Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 165

August 25, 2021

Researchers: Tetrapods evolved legs very rapidly

It happened about 390 million years ago, “really, really quickly” according to a Harvard team:

Despite the rapid evolution, the team found there wasn’t a rapid accumulation of new species, which suggests the anatomy required to get on land evolved several million years before species diversification of tetrapods. Put simply: just a few early fish grew all the right anatomy before ‘leggy bois’ became abundant and diverse.

“What we’ve been finding in the last couple of years is that you have lots of anatomical changes during the construction of new animal body plans at short periods of geological time, generating high rates of anatomical evolution, like we’re seeing with the first tetrapods,” explains Simões.

“But in terms of number of species, they remained constrained and at really low numbers for a really long time, and only after tens of millions of years do they actually diversify and become higher in number of species.”

Deborah Devis, “‘Never skip leg day’ – Tetrapods evolved superfast” at Cosmos Magazine August 24, 2021

The way they describe it, it sounds like design. The unfolding of a plan.

The paper is closed access.

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Published on August 25, 2021 18:54

August 24, 2021

At Mind Matters News: Epilepsy: If you follow the science, materialism is dead

Continuing a discussion with Arjuna Das at Theology Unleashed, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor talks about how neurosurgery shows that the mind is not the brain:

Arjuna Das: I was discussing that point in the comments under the video from your discussion with David Papineau and the person was replying, “The reason why you can never trigger a sense of agency, the sense that I’m the one moving it, is because when you’re stimulating the brain you’re triggering the action in a different way from how the brain normally triggers it.” And in this way they’re arguing that it’s not evidence that we are not identical with our brains. (01:39:59)

Michael Egnor: Well, that would be a way of looking at it. However, you have to keep in mind that the denominator in this experiment is enormous. That is that Penfield stimulated the brains of 1100 patients,hundreds of times for each patient. So, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of stimulations using different currents, different locations, different electrodes, different numbers of electrodes, different voltages, and not once was he able to find the will. So, if the will is in there, it’s awfully secret.

And in addition, on the issue of intellectual seizures, the fact that there has not been a single seizure in recorded medical history out of 250 million seizures, a quarter of a billion seizures, that has evoked abstract intellectual content, Maybe the next one will, but I’m not going to bet on it… (01:40:28)

If you’re making the argument that, well, maybe we just didn’t do the experiment the right way, maybe you should also consider that you have an ideological commitment to materialism. And you’re simply reluctant to let it go.(01:41:36)

News, “Epilepsy: If you follow the science, materialism is dead” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor addresses objections to his finding that epilepsy shows that the brain does not create the mind.

Here are transcripts and notes for the first hour and thirty-two 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.

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Published on August 24, 2021 20:03

At Mind Matters News: Do brains really evolve? The horseshoe crab’s brain didn’t

It’s very rare to find an intact fossil brain but a rare combination of minerals preserved one from 310 million years ago:

Finding an intact brain that is just like a modern horseshoe crab’s brain enables paleontologists to make some guesses about the ancient animal’s behavior:

“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. “Imagine eating a hamburger with your elbows,” Bicknell says. – Rebecca Dzombak, “How Fossilization Preserved a 310-million-year-old Horseshoe Crab’s Brain” at ScienceNews”

To the extent that the horseshoe crab is more closely related to the spider, it may have a similar type of intelligence. But we can’t be sure just now. For example, the nautilus is a cousin of the octopus but, while the octopus is sometimes considered a “second genesis” of intelligence, on account of its braininess, no such thing is said of the nautilus.

News, “Do brains really evolve? The horseshoe crab’s brain didn’t ” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Researchers found that the 310 million-year-old brain was almost identical to that of a modern horseshoe crab. The behavior was likely similar too.

You may also wish to read: In what ways are spiders intelligent? The ability to perform simple cognitive functions does not appear to depend on the vertebrate brain as such

and

If we find life on exoplanets, some of it might be “crabs”. Over millions of years, many crustaceans gradually grew to look more and more like crabs, a process called convergent evolution. In an environment similar to Earth’s, we might expect life forms to converge on similar solutions. “Crabbiness” might be one of them.

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Published on August 24, 2021 19:22

Pluto is still planet in the eyes of many

Close-up view of Pluto shows the dwarf planet has a light-colored patch shaped like a heart. Charon is shown behind Pluto.

