Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 16

And another thing: Evolutionary biology is “ableist”!

That is, opposed to people with disabilities! Or anyway, as progressives — running out of new targets — turn on unaccustomed ones, that’s their latest claim.

From the Daily Wire:

The paper argues that concepts like “fitness” and “natural selection” — foundational to the field of evolutionary biology, which studies the diversification and adaptation of life forms over time — are “harmful” and have been “weaponized against marginalized communities in the modern day.” And the authors’ thesis is that evolutionary biology’s use of purportedly “ableist” terms and concepts discourages disabled people from studying the field, and is therefore more discriminatory of the disabled than other areas of study. But instead of sampling from other academic disciplines, the authors claim that “the proportion of disabled evolutionary biologists is far below the population average.”

The authors compared a National Center for Science and Engineering Studies (NCSES) statistic that found 8.1% of disabled doctorate recipients in the life sciences with a CDC statistic that found 26% of the US population was disabled. But upon closer inspection, this 26% CDC statistic was determined through self-reporting, based on a six-question set, and included participants 65 and over who have considerably higher rates of age-related disabilities.

Christina Buttons, “New Paper Claims Evolutionary Biology Is ‘Ableist.’ Here’s How It Misrepresented The Data.” at Daily Wire (January 16, 2023)

The paper requires a fee or subscription.

The topic is complex in this case. True, the evolutionary biology field is totally dominated by Darwinism, a survival-of-the-fittest cult which is supposed to explain the history of life on Earth. Hence the “ablist” terms employed.

But, in fairness to the Darwinists, they probably aren’t intentionally discriminating against people with disabilities. They are used to destroying the careers of doubters, able or otherwise. They have never before been called to account for that.

Will the apparent pixie dust that has protected them even from evaluation of the popularity of Darwinism among white supremacists continue to protect them today? We shall see.

You may also wish to read: Michael Shermer is complaining about the Cancel Culture Darwinians like himself helped create. Now that it is attacking the revered Darwinian E. O. Wilson (1929–2021).

and When scholars simply don’t want to believe something obvious … they are very good at developing clever arguments to avoid seeing it.The relationship between white supremacy theories and pop science mag evolutionary theory is quite clear but also very embarrassing to acknowledge.

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

L&FP, 64: The challenge of self-referentiality on hard questions (thus, of self-defeating arguments)

One way to define Philosophy, is to note that it is that department of thought that addresses hard, core questions. Known to be hard as there are no easy answers.

Where, core topics include metaphysics [critical analysis of worldviews on what reality is, what exists etc], epistemology [core questions on “knowledge”], logic [what are the principles of right reason], ethics/morals [virtue, the good, evil, duty, justice etc], aesthetics [what is beauty], and of course meta issues emerging from other subjects such as politics, history, Mathematics, Theology/Religion, Science, Psychology, Medicine, Education etc. As we look at such a list, we can see that one reason why these are difficult is that it is very hard to avoid self-referentiality on such topics, opening up question-begging on one hand and self-referential, self-defeating incoherence on the other.

For striking example, in his 1994 The Astonishing Hypothesis, Nobel Laureate Sir Francis Crick [a co-discoverer on the structure and function of DNA], went on ill-advised record:

. . . that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.

The late Philip Johnson, of course, aptly replied that Sir Francis should have therefore been willing to preface his works thusly: “I, Francis Crick, my opinions and my science, and even the thoughts expressed in this book, consist of nothing more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Johnson then tellingly commented: “[t]he plausibility of materialistic determinism requires that an implicit exception be made for the theorist.” [Reason in the Balance, 1995.]

This problem is fairly widespread, and a point that should be borne in mind when we try to argue on big questions. Regrettably, this seems harder to do than one might at first imagine.

However, Elton Trueblood, building on Josiah Royce, may have put a way forward on the table, though this turns on an irony. For, one of the points of consensus of debate is that error exists. For empirical evidence, kindly refer to primary school sums duly marked with the infamous big red X’s. (That’s why I went out of my way to use green as my marking colour . . . )

However, this is not just an empirical fact, it is an undeniably true and self-evident knowable truth. To see this, set E = error exists, and try to deny it ~E. But this means, E is . . . an error. Oops. So, we know the very attempt to deny E instantly produces patent absurdity, a self defeating self contradiction. But this simple result is not a readily dismissed triviality. No, apart from being a gentle reminder that we need to be careful, it shows that self evident, certainly knowable truth exists which instantly undercuts a wide swath of radical relativist views. Their name is Legion, in a post modern world.

