Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 189

At Physical Chemistry Letters: The Perils of Politicizing Science

A veteran of politicized science in the USSR speaks up:

Science was not spared from this strict ideological control. Western influences were considered to be dangerous. Textbooks and scientific papers tirelessly emphasized the priority and pre-eminence of Russian and Soviet science. Entire disciplines were declared ideologically impure, reactionary, and hostile to the cause of working-class dominance and the World Revolution. Notable examples of “bourgeois pseudoscience” included genetics and cybernetics. Quantum mechanics and general relativity were also criticized for insufficient alignment with dialectic materialism.

Most relevant to chemistry was the antiresonance campaign (1949−1951). The theory of resonating structures, which brought Linus Pauling the Nobel prize in 1954, was deemed to be bourgeois pseudoscience. Scientists who attempted to defend the merits of the theory and its utility for understanding chemical structures were accused of “cosmopolitism” (Western sympathy) and servility to Western bourgeois science. Some lost jobs. Two high-profile supporters of resonance theory, Syrkin and Dyatkina, were eventually forced to confess their ideological sins and to publicly denounce resonance. Meanwhile, other members of the community took this political purge as an opportunity to advance at the expense of others.

As noted by many scholars,7,8 including Pauling himself, the grassroots antiresonance campaign was driven by people who were “displeased with the alignment of forces in their science”.

This is a recurring motif in all political campaigns within science in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and McCarthy’s America those who are “on the right side” of the issue can jump a few rungs and take the place of those who were canceled.

The Perils of Politicizing Science, Anna I. Krylov, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 2021 12 (22), 5371-5376, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475

That’s probably a big factor in Cancel Culture. People who could not advance by achievement advance by thinning out the ranks above them by denouncing the societal sins du jour that they can stick on them, truly or falsely.

Krylov goes on:

As an example of political censorship and cancel culture, consider a recent viewpoint discussing the centuries-old tradition of attaching names to scientific concepts and discoveries (Archimede’s Principle, Newton’s Laws of Motion, Schrödinger equation, Curie Law, etc.). The authors call for vigilance in naming discoveries and assert that “basing the name with inclusive priorities may provide a path to a richer, deeper, and more robust understanding of the science and its advancement.” Really? On what empirical grounds is this based? History teaches us the opposite: the outcomes of the merit-based science of liberal, pluralistic societies are vastly superior to those of the ideologically controlled science of the USSR and other totalitarian regimes. The authors call for removing the names of people who “crossed the line” of moral or ethical standards. Examples include Fritz Haber, Peter Debye, and William Shockley, but the list could have been easily extended to include Stark (defended expulsion of Jews from German institutions), Heisenberg (led Germany’s nuclear weapons program), and Schrödinger (had romantic relationships with under-age girls). Indeed, learned societies are now devoting considerable effort to such renaming campaigns among the most-recent cancellations is the renaming of the Fisher Prize by the Evolution Society, despite well-argued opposition by 10 past presidents and vicepresidents of the society.

The Perils of Politicizing Science, Anna I. Krylov, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 2021 12 (22), 5371-5376, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475

Not going out on a limb here: Most Cancel Culture types actually wouldn’t care about the same offenses, if practised by people who advance their interests. Mediocrities can’t afford to be that fussy.

See also: Reflecting on the cancel!ation of Richard Dawkins. Calls for Random House to stop publishing his books? As if he were Michael Behe or something? Clearly, Darwinism is losing its cultural teflon. Dawkins isn;lt as much use to the Woke just now as Cancelling him would be.

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At MercatorNet: Hybridizing humans and apes

Executive coach Sutherland, researching eugenics, came across some interesting information:

When I searched for “Dr R.A. Gibbons Eugenics,” the search engine focused on the last two words and I saw this paper at the top of the results: “Beyond Eugenics: The forgotten scandal of hybridizing humans and apes”.

Humans and apes?

