Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 160

When science becomes anti-human life

David Coppedge calls this stuff “anti-Christian.” It is that. But that’s because it’s becoming anti-human. All human traditions must speak against it.

Maybe Christians should go first? Okay… Geronimo!

Two articles highlighted below will be used to justify the headline that science is being used to vilify Christians. That’s an insufficient sample, to be sure, but one support for this view is the absence of debate about it. Usually, when there is controversy about some scientific theory or paper, journals will print alternative views by other scientists. A printed debate is labeled as a “matter arising” about the subject. A critique is printed, and the original author has an opportunity to respond. If serious enough, the journal may print an “editorial expression of concern” about a paper, which might lead to a retraction.

There is no such “matter arising” about these articles. The silence amounts to de facto endorsement by the Big Science consensus. These articles, written by professors at major universities in the name of “science” and reprinted by science news outlets like Phys.org, amount to direct quasi-scientific attacks on what Christians believe. Christians—particularly evangelicals—are portrayed as standing in the way of progress. That is the first step a society can take toward persecuting them.

Pro-Life Views as Anti-Science

In The Conversation, Sahotra Sarkar takes aim at the pro-life movement. Sarkar is Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts. He launched his pro-abortion attack after the recent Supreme Court decision that did not stop a Texas “heartbeat bill” that bans abortion when a baby’s first heartbeat it is detected. (The bill does not “ban” such abortions; it only permits lawsuits against institutions performing them.)

David F. Coppedge , “Anti-Christian Science Becoming More Blatant” at Creation–Evolution Headlines (September 24, 2021)

Cutting living babies up feet first (in abortions) is a bad idea in principle. What else do we need to say?

But Big Science does not need human beings. It could make do with mostly Big Government and lots of androids.

At that point, it need not even make sense.

Big Science badly needs a sharp whack upside the head. Will it get one?

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Crits Are Terrible Judges

As I explained in a previous post, “Critical Race Theory,” with its denial of objective morality and neutral principles of justice, is essentially metaphysical materialism applied to race relations.  While CRT has received a lot of media attention in recent days, “critical studies” of various stripes have been around for a long time.  I was first exposed to them when I was in law school in the 80’s and learned about critical legal theory (“CLT”).  Proponents of CLT (often called “Crits”) assert that the law is just another tool oppressors use to victimize the oppressed.  Harvard’s The Bridge project summarizes CLT as follows:

A family of new legal theories, launched since 1970, share commitments to criticize not merely particular legal rules or outcomes, but larger structures of conventional legal thought and practice.  According to critical legal scholars, dominant legal doctrines and conceptions perpetuate patterns of injustice and dominance by whites, men, the wealthy, employers, and heterosexuals.  The ‘Crits’ argue that prevailing modes of legal reasoning pretend to afford neutral and objective treatment of claims while shielding structure of power from fundamental reconsideration.  Critical theorists also maintain that despite the law’s claims to accord justified, determinate and controlled expressions of power, law fails on each of these dimensions and instead law mystifies outsiders in an effort to legitimate the results in courts and legislatures.

Sound familiar?  CLT, like its sister CRT, is in its essence applied metaphysical materialism.  Only instead of race, CLT is applied to law.  Crits assert that while the law pretends to apply neutral legal principals, it does not.  Indeed, “neutral legal principle,” like “objective moral principle,” is a meaningless phrase.  In a universe devoid of ultimate meaning and objective morality, there cannot be such a thing as an objective legal principle.  There is only power and those who have it and those who don’t, and the law is nothing but a power game used by oppressors to keep their victims down. 

In practice CLT plays out in predictable ways.  Instead of applying neutral legal principles to the facts of a case, Crits decide cases by reference to which party “should” win based on whether they are a member of a marginalized group.  Crits have a problem though.  American law requires judges to write opinions justifying their decisions by reference to pre-existing legal principles.  And since “the defendant was __ [pick your oppressor: “white, male, wealthy, an employer, heterosexual, etc.”] and therefore had to lose” is not yet a recognized legal principle, Crits must pretend to apply real legal principles to reach their preordained result.  Quite often this process results in opinions that are vast word salads filled with gobbledygook masquerading as legal reasoning.  But Crits don’t care that their opinions are filled with non sequiturs and contradictions, because, as I noted in my previous post, under critical theory, rationality itself must be subordinated to the goal of achieving politically desirable outcomes.