We can widen the result, take any reasonably identifiable subject, G. Assign, that O is the claim that some x in G is an objective, i.e. warranted and credibly reliable truth. Try to deny it, ~O. Has o shifted away from G? No, it is still a claim on the subject matter G. So, it refutes itself. Once there is a reasonably identifiable subject, there are objective knowable truths about and in G. This is a first such truth. Of course on many topics, the second truth is, we know little more than the first truth. That is Mr Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. Beyond lurk, the unknown unknowns.

BTW, Morality and History count as reasonably identifiable topics, as do Economics, Politics, etc. Controversy does not prevent us from knowing truths.

And, Dallas Willard et al (with slight adjustment) are right:

To have knowledge in the dispositional sense—where you know things you are not necessarily thinking about at the time—is to be able to represent something as it is on an adequate basis of thought or experience, not to exclude communications from qualified sources (“authority”). This is the “knowledge” of ordinary life, and it is what you expect of your electrician, auto mechanic, math teacher, and physician. Knowledge is not rare, and it is not esoteric . . . no satisfactory general description of “an adequate basis of thought or experience” has ever been achieved. We are nevertheless able to determine in many specific types of cases that such a basis is or is not present [p.19] . . . . Knowledge, but not mere belief or feeling, generally confers the right to act and to direct action, or even to form and supervise policy. [p. 20] In any area of human activity, knowledge brings certain advantages. Special considerations aside, knowledge authorizes one to act, to direct action, to develop and supervise policy, and to teach. It does so because, as everyone assumes, it enables us to deal more successfully with reality: with what we can count on, have to deal with, or are apt to have bruising encounters with. Knowledge involves assured

[–> warranted, credible] truth, and truth in our representations and beliefs is very like accuracy in the sighting mechanism on a gun. If the mechanism is accurately aligned—is “true,” it enables those who use it with care to hit an intended target. [p. 4, Dallas Willard & Literary Heirs, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, Routledge|Taylor& Francis Group, 2018. ]

Of course, that easily leads to the situation where false or tainted or materially incomplete knowledge claims can capture this prestige, so our knowledge institutions should be open to reform.

For this, an adapted JoHari window is helpful:

Coming back to focus, let us be on guard against making errors of self referentiality. END

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

Michael Shermer is complaining about the Cancel Culture Darwinians like himself helped create

Now that it is attacking the revered Darwinian E. O. Wilson (1929–2021):

Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to book author and Skeptic editor Michael Shermer about why scientific media, professional organizations, and academic departments are increasingly succumbing to progressive ideological fads.

The trouble is, it’s unclear what can be done now. Most of the Woke are as full of self-righteousness as an overfilled balloon is with air. That said, ideas welcome.

You may also wish to read: Woke comes back to bite the Darwinists — and they deserve it. Intelligent design people stood up not only for our colleagues and those who think as we do but we also stood up for freedom for people. (Michael Egnor)

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

Human DNA evolution as a “balancing act”

As described at Eurekalert:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—January 13, 2023—Humans and chimpanzees differ in only one percent of their DNA. Human accelerated regions (HARs) are parts of the genome with an unexpected amount of these differences. HARs were stable in mammals for millennia but quickly changed in early humans. Scientists have long wondered why these bits of DNA changed so much, and how the variations set humans apart from other primates.

Now, researchers at Gladstone Institutes have analyzed thousands of human and chimpanzee HARs and discovered that many of the changes that accumulated during human evolution had opposing effects from each other.

If humans and chimps differ in only 1% of our DNA, obviously, DNA is not the best place to look for the differences.

The findings, she says, have implications for understanding human evolution. In addition—because she and her team discovered that many HARs play roles in brain development—the study suggests that variations in human HARs could predispose people to psychiatric disease.

Among life forms, psychiatric disease is, pardon us, a high-class worry.

It’s a serious problem, to be sure. But to have it, you have to have a mind. Which sets you apart from trillions of life forms right away. Including chimpanzees. The paper is open access.

