Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 163

At Mind Matters News: Is brain science helping us understand our belief in God?

To the extent that materialist researchers are still looking for a God switch in the brain, no, it doesn’t:

Michael Ferguson is a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. He grew up as a Mormon and was quite religious. But, he reports, his beliefs have changed. That’s probably fairly common at Harvard –- there is a pervasive and palpable bias against serious religious beliefs in many of our leading universities.

Nonetheless, Ferguson thought,

“As a scientist, I can’t help but wonder what it is about these types of [religious] experiences that made them feel so rich and so profound. – Emma Yasinski, “Religion on the Brain” at the Scientist (Jul 13, 2021). The paper covered requires a subscription.”

An obvious answer would be that religious experiences are rich and profound because they are true. There’s nothing like communion with God to enrich and deepen life. Ferguson seems not to have considered this explanation, but instead seeks answers through neuroscience. The result is predictable:

“In June, Ferguson and his team published a study in Biological Psychiatry showing that brain lesions that connect to the periaqueductal gray (PAG), an area deep in the brain involved in processes such as pain modulation, fear conditioning, and altruism, seem to be associated with religiosity and spirituality. – Emma Yasinski, “Religion on the Brain” at the Scientist (Jul 13, 2021)”

Ferguson is careful to emphasize that he is not trying to disprove the reality of religious experience:

Michael Egnor, “Is brain science helping us understand our belief in God?” at Mind Matters News (August 30, 2021)

Oh no. For sure, why would anyone think that?

Takehome: Egnor: The best way to understand religious experience is to have one. Researchers who are looking for a way around that problem don’t produce useful research.

You may also wish to read:

Researchers: Prolonged meditation alters the brain. The changes were detected mainly in the frontal and parietal lobes. Andrew Newburg and colleagues found changes in brain functional.

and

Why a budding neuroscience student is skeptical of brain scans After reading her perceptive essay about the problems in fMRI imaging in neuroscience, I’m sad that a gifted student has doubts about a career in the field. Neuroscience badly needs skeptics to show how unreliable technology, biased handling of data, and materialism’s conceptual mess frustrate science.

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Comb jellies, among the oldest life forms, lost rather than gained complexity

As Harvard biologists tell us:

Despite their importance for understanding animal evolution, most information about ctenophores comes from living species alone as fossil comb jellies are extremely rare due to their gelatinous bodies. However, some fossil ctenophores have been discovered in early and middle Cambrian sites (about 520-500 million years ago) with exceptional preservation. These fossilized specimens, found around the world in sites including Burgess Shale in Canada and Chengjiang in South China, show that Cambrian ctenophores are a bit different from living representatives. The fossils include features such as a skeleton that supported the ctenes, or comb rows, as well as up to 24 comb rows – many more than the eight comb rows possessed by living species…

The researchers conclude that Cambrian ctenophores had more complex nervous systems compared to those observed today. Living species of comb jellies have a diffuse nervous system similar to the structure of chicken wire, but very thin and transparent. Cambrian ctenophores’ nervous systems were condensed with specific nerve tracks that basically ran along the length of the body and then as a ring around the mouth. This complex system is only seen in one living species, the Euplokamis, which is regarded as potentially being an early branching ctenophore living today. However, while Euplokamis has this elongated nerve structure that runs the length of the body, it does not have the ring around the mouth, so it too is simpler compared to Cambrian ctenophores.

Department of Organismic Evolutionary Biology, “Rare Cambrian fossils from Utah reveal unexpected anatomical complexity in early comb jellies” at Harvard University (August 20, 2021)

A classic example of devolution, as explained in Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves.

Throwing a horseshoe into the works of Darwinism, many life forms simply reduce their complexity in order to survive. Yes, natural selection works and is real but — because it depends on randomness — it doesn’t produce reliably complexity all by itself any more than winning a lottery ticket reliably produces wealth.

