Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 169

August 16, 2021

At Mind Matters News: Researchers: Buddhist monks’ bodies decay very slowly at death

Wisconsin-based Geshe Lhundub Sopa (1923-2014) was observed by a neuroscientist not to decay for 7 days on his death at 91. Neuroscientist launched study of the phenomenon.

According to traditional meditation lore, they are in a meditative state (thukdam) until their consciousness is clear; only then does the body begins to decay. Neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson. saw it for himself, then organized a study of the phenomenon:

We are told that one of the more remarkable effects of a lifetime of meditation can be a comparatively slow decay process for the body. Recent evidence for that emerged in the death of Tibetan Buddhist monk Geshe Lhundub Sopa, August 28, 2014, at the age of 91.

Geshe Lhundub Sopa (1923-2014) Sopa, who had been tutor to the Dalai Lama in Tibet, moved to Wisconsin in 1967. There he co-founded the Deer Park Buddhist Center and taught South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, becoming a friend of prominent American neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson…

“By conventional Western standards, Sopa died on August 28, 2014. Five days later, and two days after Davidson’s initial visit, the neuroscientist returned to Deer Park and observed his friend’s body a second time. “There was absolutely no change. It was really quite remarkable,” he said. – Daniel Burke, “The Thukdam Project” At Tricycle (July 28, 2021)”

Tibetan Buddists believe that such monks are not dead yet but in a deep, final meditative state called thukdam during which consciousness is gradually transformed into a clear awareness (“clear light”), after which the body begins to decay. After seven days, Sopa’s body started to decay and he was cremated.

News, “Buddhist monks’ bodies decay very slowly at death” at Mind Matters News

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson and colleagues found no evidence of brain activity accompanying the stasis in decay for maybe a week in such monks. We might have expected that but it doesn’t explain why their bodies don’t begin the decay process shortly after death.

Takehome: There is a practical side to this: Buddhists think the Western conception of death is too narrow, saying that death is a process, not an event. What would that do for definitions of death?

Of course, the phenomenon raises questions about the nature of consciousness.

See also: Tibetan monks can change their metabolism. Far from disproving it, science has documented it.For decades, a default assumption would be that claims that meditating monks in the Buddhist tradition could greatly raise their temperature or slow their metabolism were assumed to be exaggerations that would yield to a scientific explanation. The scientific explanation turned out to be that they can do exactly that.

and

Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

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Published on August 16, 2021 04:52

August 15, 2021

ENCODE foe Dan Graur isn’t sure if Jesus existed

Do readers remember Evolutionary bioinformaticist Dan Graur who was so upset about the ENCODE findings (very little junk DNA) that he just wasn’t going to “do politeness” on the topic any more?

Here he is again, at Twitter:

Why do scientists continue to use BC (before Christ) and AD (anno Domini, the year of our Lord). We know very little about Mr. Jesus; we are not even sure he existed. Scientists should use BCE (before the current or common era) and CE.

Wow. Dr. Graur should get out more. Only crackpots argue that Jesus did not exist. The real issues are around his status and the reliability of the documents concerning his life and ministry. There is less evidence for the existence of Socrates but no one gets all skeptical about him.

From the responses:

Jonathan McLatchie:

How much have you read in the field of New Testament scholarship? The evidence for the historicity of Jesus is just staggering, and this is reflected by the scholarly consensus to this effect.

David Klinghoffer:

How juvenile. The The ignorant bumptiousness here is remarkable from someone who thinks his views as a scientist merit respect. I myself have often used BCE and CE rather than BC and AD, by the way. As a Jew, I’m ambivalent about it.

Both usages, of course, signify a historical watershed. Can’t hide that by changing the abbreviations.

Graur had best go back to dissing ENCODE researchers. At least it is a field he knows.

