Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 158

A new open access paper offers an approach to cancer that sees past Darwin

Here.

Although neo-Darwinian (and less often Lamarckian) dynamics are regularly invoked to interpret cancer’s multifarious molecular profiles, they shine little light on how tumorigenesis unfolds and often fail to fully capture the frequency and breadth of resistance mechanisms. This uncertainty frames one of the most problematic gaps between science and practice in modern times. Here, we offer a theory of adaptive cancer evolution, which builds on a molecular mechanism that lies outside neo-Darwinian and Lamarckian schemes. This mechanism coherently integrates non-genetic and genetic changes, ecological and evolutionary time scales, and shifts the spotlight away from positive selection towards purifying selection, genetic drift, and the creative-disruptive power of environmental change. The surprisingly simple use-it or lose-it rationale of the proposed theory can help predict molecular dynamics during tumorigenesis. It also provides simple rules of thumb that should help improve therapeutic approaches in cancer. – Catania, Francesco, Beata Ujvari, Ben Roche, Jean-Pascal Capp, and Frédéric Thomas. “Bridging tumorigenesis and therapy resistance with a non-Darwinian and non-Lamarckian mechanism of adaptive evolution.” Frontiers in Oncology: 3645.

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At Mind Matters News: The final materialist quest: A war on the reality of the mind

Going to war with the very concept of the mind is an approach even George Orwell did not think up. Bound to happen though. Philosophy student Joe Gough explains:

The terms mind and mental are used in so many ways and have such a chequered history that they carry more baggage than meaning. Ideas of the mind and the mental are simultaneously ambiguous and misleading, especially in various important areas of science and medicine. When people talk of ‘the mind’ and ‘the mental’, the no-mind thesis doesn’t deny that they’re talking about something – on the contrary, they’re often talking about too many things at once. Sometimes, when speaking of ‘the mind’, people really mean agency; other times, cognition; still others, consciousness; some uses of ‘mental’ really mean psychiatric; others psychological; others still immaterial; and yet others, something else.

News, “The final materialist quest: A war on the reality of the mind” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: When George Orwell wrote 1984, he addressed destroying minds, not denying their possibility and changing the language associated with them.

But the new approach is probably more efficient, if workable.

You may also wish to read: How a materialist philosopher argued his way to panpsychism. Galen Strawson starts with the one fact of which we are most certain — our own consciousness. To Strawson, it makes more sense to say that consciousness is physical — and that electrons are conscious — than that consciousness is an illusion.

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Why are eggs shaped the way they are?

Breathtaking engineering:

Egg-shape has long attracted the attention of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists from an analytical point of view. The shape has been highly regarded for its evolution as large enough to incubate an embryo, small enough to exit the body in the most efficient way, not roll away once laid, is structurally sound enough to bear weight and be the beginning of life for so many species. The egg has been called the “perfect shape.”

Analysis of all egg shapes used four geometric figures: sphere, ellipsoid, ovoid, and pyriform (conical or pear-shaped), with a mathematical formula for the pyriform yet to be derived.

To rectify this, researchers introduced an additional function into the ovoid formula, developing a mathematical model to fit a completely novel geometric shape characterized as the last stage in the evolution of the sphere-ellipsoid, which it is applicable to any egg geometry.

This new universal mathematical formula for egg shape is based on four parameters: egg length, maximum breadth, shift of the vertical axis, and the diameter at one quarter of the egg length.

This long sought-for universal formula is a significant step in understanding not only the egg shape itself, but also how and why it evolved, thus making widespread biological and technological applications possible.

University of Kent, “A universal equation for the shape of an egg” at ScienceDaily (August 31, 2021) The paper is currently open access.

A marvel of unacknowledged engineering.

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What Steven Weinberg’s “pointless universe” really meant

Explained by a science journalist:

As science and religion began to go their separate ways—a process that accelerated with the work of Darwin—science became secular. “The elimination of God-talk from scientific discourse,” writes historian Jon Roberts, “constitutes the defining feature of modern science.” Weinberg would have agreed. As he told an audience in 1999: “One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from that accomplishment.”

Dan Falk, “Learning to Live in Steven Weinberg’s Pointless Universe” at Scientific American

What it really meant was permission to ignore the significance of the fine-tuning of the universe and of Earth for life. It really amounts to saying that evidence does not matter any more.

That was a big one and Steven Weinberg had a lot of help making it work.

See also: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

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Can it really be called science if it is purely theoretical?

Isn’t this origin-of-life speculation more like science fiction than like science?

“The scenario described can be viewed as the ancestor of mitosis,” Attal says. “Having no biological archives as old as 4 billion years, we don’t know exactly what FUCA contained, but it was probably a vesicle bounded by a lipid bilayer encapsulating some exothermic chemical reactions.”

Although purely theoretical, the model could be tested experimentally. For example, one could use fluorescent molecules to measure temperature variations inside eukaryotic cells, in which mitochondria are the main source of heat. These fluctuations could be correlated with the onset of mitosis and with the shape of the mitochondrial network.

If borne out by future investigations, the model would have several important implications, Attal says. “An important message is that the forces driving the development of life are fundamentally simple,” he explains. “A second lesson is that temperature gradients matter in biochemical processes and cells can function like thermal machines.” The paper is open access.

Cell Press, “Origin of Life: The First Cells Might Have Used Temperature To Divide” at (September 3, 2021)

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The remarkable fine-tuning of the dragonfly

The short film is titled “the insane biology” of the dragonfly. In what sense is any of this insane?