Pluto and its moon Charon/NASA

Why isn’t a dwarf planet still a planet?:

When Pluto was excluded from the planetary display in 2000 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, children sent hate mail to Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s planetarium. Likewise, there was a popular uproar when 15 years ago, in August 2006, the International Astronomical Union, or IAU, wrote a new definition of “planet” that left Pluto out. The new definition required that a body 1) orbit the sun, 2) have enough mass to be spherical (or close) and 3) have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit of other bodies. Objects that meet the first two criteria but not the third, like Pluto, were designated “dwarf planets.”

Lisa Grossman, “The definition of planet is still a sore point – especially among Pluto fans” at ScienceNews

Grossman cites scientists pro and con, and then notes,

But since 2006, we’ve learned that Pluto has an atmosphere and maybe even clouds. It has mountains made of water ice, fields of frozen nitrogen, methane snow–capped peaks, and dunes and volcanoes. “It’s a dynamic, complex world unlike any other orbiting the sun,” journalist Christopher Crockett wrote in Science News in 2015 when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto.

Lisa Grossman, “The definition of planet is still a sore point – especially among Pluto fans” at ScienceNews

She adds, “The truth is, there’s no single definition of a planet — and I’m beginning to believe that’s a good thing.”

Dumping Pluto as a planet just added needless complexity to the system — for all the people who don’t live this stuff. At least it gave the people who do live this stuff something to do.

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Published on August 24, 2021 18:43

Researchers: “Junk DNA” plays a key role in speciation

Has anyone ever made a list of all the Darwinians who insisted that all that DNA was just a vast heap of junk, left over from evolution? There is a book in that. Meanwhile,

So-called “junk” DNA plays a key role in speciation

Researchers have known for years that satellite DNA is highly variable between species. “If you look at the chimpanzee genome and the human genome, the protein coding regions are, like, 98 percent, 99 percent identical,” she says. “But the junk DNA part is very, very different.”

“These are about the most rapidly evolving sequences in the genome, but the prior perspective has been, “Well, these are junk sequences, who cares if your junk is different from mine?'” said Jagannathan.

But as they were investigating the importance of satellite DNA for fertility and survival in pure species, Yamashita and Jagannathan had their first hint that these repetitive sequences might play a role in speciation.

When the researchers deleted a protein called Prod that binds to a specific satellite DNA sequence in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the flies’ chromosomes scattered outside of the nucleus into tiny globs of cellular material called micronuclei, and the flies died. “But we realized at this point that this [piece of] satellite DNA that was bound by the Prod protein was completely missing in the nearest relatives of Drosophila melanogaster,” Jagannathan said. “It completely doesn’t exist. So that’s an interesting little problem.”

If that piece of satellite DNA was essential for survival in one species but missing from another, it could imply that the two species of flies had evolved different satellite DNA sequences for the same role over time. And since satellite DNA played a role in keeping all the chromosomes together, Yamashita and Jagannathan wondered whether these evolved differences could be one reason different species are reproductively incompatible.

Eva Frederick, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, “So-called ‘junk’ DNA plays a key role in speciation” at Phys.org

A friend writes to say that it appears that taxonomically restricted (“orphan”?) DNA was important to the process.

Too bad PePe LePew got Canceled. He’s the poster skunk for the species problem:

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Published on August 24, 2021 18:08

Fossil spores on land pushed back 20 million years

Fossil plant spores (charophyte algae) found in Western Australia, dating form the Ordovician period (480 mya), are thought to provide insight into plants venturing onto land:

“I think [the paper] is interesting for a few reasons,” says paleobiologist Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol who was not involved with the study. “It extends the fossil record of [early land plants] by something like 20 million years. . . . Also, potentially [the fossils] provide a sort of intermediate between the Cambrian record and the later Ordovician records.”

Plants that live on land are thought to have evolved from algae—typically aquatic plants lacking stems, roots, leaves, and vascular systems. But when and how plants first adapted to life on land is a matter of debate. The first macrofossil evidence of land plants is in the form of 425 million-year-old specimens of Cooksonia, a primitive vascular plant. However, molecular clock estimates—which are based on, among other things, genetic mutation rates—have suggested an origin for land plants in the Cambrian period (approximately 505 million years ago).

This 80-million-year disconnect between the molecular and fossil data exists in part because molecular genetic changes always precede morphological ones, says Donoghue. Other researchers have suggested that it might also be because early land plants had soft, nonvascular tissues that would not have been well preserved.