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Published on August 15, 2021 20:40

William Lane Craig and Alvin Planting rank in Top Ten of world philosophers

William Lane Craig writes to his newsletter mailing list:

Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,

Ever since I became a Christian as a teenager, I’ve longed to make a difference in the world for Christ, to have an impact for the Kingdom of God. You can imagine, then, how gratified and encouraged—not to say bowled over!—I was to learn that Academic Influence has ranked me as the tenth most influential philosopher in the world over the last three decades (1990-2020)! What is especially significant is that these rankings are not just someone’s subjective opinion but are computed according to an algorithm that takes into account such objective data as number of citations of one’s work. According to Forbes magazine, “Using machine-learning technology, . . . Academic Influence searches open-source data in two massive sources. . . for papers, chapters, books, and citations to individuals worldwide. Collectively, these databases contain billions of continuously updated data points about millions of individuals’ achievements.” I was especially thrilled to be ranked just behind my philosophical role model Alvin Plantinga at number seven.

William Lane Craig, “August” at Monthly Report

Alvin Plantinga is sympathetic to intelligent design. Craig sort of wavers.

Here is the entire Top Ten.

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Published on August 15, 2021 19:54

At Forbes: Could dark energy be a misinterpretation of the data?

Now is the time to ask:

By the early 2000s, it became clear that even if you were to ignore the supernova data entirely, you would still be compelled to conclude that there was an extra type of energy present within the Universe that comprised this “missing” ~70% or so, and that it had to behave in such a way that it was causing distant objects to have a redshift that increased over time, rather than decreased as expected in a Universe without some form of dark energy.

Although the evidence that dark energy behaved as a cosmological constant had initially large uncertainties, by the mid-2000s that was down to ±30%, by the early 2010s it was ±12%, and today it’s down to ±7%. Whatever dark energy is, it sure does look very much like its energy density remains constant in time.

In the near future, observatories like the ESA’s Euclid, the NSF’s Vera Rubin Observatory, and NASA’s Nancy Roman Observatory will improve that uncertainty so that if dark energy departs from a constant by as little as ~1-2%, we’ll be able to detect it. If it strengthens or weakens over time, or varies in different directions, it would be a revolutionary new indicator that dark energy is even more exotic than we currently think.

Sure, the idea of a novel form of energy inherent to the fabric of space itself — what we know today as dark energy — is a wild one, nobody doubts that. But is it truly wild enough to explain the Universe that we have?

Ethan Siegel, “Ask Ethan: Could Dark Energy Simply Be A Misinterpretation Of The Data?” at Forbes

All we’ve really established is that something is out there, not necessarily that dark energy is out there.

See also: Rob Sheldon: Are “multiple measurements ”closing in on dark energy? Nope.

Researchers: Either dark energy or string theory is wrong. Or both are. But dark energy is so glitzy! Isn’t it a line of cosmetics already?

Researchers: The symmetrons needed to explain dark energy were not found

Rob Sheldon: Has dark energy finally been found? In pop science mags?

Are recent dark energy findings a blow for multiverse theory?

and

Science at sunset: Dark energy might make a multiverse hospitable to life… if it exists

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Published on August 15, 2021 08:04

Jordan Peterson’s reflections on Twitter on reading Steve Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis

Readers will recall the well-known Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson

On The Return of the God Hypothesis he has tweeted,

Reading Stephen C. Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. It’s a difficult book, well-written, densely informative. He claims (p. 211) “without functional criteria to guide a search through the vast space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed.“

Reading Stephen C. Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. It’s a difficult book, well-written, densely informative. He claims (p. 211) “without functional criteria to guide a search through the vast space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed.

Is this an accurate claim? He makes the case very carefully. It’s not often that I encounter a book that contains so much that I did not know….

Which neo-Darwinists effectively address critiques of neo-Darwinism’s putative inability to deal with the problem of combinatorial explosion with regard to protein folding (to say nothing of DNA mutation)

I lack the capacity to substantively critique Meyer’s claims. What about the fact, however, that micro-evolution at least is often observed? Take Covid variants as a painfully evident example. Is that not a consequence of random variation and natural selection?