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

Century of bird evolution knowledge overturned?

Cambridge U tells SciTechDaily the story: “Evolving “Backward” – Discovery Overturns More Than a Century of Knowledge About the Origin of Modern Birds” (January 20, 2023):

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht discovered that a crucial skull feature of modern birds, the mobile beak, had developed prior to the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

This finding also suggests that the skulls of ostriches, emus and their relatives evolved ‘backward’, reverting to a more primitive condition after modern birds arose.

“Evolution doesn’t happen in a straight line,” said Field. “This fossil shows that the mobile beak – a condition we had always thought post-dated the origin of modern birds, actually evolved before modern birds existed. We’ve been completely backward in our assumptions of how the modern bird skull evolved for well over a century.”

Evolved “backward”? In other words, devolution? Funny, so few ever question a theory that is always being overturned by new findings.

Video showing the rotating pterygoid (a palate bone) of Janavis finalidens, which is very similar to that of living duck- and chicken-like birds. The bone was found as two matching fragments, which have been digitally fitted together. The bone is hollow and was likely full of air in life, as shown by the large opening on its side. Credit: Dr. Juan Benito and Dr. Daniel Field, University of Cambridge

Philip Cunningham points to these paragraphs from the PR:

The two groups were originally classified by Thomas Huxley, the British biologist known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his vocal support of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 1867, he divided all living birds into either the ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’ jaw groups. Huxley’s assumption was that the ‘ancient’ jaw configuration was the original condition for modern birds, with the ‘modern’ jaw arising later.

“This assumption has been taken as a given ever since,” said Dr. Daniel Field from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, the paper’s senior author. “The main reason this assumption has lasted is that we haven’t had any well-preserved fossil bird palates from the period when modern birds originated.”

Bulldogs, after all, are known for being stubborn, not for being on the right track.

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

Atheists vs Christians: Who makes the better claims ?

I am covering in this video some of the main talking points in debates between atheists and Christians.

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

God of the gaps. Really ?

The arguments for God’s existence are based on positive evidence and logical inferences. Not gaps of knowledge.

God of the gaps and incredulity, a justified refutation of ID arguments? https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1983-gaps-god-of-the-gaps-and-incredulitya-justified-refutation-of-id-arguments

125 reasons to believe in God

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1276-125-reasons-to-believe-in-god

There is no evidence of Gods existence. Really?

1. The universe and biological systems appear designed. Therefore, most likely, they were designed.

2. The universe is like a wind-up clock, winding down as if at one point it was fully wound up and has been winding down ever since. That means, it had a beginning, therefore a cause.

3. Laws and rules of mathematics and physics are imprinted in the universe, which obeys them. The fundamental physical constants, the universe, and the earth are finely tuned to permit life. Hundreds, if not thousands of constants must be just right. Who/what finely adjusted these parameters to permit life?

4. Cells ARE literally factories. Biological cells ARE an industrial park of millions of interconnected complex factories, full of machines, production lines, computers, energy turbines, etc.

5. Cell factories have a codified description of themselves in digital form stored in genes and have the machinery to process that information through transcription and translation into an identical representation in analog 3D form, the physical ‘reality’ of that description.

6. DNA has the highest storage density known, stores the blueprint of life, has information encoding, transmission, and decoding, and translation machinery.

7. Humans are moral beings, and have conscious intelligent minds, able to communicate, use language, and objective logic. Morals, the mind, information, and logic, are non-material, non-physical entities.

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

China is Doomed

From a recent FB post:

China has committed slow motion suicide.

The WSJ reports that China’s population shrank last year for the first time since the early 1960s when Mao’s insane policies led to the deaths of tens of millions. India is on the cusp of displacing China as the world’s most populous country. From this point on China’s population will continue to shrink. Again, insane CCP policies are the culprit. The CCP’s one child policy has resulted in an inversion of the population pyramid. Instead of more young people, today there are more people in their 60s than in their 50s and more people in their 50s than in their 40s and so on. China’s population implosion is almost certainly irreversible. Only time will tell how it will play out, but one thing is sure; it won’t be good.