Surely not! …but this was a paper on an academic website, so I clicked the link and read in Alexander Etkind’s abstract:

“In the mid-1920s, the zoology professor Ilia Ivanov submitted to the Soviet government a project for hybridizing humans and apes by means of artificial insemination. He received substantial financing and organized expeditions to Africa to catch apes for his experiments. His project caused an international sensation. The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism announced its fund-raising campaign to support Ivanov’s project but gave it a scandalously racist interpretation.”

The article told how Howell S. England, spokesman of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, promoted the project in the United States: according to England, the idea interested “prominent American patrons of science,” though the article mentioned no names. England confidently forecast that the experiments would be successful and that “the evolution of humankind would be proved to everyone’s satisfaction.” This crazy talk became crazier still when England predicted that types of monkeys would be bred with particular human races: orangutans with “humans from the yellow race, gorillas from the black race, chimpanzees from the white race” and gibbons with Jews.

Mark Sutherland, “Insanity is scientists doing the same experiments over and over again and expecting different results” at MercatorNet

So William Jennings Bryan, of Scopes Trial fame, was an even clearer voice of sanity than we have realized. Americans should name more institutions after him.

Like, when you look at the type of people on the other side of the Scopes Trial, well, holy cow.

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L&FP 45: The Hypothetical Syllogism — a lecture

Here:

This syllogism is of considerable practical importance:

Corresponding Tautology: ((p →q) ∧ (q→r))→(p→ r) Example: Let p be it snows. Let q be I will study discrete math. Let r be I will get an A. If it snows, then I will study discrete math. If I study discrete math, I will get an A. Therefore , If it snows, I will get an A.

This raises the issue of denying the consequent, ~q. If p –> q and ~q, then as q is necessary for p, ~p. Where, p is sufficient for q, by reason of its core characteristics, the states of affairs associated with p, causal power, requirement of logic of being etc.

Let us note, p –> q is equivalent in import to ~q –> ~p.

(Let’s add, that denying the antecedent, thinking this falsifies the consequent also fails, p –> q does not mean there isn’t another way, say r, to get q. There’s more than one way to skin a cat-fish.)

Connected to ID, Newton’s rules demand that causal adequacy be shown before assigning powers to claimed causes, especially for things we cannot directly observe. (Design [= intelligently directed configuration] routinely causes functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information beyond 500 – 1,000 bits. Undirected, blind dynamic-stochastic processes . . . chance and/or mechanical necessity alone . . . have no such observed powers. Hence the controversial resort to Lewontin’s a priori commitment to only allow materialistic causes.)

Dynamic-stochastic process:

As it just came up again, let me again document how the ID explanatory filter does not impose design as a default but instead infers across three broad explanatory forces, blind chance and/or mechanical necessity and/or design . . . and yes all three factors can be jointly at work so we need to examine an entity, network, structure or process per aspect:

The ID Inference Explanatory Filter.

We thus see modus ponens [direct implication] and modus tollens [denial of the consequent]. A classic application of the latter, is that once a chain of implications terminates in a falsehood, this upends the chain. This is used in proof by reductio ad absurdum.

Related, p –> q and q –> r entails, p –> r, which extends to any chain we may warrant. That is, truth of an initial proposition chains downstream. This truth transmission property is an important power of implication.

Bearing in mind that time may be a factor in causal chains, cause-effect bonds, likewise, will flow from initial conditions to outcome. Hence, the issue of a first-cause agent, something which is self-moved and initiates chains of consequences. To type, I move a finger to and press a key initiating a keyboard scan and ultimately screen display, etc.

This points to the explanation argument, inference to the best explanation, aka abductive reasoning. (Abductive reasoning also includes the educated guesswork of spotting candidate patterns, hypothesis creation.)

