Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 177

July 22, 2021

So what does the US Navy think of current UFO beliefs?

Well, it’s tricky. It was never just plain ridicule:

Aliens are in the news again. In June, a Navy report could not rule out the possibility that “unexplained aerial phenomena” spotted in our atmosphere were visitors from outer space. In January, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb claimed an alien spacecraft had actually swept through our solar system in 2017 — and more are coming. Loeb later doubled down, suggesting that UFOs spotted by the military could be spies sent to gather intelligence about our life on Earth.

As crazy as it all sounds, scientists have long posited the possibility of aliens on our planet. In fact, Francis Crick (who along with James Watson won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of the DNA molecule) once theorized that life on Earth was “deliberately transmitted” by intelligent extra terrestrials. Far from being scorned, Crick’s “Directed panspermia” theory was presented at a conference organized by Carl Sagan in 1971 and later published as a scientific paper.

Stephen C. Meyer, “Why God is still the best scientific theory to explain our life on Earth” at New York Post (July 17, 2021)

Meyer is the author of the The Return of the God Hypothesis

Don’t overlook — while we are here anyway — the space cows hypothesis. Unidentified aerial phenomena are not smarter than us but stupider. They’re out there and they are not trying to take over. They are just attracted to something we do, the way cows might be attracted to a market garden.

See also: What if the unidentified aerial phenomena (UFOs) are much simpler than we think?

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Published on July 22, 2021 07:08

Kirk Durston on design in the universe

Kirk Durston talks about John D. Barrow (1952–2020) and Frank Tipler who introduced the conversation we have today:

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Published on July 22, 2021 06:31

July 21, 2021

Readers, thinkers: Wake up and figure out what time it is

For example: When universities no longer want you to know controversial ideas, you have a problem:

— In the continuing uproar, of course, The Economist tries to come down on both sides at once, on all four feet. The arguments, we are told, are “complex and debatable.” Also that “many trans activists think that any disagreement is tantamount to hate speech and try to suppress it.Perhaps The Economist might wish to consider whether reality matters. If reality matters, the right to talk about it freely is not so hard a road to walk as many must suppose.

— Fighting back against Cancel Culture with Douglas Murray: “All ages have their orthodoxies. And if writers, artists, thinkers and comedians do not occasionally tread on them, then they are not doing their jobs. Meanwhile human nature remains what it is. And just as some children will always pull the wings off flies and fry small ants with their toy magnifying glasses, so a certain number of adult inadequates will find meaning in their lives by sniffing around the seats in the public square until they find an aroma they can claim offends them.”

We may need to start asking ourselves some hard questions. Do educational institutions we support sponsor crackdowns on independent thinking? It may be time to find out.

and

— Why did the publishing industry go to war against books? Readers need to know how things have changed.

“For various reasons, traditional publishers today are trying to dump controversial books instead of profiting from their sale. The publisher’s great cry against the government, has always been, since the printing press was invented, that people wanted to read those books. Whether it was the Bible or something decidedly unbiblical. That was one of the ways freedom of thought got started.

“But today, many publishers not only meekly submit to whatever bureaucrats and lobbyists want but bally-hoo in favor of it, without reserve. Journalist Rod Dreher spells that out, writing on behalf of another threatened book, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage… ”

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Published on July 21, 2021 16:24

Only a small portion of the human genome is unique

Geneticists:

Many humans carry genes from Neanderthals, a legacy of past admixture. Existing methods detect this archaic hominin ancestry within human genomes using patterns of linkage disequilibrium or direct comparison to Neanderthal genomes. Each of these methods is limited in sensitivity and scalability. We describe a new ancestral recombination graph inference algorithm that scales to large genome-wide datasets and demonstrate its accuracy on real and simulated data. We then generate a genome-wide ancestral recombination graph including human and archaic hominin genomes. From this, we generate a map within human genomes of archaic ancestry and of genomic regions not shared with archaic hominins either by admixture or incomplete lineage sorting. We find that only 1.5 to 7% of the modern human genome is uniquely human. We also find evidence of multiple bursts of adaptive changes specific to modern humans within the past 600,000 years involving genes related to brain development and function.
An ancestral recombination graph of human, Neanderthal, and Denisovan genomes By Nathan K. Schaefer, Beth Shapiro, Richard E. Green Science Advances16 Jul 2021 : Eabc0776

The paper is open access.

It’s interesting but why should it be a surprise? Only a small portion of the English language is unique, for example. Almost all of it depends on previous languages. And all languages depend on previous languages, going back to … we don’t know where? The good thing about mysteries is that they are fun.

