Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 159

Start your day with a pre-Cambrian “swimming head” creature

Only if you want to:

Titanokorys would have been a bewildering animal to encounter. It had multifaceted eyes, a mouth shaped like a pineapple slice that was lined in teeth, and spiny claws located beneath its head to catch prey. The animal’s body was equipped with a series of flaps that helped it swim. And Titanokorys had a large head carapace, or a defensive covering, like the shell of a crab or turtle…

“These enigmatic animals certainly had a big impact on Cambrian seafloor ecosystems. Their limbs at the front looked like multiple stacked rakes and would have been very efficient at bringing anything they captured in their tiny spines towards the mouth. The huge dorsal carapace might have functioned like a plough,” Caron said.

Ashley Strickland, “Giant ‘swimming head’ creature lived in our oceans 500 million years ago” at CNN (September 8, 2021)

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New Video Presentation on YouTube: Intelligent Design & Scientific Conservatism

I have recently posted a new video on my Intelligent Design YouTube channel. In this video I discuss several areas in the philosophy of science and modern evolutionary biology, and their relationship to ID. These thoughts were prompted initially by an interesting paper by philosopher of science Jeffrey Koperski ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design, and Two Good Ones’. Koperski thinks that one good way to critique ID is to point out that it violates principles like ‘scientific conservatism’. Because there are several potential naturalistic mechanisms on the table, even if orthodox neo-Darwinism fails, ID is an unnecessary proposal. To turn to design explanations would be to adjust our theories too drastically. I argue against this claim, concluding that in fact ID may be the most adequate and conservative theory we have, and therefore should be incorporated into our scientific framework. Follow the link below:

A Good Way to Attack Intelligent Design?

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Never buy a parrot from a sailor…

Otherwise, a lesson in science media gullibility. This time it concerns a duck:

TS: What went through your head when you first heard those recordings? When I first heard and saw the report of it imitating a human voice, it also mentioned that the duck imitated ‘you bloody fool.’ I thought: is this a hoax?

CtC: I was amazed. I was really amazed. When I first heard and saw the report of it imitating a human voice, it also mentioned that the duck imitated ‘you bloody fool.’ I thought: is this a hoax? I couldn’t believe it. It would be—it is—so unexpected from a species from this group, which is considered quite primitive. . . . Vocal learning is considered quite an advanced trait, and that it would be present in any representative of these groups—yeah, I couldn’t believe it.

That’s also why I went out of my way to get hold of these recordings before I dared to contact the guy who made them, because I wanted to be convinced myself that it was a genuine imitation. I was really flabbergasted.

The recordings were very convincing. And I discovered that the man who made these recordings was actually still alive and around. . . . And he, then, was capable of telling me from his own experience, but also from people whom he contacted who had been involved in the rearing of this duck at the time, how it was raised. And yeah, the story of Ripper then unfolded.

Christie Wilcox, “Talking Duck Stuns Animal Behavior Researcher” at The Scientist (September 5, 2021)

Flabbergasted? But why? When I (O’Leary for News) was a little kid, people said, “Never buy a parrot from a sailor.”

Are readers clever enough to get why they said that?

Meanwhile, a friend shares a parrot joke: A sailor walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder and a man at the bar says, “Hey, where did you get that?” The parrot replied: “In the navy; there’s thousands of them.”

But why do we pay for science media that are this stupid?

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

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Peter Boghossian has quit at “ideas go to die here” Portland U

This is what we know:

Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX investigation. (Title IX investigations are a part of federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor.

With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself. Finally, the results of the investigation were revealed in December 2017. Here are the last two sentences of the report: “Global Diversity & Inclusion finds there is insufficient evidence that Boghossian violated PSU’s Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment policy. GDI recommends Boghossian receive coaching.”

Not only was there no apology for the false accusations, but the investigator also told me that in the future I was not allowed to render my opinion about “protected classes” or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known — a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges. Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.

I eventually became convinced that corrupted bodies of scholarship were responsible for justifying radical departures from the traditional role of liberal arts schools and basic civility on campus. There was an urgent need to demonstrate that morally fashionable papers — no matter how absurd — could be published. I believed then that if I exposed the theoretical flaws of this body of literature, I could help the university community avoid building edifices on such shaky ground.

So, in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” This example of pseudo-scholarship, which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems.

Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department …

Bari Weiss, “My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit.” at Substack (September 8, 2021)

Would any readers who pay taxes in the state of Oregon like to write in and explain what they pay taxes for? Is this how you think your tax money should be spent?

Readers may remember Peter Boghossian for the hilarious takedowns of Woke peer-reviewed papers. The Portlanders were trying to find some way to fix him good for that but he may have preempted it. Stay tuned.

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Artificial Cells “Created”

At Phys.Org today, a press release indicates that scientists have fashioned a type of stand-in for natural cells which can ‘mimic’ some of their functions/properties. The title of the PR is:

“Scientists create artificial cells that mimic living cells’ ability to capture, process, and expel material.”

Should we add this to the Miller-Urey experiment as a new piece of the puzzle as to how life started? Well, first of all, the limitations of the Miller-Urey experiment have been spelled out elsewhere, but should be well-known by now. Second, here’s what we read at Phys.Org:

To design the cell mimics, the researchers created a spherical membrane the size of a red blood cell using a polymer, a stand-in for the cellular membrane that controls what goes in and out of a cell. They pierced a microscopic hole into the spherical membrane creating a nano-channel through which matter can be exchanged, imitating a cell’s protein channel.

But in order to perform the tasks required for active transport, the cell mimics needed a mechanism to power the cell-like structure to pull in and expel material. In a living cell, mitochondria and ATP provide the necessary energy for active transport. In the cell mimic, the researchers added a chemically reactive component inside the nano-channel that, when activated by light, acts as a pump. When light hits the pump, it triggers a chemical reaction, turning the pump into a tiny vacuum and pulling cargo into the membrane. When the pump is switched off, the cargo is trapped and processed inside the cell mimic. And when the chemical reaction is reversed, the cargo is pushed out on demand.