The idea here is that facts of observation f1, f2, . . . fn = F, require a common explanation, so, we have candidate explanations e1, e2 . . . em that can be tested for implying the span of facts F. We also look for coherence and for balanced explanatory power [neither an ad hoc patchwork nor simplistic], picking the best, where E –> F. Power to predict future facts is a further important test. Such explanations, are not proved, nor can abduction — an inductive form of reasoning — prove, though it can support high reliability in a tested zone of application. However, implications are such that a false explanation or model can also be highly reliable.

Underneath, is the meaning of IF — THEN –, that is sufficiency:

p –> q is equivalent to ~ [p AND ~q], we cannot have p true and q false. This does not mean, p is true. To get there, we would need EQUIVALENCE, i.e. p –> q and q –> p. That is p is necessary and sufficient for q. The fallacy of affirming the consequent confuses p –> q with that equivalence.

Linked, q is necessary for p, that is, ~p OR q. This can be shown by using truth tables for what is called material implication.

Hence, the peculiar phrase for equivalence, “necessary and sufficient.” In Mathematical contexts, we may see p IFF q, p if and only if q. Notice, a false p can properly imply a true q, which is a subtlety that is the root of many errors of thought.

Also related, is the disjunctive syllogism:

The conjunctive syllogism is p AND q, so that for and to be true both must be. This can be chained, and of course we then see if a chain has in it x and y so y = ~x, then the whole is inconsistent logically. One use of this is in a coherence defence by augmenting explanation. If claims p1, p2, . . . pn = P are suspected to be inconsistent but on augmenting with some e, e AND P is coherent, P must be coherent. This is the heart of Plantinga’s free will defence of the coherence of the concept of God in ethical theism. It also allows us to see that we can for example make a coherent account of the passion-resurrection narratives in the gospels. Weakening, to the case where there are contradictions, we may be able to identify which of x or y to choose, or we may be able to footnote the matter and set it aside as a difficulty. In short, it can be very hard to demonstrate substantial and irretrievable inconsistency in a string of propositions forming a narrative.

The celebrated case of the six blind men of Hindustan encountering the elephant and having partial patterns (beloved of post modernists and those who try to reduce differences to relativism), is a subtle lesson:

The onlooker with a broader picture and better explanation illustrates the power of a best explanation. Notice, here, it is Jesus of Nazareth!

Such various real-world syllogisms, however, are important.

In particular, implication used for explanation or prediction has utility in planning or modelling. We propose a “simplified” or proposed or candidate, p and explore its implications or what it explains. We may look at several, then choose the best, which we then implement.

In short, the logic of implication is powerful, subtle, useful but a source of many pitfalls. We would to well to study it. END

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Gunter Bechly vs. Joshua Swamidass at Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable show

Dr Gunter Bechly is a palaeontologist who became convinced that Darwinian evolution cannot explain the fossil record. He debates Intelligent Design with computational biologist Dr Joshua Swamidass who affirms an evolutionary account.

Note: If we’re thinking of Joshua Swamidass anyway, J. R. Miller comments on his book, Genealogical Adam and Eve:

Swamidass’ Theory is a Mathematical Shell Game We have all seen the shell game played out on TV and movies. There is some street hustler who has three shells and one ball. He places the ball under one shell and shuffles them around. If you want to win the game, you have to pick the shell that conceals the ball. But we all know that you can’t really win the game. Why? Because it’s a game of misdirection. In fact, the ball is not really under any of the three shells. It is hidden in the palm of the hustler’s hand ready to be placed anywhere he likes. I don’t mean to call Swamidass a hustler (that takes my analogy too far), but I do think he is playing the shell game.

I think this shell game is a fair analogy to Swamidass’s theory of human origins because Swamidass hides the ball of “ancestry” behind the many shells of population genetics. When the Apostle Paul says that Adam and Eve are the ancestors of of us, he means something very different than does Swamidass. Instead of shells, Swamidass uses a computer model based on population genetics to hide the ball of ancestry. And while this claim that the ball is somewhere under the shells may be statistically meaningful, in practical terms it is meaningless. In his book, Is Science Racist?, Jonathan Marks raises this very point. Not directly about Swamidass, but about how folks play the game of “ancestry” using mathematical models…

J.R. Miller, “Misconceptions about Swamidass’ Genealogical Adam and Eve” at More Than Cake (June 18, 2021)

Maybe another debate?