Comb jellies today:

You may also wish to read: Devolution: Getting back to the simple life

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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Here’s a podcast with Neil Thomas on his new book, Taking Leave of Darwin

Here.

On today’s ID the Future, meet Taking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas, not at all the sort of person one might expect to find waging a campaign against modern evolutionary theory. An erudite and settled Darwinist living comfortably in a thoroughly secular English academic culture, Thomas nevertheless came to reject Darwinian materialism and, as he insists, did so on purely rationalist grounds. 

Here’s the book: Taking Leave of Darwin (2021)

Also enjoy: Privileged Address: An excerpt from Neil Thomas’s Taking Leave of Darwin: Through the lens of a celestial telescope, it is true, one can see little but the unfeeling immensity of that unremittingly hostile universe invoked by [Bertrand] Russell, but if we look around us here on Earth we can see a planet which seems entirely discontinuous with the rest of the observable cosmos and abounding in a host of benign phenomena so numerous that they tend to go largely unnoticed.

and

At Evolution News: Twilight of the Godless Universe. If so, fashionable atheists must all just want to kill Meyer for busting up a sweet faith-and-science racket. Whatever any establishment figure with a PhD in science wants to call science is science and obedient religion profs mostly just bumble along, glad to be noticed. Actually, with all the stuff we have discovered that does not confirm what everyone thinks, it’s a pretty decrepit racket now.

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Here’s a great “molecular machines” video

On polymerase chain reactions:

Casey Luskin explains his choice of this vid:

Back in June I published a critique of a video posted on the popular YouTube science channel Veritasium that had overstated the evolutionary findings of the Long Term Evolution Experiment. But I don’t like being negative, and so I’m very happy to be able to report on a wonderful video from Veritasium on molecular machines.

It’s an older video, from 2017, but it’s so good that it’s worth highlighting here. The animation has a fantastic sequence explaining DNA replication, showing how the helicase separates the two DNA strands for replication, and how DNA is wrapped around histone complexes and bundled with chromatin so it can all be packed into the nucleus of your cell as chromosomes…

The video gives a nice visual window into the operation of molecular machines that are fundamental to cell replication. Of course Veritasium doesn’t frame it this way, but this complex system of carefully coordinated machines cannot help but testify powerfully to intelligent design.

Casey Luskin, “Spectacular Video on Molecular Machines and Cell Replication” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 26, 2021)

Veristasium probably MUST front some Darwin nonsense to stay in good with the main people in charge of pointing others to their site. Focus on the real stuff, like the remarkably complex cell machinery and ask: Randomness?

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At Mind Matters News: Non-materialist science is wanted — dead or alive

Exploring a non-materialist approach to the mind has included a death threat for neurosurgeon Michael Egnor:

Arjuna Das: You said how scientists, if they reject physicalism, it doesn’t help their career. They might get less opportunities or less prestige or whatever… I imagine the same is not true of neurosurgeons. As long as you can fix people’s brains, nobody really cares what your metaphysical beliefs are. (01:44:11)

Michael Egnor: Right. And it’s interesting that doctors are not often materialists. Nor are, for example, engineers. Materialists in the scientific professions are almost always theoretical scientists. They’re not scientists that work in the real world. They’re scientists who live in these little imaginary scenarios.

As an example of how difficult this can be, I’ve been involved quite a bit in the intelligent design vs. Darwinism debates. I have a friend who is a basic scientist and molecular biologist who is one of the leading people in this field. He is exceptionally accomplished… great guy.

I was at a meeting with him one time and he took me aside and he said, “I’ve seen what you’ve been doing with intelligent design and so on. I’m a Christian. And I think you’re right. I think Darwinism and materialism are grossly inadequate ways of understanding biology. But I can’t say that out loud. I can’t say a word about that, because my wife is sick. We need our health insurance. I need my job. And if I said a word about materialism or Darwinism not being acceptable frameworks for doing the science, I would never get another grant. I couldn’t feed my family.” (01:45:51)

And that’s true. They will destroy people. They will destroy people’s careers. Look at what people tried to do to Mike Behe for writing Darwin’s Black Box (1996). He’s tenured. But in his department, he was treated as a pariah. If they could have fired him, they would have done it in a minute.

