Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 167

August 20, 2021

Microbial fossils found at 3.4 billion years ago at the sub sea floor level

The University of Bologna find at the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa is considered a plus for the hydrothermal vent theory of the origin of life:

Optical microscope image of the filamentous microfossils. Credit: B. Cavalazzi

“I’m pretty well convinced,” says environmental chemist Eli Moore of Rowan University who was not involved in the research. “The [fossils’] morphology resembles cellular colonies, and then within the fossils they have high concentrations of carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen, so it really looks like organic matter . . . most likely representing ancient cells.”

The analysis also showed the presence of nickel in the chert, which is “particularly cool,” says Moore, because nickel is an important metal cofactor in the biological process of microbial methanogenesis.

“The evidence is definitely strong” that these filaments are indeed fossilized Archean methanogens, and is more definitive than that gleaned from previously discovered microfossils, he says.

Earlier reports of filamentous microfossils had been debated as potential abiogenic biomorphs—that is, organic structures that look like cells but are produced as a result of geochemical, not biological, processes. “We were able to exclude any possibility that our structures were related to any abiotic process,” Cavalazzi says, because they have a different composition from abiogenic biomorphs and formed typically microbial-looking biofilms.

Ruth Williams, “Microbial Fossils Found in 3.4-Billion-Year-Old Subseafloor Rock” at The Scientist (July 14, 2021)

The paper is open access.

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.

You may also wish to read: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.

Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 20, 2021 17:09

At Mind Matters News: Defending the mind’s reality at a materialist cocktail party

What to say when you find yourself among self-assured elite sloganeers. For example:

Arguments from evolution

Claim: We are just animals so, as we might expect, the human brain is not really unique. The human, mouse, and fly brains all use the same basic mechanisms!

Response: That’s the remarkable part. What we do with our brains sets us apart. And greater size doesn’t really account for that. Lemurs, whose brains are only 1/200th the size of chimps’ brains, did as well as chimps on a primate intelligence test.2

Claim: We now know how the human mind evolved. Quite simply, it evolved to help our ancestors hunt more efficiently in groups.

Response: Wolves hunt efficiently in groups without anything like human consciousness. Microorganisms hunt efficiently without any brain at all. A human mind allows us to do many remarkable things but it is not needed for basic survival. That’s one reason that human consciousness is called a Hard Problem.

Claim: The human brain is a mess, the haphazard outcome of millions of years of evolution, not of some sort of divine design.

Response: Actually, neuroscientists were recently surprised to discover that the white matter (connectome) in human brains is quite orderly, hardly a haphazard accumulation at all.

Claim: Okay, perhaps the mind just emerged, slowly over eons, from the brain.

Response: The mind cannot just “emerge from” the brain if the two have no qualities in common — the one is immaterial, the other material. Pretty big gap.

News, “Defending the mind’s reality at a materialist cocktail party” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: The actual history of neuroscience in the last century has not been kind to materialist assertions and assumptions.

You may also wish to read: Four researchers whose work sheds light on the reality of the mind The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot, says Michael Egnor. The intellect and will are metaphysically simple.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 20, 2021 16:50

Does the next 30 years of astronomy depend on a single report?

So they say. And all isn’t well:

Organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, six Decadal Surveys have set the course of U.S. astronomy since they began in the 1960s. The results of the seventh, dubbed Astro2020, will soon be announced after two years of exhaustive deliberations led by a 20-member steering committee. And just like its predecessors, Astro2020 will reveal where major new investments and discoveries are most likely to be made—and where neglect, disinterest or even fear may block progress for generations to come…

For now, the U.S. remains at the forefront of off-world observing, but of the four “Great Observatories” NASA launched between 1990 and 2003, only Hubble and the Chandra X-ray Observatory are still operational, and both are nearing their end, with no replacement on the horizon. “Hubble is probably not going to last another decade, and maybe we’ll get five more years out of Chandra. But then that’s it—they’re gone,” says Jason Tumlinson, an astronomer heading the community missions office at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “We’ll probably have a long gap with no real optical, ultraviolet or x-ray capability in space. And now is the time to decide how and when we might get it back.”