One harm Darwinism has done to people is to make things that are conventional expressions of intelligence sound “insane. ”

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Statistician Ioannidis on how COVID wrecked science

Readers may remember John Ioannidis. His point here is that getting more people involved with science doesn’t always work:

Lack of communalism during the pandemic fueled scandals and conspiracy theories, which were then treated as fact in the name of science by much of the popular press and on social media. The retraction of a highly visible hydroxychloroquine paper from the The Lancet was a startling example: A lack of sharing and openness allowed a top medical journal to publish an article in which 671 hospitals allegedly contributed data that did not exist, and no one noticed this outright fabrication before publication. The New England Journal of Medicine, another top medical journal, managed to publish a similar paper; many scientists continue to heavily cite it long after its retraction.

The hottest public scientific debate of the moment—whether the COVID-19 virus was the product of natural evolution or a laboratory accident—could have been settled easily with a minimal demonstration of communalism (“communism,” actually, in the original Merton vocabulary) from China: Opening the lab books of the Wuhan Institute of Virology would have alleviated concerns immediately. Without such openness about which experiments were done, lab leak theories remain tantalizingly credible.

Personally, I don’t want to consider the lab leak theory—a major blow to scientific investigation—as the dominant explanation yet. However, if full public data-sharing cannot happen even for a question relevant to the deaths of millions and the suffering of billions, what hope is there for scientific transparency and a sharing culture? Whatever the origins of the virus, the refusal to abide by formerly accepted norms has done its own enormous damage.

John P. A. Ioannidis, “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science” at Tablet (September 8, 2021)

Some of us find the lab-leak theory quite reasonable. See: Why did the New York Times discredit the lab leak theory? The Times led the way in zealously discrediting the quite reasonable COVID-19 lab leak theory. But what underlay its zeal?

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At Mind Matters News: The science “advances” are proving the mind ever more elusive

A friendly interview with an important neuroscientist makes that starkly clear:

In short, no one knows how human consciousness, which includes great novels, symphonies, and science discoveries contributes to “evolution.” Bacteria and insects are much more numerous than humans. Some would argue that they are more successful. That fact that this is the level of discussion, even today, tells us a lot.

Nearer the close of the interview:

[Tim Adams:] Have your thoughts on that ever taken any spiritual swerve – in terms of the why of there being something rather than nothing?

[Anil Seth:] It’s more that I think there’s hubris in assuming that everything will submit to a mechanistic programme of explanation. I think it’s intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the existence of conscious experience as a phenomenon in a universe for which we generally have physicalist accounts seems weird. I want to figure out the ways in which we can undermine this seeming weird. – Tim Adams, “Neuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We Risk Not Understanding the Central Mystery of Life’” at the Guardian, (August 21, 2021)

What Seth is saying is that he wants to undermine the feeling that human consciousness is different from what happens to clams and sand dollars.

If that doesn’t work? Well, it never has.

News, “The science “advances” disproving the mind are ever more elusive” at Mind Matters News

So many establishment figures do not appear to want to notice the obvious point: Materialism is failing. Popular but failing.

Make no mistake: It matters: Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

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At Mind Matters News: The science “advances” is proving the mind are ever more elusive

A friendly interview with an important neuroscientist makes that starkly clear:

In short, no one knows how human consciousness, which includes great novels, symphonies, and science discoveries contributes to “evolution.” Bacteria and insects are much more numerous than humans. Some would argue that they are more successful. That fact that this is the level of discussion, even today, tells us a lot.

Nearer the close of the interview:

[Tim Adams:] Have your thoughts on that ever taken any spiritual swerve – in terms of the why of there being something rather than nothing?

[Anil Seth:] It’s more that I think there’s hubris in assuming that everything will submit to a mechanistic programme of explanation. I think it’s intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the existence of conscious experience as a phenomenon in a universe for which we generally have physicalist accounts seems weird. I want to figure out the ways in which we can undermine this seeming weird. – Tim Adams, “Neuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We Risk Not Understanding the Central Mystery of Life’” at the Guardian, (August 21, 2021)

What Seth is saying is that he wants to undermine the feeling that human consciousness is different from what happens to clams and sand dollars.

If that doesn’t work? Well, it never has.

News, “The science “advances” disproving the mind are ever more elusive” at Mind Matters News

So many establishment figures do not appear to want to notice the obvious point: Materialism is failing. Popular but failing.

Make no mistake: It matters: Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
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Larry Elder: Can somebody text Dr. Martin Luther King… ?

Wow. Listen to this:

Yesterday in Los Angeles, California, black gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder was threatened by a mob on a campaign stop. According to Elder, “my security detail was physically assaulted, shot with a pellet gun and hit with projectiles.”

What stood out to me in the altercation was that one member of the mob — apparently a white woman who threw an egg at Elder — was wearing a gorilla mask.

Now why would she do that?

As we’ve discussed before, the vile trope that blacks are somehow closer to apes than other races has deep roots in Darwinian biology and social theory. Charles Darwin himself made the argument in The Descent of Man. You can find more about the history of this dehumanizing and racist idea by watching my documentary Human Zoos.

The blacks-as-apes trope is used by some on the right and left alike. In 2018, we called out actress Roseanne Barr’s loathsome comparison of Obama Administration official Valerie Jarrett to an ape.

Now we call out a progressive white activist in California who is trying to stigmatize a conservative black man as an ape.

John West, “Sickening: Darwinian Racism Alive and Well in California” at Evolution News and Science Today (September 9, 2021)

Here’s the film. So far as we know, it is still available at YouTube, owned by Google, despite problems.

California should be entitled to a respectable election. Or is the point that Big Tech wants to just plain OWN it? No matter what?

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