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At Vox Popoli: Neo-Darwinism is dead

Or it would be, except for one thing:

Some of you will recall that I thoroughly, and in some detail, demonstrated the way in which, according to the present scientific understanding of astrophysics, genetic biology, and mathematics, the modern Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the theory of evolution by (mostly) natural selection is impossible, caught as it is between the Scylla of a fixed amount of time and the Charybdis of the number of fixed mutations required to take place in the evolution between one historical species and a present species.

To put it in the most simple terms that even a biologist should be able to follow, if we are told that a football team has gained 1,500 yards on the ground while averaging three yards per rushing play, and we know that the maximum number of offensive plays per team per game is 84, then we know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the yards reported were not gained in a single 60-minute game. They could not have been. It is impossible.

Vox Day, “Neo-Darwinism is dead” at Mind Matters News

Neo-Darwinism is a religious tenet of naturalism. It conjures impossible complexities out of inert matter by the magic of belief. Objections such as the ones cited above are evidence of disloyalty to the faith.

And the scientific verbiage gymnastics are amazing.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

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That time they invented scientists as well as research papers…

That time is today. Here’s another addition to the Trust the Science files:

In 2010 Labbé showed how citation counts could be inflated. In a few short months, he elevated an imaginary computer scientist (Ike Antkare, pronounced, “I can’t care”) to “one of the greatest stars in the scientific firmament.” Since Google Scholar only indexes papers that reference a paper already in Google Scholar, Labbé used SCIgen to create a fake paper, purportedly authored by Antkare, which referenced real papers and then used Scigen to generate 100 additional bogus papers supposedly authored by Antkare, each of which cited itself, the other 99 papers, and the initial fake paper. Finally, Labbé created a web page listing the titles and abstracts of all 101 papers, with links to pdf files, and waited for Google’s web crawler to find the bogus cross-referenced papers.

The Googlebot soon found the papers and Antkare was credited with 101 papers that had been cited by 101 papers, which propelled him to 21st on Google’s list of the most cited scientists of all time, behind Freud but well ahead of Einstein, and first among computer scientists.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Labbé should be flattered. Soon after he reported the Antkare stunt, three Spanish researchers who specialize in bibliometrics and research evaluation reported inflating their Google Scholar Citation profiles by posting six fictitious papers on one of their university websites, with each of the six papers citing 129 papers written by the authors. As expected, “The citation explosion was thrilling, especially in the case of the youngest researchers whose citation rates multiplied by six.” They published an account of their manipulation of citation counts because their intent was not to game the system, but to show how the system cannot be trusted because it can be gamed.

Even if researchers do not do an all-out Ike Antkare, they can still easily game citation metrics. In every paper they write, they cite as many of their other papers as the editors will let them get away with.

Journals can also game citation counts by publishing lots of papers that cite papers previously published in the journal. On more than one occasion, I have had journal editors ask me to add references to articles published in their journal.

Gary Smith, “A vulnerable system: fake papers and imaginary scientists” at Mind Matters News

Blowharding about “Trust the science” is necessarily losing its shine. Like a wooden nickel.

You may also wish to read the first two articles in this three-part series:

Publish or Perish — Another Example of Goodhart’s Law. In becoming a target, publication has ceased to be a good measure. Researchers game the system to beat the publish-or-perish culture, which undermines the usefulness of publication and citation counts. (Gary Smith)

Gaming the System: The Flaws in Peer Review. Peer review is well-intentioned, but flawed in many ways. Predatory journals, dishonest researchers, and escalating costs in academic journals reveal the weaknesses in peer review. (Gary Smith)

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Reflecting on the cancel!ation of Richard Dawkins

Is this a symptom of the gradual cultural failure of Darwinism?