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Published on July 21, 2021 09:46

Astrophysicist explains: Universe as three-dimensional donut

One approach, offered by Thomas Buchert:

Examining light from the very early universe, Buchert and a team of astrophysicists have deduced that our cosmos may be multiply connected, meaning that space is closed in on itself in all three dimensions like a three-dimensional donut. Such a universe would be finite, and according to their results, our entire cosmos might only be about three to four times larger than the limits of the observable universe, about 45 billion light-years away.

Paul Sutter, “Our universe might be a giant three-dimensional donut, really” at LiveScience

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Published on July 21, 2021 08:30

Researchers: Spiders are smarter than we think about determining whether you are alive

Especially those jumping spiders:

Tiny little jumping spiders, with their magnificent eyes, seem to be able to do something we’d only ever seen before in vertebrates: distinguishing between animate and inanimate objects.

In a new test, wild jumping spiders (Menemerus semilimbatus) behaved differently when presented with simulated objects of both kinds, in ways that indicated an ability to discern between them.

The research doesn’t just suggest that this ability can be found more widely in the animal kingdom than we knew, it demonstrates that the team’s experimental setup can be used to test other invertebrates in the same way.

“These results clearly demonstrate the ability of jumping spiders to discriminate between biological motion cues,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

Michelle Starr, “Jumping Spiders Seem to Have a Cognitive Ability Only Previously Found in Vertebrates” at ScienceAlert (July 16, 2021)

The paper is open access.

Of course, it makes sense. If a spider could not distinguish between a fly and a dust bunny, it probably would not survive.

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

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Published on July 21, 2021 07:44

Dr Been and Dr Marik on Covid-19 after 15 months

Here:

This is a news notice, not an invitation to debate, so no comments. END

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Published on July 21, 2021 03:58

Re-thinking the “Dark” Ages from 476 – c 1400 . . .

Food for sobering thought, on the myth of progress:

It looks like we have some serious re-thinking to do. END

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Published on July 21, 2021 03:02

July 20, 2021

Sabine Hossenfelder asks: Is time real?

Here.

Sabine Hossenfelder also has a blog at which she provides transcripts:

First things first, what is time? “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once,” as Ray Cummings put it. Funny, but not very useful. If you ask Wikipedia, time is what clocks measure. Which brings up the question, what is a clock. According to Wikipedia, a clock is what measures time. Huh. That seems a little circular.

Luckily, Albert Einstein gets us out of this conundrum. Yes, this guy again. According to Einstein, time is a dimension. This idea goes back originally to Minkowski, but it was Einstein who used it in his theories of special and general relativity to arrive at testable predictions that have since been confirmed countless times.

Time is a dimension, similar to the three dimensions of space, but with a very important difference that I’m sure you have noticed. We can stand still in space, but we cannot stand still in time. So time is not the same as space. But that time is a dimension means you can rotate into the time-direction, like you can rotate into a direction of space. In space, if you are moving in, say, the forward direction, you can turn forty-five degrees and then you’ll instead move into a direction that’s a mixture of forward and sideways.

You can do the same with a time and a space direction. And it’s not even all that difficult. The only thing you need to do is change your velocity. If you are standing still and then begin to walk, that does not only change your position in space, it also changes which direction you are going in space-time. You are now moving into a direction that is a combination of both time and space.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Is Time Real?” at BackRe(Action) (January 2, 2021)

We think time is real but that it has never been convenient.

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Published on July 20, 2021 18:11

At Evolution News and Science Today: Can you measure intelligent design?

Well yes, if you are willing to tolerate a positive answer:

The theory of intelligent design employs scientific methods commonly used by other historical sciences to conclude that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Intelligent agency is a cause “now in operation” which can be studied in the world around us. Thus, as a historical science, ID employs the principle of uniformitarianism. It begins with present-day observations of how intelligent agents operate, and then converts those observations into positive predictions of what scientists should expect to find if a natural object arose by intelligent design.

For example, mathematician and philosopher William Dembski observes that “[t]he principal characteristic of intelligent agency is directed contingency, or what we call choice.” According to Dembski, when an intelligent agent acts, “it chooses from a range of competing possibilities” to create some complex and specified event. Thus, the type of information that reliably indicates intelligent design is called “specified complexity” or “complex and specified information,” “CSI” for short.

In brief, something is complex if it’s unlikely, and specified if it matches an independently derived pattern. In using CSI to detect design, Dembski calls ID “a theory of information” where “information becomes a reliable indicator of design as well as a proper object for scientific investigation.” ID theorists positively infer design by studying natural objects to determine if they bear the type of information that in our experience arises from an intelligent cause.

Casey Luskin, “Answering an Objection: “You Can’t Measure Intelligent Design”” at Evolution News and Science Today (July 16, 2021)

If you are not willing to tolerate a positive answer, well … your quarrel is not with us, really.

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Published on July 20, 2021 08:24

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