Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 162

September 2, 2021

At Mind Matters News: Mushrooms have minds? Well, if you doubt humans are exceptional…

… it is a short step to thinking that mushrooms have minds. A Miami University biologist has taken that step:

It’s pretty daring to claim that mushrooms have minds. But, in the light of what we have learned about plant communications, we should perhaps pause a moment to at least listen. Miami University biologist Nicholas P. Money, argues:

“Given the magical reputation of the fungi, claiming that they might be conscious is dangerous territory for a credentialled scientist. But in recent years, a body of remarkable experiments have shown that fungi operate as individuals, engage in decision-making, are capable of learning, and possess short-term memory. These findings highlight the spectacular sensitivity of such ‘simple’ organisms, and situate the human version of the mind within a spectrum of consciousness that might well span the entire natural world. – Nicholas P. Money, “The Fungal Mind: on the Evidence for Mushroom Intelligence” at Psyche”

Wait! The ability to process information is not consciousness. If it were, your laptop would be conscious. But it isn’t. And giving the laptop more power or memory would never make it so.

Things continue going wrong for mindful mushrooms as Money continues…

News, “Mushrooms have minds? Well, if you doubt humans are exceptional…” at Mind Matters News

If mushrooms think like people, why should we care more about the environment than we now do? (One of the author’s concerns)Why not just let mushrooms handle it?

See also: Scientists: Plants are not conscious! No, but why do serious plant scientists even need to make that clear? What has happened? Quite simply, the need to see humans as equivalent to animals has now spread to the need to see us as equivalent to plants.

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Published on September 02, 2021 07:11

September 1, 2021

Mind Matters News: Our brains break DNA in order to learn more quickly

Breaking both strands of DNA in order to quickly form memories may be conventional brain behavior that works better for young people than older ones:

An interesting 2015 discovery sheds some light on memory issues:

“The urgency to remember a dangerous experience requires the brain to make a series of potentially dangerous moves: Neurons and other brain cells snap open their DNA in numerous locations — more than previously realized, according to a new study — to provide quick access to genetic instructions for the mechanisms of memory storage. – David Orenstein, “Memory-making Involves Extensive DNA Breaking” at MIT News (July 14, 2021) ”

Jordana Cepelowicz explains an “unsettling” discovery made by Li-Huei Tsai’s team at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory:

“… to express learning and memory genes more quickly, brain cells snap their DNA into pieces at many key points, and then rebuild their fractured genome later…

The discovery is all the more surprising because DNA double-strand breaks, in which both rails of the helical ladder get cut at the same position along the genome, are a particularly dangerous kind of genetic damage associated with cancer, neurodegeneration and aging. It’s more difficult for cells to repair double-strand breaks than other kinds of DNA damage because there isn’t an intact “template” left to guide the reattachment of the strands. – Jordana Cepelewicz, “To Learn More Quickly, Brain Cells Break Their DNA” at Quanta Magazine (August 30, 2021)

The unsettling part is that it is not a bug, it is a feature of our brains …

News, “Our brains break DNA in order to learn more quickly” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Memory loss in old age may be easier to understand if we know more about the mechanisms our brains are using to keep key memories intact

You may also wish to read some other surprising facts about brain cells:

Study: The human brain and the universe are remarkably similar It looks as though the universe is not random but rather patterned in the way it unfolds. When an astrophysicist and a neurosurgeon compared notes, they were surprised by the way the brain follows the same pattern as the universe.

The human brain has given researchers a big surpise. Gray matter isn’t the big story. Connection—the connectome—is the astonishing feature of the brain. Mapping the “connectome” — all the connections in the brain—researchers expected a huge, random tangle. They found a street map.

Even the axons in our nerve cells are smart PCs Your brain is not a computer, it is billions of them. Contrary to expectations, researchers say, far-flung regions (thousands of cell body widths from their nucleus) can even make independent decisions. (February 15, 2019)

and

“What neuroscientists now know about how memories are born and die” Where, exactly are our memories? Are modern media destroying them? Could we erase them if we wanted to?

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Published on September 01, 2021 20:11

Sponges, believed to be oldest animals, are thought to be even older, at 890 mya

These findings would put animals millions of years older than earlier supposed:

Scientists predict that sponges—among the most basic animals—arose a few hundred million years before the occurrence of the oldest confirmed fossil specimens, which date to about 500 million years ago. Now, in a study published today (July 28) in Nature, Elizabeth Turner, a geologist at Laurentian University in Canada, identified structures in 890-million-year-old fossils of organisms similar to modern bath sponges, potentially pushing back the emergence of the animals to at least that long ago.