Note: Biochemist Michael Behe is the author of a number of books, Darwin’s Black Box, Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves, which explore the sharp constraints on what natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism) can actually do in creating and enabling new life forms. In academic environments where Darwinism is experienced as a support for fashionable atheism, Behe has not been very popular.

Arjuna Das: I was wondering how he got away with it. (01:46:12)

Michael Egnor: He’s tenured. I’ve gotten calls to my department in my university demanding that I be fired. That’s a fairly frequent thing.

I was called a couple of years ago by the campus police that there was a death threat against me and they wanted to protect me. So this kind of stuff goes on. And some of these people are vicious.

If you are a scientist — and there are many scientists who really don’t buy into this, scientists who are good Christians or good Jews or good Muslims or good Hindus, who really have deep and justified religious beliefs — for the most part, they dare not say it publicly. (01:46:18)

News, “Non-materialist science is wanted — dead or alive” at Mind Matters News

Actually, the lid is coming off materialism and its hyper variant Darwinism anyway… but you still don’t wanna be roadkill on the campus crybullies’ highway even if it’s breaking up.

Takehome: In neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s view, materialist scientists are almost always theoretical scientists. They’re not doctors or engineers.

—

Here are transcripts and notes for the first hour and forty-three minutes, starting from the beginning:

Why neurosurgeon Mike Egnor stopped being a materialist atheist. He found that materialism is just not working out in science. Most propositions in basic science are based on mathematics and mathematics is not a material thing.

How science points to meaning in life. The earliest philosopher of science, Aristotle, pioneered a way of understanding it. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor talks about the four causes of the events in our world, from the material to the mind.

How we can know mental states are real?
Mental states are always “about” something; physical states are not “about” anything. Michael Egnor argues that doing science as a physicalist (a materialist) is like driving a car with the parking brake on; it’s a major impediment to science.

What’s the best option for understanding the mind and the brain? Theories that attempt to show that the mind does not really exist clearly don’t work and never did. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor reviews the mind-brain theories for East Meets West: Theology Unleashed. He think dualism makes the best sense of the evidence.

How did Descartes come to make such a mess of dualism? Mathematician René Descartes strictly separated mind and matter in a way that left the mind very vulnerable. After Descartes started the idea that only minds have experiences, materialist philosophers dispensed with mind, then puzzled over how matter has experiences.

How philosopher John Locke turned reality into theatre His “little theater in the mind” concept means that you can’t even know that nature exists. It may just be a movie that’s being played in front of your eyes.
Aristotle and Aquinas’s traditional philosophical approach, Michael Egnor argues, offers more assurance that we can truly perceive reality.

The brain can be split but the mind can’t. Neuroscientist Roger Sperry found that splitting the brain in half does not split consciousness in half. It just gives you a rather interesting, but very subtle set of perceptual disabilities.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has split patients’ brains, while treating serious epilepsy, and the results are not at all what a materialist might expect.

How the split brain emphasizes the reality of the mind. Fascinating research following up Roger Sperry’s work — which showed that the mind is not split when the brain is — has confirmed and extended his findings. One investigator, whose work followed up and confirmed Roger Sperry’s, called her split brain findings “perceptual disconnection with conscious unity.”

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.

Why do some people’s minds become much clearer near death?
Arjuna Das and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discuss the evidence for terminal lucidity at Theology Unleashed. Dr. Egnor argues that the brain and body constrain the mind. When dying, they may constrain it less, resulting in sudden end-of-life lucidity.