Lee Billings, “This Report Could Make or Break the Next 30 Years of U.S. Astronomy” at Scientific American

If activists can just ramp up the war on math and the war on science, maybe it won’t matter. Isn’t astronomy just imperialism anyway? Interfering with traditional beliefs about the stars…

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 20, 2021 04:16

Why do one-celled organisms undergo programmed cell death? A real evolution puzzle

Why would something so central for multicellularity as programmed cell death (PCD) appear in unicellular organisms?:

Abstract: In multicellular organisms, cells are frequently programmed to die. This makes good sense: cells that fail to, or are no longer playing important roles are eliminated. From the cell’s perspective, this also makes sense, since somatic cells in multicellular organisms require the cooperation of clonal relatives. In unicellular organisms, however, programmed cell death (PCD) poses a difficult and unresolved evolutionary problem. The empirical evidence for PCD in diverse microbial taxa has spurred debates about what precisely PCD means in the case of unicellular organisms (how it should be defined). In this article, we survey the concepts of PCD in the literature and the selective pressures associated with its evolution. We show that definitions of PCD have been almost entirely mechanistic and fail to separate questions concerning what PCD fundamentally is from questions about the kinds of mechanisms that realize PCD. We conclude that an evolutionary definition is best able to distinguish PCD from closely related phenomena. Specifically, we define “true” PCD as an adaptation for death triggered by abiotic or biotic environmental stresses. True PCD is thus not only an evolutionary product but must also have been a target of selection. Apparent PCD resulting from pleiotropy, genetic drift, or trade-offs is not true PCD. We call this “ersatz PCD.”
Durand, P.M., Ramsey, G. The Nature of Programmed Cell Death. Biol Theory 14, 30–41 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-018-03...

The paper is closed access.

It’s not clear just how the researchers think they have answered the question. Claiming that some types of PCD are “true” and others are “ersatz” doesn’t seem to answer the central question — why programmed death occurs at all.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 20, 2021 03:52

Does John van Wyhe typify the last, best burst of unfettered Darwinism in 2013?

John van Wyhe is a historian of science at the National University of Singapore. He is the Director of Darwin Online and Wallace Online, the author of eight books and lectures and broadcasts around the world.

A friend kindly writes to say:

He spends a fair bit of his 17 minutes retelling the story of the history of fossil research, which is interesting and fun. I’d never heard it before.

But then he goes on to say, we now have “billions of times more evidence for evolution than in Darwin’s time,

So I kept waiting, and waiting, for an account of the evidence. Well, he spends maybe 2-3 minutes at the very end, trotting out “vestigial organs” and “embryonic recapitulation” [What? That dead horse again? Call Jonathan Wells!] and “homology” and the sort of simplistic “proof” you might see in a high school biology text from 1955. So this is scholarship? And this is “how we know evolution [never defined] is true?”

It surely shows what people could get away with in 2013 by way of poorly sourced evolution claims.

Could they do so as easily today?

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 20, 2021 03:29

One in five health care researchers pressured to change results

By study funders. From a PLOS survey,

In the small survey of 104 researchers in fields such as nutrition, sexual health, physical activity and substance use, 18% of respondents said that they had, on at least one occasion, felt pressured by funders, the data showed.

The affected studies were published between 2007 and 2017, the researchers said.

Because of what the researchers describe as a history of interference from industry funders, such as drug companies in public health research, they expected those leading industry-funded studies to report the most attempted influence, they said.

FDA data reveals racial discrepancies in cardiovascular drug trials “But we didn’t find any instances of that,” study co-author Sam McCrabb said in a press release.

Brian P. Dunleavy, “Survey: 1 in 5 medical researchers reports pressure from funders to change study results” at UPI

The biggest offender was government, not industry or non-profits. Also:

Such interference was more common in studies on sexual health and substance abuse than those involving nutrition and physical activity, although the study does not provide reasons for this, McCrabb said.