The work “gives good evidence that there were sponges living 890 million years ago, and that’s much older than any firm recognition of fossil sponges so far,” says Robert Riding, a geologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville who did not participate in the study. That record, until today, was held by fossils of purported sponges that are about 635 million years old, although their animal identity is not accepted by all researchers in the field.

In fact, if the new fossil finds are confirmed to be sponges, “they would be not just the oldest sponges; they would be the oldest animals,” Riding points out. To find any fossil more than 200 million years older than previous animal fossils “is significant,” he says.

Abby Olena, “890-Million-Year-Old Fossils Are Sponges, Oldest Animals: Study” at The Scientist (July 28, 2021)

Takehome: Each one of these “oldest” milestones reduces the time for blind Darwinism to work its magic.

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Published on September 01, 2021 17:58

August 31, 2021

Why do they need Einstein to be wrong?

Maybe he is but …

What could possibly be wrong with Einstein’s beautiful masterpiece? From the theory perspective, there are two possibilities. One of them is that general relativity seems to be incompatible with quantum mechanics. The many successes of quantum mechanics in the second half of the 20th century have been dazzling. We have learned how to create quantum electrodynamics (the quantum version of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism) and quantum chromodynamics (the quantum version of the fundamental weak and strong nuclear forces). However, the methods that worked so well there fail badly when applied to general relativity, suggesting perhaps that a completely different description of gravity is needed at the quantum scale.

Another possible issue with Einstein’s theory relates to “singularities.” In general relativity, there can exist regions of space and time where the curvature of the spacetime continuum becomes infinite. In fact, Roger Penrose, one of the recipients of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, was instrumental in proving that not only can these bizarre regions exist, but in fact, they must exist! Einstein’s theory, however, seems to have a built-in “censorship” mechanism so that observers like us are not exposed to the gory and dangerous features of these singularities. Indeed, the spacetime singularities in all reasonable solutions to general relativity are hidden behind event horizons, boundaries that forever trap all observers and light signals, as well as any garbage emitted by a singularity. But just because they are hidden behind a veil does not mean that singularities are not a problem.

From the observational perspective, there are also arguments from the world of astronomy suggesting that perhaps Einstein’s theory is not the final word…

Clifford Martin Will and Nicolas Yunes, “Is Einstein still right?” at IAI.TV (August 25, 2021)

It’s been a while though. What would replace Einstein’s theories? The war on math?

You may also wish to read: Sabine Hossenfelder despairs over vacuum energy. Rob Sheldon responds. These specialty controversies are an interesting backdrop to the current war on math. Sabine Hossenfelder and Rob Sheldon would likely agree that 2 + 2 = 4. But survey the vast degreed hordes for whom such a statement is an instance of white supremacy and colonialism and we will see the real problem facing our civilization: Far too many people have degrees (and grievances!) but no insight into what knowledge is.

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Published on August 31, 2021 18:59

How engineering destroys faith in Darwinism

Engineering demands a strict account of things that can possibly happen without design:

The most philosophically astute materialist scientists recognize the hazard of too closely comparing biology to engineering. Not only does engineering embody intelligent design, but engineers have developed a deep intuition of what incremental processes can and cannot achieve. And they recognize that the design patterns pervasive in life could not possibly have emerged through any gradual, undirected process.

Biologists wedded to scientific materialism have argued that life is so different from human artifacts that they can dismiss engineers’ conclusions about organisms’ limited evolvability. The central fallacy in this argument is that nearly every difference between human creations and life makes the latter ever more challenging to design. And the challenges translate into more daunting obstacles for any evolutionary scenario.

Design motifs such as four-bar linkages and control systems must meet exacting requirements whether implemented in a space shuttle or a fish (here, here). Many of these requirements operate largely independently of the constituent materials that compose them or the exact methods they employ in their operation. Moreover, the distinctive nature of living systems entails many additional requirements and even stricter constraints. Not only must a biological element function properly, but an organism must also manufacture, maintain, and operate it.

Brian Miller, “How Engineers Helped Save Biology from Evolutionary Theory” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 30, 2021)

In the real world, Darwinism is largely maintained by enforcement at all levels of education and the career ruin of those who doubt it. All that is quite unrelated to what’s happening — or could happen — in science.