But those assumptions add immense complexity to what was once a theory typified by its elegance. If you have to posit whole universes to maintain the credibility of your assumptions is that not a problem?

The responses under the tweets are most interesting.

But now …

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.

You may also wish to read:

O’Leary for News’s profile and review of Peterson and his 2018 book Twelve Rules for Life: Do the stitches hold?

and

In Big Tech World: the journalist as censor, hit man, and snitch. Glenn Greenwald looks at a disturbing trend in media toward misrepresentation as well as censorship — on the campaign to take him down.

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Published on August 15, 2021 07:25

At New Scientist: Ancient comb jelly more complex than its modern relatives?

So we learn at New Scientist:

A comb jelly fossil from some 500 million years ago shows a previously unknown species of these ancient sea animals that had a more complex nervous system than their modern descendants.

Evolutionary theory doesn’t preclude the possibility of organisms becoming simpler over geological time, but it’s a relatively uncommon phenomenon.

James Urquhart, “Ancient comb jelly had more complex nerves than its modern relatives” at New Scientist (August 14, 2021, The paper is open access.)

Well, it’s a good thing for “evolutionary theory” that it doesn’t “preclude” life forms becoming “simpler over geological time.” That’s called devolution and it is in fact very common.

In fact, as Michael Behe points out in Darwin Devolves, a great deal of “evolution” is simply breaking or blunting working machinery for an immediate advantage. That’s natural selection at work. The real natural selection, that is, not the Darwinians’ magical version.

If a comb jelly can survive while being less complex, it probably will. Being less complex may not be an advantage in the long run but natural selection is not about the long run. Natural selection is about the here and now — and can never be more than that.

See also: Genome Map Shows Comb Jellies Had Separate Course Of Evolution From Other Animals

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Published on August 15, 2021 05:28

August 14, 2021

At Mind Matters News: Polar bears use stones to kill walruses

The unexpected bear behavior was dismissed as folklore in the past although there is certainly evidence of other life forms using rocks as tools:

At one time, researchers thought it was a myth that polar bears could use stones to kill walruses. Not any more:

“Walruses, weighing as much as 1,300 kilograms with huge tusks and nearly impenetrable skulls, are almost impossible for a hungry polar bear to kill. But new research suggests that some polar bears have invented a work-around — bashing walruses on the head with a block of stone or ice.

For more than 200 years, Inuit in Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic have told stories of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) using such tools to aid in killing walruses. Yet explorers, naturalists and writers often dismissed such accounts, relegating them to myth along with tales about shape-shifting bears. – Gloria Dickie, “Polar Bears Sometimes Bludgeon Walruses to Death with Stones or Ice” at Sciencenews (July 29, 2021). The Paper Is Closed Access.” News, “Polar bears use stones to kill walruses” at Mind Matters News

Here’s a video of a polar bear throwing a block of ice at a seal (the camera was attached to the bear; hence the bumpiness):

Takehome: The life forms that use rocks and stones as tools are reversing a process: bringing the rock to smash prey instead of bringing prey to be smashed on the rock.

You may also wish to read:

Crows can be as smart as apes But they have quite different brains. The intelligence doesn’t seem to reside in the details of the mechanism.

and

Scientists clash over why octopuses are smart New findings show, the brainy seafood breaks all the rules about why some life forms are smart.

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Published on August 14, 2021 19:30

August 13, 2021

Chase Nelson at Inference Review: Reconstructing ancestral proteins

Which raises a number of questions:

ANCESTRAL PROTEINS can only be inferred for modern proteins similar enough to be grouped into families, of which S100s are one example. This leaves out deeper protein relationships between families. As a rule of thumb, a pair of proteins matching at fewer than ~30% of their positions cannot be confidently aligned. This is because such levels of similarity are likely due to chance alone.26 As a result, it is only possible to scratch the surface of evolutionary history—only those proteins which diverged relatively recently remain similar enough to compare with confidence. The deepest questions about the origins of novel gene families remain shrouded in mystery.