Brian P. Dunleavy, “Survey: 1 in 5 medical researchers reports pressure from funders to change study results” at UPI

his post is dedicated to everyone who believes that more and bigger government is the answer to our problems.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 20, 2021 03:17

August 19, 2021

Researchers propose to redefine life to include the economy

We don’t have a clear definition of life, of course. Is a virus alive? What about an interdependent ecosystem? NASA defines life as an entity capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. That props up Darwinism but does little to define life. But this new proposed definition is definitely a walk on the wild side:

So biologist Chris Kempes and complex systems researcher David Krakauer from Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico have posed the idea that our focus on evolution as a driving force of life may have “blinded us to additional general principles of life”.

To explore this, the researchers broaden the definition of “life” to the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time.

Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself.

“Human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms,” Kempes explains.

Based on their new definition, the researchers argue that life has emerged many times on Earth, and that we in fact are co-existing with many forms of current life.

Tessa Koumoundouros, “Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth” at ScienceAlert

The paper is open access.

It’s understandable. See, for example: Unclassifiable living structure: Not an animal, plant or fungus — or protist — but still a life form. Fuligo septica is also known by the attractive name of “dog vomit slime mold.” It’s maybe a “protist,” which could be expert-ese for “we don’t know for sure.” It seems that life comes into existence whether it can be classified or not.

On the other hand, when we define “the economy” as “life,” what follows? Dollar bills are cells?

No, they are not cells. They power the economy only through human recognition, not on their own physical contribution of any type.

Nice try, guys, Keep thinking.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 19, 2021 07:10

A vid on cell division that should make Darwinians wince

To the extent that they can wreck careers, all they need do is wince:

But the day may come that they can’t wreck careers any more.

These are the molecular machines inside your body that make cell division possible. Animation by Drew Berry at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.

Every day in an adult human roughly 50-70 billion of your cells die. They may be damaged, stressed, or just plain old – this is normal, in fact it’s called programmed cell death.

To make up for that loss, right now, inside your body, billions of cells are dividing, creating new cells.

And cell division, also called mitosis, requires an army of tiny molecular machines.DNA is a good place to start – the double helix molecule that we always talk about.

This is a scientifically accurate depiction of DNA. If you unwind the two strands you can see that each has a sugar phosphate backbone connected to the sequence of nucleic acid base pairs, known by the letters A,T,G, and C.
“Your Body’s Molecular Machines” at Veristasium

A reader comments: Veritasium says reasonable things until the last 10 seconds when we hear “We will create nanobots able to work better than the natural ones to make molecular repairs to your body.” Honestly, how likely is that? Would anyone prefer an artificial leg to a real one?

Note: Facebook is now subjecting posts from Uncommon Descent to inhouse review as “selling” something, so they may no longer be visible. You may need to come to this page yourself to see the news. If you voted for this, rejoice and be glad. Otherwise, think again. We may need to start reporting here on the valiant efforts to curb irrational Big Tech censorship. It’s not our usual beat but we could be forced into it.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 19, 2021 06:06

ID theorists publish new paper in Journal of Theoretical Biology

On the improbability of Darwinian claims:

A new peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, “On the waiting time until coordinated mutations get fixed in regulatory sequences,” is authored by three key scientists in the intelligent design (ID) research program: Ola Hössjer, Günter Bechly, Ann Gauger. The paper is part of the “Waiting Times” project, spurred by Discovery Institute as part of its ID 3.0 initiative, and it investigates a question of vital interest to the theory of intelligent design: How long does it take for traits to evolve when multiple mutations are required to give an advantage? A previous peer-reviewed publication from this team appeared as a chapter in the 2018 Springer volume Stochastic Processes and Applications. This latest paper is lengthy, technical, and math intensive. In other words, it’s not for the fainthearted, but it’s open access and free to read here.

Casey Luskin, “In Mainstream Journal, ID Theorists Explore “Waiting Times” for Coordinated Mutations” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 18, 2021)

We hope the journal isn’t intimidated by Darwin’s Outrage Machine, Inc. Just think, some people are now allowed to bring this up. And not just as an inhouse titter, followed promptly by dismissal of the question.