“Our design concept enables these artificial cell mimics to operate autonomously and perform active transport tasks that have so far been confined to the realm of living cells,” said Stefano Sacanna, associate professor of chemistry at NYU and the study’s lead author.

Well, what about all this ‘designing’? Can we adduce that these ‘cell mimics’ were designed by considering the materials they’re made out of and how it’s assembled? If so, then, based on living cells, ‘design’ can also be adduced.

So, no, even if this experiment is tauted as the next “Miller-Urey” experiment, we see that in both instances it is the presence of the ‘intelligent’ agents that brought about their published results.

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Why it’s okay for Rolling Stone to write false stories about a drug called Ivermectin

Barry Arrington wrote an interesting post on Rolling Stone’s latest debacle: Ridiculous claims about Ivermectin overdoses.

Followed up at the page by commenters discussing the earlier self-satisfied media claims that the Wuhan lab leak was a crackpot theory.

The Wuhan lab leak is today’s Chernobyl.

It’s all a perfect illustration of what sold-out media incompetence can do.

Readers, they don’t need you. And you don’t need them. We all have the internet.

Ivermectin probably usually works, used as directed. Whether that is convenient to Big Pharma or not. Something happened at the Wuhan Level 4 virus lab. Whether that is convenient to the Chinese Communist Party or not.

But much that happens in media today is not about what happened. It’s about Hot Hair and Big Lipstick posing as news.

One thing to see is that Big Media wants the Chinese market, which it can only get by telling people the stories the CCP wants them to hear.

Increasingly, more and more of the real stories will be provided by independent media. We are more important than we ever used to be. – Denyse O’Leary

See also: Update on COVID-19 origins In January, Dr. Peter Ben Embarek said it was “extremely unlikely” that COVID-19 came from a lab accident. He has since begun to walk back those claims.

And any story from Uncommon Descent

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How materialism is enforced when the evidence is against it

Fashion mags rule:

A recent University of Michigan survey claims “Evolution now accepted by majority of Americans,” or 54 percent. Salon declared the debate over, posting the headline “Science quietly wins one of the right’s longstanding culture wars,” calling it a “setback for purveyors of pseudoscience.” What role does information suppression play in this trend?

In 2006, an article in the journal Nature reported “70 years of enforced atheism and official support for darwinism in the Soviet Union” were causing a public backlash against evolution in post-Soviet Russia. During the Soviet era, virtually everyone accepted Darwinism, largely due to government indoctrination and a lack of intellectual freedom. Could a similar intolerance be responsible, at least in part, for increased public acceptance of evolution in the United States?

More than 1,100 scientists have signed a list agreeing they are “skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” As a scientist, I’ve signed that list. But as an attorney, I can attest that many of these scientists — and others who are afraid to sign the list — face discrimination because they won’t toe the Darwinian line.

Casey Luskin, “Why You Only Hear One Side Of The Debate Over Life’s Origin” at The Federalist

Luskin probably doesn’t know the half of it. But then he probably knows that.

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Science Uprising is back, with more uproar, fun

If conventional admin butts are scorched, maybe that had to happen sometime:

Season 2 is scheduled to begin on September 15 and will include four new episodes, to be released over several months.

The first new episode will look at what science says about the beginning of the universe. Another episode will investigate explosions of new animal forms throughout the history of life. A third episode will critique the fossil evidence for human evolution, and a final episode will tackle the claim that artificial intelligence will make humans obsolete.

Evolution News, “Science Uprising — Returning for Season 2 on September 15” at Evolution News and Science Today (September 6, 2021)

Here’s a look:

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At Mind Matters News: How complex is a single neuron in your brain?

More complex than most computers:

To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev and Michael London, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron.

Even the authors did not anticipate such complexity. “I thought it would be simpler and smaller,” said Beniaguev. He expected that three or four layers would be enough to capture the computations performed within the cell.

– Allison Whitten, “How Computationally Complex Is a Single Neuron?” at Quanta Magazine (September 22, 2021) the Paper Is Closed Access.

News, “How complex is a single neuron in your brain?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: An artificial intelligence network did not do nearly as well. Researchers showed that a deep neural network needs 5-8 layers of [artificial] interconnected “neurons” to mimic the complexity of one single biological neuron.

You may also wish to read:

Researchers can’t explain: Memories drift from neuron to neuron. Memories are supposed to stay put in the neurons that lay them down. A recent study, published at Nature, shows that they move a lot…

and

Human neurons are different from animal ones, researchers say.

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Rob Sheldon on the new evidence against the Standard Model in cosmology: “The party’s over.”

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon responds to our recent note on theoretical physicst Sabine Hossenfelder’s recent remarks on the current findings against the Standard Model:

He writes, “Translating into the Greek, the standard model is called ΛCDM. Sabine just said the Lambda has vanished. Earlier in the year she has said the CDM (cold dark matter) has failed to materialize despite 20 years of increasingly sophisticated searches, so she is in favor of MOND (modified newtonian dynamics). The net result is that the standard model has lost its two main distinguishing features. Which is about time, since dark matter and dark energy (aka Λ) have become science fantasy with no shortage of storytellers. It’s time to tell everybody the party’s over.”

You may also wish to read: Sabine Hossenfelder: New evidence against the Standard Model of Cosmology. Hossenfelder: “… the evidence is mounting that the cosmological principle is a bad assumption to develop a model for the entire universe and it probably has to go. It increasingly looks like we live in a region in the universe that happens to have a significantly lower density than the average in the visible universe.

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