As one might imagine, very often judges who apply CLT-type “results first, reasons later” methods bump up against other judges who apply the neutral legal principles developed over the course of centuries.  Again, Crits don’t care; they just keep coming.  The late Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt was one of the most famous judges who routinely ignored binding legal principles in arriving at lawless outcomes.  The Supreme Court reversed him many times, and when this was pointed out to him, he famously replied, “they can’t catch ‘em all.”  And of course, he was correct.  The Supreme Court has a limited capacity to review cases, and it is easy for a lawless judge to overwhelm its ability to catch and reverse all his escapades into CLT land. 

Whenever one of my clients has the misfortune of drawing a radical leftist judge (unsurprisingly, CLT finds its expression exclusively on the left), I must go through a by now all-too-familiar litany.  I give the client the bad news and explain there is a near 100% certainty they will lose at the trial court level, and therefore they should be prepared to either see the case through to an appeal or drop it immediately.  (I suppose that what the legal rule “the party whom the judge favors always wins” lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in near certain predictability.)  Some clients bail out; others soldier on.  I have never been wrong in my prediction.  I lost all of those cases at the trial court level, but I often won on appeal. 

CLT is not, strictly speaking, a theory of law at all.  It is a repudiation of the very concept of “law” as most people understand it.  If “law” is defined in a commonsense way as a set of pre-existing rules that are applied dispassionately and in a rigorously logical way to the facts of cases to arrive at politically neutral results, the fundamental animating principle of CLT is that law in that sense does not – indeed cannot – exist.  And while Crit judges understand they must “play the game,” they never lose sight of the central gnostic insight of CLT – the law is just that, a game with arbitrary rules based on nothing but power relationships.

CLT was once considered outlandish by most legal scholars, but  it is becoming increasingly mainstream.  That should worry anyone who values the rule of law.  Under CLT, the law does not exist.  It follows that the “rule of law” is a convenient fiction oppressors use to victimize the weak.  The most perfect expression of a legal system based on metaphysical materialism was found in the Soviet Union.  Sure, there were judges and lawyers and trials and appeals and all of the other procedural trappings of a legal system.  But everyone understood the game was rigged.  The lower-case party who was favored by the upper-case Party always won. 

This is what the Crits want for us.  Indeed, like the Soviet Union, they are candid about the fact that their theory is based on Marxist principles.  One needn’t be conservative or religious to understand the danger here.  CLT fails at the most basic application of Kant’s categorical imperative (“act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”).  How would CLT play out if it were adopted as a universal law?  This is not hard to predict.  If the rule in all cases were “the party whom the judge favors always wins,” the people would very quickly come to understand that the law is a scam and respect for the law would plummet to zero.  After all, what sense does it make to play by the rules of a game you know is fixed? 

In the West we take respect for the rule of law for granted.  We shouldn’t, because the blessing of living in a society governed by law is the exception in history, not the rule.  Many cultures think of the law as an impediment to be gotten around, not as binding rules of conduct.  I once litigated a contract case with a foreign party who acted this way.  I will never forget the maxim that governed contracts in that person’s culture:  “A contract is in no sense binding; it is merely a snapshot of the negotiations at a particular point in time.”  An approach to law like that might be advantageous to a particular party in a particular case, but it is disastrous for a society as a whole.  When no one can enter a contract with any firm expectation that it will be performed, transaction costs increase exponentially with a predictable drag on economic output and thus overall prosperity.  It is no coincidence that the wealthiest nations tend to be those with the greatest commitment to the rule of law. 

Yet Crits and their fellow travelers expend enormous time and effort chopping away at the very concept of the rule of law.  And the superstructure is becoming increasingly wobbly, as the increasingly fractious fights over the confirmation of judges attests.  The left wants Crit judges or at least judges who act like Crits.  President Obama said he wanted to appoint judges who displayed empathy.  This is exactly what judges should not do.  If the law dictates that a party for whom the judge has great empathy must lose, then far from expressing that empathy, the judge must suppress it and rule for the other side.  Justice Sotomayor famously observed that she hoped “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”  Blithering nonsense on a stick.  A judge’s ethnic background, gender, and life experience have absolutely zero relevance to the application of politically neutral legal principles to the facts of a case in a logically rigorous manner.  Yet the left went gaga over her statement. 