Epilepsy: If you follow the science, materialism is dead Continuing a discussion with Arjuna Das at Theology Unleashed, Dr. Egnor talks about how neurosurgery shows that the mind is not the brain. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor addresses objections to his finding that epilepsy shows that the brain does not create the mind.

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Reptile’s skull changed little in 22 million years

A 3-D imaging analysis shows that the skull is nearly identical to one much older:

Elasmosaurid plesiosaurs, lookalikes of the mythical Loch Ness monster, were the largest of the long-necked plesiosaurs, growing as long as 43 feet with half of that length deriving from their small heads and very long necks. Paleontologists from SMU (Southern Methodist University), as part of an international team called Projecto PaleoAngola, based their findings on a CT scan of the 71.5 million year old skull from a species of elasmosaurid called Cardiocorax mukulu.

This detailed 3D model allowed the paleontologists to compare the well-preserved skull of C. mukulu found in Angola to that of other species of elasmosaurids. They found that C. mukulu looked nearly identical to skulls that came from much older elasmosaurids, including one found at Cedar Hill, Texas, in 1931, whose 93-million-years old remains can be found at SMU’s Shuler Museum of Paleontology.

“The skull shape, organization of muscles, and the shape and arrangement of the teeth largely reflect how an animal acquired prey,” said co-author Michael J. Polcyn, research associate and director of SMU’s Digital Earth Sciences Laboratory “The interesting aspect of Cardiocorax mukulu is that it appears that this animal’s predecessors adopted a particular feeding style early in their evolutionary history, and then maintained the same basic skull structure for the next 22 million years”

Southern Methodist University, “CT scan of an ancient reptile skull reveals little evolutionary change over 22 million years” at ScienceDaily

One researcher’s comment is revealing:

“Basically, in anything except living fossils, you don’t go 22 million years without evolving,” said [Louis] Jacobs, professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at SMU and president of ISEM at SMU.

Southern Methodist University, “CT scan of an ancient reptile skull reveals little evolutionary change over 22 million years” at ScienceDaily

Well, first, if that’s true, maybe they were the “living fossils” of their day. Maybe it is not even that unusual.

In any event, the horseshoe crab’s brain itself didn’t change much in over 300 million years. Any chance there is a pattern here that devotion to Darwinism prevents people from seeing?

You may also wish to read: Do brains really evolve? The horseshoe crab’s brain didn’t. At Science News: “The preserved central nervous system lends insight into the ancient crab’s behavior, the researchers say. Because the fossil brain is so similar to the brains of modern horseshoe crabs, Bicknell says, it’s safe to say the ancient animal’s walking, breathing and even feeding habits were probably similar to horseshoe crabs’ today, including eating with their legs.”

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Cane toads: At a certain point, “evolution” becomes an excuse for not thinking clearly

At Nature: “Study finds that the noxious pests have become so numerous, they’ve developed a taste for each other — as well as defences to ward off such attacks”:

The discovery could help researchers to understand the evolutionary underpinnings of how this uncommon and extreme behaviour emerges. Scientists have seen cannibalism evolve in species before, says Volker Rudolf, a community ecologist at Rice University in Texas, who studies the phenomenon. But what’s exciting about this work, he says, is that the researchers are almost seeing it “develop in front of their eyes”, given that the behaviour arose in less than a hundred years — the blink of an eye by evolutionary standards…

Although adult cane toads are fearsome — they grow up to 25 centimetres in length — it’s their tadpoles that are usually the cannibals. Multiple tadpoles together can gobble more than 99% of the hatchlings that emerge from the tens of thousands of eggs in a single clutch.

Max Kozlov, “Australia’s cane toads evolved as cannibals with frightening speed” at Nature (August 25, 2021)

And this is some kind of a find or any kind of a problem because… ?

Basically, the invasive cane toads, with no natural enemies in Australia, have taken to eating each other. What “evolutionary underpinnings” do we require to understand that?