Way back when, one of life’s great certainties used to be that no matter how obnoxious, prejudiced, jaundiced or snooty Richard Dawkins, the Grand Poobah of Atheism, was, the accolades would continue to roll in.

Alas! Those were the Good Old Days for poor old Richard. Nowadays he is looking more and more like a bewildered T-Rex the day after the Cretaceous extinction event.

Earlier this year Richard was cancelled by the American Humanist Association. It revoked his 1996 humanist of the year award because he had expressed scepticism about trans people in one of his recent tweets…

It turns out that Richard needed his mouth washed out with soap for a very long time. The AHA board declared that he had “over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalised groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values”.

Amongst these are Down Syndrome children, although I doubt that the AHA had them in mind. Dominic Lawson, a columnist for the Daily Mail, reports that there have been calls for Random House to stop publishing books by Dawkins.

Ann Farmer, “Richard Dawkins is not just ableist, he’s unscientific” at Mind Matters News

Calls for Random House to stop publishing his books? As if he were Michael Behe or something? Clearly, Darwinism is losing its cultural teflon.

To his credit, Lawson does NOT think Dawkins should be Canceled. But he is only one journalist. There are mobs of Woke out there. People who could not provide an intellectually respectable critique of his work would be happen to see the publisher Cancel it. Stay tuned.

See also: Richard Dawkins goes after people with Down syndrome… again. It’s interesting that, for decades, Dawkins could say the most awful things and still be popular. But there’s some evidence, noted here, that he’s starting to lose his shine, along with Darwinism in general.

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Girl’s parents are “two different species”?

Let’s just say, paleontologists need Neanderthals and Denisovans to be “different species.” Otherwise, it’s just a bone:

Eventually, though, Slon realized that there was no mistake. Although the teenager’s mother had Neanderthal DNA, her father, according to the analysis, had been a Denisovan. And that wasn’t all. While analyzing the bone fragment, the paleogeneticist also discovered that the girl’s genetic makeup was remarkably varied as a whole.

Suzi Marsh, “ Geneticists Studying Ancient DNA Discovered A Girl Whose Parents Were Two Different Species” at Boredom Therapy

All this will really do is further cast doubt on the idea of all these separate “species.”

See also: A physicist looks at biology’s problem of “speciation” in humans

and

This California Story Shows What A Mess The Whole Concept Of Speciation Is In

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Jonathan Bartlett: Intelligent Design Is Not What Most People Think It Is

Widespread confusion about Intelligent Design leads us to address the question: What exactly is it?:

Intelligent Design, at its core, says that agency is a distinct causal category in the world. That is, when I code a computer program, write a book, invent a formula, write a poem, etc., I am doing something that is distinctively beyond the operation of pure physics. There is something distinct about the way that causation works for beings with minds compared to how it works for beings without minds. This might sound like an abstract philosophical concept, but it actually has pretty radical (and practical) results.

The business applications of Intelligent Design were put forth by Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One. There, specifically invoking Intelligent Design theory, he demonstrated what sets apart businesses that move markets — they generate new truths that are not algorithmically deducible. Thiel shows that the mind has unique powers which are not reducible to mechanism, and that by focusing our efforts in the direction that our minds are specially built for allows us to create more economic prosperity…

Intelligent Design is not what most people think it is. The mistake is understandable because, for people who are stuck in old ways of thinking, it can sound like creationism. However, the theory and application of Intelligent Design approaches a different question than who, what, where, when, or by what means something is designed, and takes a look at the logic and nature of design itself. Approaching the problem in this way leads to applications that go far beyond biology and into computer science, business, economics, and other areas of inquiry and application.

Jonathan Bartlett, “Intelligent Design Is Not What Most People Think It Is” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Clarifying the distinction between the things that minds can do compared to computers is a core aspect of Intelligent Design, and has practical results.