Ola Hössjer, Gunter Bechly, and Ann Gauger, are competent scientists who happen not to be Darwinists. It’ll be interesting to see what happens now. More from Luskin:

This paper develops a complex mathematical model for calculating the waiting time for the evolution of a trait that requires L nucleotides in order to function. Although this is strictly a methodological paper, one potential application could be the evolution of regulatory regions which control the expression of a gene. Changes to transcription are thought to be important to evolving new body plans or biological systems. Regulatory regions such as enhancers or promoters may have a length of 1000 nucleotides, and for expression to occur special proteins called transcription factors must bind to these regulatory regions at binding sites, which may be 6 to 10 nucleotides in length.

Casey Luskin, “In Mainstream Journal, ID Theorists Explore “Waiting Times” for Coordinated Mutations” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 18, 2021)

It’s like just hoping that random guesses on a multiple choice exam will net you 100% and that is what you need to graduate.

A friend comments that the paper basically shows that if many mutations must be coordinated to enable a new feature, Darwinism won’t do it. Note: Dense mathematics warning.

Update updated: Apparently, the disclaimer below applies only to an earlier article: “The Journal of Theoretical Biology and its co-Chief Editors do not endorse in any way the ideology of nor reasoning behind the concept of intelligent design. Since the publication of the paper it has now become evident that the authors are connected to a creationist group (although their addresses are given on the paper as departments in bona fide universities). We were unaware of this fact while the paper was being reviewed. Moreover, the keywords “intelligent design” were added by the authors after the review process during the proofing stage and we were unaware of this action by the authors. We have removed these from the online version of this paper. We believe that intelligent design is not in any way a suitable topic for the Journal of Theoretical Biology.”

Neither paper was retracted. A friend asks us to have pity on the poor editors who are like deer among the wolves, when it comes to dealing with Darwin mob. Very well. We shall. Kudos to them for publishing something despite the mob.

Note: Facebook is now subjecting posts from Uncommon Descent to inhouse review as “selling” something, so they may no longer be visible. You may need to come to this page yourself to see the news. If you voted for this, rejoice and be glad. Otherwise, think again. We may need to start reporting here on the valiant efforts to curb irrational Big Tech censorship. Note: They seem to have stopped doing it for the last couple of posts. But just remember, they don’t work for you. They work for a Big Guy. Stay tuned.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 19, 2021 05:35

At Fermilab, Wokeness now beats out work

Bigtime:

Physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as Fermilab, look at the smallest scales and greatest expanses of the universe. Known for its powerful particle accelerator, Fermilab epitomizes American physics research. But after accusations of racism, a group of woke physicists now controls the lab. Last summer, Change–Now presented a 17-page list of demands to the Fermilab Directorate. It claimed that “anti-Black racism and other elements of white supremacy … are embedded within structures at Fermilab.” They envision a new Fermilab “that prioritizes humanity over productivity.”

Herman White, a tenured black physicist who worked at Fermilab from 1971 to 2019, questions this perception: “If they’re saying African Americans aren’t welcome [at Fermilab], then I disagree. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Tuskegee, Alabama, and people shot at our houses to stop us from integrating.” White’s account of his experience at Fermilab bears no resemblance to the white supremacist dystopia Change–Now describes.

Among their demands, they ask that black scientists be paid for voluntary social justice work. They want the activism of Fermilab employees to be funded by the government.

Christopher Sanfilippo, “Fermilab concedes to woke ignorance” at Washington Examiner (August 16, 2021)

Let’s keep an eye on Fermilab and see if Wokeness beating out work results in more genuine physics discoveries or fewer.

Note: Fermilab was named after Italian physicist and Nobelist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), known for these thoughts:

“Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.”

“Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level.”

and

“There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.”

So it’s a fair test. Will today’s Fermilab match the eponymous founder in productivity — or merely change the rules so it doesn’t matter?

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on August 19, 2021 04:49

← Previous 1 2 … 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 … 592 593 Next →

Michael J. Behe's Blog

Michael J. Behe's profile
219 followers

Michael J. Behe isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.