See also: Researchers: Blind mouse pups prepared for sight. Researcher: “I love this paper. It blew my mind,” says David Berson, who studies the visual system at Brown University and was not involved in the research. “What it implies is that evolution has built a visual system that can simulate the patterns of activity that it will see later when it’s fully mature and the eyes are open, and that [the simulated pattern] in turn shapes the development of the nervous system in a way that makes it better adapted to seeing those patterns. . . . That’s staggering.”

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Published on August 31, 2021 17:51

Talking to “science deniers”? How about a bit of self-reflection first?

Commenting on a new book, How to Talk to A Science Denier, by Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre — one of our moral and intellectual superiors — Unherd’s science editor Tom Chivers comments,

Even with climate change scepticism, sure, there are people who literally don’t believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet. But those people are relatively rare. People who believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet, but that the emissions are going to be hard to stop because of economic growth in the developing world and it would make more sense to concentrate on adaptation rather than mitigation, are much more common. Are they “deniers”? Certainly they’re often called deniers. But McIntyre himself acknowledges that China is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that the IPCC says the sweeping global changes required to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid a 1.5°C warming are unprecedented.

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories? …

It’s mainly a book designed to tell readers that people they already think are dumb are, in fact, dumb. It is, really, How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil.

Tom Chivers, “How not to talk to a science denier” at Unherd

Thus, the book will doubtless have just the reception we might expect. If people want to spread a message, contempt for listeners and failure to listen oneself is not exactly a recipe for success.

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Published on August 31, 2021 17:19

Eric Holloway: Why is randomness a good model, but not a good explanation?

After all, he argues, random processes are used all the time to model things in science:

When we test a sequence of numbers for randomness, we are essentially testing how easy it is to predict the sequence of numbers. One of the simplest tests is to measure how frequently heads and tails occur during a series of coin flips. If the distribution is heavily skewed one way or the other after a large number of flips, then we can be pretty certain the coin is not fair. We cannot be absolutely certain, since there is always a small probability for a really long run of heads, but as the run lengthens, the probability of achieving the run with a fair coin drops exponentially. If we cannot find any predictable patterns in a series of numbers, then we say the series is at least pseudo random.

However – and this is the really important point, so pay attention – we can never say a series is truly random just by examining it, since we would have to run an infinite number of randomness tests to look for all conceivable patterns. Thus, without actually knowing the original cause of a number sequence, the best we can ever say is a sequence is pseudo random with regard to the set of randomness tests that we have run. This conclusion is mathematically provable with Kolmogorov complexity.

Now we come to the second really important point, so don’t switch to YouTube just yet! Observe that the reverse is not true. Once we have detected a predictable pattern in a number sequence, then we are able to say, at least with some confidence, the sequence is not random. And the longer the sequence and higher the predictability, the greater our confidence grows.

Eric Holloway, “Why Is randomness a good model, but not a good explanation?” at Mind Matters News

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Published on August 31, 2021 16:50

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne speaks out on the war on math

Some of us remember when Darwinian commenters chided us for writing about the war on math . Now that Jerry Coyne is starting to talk about it, will they start to listen? He’s talking about a recent Scientific American op-ed, “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past”:

The article, of course, claims that mathematics is a hotbed of racism and misogyny, which explains why there are so few women and blacks in academic mathematics.

The article begins with stories of thee women mathematicians, all of whom report that they felt discriminated against or at least looked down upon. All of them have academic jobs, two as professors and one as a postdoc. I don’t doubt their stories, but what we have are three anecdotes. At face value, they show that there is some racism or sexism in academic math, but these are cherry-picked anecdotes that demonstrate little except that, like all fields, math is not entirely free of bigotry. I also procured two anecdotes with no effort. First, I asked one of my female math-y friends, Professor Anna Krylov, a theoretical and computational quantum chemist at USC, who deals extensively with mathematicians, if that had been her experience…

“I was often a single women in a room — but so what? It did not turn me away from the subject I was passionate about. I experienced some forms of discrimination throughout my career and can tell stories… But — as McWhorter often says — “there was then and there is now”! These anecdotes [from Sci. Am.] are blown out of proportion and completely misrepresent the current climate.”

She also worried that these narratives, which don’t resemble her own, cultivate a victim mentality in women. (Anna is no anti-feminist, either: she helped initiate a protest against an all-male speaker agenda at a chemistry conference.)

Jerry Coyne, “Scientific American (and math) go full woke” at Why Evolution Is True (August 29, 2021)

“Performative wokeness,” as Coyne puts it, does much more damage in public education than it would among accomplished mathematicians. It lets people who can’t really teach get away with not teaching math — in favor of a group spout of some sort of Wokeness.