As a nation we are becoming increasingly divided over fundamental things.  One of the lines of demarcation is whether we will be ruled by law or ruled by, in Justice Scalia’s famous phrase, our “robed masters.”  That a significant plurality of our fellow citizens affirmatively desires to be ruled by a committee of unelected, unaccountable, life-tenured lawyers just so long as the committee “gets it right,” is both heartbreakingly sad and exceedingly shortsighted.  Sad, because we are on the verge of squandering the rule of law birthright bequeathed to us by the founders for a mess of progressive pottage.  Shortsighted because if it ever becomes widely understood that judges are merely imposing their policy preferences on us under the guise of interpreting the Constitution, that will be the end of our Republic as we have known it.

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Sabine Hossenfelder: New evidence against the Standard Model of cosmology

Transcript here:

Since 2003 astrophysicists know the „great wall“ a collection of galaxies about a billion light years away from us that extends over 1.5 billion light years. That too, is larger than it should be.

Then there’s the “Huge quasar group” which is… huge. It spans a whopping four Billion light-years. And just in July Alexia Lopez discovered the “Giant Arc” a collection of galaxies, galaxy clusters, gas and dust that spans 3 billion light years.

Theoretically, these structures shouldn’t exist. It can happen that such clumps appear coincidentally in the concordance model. That’s because this model uses an initial distribution of matter in the early universe with random fluctuations. So it could happen you end up with a big clump somewhere just by chance. But you can calculate the probability for that to happen. The Giant Arc alone has a probability of less than one in a hundred-thousand to have come about by chance. And that doesn’t factor in all the other big structures.

What does it mean? It means 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. This area of underdensity which we live in has been called the “local hole”, and it has a diameter of at least 600 million light years. This is the finding of a recent paper by a group of astrophysicists from Durham in the UK.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “New Evidence against the Standard Model of Cosmology” at BackRe(Action)

We’re so lucky. Those things just keep on “happening.”

You may also wish to read: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

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Rolling Stone’s “Hospital Overwhelmed With Ivermectin Overdose Cases” Story False

The story about Rolling Stone’s “update” (which should have been called a retraction) is here.

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Historian Peter Harrison’s five best science and religion books

In an interview, Peter Harrison offers some thoughts worth noting, among others:

Have science and religion been fundamentally at war throughout history? Are they incompatible? Has religion always held back scientific progress? These views may seem intuitive but few historians would defend them. Professor Peter Harrison looks at the complexity of science-religion interactions, including the cases of Galileo and Darwin, and considers how we frame the debate…

[Styles:] So, “science” and “religion” as we understand them today haven’t been constant categories throughout history, and the idea of them as independent things that can relate to one another is a recent development?

[Harrison:] If you look at the frequency of the word “religion”, no one talks about it much until the 17th century—this is true for English, originally Latin, and also the European vernacular languages, too. So, “religion” as a category is not really important to anyone until the modern period. With science, the practices that we regard as science went under a range of different labels. “Natural philosophy” is one, as is “natural history”, and “mathematical sciences” is other. These things are different in really important ways to what we regard as science.

Natural philosophy, as the name suggests, was part of the philosophical enterprise and as part of that enterprise was concerned to some degree with moral formation. Its theoretical scope extended to things like God, so natural philosophy would often include discussions of God and the soul. These topics were a clear part of its agenda. I don’t think anyone today would say that God falls within the agenda of the natural sciences. So, we have to be very careful not to project back our present conception of the subject matter and goals of science onto these activities in the past. They were actually quite different from modern science.

One way of grasping this is to think about the way that geographical territories change over time. If a historian were to claim that there was a war between Israel and Egypt at some time during the Middle Ages, we’d just know a priori that that was completely wrong. And it’s wrong because Israel is a modern state founded after World War II. Neither did Egypt exist as a nation state in the Middle Ages. To speak about a conflict in those terms is completely anachronistic.