This includes protein specificity. The ancestor of S100A5 and S100A6 may not have been more general than its descendants—but is the same true of other proteins and protein families? If so, how far back can this trend, or lack thereof, be extrapolated? Which targets were actually present in their environments? How did the primordial archetypes which gave rise to the modern protein families evolve, and had their own ancestors been more general? And, are more general proteins easier to chance upon in sequence space, that is, could they be reasonably expected to have arisen as evolutionary starting points?

To answer these questions, a lot more work just like that of Wheeler and Harms will need to be done.

Chase Nelson, “Reconstructing ancestral proteins” at Inference Review

Wheeler and Harms: Lucas Wheeler and Michael Harms, “Were Ancestral Proteins Less Specific?” Molecular Biology and Evolution 38, no. 6 (2021): 2,227–39

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Published on August 13, 2021 20:35

Snakes evolved venom fangs multiple times

From wrinkles in their teeth:

Different snake species have independently evolved fangs that allow them to inject venom into other animals, either to attack prey or for defence. Now we know how: they turned small wrinkles inside the base of the fang – an ancient feature inherited by most living snakes – into deep channels to carry venom towards the tip.

Alessandro Palci at Flinders University in Australia and his colleagues wanted to explain the origins of venom fangs, which are found in so many species of snake that they must have evolved on several separate occasions.

Krista Charles, “Snakes evolved venom fangs multiple times from wrinkles in their teeth” at New Scientist (August 10, 2021)

A friend writes to protest “But this could happen to any of us.”

Sure, maybe, if you have fangs. But, in any event, convergent evolution can definitely happen to any of us.

Of course, it’s even more unlikely to have all just happened by chance a number of times than just once. Nonetheless, New Scientist tries valiantly to ascribe it all to natural selection (acting on random mutation).

“Evolution” in this vid appears to be some kind of wizard.

See also: Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?

and

Has New Scientist returned abjectly to Darwin’s fold?

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Published on August 13, 2021 19:48

Rob Sheldon on the secret to design detection

A reader writes to comment, “I was thinking about fractals yesterday, how do you even start approaching design detection which seems so intuitive?”

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon replies:

The scientific method: Supposedly, it starts with a hypothesis. But long before the hypothesis it starts with metaphysics.

Why should I be able to understand the universe? What characteristics do the designer and I share? Love of math? Love of order? Love of intricacy? When I feel like the designer is someone I could meet at an icebreaker and have a great conversation with, that’s when I know I’m on the right track.

The power of science, whether anyone admits it or not, is being on friendly terms with the designer of the universe. If like Weinberg, we say it is all pointless, then I’m afraid it will be a very short cocktail conversation.

I hate it when I’m introduced, and the other party says “Oh a physicist! I flunked physics in high school. Its all so pointless you know.” “Right, and you have the intelligence of a cockroach, and I’m wasting my breath talking to you.”

But when the designer says “I used logarithms to make the universe.” I say, “Really, does that enable you to compress information?” “Yes, and it really opens up the bandwidth for sight and sound.” “What about time?” “Everything else is logarithmic, wouldn’t time be as well?” “Even days and years?”

We are finally able to make a hypothesis. “If I were a designer, I would use logarithms to solve the ‘large space limited time’ problem. Information flow should be power laws in space and time.”

Then when we examine these power laws, fractional powers are indicative of fractional diffusion. But fractional diffusion is non-local. It is completely opposite to the 19th century local diffusion that informed Darwin, Boltzmann, Maxwell and a century earlier Newton and Descartes.

Indeed the QM version bothered Einstein so much he called it “spooky action at a distance”. It isn’t just QM that is non-local, it is classical diffusion laws fractally observed.

How does one approach design detection?

By being on friendly terms with the designer. I know of no other way.

—

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

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Published on August 13, 2021 19:24