Presumably, if a student can get marks for “performative wokeness,” that effort counts toward numeracy, whether the math topic is grasped or not. And — yes, we have said this before — the students most harmed are predominately poor and underprivileged. The well-to-do can afford private lessons for their children in actual math. Prediction: The social divide will soon be bigger than ever.

With any luck, espousing the war on math will work out about as well for the Woke at Scientific American as the claim that creationism is a form of white supremacy did.

All that claim, made in the same magazine, did was: It finally freed Darwin doubters of all stripes to start talking to the public about the racism inherent in Darwin’s body of work.* In the past, we have been drowned out by widespread mass bellowing that he was anti-slavery (“Darwin’s sacred cause”** and all that).

See: Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism (book)

(Note: YouTube sometimes attempts to restrict the documentary but that’s YouTube. The facts are well-attested, not under dispute.)

** It cost Darwin little to be anti-slavery. In the time and place where he lived, slavery was not a pressing issue. The issues in Victorian England had to do with the dreadful conditions under which poor people who were not slaves lived and worked. Attention to that problem was the mark of a social justice warrior in action, not armchair opposition to outlawed chattel slavery.

You may also wish to read: Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne speaks out on a SciAm op-ed’s claims that denial of evolution stems from white supremacy It seems obvious, on reflection, that Hopper’s piece is a disastrously clumsy effort on the part of Scientific American to get Woke. Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne thinks the mag is not just circling the drain but “approaching the drainhole.” To the extent that the editors couldn’t find someone who at least gets basic facts right, he has a point.

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Published on August 31, 2021 07:03

August 30, 2021

At Mind Matters News: A neuroscience theory that actually helps explain the brain

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor argues that Robert Epstein’s “transducer” theory of the replationship between the mind and the brain is an instance of getting something right:

Many of my posts here at Mind Matters News entail debunking nonsensical materialist theories of the mind–brain relationship. It is altogether fitting and proper that I do so. But, at times, thoughtful and very promising ideas are proposed by modern neuroscientists. One of those ideas is discussed in an essay in Discover Magazine by neuroscientist Robert Epstein.

Epstein, the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today Magazine, is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California and holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University. He proposes that we re-examine a theory that has had a number of prominent proponents over the past several centuries.

It is the theory that the brain is a type of transducer, that is, a device or an organ that converts one signal to another signal, commonly from one medium to another. A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision.

Epstein points out that a host of perplexing neurological problems, such as blindsight (the ability of some blind people to be aware of objects in their environment that they cannot consciously see), mindsight (the phenomenon during some near-death experiences of congenitally blind people in which they are able to see normally), terminal lucidity (the brief period of clear consciousness that sometimes precedes death in dementia patients), hallucinations and such diseases as schizophrenia, among many others, could be explained by the inference that the human brain focuses and transduces consciousness rather than generates it.

Michael Egnor, “A neuroscience theory that actually helps explain the brain” at Mind Matters News (August 30, 2021)

Takehome: The ear transduces sound to hearing; the eye transduces light to vision. It is reasonable to infer that the brain transduces thought to body.

You may also wish to read:

The brain does not create the mind; it constrains it. Near-death experiences in which people report seeing things that are later verified give some sense of how the mind works in relation to the brain. A cynical neurosurgeon colleague told Michael Egnor that he could not account for how a child patient’s NDE account described the operation accurately.

and

Yes, split brains are weird, but not the way you think. Scientists who dismiss consciousness and free will ignore the fact that the higher faculties of the mind cannot be split even by splitting the brain in half.

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Published on August 30, 2021 19:05

Spare a thought for Afghanistan’s terrified scientists

They had hoped for a world that was ultimately denied them:

Now, academics fear for their own safety. They also worry that research will languish without money and personal freedoms, and because educated people will flee. Some fear that they could be persecuted for being involved in international collaborations, or because of their fields of study or their ethnicity.

“The achievements we had over the past 20 years are all at great risk,” says Attaullah Ahmadi, a public-health scientist at Kateb University in Kabul.

According to news reports, billions of dollars in overseas finance for Afghanistan’s government—such as assets held by the US Federal Reserve and credit from the International Monetary Fund—have been frozen. It’s not clear whether or when the funding will be released, and how that will affect universities and researchers, but many report salaries not being paid.

Smiriti Mallapaty, “Afghanistan’s Terrified Scientists Fear Persecution” at Scientific American

And now hordes may persecute them for even wanting that world.

Meanwhile, in the cradles of science that they are denied, there is a Woke war on math and on science.

Yes, the lights are going out… for now.

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Published on August 30, 2021 18:46

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