Now, it doesn’t follow that the geographical territories that now comprise Egypt and Israel weren’t there. When I say there was no religion before the 17th century, I don’t mean there weren’t people worshiping God and praying and having certain beliefs and practices. But those beliefs and practices were not a part of this coherent idea that we call “religion”. There weren’t “religions” plural either. In much the same way, there were things that looked like scientific practices, but they weren’t gathered together under the same umbrella that we could recognise as “science”.

Charles J. Styles, “The best books on The History of Science and Religion” at FiveBooks.com.

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Dark matter as Fermi balls? Rob Sheldon offers a question

So if dark matter might be “Fermi balls,” why isn’t the idea being tested?

Last week, we wrote about dark matter as — potentially — Fermi balls, forged in the Big Bang. Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon writes to say,

Quite surprisingly, such a theory is readily available for testing. Remember, dark matter avoids the center of galaxies, but neither does it condense into stellar-sized black holes (we looked). So if it is little balls created in the Big Bang, then it is indistinguishable from Primordial Black Holes that have been proposed for decades. The fate of a eensy-weensy black hole, according to current theory, is to evaporate by the emission of Hawking Radiation. For the moment, let us believe in the existence of Hawking Radiation despite the complete absence of data. Then PBH that are smaller, say, than a pea would have evaporated by now. They also would have been seen by now, because the smaller the PBH, the more of them it takes to be 5X more massive than the galaxies, and the Space Station flew big chunks of plexiglas looking for microscopic tracks left by micrometeorites.

But could these PBH be slightly larger and still exist? Then they wouldn’t have to be so numerous, wouldn’t emit Hawking Radiation, and we could have just not seen them yet?

The answer is yes. I just happened to write a proposal on it 8 years ago. If they are smaller than asteroids and bigger than peas, then they might have gone undetected. The larger and smaller PBH regions have been excluded by measurements. The technique is “nano-lensing” where gravity of a black hole spreads light like a diffraction grating. We would look at very very bright “Gammaray bursters” that are so far away (other galaxies) that the light is plane parallel. When a nano-lensing object lies between us and a Gammaray burster, the light appears as a rainbow and can be easily detected with the GRO gammaray observatory. So the 20 years dataset of Gammaray bursters would be analyzed for rainbows. We could exclude sizes from peas to houses pretty easily. With some work maybe up to asteroids.

Needless to say, the study remains unfunded.

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

You may also wish to read: Is dark matter the Fermi balls forged in the Big Bang? Physicist: Dark matter — the mysterious substance that exerts gravity but doesn’t interact with light — might be made of tiny black holes permeating the universe.

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The religious dimensions of Darwinian evolution theory

Here’s a new study by Cornelius Hunter:

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution interacted with non-empirical factors including a range of theological concerns. The influence of these theological concerns is typically modeled as secondary to that of empirical evidence. In both Darwin’s thought and later development of the theory of evolution, theological concerns have been viewed as serving in a range of possible roles. However, the theological concerns have consistently been viewed as, ultimately, subservient to empirical science. In the end, science has the final say regarding the content and evaluation of the theory. Here, this paper demonstrates the failure of this model. Theological concerns do have primacy over the science. They motivate the development of evolutionary theory, and they control the interpretation of the empirical evidence and justification of the theory. It is more accurate to view evolution as a theological research program. V

“Evolution as a Theological Research Program,” School of Natural and Applied Sciences, William Jessup University, Rocklin, CA 95765, USA, Academic Editor: Jeffery D. Long, Religions 2021, 12(9), 694; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090694 Received: 13 July 2021 / Revised: 20 August 2021 / Accepted: 23 August 2021 / Published: 30 August 2021 The paper is open access.

What about this? Darwinism was the way an imperial British culture justified its rule over the “lesser breeds without the law?” That really was how they did see it all. And Darwinism was perfect for the purpose.

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Maybe this is an argument for the rights of human embryos…

From embryonic development:

An adult human body comprises trillions of cells of more than 200 types. How a human develops from a single fertilized egg to a fully grown adult is a fundamental question in biomedical science. Due to the ethical challenges of performing studies on human embryos, however, the details of this process remain largely unknown.

To overcome these issues, the research team took a different approach. They analysed genetic mutations in cells taken from adult human post-mortem tissue. Specifically, they identified mutations that occur spontaneously in early developmental cell divisions. These mutations, also called genomic scars, act like unique genetic fingerprints that can be used to trace the embryonic development process.