UPDATE:DREW’S INSIGHTFUL QUESTIONS AND MY RESPONSES FOLLOW:

DREW’S QUESTIONS:

I am curious about 1. When a population size becomes unsustainable, and 2. After the current population painfully implodes, whether the population will stabilize, thus making the “new normal” (in a non-Faucian sense) stable and prosperous, albeit perhaps giving the Chinese regime less economic power on a macro-level. Wouldn’t this theoretically benefit the US? Maybe this doesn’t make sense or is naive. I’m not an economist.

MY RESPONSE: Drew, good questions. The answer to your first question has a very long history and here is a very short over simplified answer. 220 years ago Malthus predicted imminent population catastrophe when the world’s population was around 1 billion. He was wrong. Now the population is 8 billion and the vast majority of those people are living longer healthier lives than ever before in history. In the late 60s Paul Ehrlich predicted 100s of millions would die in of starvation in the 70s. He was wrong. The population of the world has doubled while calories available per person have increased. Population doomsayers have always been wrong because they have always underestimated humanity’s ability to increase the food supply through better tech and better ag methods. BTW, this is the same mistake climate doomsayers make. So the answer to your question is there may be some absolute limit the planet earth cannot sustain, but we have not reached it and it does not appear likely that we will reach it before population peaks at around 10 billion in the middle of the 21st century and then start’s to decline

No, the new normal is unlikely to be stable and prosperous. It is not a matter of stabilizing the population. It surely will. The issue is the inversion of the population pyramid. Modern societies are built on the idea that old people can retire because for every old person there are lots of young people paying taxes to support them. For example, in 1960 there were 5.1 taxpayers per Social Security retiree. Now there are 2.8 and that number is dropping fast because Boomers (the largest age cohort in history) are retiring and the age cohorts that follow them are much smaller. At your age you should not count on Social Security in its present form being around when you retire. Everyone knows that the way we have done it for nearly a hundred years is coming to an end. Now multiply that problem by millions and you have the problem in China (and many other countries, but China will be hit the hardest). We don’t know what will happen when the full effect of the inversion is felt, but the social disruptions that will occur when younger generations are unable to bear the cost of supporting hundreds of millions of older people will likely be catastrophic. Add to this the fact that China’s one child policy created a situation where there are far more men than women in the generation born after 1990. This is because tens of millions of girls were killed in the womb because families who could have only one child preferred a boy. What is going to happen when tens of millions of men literally have no one available to marry? No one knows, because an artificial catastrophe of this nature has never happened before. But, again, my prediction is that they have sewn the wind and they will reap the whirlwind.

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

At Mind Matters News: Do cave paintings from 20,000 years ago show symbolic writing?

In an article in the Cambridge Archeological Journal, researchers say they’ve deciphered the dots and Y’s among the animal paintings

Of the 800 sequences of dots analyzed, no sequence contained more than 13 dots, which suggested to the researchers the 13 months of the lunar year. They also “ found strong correlations between the number of marks and the lunar months in which the specific animal is known to mate.” (LiveScience) The frequent “Y” sign was, they believe, connected to giving birth: …

Naturally, other researchers are not convinced.

Note: The find challenges the idea that human consciousness underwent a long, slow evolution in recent millennia. It was mainly our technology that evolved.

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana

At Mind Matters News: Nobelist Roger Penrose talks about his impossible triangle

At Closer to Truth, the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose explains to Robert Lawrence Kuhn how he understands the relationship between mathematics, the mind, and the physical world:

Penrose triangle

Penrose: Then in the physical world we have these conscious beings and these conscious beings are part — a very small part — of a physical world… So it’s a very small part of the physical world which seems to have direct relationship to consciousness. And I regard this consciousness as having a different kind of existence but it springs from that very tiny part of the physical world. (3:07)

But in the world of conscious experience, we also have understanding and we have understanding of mathematics. That again is a very tiny part of mentality. But nevertheless that tiny part of the mentality … in a sense encompasses or at least has the potential to encompass the top world, which is the mathematical world. And I sort of draw this as a kind of paradox because it’s a small part of each world which seems to encompass the totality of the next one. And it’s deliberately drawn as paradoxical just to emphasize the strangeness of this thing. (3:50)

Penrose attempts a minimalist position when defending the reality of both mathematics and the mind in a world where many believe that only the physical exists.

Copyright © 2023 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.
Plugin by Taragana