would say the typical view of physics is that entropy is an emergent property that you can calculate based on, say, the microscopic quantum state of all the particles aggregated together. Are you basically doing something similar to that, except with this thing you define as “variety” instead of entropy?

Lee Smolin: Roughly speaking yes, but that’s a long discussion. Because the role of entropy in cosmological theory is something we have to get our heads straight about. “

Translating, Ethan is saying that the old 20th century materialism that says “entropy” or “information” emerges from the particles is being replaced by a 21st century view that “entropy” or “information” is fundamental and the material particles emerge from the immaterial field. Recall that the late John Wheeler coined “it from bit”, that matter proceeds from information. Lee Smolin agrees that his “variety” theory is of the 21st century, post-materialism type.

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

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Published on September 21, 2021 19:18

At Mind Matters News: Can there be a general theory for fine-tuning?

If you make a bowl of alphabet soup and the letters arrange themselves and say, good morning, that is specified. What are the probabilities?:

Robert J. Marks: Ola, you came up with a general theory. We talk about in physics, for example, a theory of everything. It turns out the fine tuning is something ubiquitous in our universe. It occurs in biology, chemistry, and physics and cosmology, the specific area of physics.

The question is, is there a general theory, a general way that we can look at fine tuning across all of these disciplines? You’ve done that, by something called a specificity function, I believe. Could you explain the specificity function at as a high a level as you possibly can, so that we can understand what’s going on here about your general theory?

Ola Hössjer: We introduced this idea in my joint paper with Steinar Thorvaldsen originally. I have an ongoing project now with Daniel [Diaz], where we elaborate on this idea more. We start with a sample space of all the possible outcomes of a certain algorithm. This could be the algorithm on generating the universe.

Robert J. Marks: Okay. An algorithm for generating the universe is, how would you describe that as a theory or a model of by which the universe came into creation?

Ola Hössjer: If the universe was randomly generated, the different constants of nature could have different possible values with different probabilities. The sample space is a collection of all possible outputs of the algorithm…

News, “Can there be a general theory for fine-tuning?” at Mind Matters News

See also: Thorvaldsen, Steinar, and Ola Hössjer. “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 501 (2020)

Takehome: Swedish mathematician Ola Hössjer, who is working on a general theory of fine tuning, sees the beauty of mathematics in the fact that seemingly unrelated features in cosmology and biology can be modeled using similar concepts.

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Published on September 21, 2021 19:08

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