Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 191

Memories don’t stay put in neurons, they drift a lot

Textbooks did not tell most students that:

“Scientists are meant to know what’s going on, but in this particular case, we are deeply confused”, a recent article at The Atlantic begins.

It’s about the way nervous system cells don’t simply lay down memories and keep them. The memories drift from neuron to neuron, quite contrary to textbook claims and traditional neuroscience assumptions.

News, “Researchers can’t explain: Memories drift from neuron to neuron” at Mind Matters News

Not the textbooks’ fault. It’s a moving target. Only their fault if they keep insisting otherwise, dogmatically.

Takehome: The mobile memories are only one of many recent remarkable neuroscience finds that have been challenging textbook wisdom.

See also: Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

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

Central Dogma: Reasons for Further Thought

For about a year now, from reading various news items on newly published science articles, I’ve begun to consider not DNA, but RNA, the real driver of life. I think that DNA’s essential role is that of information storage–a hard drive, while RNA is like the BIOS system–it tells the “system” what it should be doing.

I’ve been waiting for the right article to come along to present this newer view of genomic life. Well, it appears that the ‘right article’ has come along. This is from Phys.Org and this is the pdf online version of the article.

From the Press Release via Phys.Org:
Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed cell. That same class of machines, called polymerases, also build RNA messages, which are like notes copied from the central DNA repository of recipes, so they can be read more efficiently into proteins. But polymerases were thought to only work in one direction DNA into DNA or RNA. This prevents RNA messages from being rewritten back into the master recipe book of genomic DNA. Now, Thomas Jefferson University researchers provide the first evidence that RNA segments can be written back into DNA, which potentially challenges the central dogma in biology and could have wide implications affecting many fields of biology.

Also:

Richard Pomerantz, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Thomas Jefferson University. “The reality that a human polymerase can do this with high efficiency, raises many questions.” For example, this finding suggests that RNA messages can be used as templates for repairing or re-writing genomic DNA.

Admittedly, these are much bolder statements than any made in the article itself.

Nevertheless, this does fit in with what I began thinking about after reading that it has been found that along with the father’s DNA, an RNA is also included which is responsible for initiating the life of the embryo. It’s hard to think this sort of stuff through in the absence of experiments, but a quick view of this certainly suggests, at least to me, that we must begin to view cellular life not just in terms of DNA–the “Central Dogma,” but in terms of a cooperation between RNA and DNA where it is entirely possible that RNA is the driver of cellular life. I think the great rise of discovered function in “junk-DNA” might be a harbinger of this needed change in understanding the functioning of cells and of life.

I think an expert assessment of this article is in order. I await your comments and observations. I wonder if anyone out there has had some of these same thoughts.

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

TheConversation.com Makes an About-Face on Teaching Creationism in Science Classes – Now is Supportive!

TheConversation.com touts itself as having “academic rigor” combined with “journalistic flair”. In polite society today, creationism is usually out of bounds for this milieu. However, I was surprised to find that, in a recent article, they at least seemed to promote the idea of treating creationism with respect not just in history, but in STEM subjects.

The article says that modern ways of teaching are problematic for students because the subjects

prevent them from using their cultural worldviews, spirituality and language in the STEM learning setting.

So what, specifically did they mean by spirituality? I clicked on the link, and lo and behold, it was about teaching creationism in the classroom!

This is a radical shift from their previous position, which was that creationism should be treated as a conspiracy theory (see here and here), or that it should only be treated as history (see here).

Anyway, I would not have guessed that TheConversation would have had such an overnight shift from calling creationism a conspiracy theory to saying it should be a part of science class.

It’s possible I’m misreading the article somehow, but I don’t think I am. I would love to have other people’s take on this.

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

New Intelligent Design YouTube Channel

I’ve been writing intermittently about ID for quite a few years now. In the past I have posted some of my articles on this page. Although I haven’t written anything for a good while, I still follow this area very closely. Recently I set up a YouTube channel that I intend to use alongside my blog. Both the blog and the channel are called Design Disquisitions. These days especially, I think some material lends itself more readily to video format, and I wish to engage with other people interested in ID and evolution in a conversational manner. I’ll be posting videos that will feature conversations with other people, and I’ll also be putting together some presentations and short talks on various topics related to this area. I’ll continue to write stuff for the blog as well. There may be a little overlap here and there, as I’ll probably do a few video presentations based on some of my writing, but there will also be things unique to the blog and channel.