The study, which looked at 334 single-cell colonies and 379 tissue samples from seven recently deceased human body donors, is the largest single-cell, whole-genome analysis carried out to date. The researchers examined the genomic scars of each individual in order to reconstruct their early embryonic cellular dynamics.

The result revealed several key characteristics of the human embryonic development process. Firstly, mutation rates are higher in the first cell division, but then decrease to approximately one mutation per cell during later cell division. Secondly, early cells contributed unequally to the development of the embryo in all informative donors, for example, at the two-cell stage, one of the cells always left more progeny cells than the other. The ratio of this was different from person to person, implying that the process varies between individuals and is not fully deterministic.

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), “Genomic data reveals new insights into human embryonic development” at ScienceDaily (August 31, 2021) The paper is closed access. The paper is closed access.

The hate squad against baby humans is sure on the march these days.

You may also wish to read: An argument that obvious humans should not have any rights — in order to protect those who may wish to kill them. Nice.

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How to explain why you don’t believe in “evolution”

Math prof Granville Sewell suggests how to respond when you don’t have time to offer a 30-minute answer on all the meanings of the term and, chance are, the yob who is asking is just trying to get you anyway:

Like automobiles, life evolved step-by-step, but not really gradually. The video points out how similar the fossil record is to the history of human technology, with obvious similarities between each new invention and previous designs but with large gaps where major new features appeared. That is for the same reasons: gradual development of the new organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would require the development of new but not yet useful features. “Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large,” wrote Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson. So Darwinism could not explain the development of these new features even if they did occur gradually — and they don’t.

The video highlights further similarities between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technology. With automobiles, if you try to to sketch an evolutionary “tree” showing which models evolved from which, you may be able to produce a tree that is generally reasonable. But closer inspection shows that car species do not really fit so nicely into a tree structure: often even the designers might have a hard time identifying the “ancestor” of a particular model because it inherited ideas from several different automobile lineages. Contrary to Darwinian expectations, the evolutionary “tree” of life is equally confused. There are many indications that humans might have evolved from earlier primates, or that birds might have evolved from reptiles (though this “evolution” was not gradual). But here convergence also confuses things greatly. Similar new features (e.g., the echolocation abilities of bats and dolphins) and similar new genes often appear independently in distant branches of the supposed tree of life, suggesting common design rather than common descent. In fact, Winston Ewert has shown in a 2018 BIO-Complexity article that instead of a tree, the history of life is much better modeled by a dependency graph like we see in the evolution of software development!

Granville Sewell, “Do you believe in evolution? ” at Evolution News and Science Today (September 3, 2021)

Here’s the vid:

Be warned: For the yob, “evolution” explains why he has the right to beat up on people. That’s all he thinks he needs to know. Best to note the quick escape routes before you get accused of violating his rights.

You may also wish to read: More on the Tree of Life and why there seem to be gaps where there should be branches — which is the whole point of a tree.

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The complex truth about junk DNA

One of the biggest fails in the history of science is smoothed out by PR:

“Genomes hold immense quantities of noncoding DNA. Some of it is essential for life, some seems useless, and some has its own agenda.” …

Cells use some of their noncoding DNA to create a diverse menagerie of RNA molecules that regulate or assist with protein production in various ways. The catalog of these molecules keeps expanding, with small nuclear RNAs, microRNAs, small interfering RNAs and many more. Some are short segments, typically less than two dozen base pairs long, while others are an order of magnitude longer. Some exist as double strands or fold back on themselves in hairpin loops. But all of them can bind selectively to a target, such as a messenger RNA transcript, to either promote or inhibit its translation into protein.

These RNAs can have substantial effects on an organism’s well-being. Experimental shutdowns of certain microRNAs in mice, for instance, have induced disorders ranging from tremors to liver dysfunction.

By far the biggest category of noncoding DNA in the genomes of humans and many other organisms consists of transposons, segments of DNA that can change their location within a genome.

Jake Buehler, “The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’” at Quanta Magazine (September 1, 2021)

You may also wish to read: The Myth of Junk DNA

and

Junk DNA defender just isn’t doing politeness any more.

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