The toad has no mind, no morals, no overarching concerns. It needs to fill its maw with something and why not another cane toad? “You today, me tomorrow!”

And of course they develop defenses to ward off such attacks; otherwise, the younger offspring would all be eaten. But the toad doesn’t know that or care.

In fact, the toads are a good example of overarching laws of nature that regulate things and keep them in balance. But just watch Darwinians try to get window dressing for their schoolbook-enforced theory out of it:

Roshan Vijendravarma, an evolutionary biologist at the Curie Institute in Paris, who has studied cannibalism in fruit flies, says the differences between the invasive and native toads’ behaviour probably have a genetic basis, given how extreme they are and how quickly they evolved over relatively few generations of toads.

Shine and his colleagues think this idea is worth exploring and are studying it now. Although there are still mysteries around the cane toads’ cannibalistic tendencies, one thing is for certain, says Shine: “The cane toads that are currently hopping across Australia are extraordinarily different animals from the ones that were first taken out of the native range.” Max Kozlov, “Australia’s cane toads evolved as cannibals with frightening speed” at Nature (August 25, 2021)

Genetic basis? It sounds like a flaw designed into the system by inescapable laws: Being omnivorous, they start eating each other.

It’s not clear how different the current lot is from their recent ancestors. More likely, they just ran out of other things to eat and turned to younger hatchlings. It’s one of the things that can happen when a life form becomes a mere eating machine:

Indeed, the toads didn’t “slow down,” as noted in the narrative of this 2010 clip. Instead, they started eating each other. Whoever did the calculations for toads had that right.

File under: Why doesn’t all life just die out? Current best answer: Because Whoever did the calculations had thought about the contingencies.

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Privileged Address: An excerpt from Neil Thomas’s Taking Leave of Darwin

In Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), longtime rationalist skeptic Neil Thomas observes, regarding Bertrand Russell’s and others’ dismissal of fine-tuning of the universe and Earth for life:

However courageous one may find such sermons, whether from Dawkins or Russell or Nietzsche, they could be said to have acquired a kind of sepia-tinted datedness about them. In the last half century, advances in the world of cosmology have revealed that our planet turns out to be biofriendly to a well-nigh miraculous degree — a verdant oasis fine tuned in a dizzying number of ways for life, in contradistinction to the little less than Hadean depths found in possibly the entire remainder of the observable universe. Through the lens of a celestial telescope, it is true, one can see little but the unfeeling immensity of that unremittingly hostile universe invoked by Russell, but if we look around us here on Earth we can see a planet which seems entirely discontinuous with the rest of the observable cosmos and abounding in a host of benign phenomena so numerous that they tend to go largely unnoticed.

Russell’s assumption of material forces churning away mindlessly over the eons and at length spewing out the unplanned anomaly of human life — “a curious accident in a [cosmic] backwater,” he once termed it — was first formally challenged by astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973. Carter put forward what he termed “the anthropic principle” (from the Greek anthropos, man). According to Carter’s detailed calculations, the fact that our planet is habitable, and exists in a universe that could generate and host a habitable planet such as Earth, obtains thanks only to numerous finely tuned conditions, many of them stretching back to the first nanosecond of the Big Bang. Many of the ways that Earth appears fine tuned for life had been noted previously, but Carter made an advance in formalizing planetary and cosmological fine tuning, and he jump-started a wider conversation in the community of physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists about possible explanations for this fine tuning.

Already in the 1960s scientists had begun to notice a strange connection among a number of otherwise unexplained coincidences in physics. It emerged that many of these mysterious values could be explained by one overarching fact: the values had been necessary for the origin and preservation of human and other life. Some of the fundamental constants referred to include the particular strengths of the electromagnetic force and the force of gravity, which appear to be calibrated with extraordinary precision (to a dizzying number of decimal points) for human needs. The Earth, too, caters to human needs in a host of ways unknown to scientists of a century or more ago.