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Asked at Quillette: Why Is the Society for American Archaeology Promoting Indigenous Creationism?

Well, we sort of know why, don’t we? Even Darwin is no longer Cancel Culture proof:

In April, one of us—Elizabeth Weiss—gave a talk, titled Has Creationism Crept Back into Archaeology?, at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA). The 87-year-old SAA identifies itself as “an international organization dedicated to research about the interpretation and protection of the archaeological heritage of the Americas.” The SAA board of directors includes professors, curators, and government archaeologists, all of whom presumably appreciate the importance of studying artifacts and human remains as a means to understanding the history of our species…

The most expansive interpretations of NAGPRA’s provisions now serve to place Indigenous oral traditions, which typically include religious stories, on equal footing with traditional forms of scientific evidence such as DNA analysis. And NAGPRA’s review committees often contain traditional Indian religious leaders who assist in repatriation decisions. While it is unfashionable to say so, we do not believe that this application of NAGPRA is correct. Contrary to the popular misunderstanding of NAGPRA, human remains and artifacts are not just repatriated to lineal descendants (such as a great-great grandchild), but are often repatriated to those who are deemed culturally affiliated. This kind of link can be established through orally transmitted creation myths that are analogous to what exists in the book of Genesis—tales of the origin of the universe and of people that are based on a series of miraculous events. (In 2007, the Department of the Interior went further by attempting to extend NAGPRA’s provisions to even those remains whose connections are “culturally unidentifiable.”)

In arguing against the perspective that oral traditions consisting of animistic creation myths should be used to determine repatriation decisions, we had hoped for an intellectually-driven debate over the scope of NAGPRA, and in regard to the treatment of knowledge more generally in our field. Instead, even before our talk aired, repatriation activists, both within the SAA and beyond, attacked it as racist, anti-Indigenous, colonialist, and even white-supremacist.

Elizabeth Weiss and James W. Springer, “Why Is the Society for American Archaeology Promoting Indigenous Creationism?” at Quillette (June 13, 2021)

The rest went pretty much as you might expect, with the Archeology Society refusing to broadcast the talk and announcing that “the SAA board finds the presentation does not align with SAA’s values,” and mentioned that “the board categorically rejects the Weiss-Springer position.”

Weiss and Springer rerecorded the talk because the Society refused to prove them with a copy (of their own talk). Here it is:

What to think? Well, Darwinism was the original Cancel Culture, as many reading this will know. For many decades, it was difficult or impossible to critique it from any perspective, no matter what the evidence. If social power alone wins, why not Indigenous creationism? Weiss and Springer will be lucky to come out of this with their careers intact.

Yer news hack (O’Leary for News) was reminded by this episode f an event from decades ago:

Once upon a time in 1990, before I had a computer, I was sitting at my desk in an apartment in Toronto (Canada) editing a chapter of a Grade 8 history textbook in pencil, line by line.

In, possibly, Chapter 6, the authors offered the opinion that science explanations are all very well but Indigenous people are entitled to believe their own origin myths, which are just as good.

I flagged that for my boss editor, told her: Take a look at this. = The Ministry for Education won’t like it and they pay for the books.

At the time, I had never heard of ID. I recall cowboys and frontiersmen thinking Darwinism was rubbish. = It didn’t reflect what they knew about animals and such.

However, my job required me to point out this material and ask for a house ruling. I expect it got the chop but, whatever happened, I had already been moved on to a different book project.

But maybe it wouldn’t get the chop today.

So, the mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small: The Darwinians trampled on a lot of evidence to get where they are now and there is no reason some enterprising fanatic, sailing under another flag, can’t just unseat them the same way.

Note: Weiss and Springer may not be hardcore Darwinists, of course, and the situation they are describing is bad for science-based enquiry. The trouble is, if they choose to see the problem solely in terms of a decline in the dogmatic acceptance of Darwinism, they are part of the problem themselves.

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