Ruth Williams, “Discovered: Fossilized Spores Suggestive of Early Land Plants” at The Scientist, (August 12, 2021)

The big story here isn’t about the disconnect between molecular and fossil data; it’s about how early on more complex life forms got started (all that complexity in such a short time isn’t looking good for random mutations).

The paper is closed access.

You may also wish to read: Microbial fossils found at 3.4 billion years ago at the sub sea floor level. It’s not entirely clear that these were life forms but if they were, it’s further evidence that life got started pretty much when the planet cooled and not, apparently, as a result of some long, slow, Darwinian process.

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Published on August 24, 2021 06:13

How things have changed! Even Darwin’s Finches’ defenders are spooked

Remember the iconic Darwin’s finches rattling through the textbooks, proving Darwinism? Well,

Few beside historians know about the crisis of evolution in the late 19th century continuing into the early 20th century. At the time, most intellectuals had been convinced of evolution in some form, but critics of Darwin’s natural selection were many. Neil Thomas writes about that period in his new book, Taking Leave of Darwin. Even before Darwin died in 1882, he was feeling the pressure of critics against his theory and was relying more on the Lamarckian notions he had tried to supplant. Doubts about natural selection increased well after the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of heredity. Finally in the 1930s the “Neo-Darwinists” breathed a sigh of relief when they found a way to incorporate Mendelism. Their relief led to strong confidence in Darwinian evolution that roared into overconfidence at the Darwin Centennial and still reigns today. New findings are unraveling that confidence.

More scientists are realizing that organisms have other ways to inherit traits. In 2017, some of those methods were introduced here. Last month, Emily Reeves categorized some of the sources of genetic change. In her table, “random copy errors” and “chemically induced mutagenesis” were only two of them. At the CELS conference in June, engineers and biologists mooted some cutting-edge ideas of internal reprogramming by organisms enabling them to adapt to changing environments. That almost sounds Lamarckian: if an organism can “learn” adaptations and pass them on, is that “inheritance of acquired characteristics” due to “use and disuse”? Whatever it is, it is not unguided variation in the sense Darwin taught. Any process that shares existing information is also anti-Darwinian. That includes horizontal gene transfer (HGT), hybridization and introgression.

Evolution News, “Non-Mendelian Inheritance Undermines Neo-Darwinism” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 13, 2021)

More remarkable yet:

Of all things, Darwin’s finches are coming up for debate again. Lifetime finchologists Peter and Rosemary Grant just published a paper in PNAS that conjures up “Morphological ghosts of introgression in Darwin’s finch populations.” The ghosts spooked them.

The ghost of hybridization is scaring them into changing their view of finch evolution by natural selection. The information on beak size from an extinct species apparently is showing up in some living species. This can only be due to information-sharing between the islands. If this happens in one of the most famous icons of evolution, where else is it occurring?

Evolution News, “Non-Mendelian Inheritance Undermines Neo-Darwinism” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 13, 2021)

If even Peter and Rosemary Grant must adapt, something is changing for sure… Specifically Darwinian speciation of Darwin’s finches was their claim to fame.

And don’t miss the Borg: “Nature reports that “Massive DNA ‘Borg’ structures perplex scientists.” These unexpected structures appear to be a library of information accessible to microbes.”

This is a great time to be a recovering Darwinist. The world is much more interesting than that.

See also: Darwin’s finches, not a typical example of evolution at all

and

What we learned when we talked to the fossils

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Published on August 24, 2021 05:42

Jerry Coyne vs Ross Douthat on science-based belief in God

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne makes a virtue of the fact that he finds typical, widespread points of view hard to comprehend:

I’m always puzzled when people who show reasonably high intelligence confess that they’re religious—even deeply religious. These people include Andrew Sullivan, NIH head Francis Collins, and NYT columnist Ross Douthat. Though I usually disagree with Douthat and his conservative views, at least they’re based on data, however misinterpreted. But his deep faith (pious Catholicism), which he displays in embarassing detail in his new NYT essay, is beyond my ken. For here Douthat not only advances some of the common and unconvincing arguments for God (many taken from Intelligent Design), but also makes many of them, and says that they’re based on science itself.

Jerry Coyne, “Douthat: Science gives us more reason than ever to believe in God” at Why Evolution Is True (August 15, 2021)

Some have suspected that Douthat has been reading Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis.