Neil Thomas, “Cosmos, Chaos, and a Privileged Address in the Universe” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 26, 2021)

Most efforts to dismiss the significance of fine-tuning seem like special pleading. We don’t know why but we do know what — and why it matters.

You may also wish to read: New class of “Hycean” exoplanets may feature life. The new James Webb Telescope will enable much clearer resolution for the composition believed necessary for hosting life. Exoplanets that have been overlooked because they are un-Earthlike may feature oceans that extremophiles could live in, Cambridge astronomers say.

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At Mind Matters News: Can science really engineer a bigger human brain?

Computational neuroscientist Daniel Graham wonders why we would bother. There is no strict relationship between brain size and intellectual achievement:

In a three-part series at Psychology Today, Smith College computational neuroscientist Daniel Graham, author of An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works (2021), tackles that question:

First, most parts of the human brain are already larger than they should be for an animal life form of our size. But the difference is hardly commensurate with average human intelligence vs. average chimpanzee intelligence…

Meanwhile, there’s also the fact that many humans get by — in human society — with a split brain or only half a brain. As Graham notes, Albert Einstein’s brain, as such, was not unusual.

Second, the human brain has been shrinking …

News, “Can science really engineer a bigger human brain?” at Mind Matters News

Studies with guppies did not show that breeding bigger brains consistently led to smarter guppies, he says.

Takehome: The human brain has actually been shrinking in the last 30,000 years, the same period that has also shown great intellectual achievements.

You may also wish to read:

Researchers: Prolonged meditation alters the brain. The changes were detected mainly in the frontal and parietal lobes. Andrew Newburg and colleagues found changes in brain functional connectivity in participants in a seven-day Ignatian spirituality retreat in Pennsylvania.

and

Do larger brains make us human? Is that all? Brain organoid studies suggest a “key genetic switch” that makes human brains grow larger than ape brains. Some researchers believe that our diet led to a larger brain but they differ as to which food was the ultimate brain booster. Are we missing something here?

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Serious questions raised in journal around origin-of-life claims

A friend sends word of a an open-access paper at BioEssays (p. 4, emphasis added):

… there is an open, ongoing debate on whether prebiotic reactions to produce the first biomolecules, the basic building blocks for life (e.g., amino acids, lipids, nucleosides), should resemble current metabolic pathways or be completely different. This resonates with some classical controversies among defenders of the heterotrophic versus autotrophic nature of the first metabolisms. The question may not have an “all-or-none” answer….In principle, nobody can refute the possibility that the beginnings were, indeed, very different. However, it is harder to prove that case, because one must demonstrate, on top of the geological likelihood of such a divergent, primitive chemistry, what would be, then, the sequence of evolutionary steps required to converge towards extant biochemical pathways. The common justification that “natural selection would do the job, one way or another” is not tenable as a scientific argument, and less so the further away the corresponding chemistries stand from each other.

Nino Lauber, Christoph Flamm, Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo, “Minimal metabolism”: A key concept to investigate the origins and nature of biological systems, 23 August 2021

From the conclusions (p. 9):

Understanding subsequent transitions towards genetically-instructed metabolisms (i.e., real, much more robust and efficient, full-fledged metabolisms) will not be easy, either. How on earth could these complex systems (complex but natural systems, after all) bring about a translation apparatus, for instance (with ribosomes, genetic code, etc.)… is simply mind-blowing. Nevertheless, what appears crystal clear to us is that a translation apparatus would make, literally, no sense without metabolism.

Nino Lauber, Christoph Flamm, Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo, “Minimal metabolism”: A key concept to investigate the origins and nature of biological systems, 23 August 2021

Imagine these kinds of objections being made to origin of life claims in a science journal!: “The common justification that “natural selection would do the job, one way or another” is not tenable as a scientific argument, and less so the further away the corresponding chemistries stand from each other.” Isn’t this heresy? Natural selection is supposed to be omnicompetent.

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