Back to Coyne:

In this long piece, Douthat makes five arguments for God that I’ll summarize and discuss briefly. But first lays out his claim: that, in fact, believing in God, especially these days, is the most parsimonious thing to do. Atheism is less parsimonious than faith. And, even though science has advanced and explained via naturalism a lot of things once imputed to God, Douthat sees these advances as simply confirming God’s existence even more strongly.

Jerry Coyne, “Douthat: Science gives us more reason than ever to believe in God” at Why Evolution Is True (August 15, 2021)

Actually, Douthat is right. Atheists, to be consistent, must believe in an infinite array of universes, just one of which happens to be law-like enough to work. It would be simpler to believe that a Mind, greatly superior to our minds, created the laws that our minds can recognize.

Significantly, once naturalism runs up against even the human mind, it sputters most painfully. See, for example, “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” and the previous posts in the series.

Uncommon Descent to Jerry Coyne: Come in Coyne, are you reading us?: Buckle that seatbelt, man! This is the BIG roller coaster, Flyin’ Annie. Not the little ones you are used to. Over and out.

You may also wish to read: 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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Published on August 24, 2021 04:41

August 23, 2021

We did NOT make this up: Famed Honesty researcher’s paper retracted over made-up data

He’s retracting it himself:

Renowned psychologist Dan Ariely literally wrote the book on dishonesty. Now some are questioning whether the scientist himself is being dishonest.

According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie. A seemingly cheap and effective method to fight fraud, it was adopted by at least one insurance company, tested by government agencies around the world, and taught to corporate executives. It made a splash among academics, who cited it in their own research more than 400 times.

Stephanie M. Lee, “A Famous Honesty Researcher Is Retracting A Study Over Fake Data” at Buzzfeed

Of course, Ariely was featured in TED talks, had an advice column in the Wall Street Journal and wrote a New York Times bestseller. His co-author, we are told, did all right too.

But then, apart from the fact that follow-up studies did not support the main thesis, another problem arose:

But more recently, a group of outside sleuths scrutinized the original paper’s underlying data and stumbled upon a bigger problem: One of its main experiments was faked “beyond any shadow of a doubt,” three academics wrote in a post on their blog, Data Colada, on Tuesday.

Stephanie M. Lee, “A Famous Honesty Researcher Is Retracting A Study Over Fake Data” at Buzzfeed

The rest is classic.

Here’s the paper. Here’s the Data Colada story.

Stephanie Lee describes this as the latest blow to behavioral economics. One fears it will not be the last.

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Published on August 23, 2021 19:23

At Evolution News: Twilight of the Godless Universe

A mood captured by: Steve Meyer’s new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis:

There is something in the air — and it’s not wildfire smoke anymore. Stephen Meyer’s argument for what he calls the “God hypothesis” is very of the moment. Jordan Peterson tweeted that he is reading Meyer’s new book, Return of the God Hypothesis, and finds that, “Meyer makes the case very carefully. It’s not often that I encounter a book that contains so much that I did not know…” From Peterson, that is some praise.

Confused Scientists

Meanwhile in an essay in the New York Times, columnist Ross Douthat significantly, perhaps, uses the phrase from the title of the book (while not referencing the book itself). He notes some “confusion…among scientists”:

“Because their discipline advances by assuming that consistent laws rather than miracles explain most features of reality, they regard the process through which the universe gets explained and understood as perpetually diminishing the importance of the God hypothesis.

“But the God hypothesis is constantly vindicated by the comprehensibility of the universe, and the capacity of our reason to unlock its many secrets.”

Notwithstanding what some atheist scientists may say, “the God hypothesis is constantly vindicated” — and I am reading that in the New York Times of all places?

David Klinghoffer, “Meyer: “Twilight of the Godless Universe”” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 17, 2021)

They all must 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 just bumble along, glad to be noticed.

Actually, with all the stuff we have discovered that does not confirm just what everyone thinks, it’s a pretty decrepit racket now.

You may also wish to read: Jordan Peterson’s reflections on Twitter on reading Steve Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. Jordan, if you believe Meyer is right or even partways right or is making a good case, stand your ground. You have already faced some of the most incomprehensibly vicious mobs that Cancel Culture has spewed and you are still standing. Follow the evidence, not the crybullies. You, of all people, can afford to and it would do immense good.

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Published on August 23, 2021 06:04

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