A few days ago I put up an introduction video, where I talk a little about the channel and my own background. You can find a link to the video below. Feel free to subscribe to keep up to date with my videos. I appreciate any feedback and ideas as well!

Thanks,

Joshua

Channel Introduction & My Journey to Intelligent Design 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

L&FP44: What are Self-evident truths [SET’s] and why do they matter?

A classic case in point of self-evident truth can be seen by splitting our fingers into a two and a three then joining them again — and, sorry, this needs to be hammered home hard as we are cutting across the grain of current education and cultural conditioning.

So, pardon demonstration by undeniable example and re-use of an illustration:

As a bonus, we see another SET that is like unto the first, self-evident, but is subtler. That error exists is not only a massive empirical fact but an undeniable truth. The attempted denial actually supports the Josiah Royce proposition.

By way of Epictetus (c. 180 AD), we can see a third case, SET’s that are first principles of reasoning antecedent to proof and which therefore inescapably pervade our reasoning, including proofs and [attempted] dis-proofs:

DISCOURSES CHAPTER XXV: How is logic necessary?

When someone in [Epictetus’] audience said, Convince me that logic is necessary, he answered: Do you wish me to demonstrate this to you?—Yes.—Well, then, must I use a demonstrative argument?—And when the questioner had agreed to that, Epictetus asked him. How, then, will you know if I impose upon you?—As the man had no answer to give, Epictetus said: Do you see how you yourself admit that all this instruction is necessary, if, without it, you cannot so much as know whether it is necessary or not? [Notice, inescapable, thus self evidently true and antecedent to the inferential reasoning that provides deductive proofs and frameworks, including axiomatic systems and propositional calculus etc. Cf J. C. Wright]

These examples and others that could be brought forward show that SET’s are true, and for one with adequate experience, background and insight to understand, will be seen as necessarily true once understood. That is, the attempted denial is in some way immediately, manifestly absurd so that the certainty of the SET is assured.

Thus, SET’s are objective, warranted to full certainty.

Which makes them suspect to those enamoured with today’s all too common relativism, subjectivism and emotivism. Clearly though if SET’s have been demonstrated — as we saw — then the claim or suggestion that truth is a perception or agreement or feeling regarding an opinion only . . . true to me or to us, that’s all . . . manifestly fails.

Starting with, 2 + 3 = 5 and with, error undeniably exists or that we are undeniably self-aware (conscious) and able to reason responsibly. Illustrating, by contrast with a rock (even one formed into computer hardware!):

However, as the Angelic Doctor long ago noted, having adequate background and inclination to understand and acknowledge the force of a SET can be an issue. Indeed, the case with Epictetus’ interlocutor shows that one may have to be educated to be able to understand a SET. (Recall, we have to be taught basic addition and multiplication facts.)

Epictetus also shows that one might have to be corrected regarding a SET. The silence in response suggests, too, that such correction may not be welcome.

For sure, self-evidence does not mean utterly simple and obvious to one and all.

We may now expand:

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS — CHARACTERISTICS:

1] A SET is just that, true, it accurately describes actual states of affairs, e.g. split your fingers on one hand into a 2-cluster and a 3-cluster, then join, you necessarily have a 5-cluster, || + ||| –> ||||| accurately describes a state of affairs.

2] Further, a SET is understandable to anyone of appropriate experience and maturity to have formed the basic concepts and to therefore recognise the sentences expressing it.

3] A SET, is then recognisable as not only true but necessarily and manifestly true given its substance, though of course some may try to evade it or deflect it.

4] That necessity is backed up by a certainty mechanism, specifically that the attempted denial immediately manifests a patent absurdity, not by step by step reduction such as incomensurateness of the side and diagonal of a square, but blatant absurdity manifest on inspection.

5] Where such patent absurdities of denial may come in various forms, e.g.:

– Absurd incoherence or blatant error [ 2 + 3 = 4 X],
– undeniability [E= error exists, ~E is a claim it is error to assert E, so E is undeniable],
– inescapability [Epictetus’ interlocutor who tried to demand a logical proof of the necessity of logic . . . and — yes — the inescapability of appeals to the authority of Ciceronian first duties of reason, even in the face of an ongoing campaign to dismiss and sideline . . . to truth, to right reason, to prudence (including, warrant), to sound conscience, to neighbour, so too to fairness and justice etc . . . where, moral truths are truths regarding states of affairs involving oughtness, i.e. duty — we ought to respect the life, body, freedom and dignity of a young child walking home from school, never mind convenient bushes and dark impulses in our hearts],
– blatant self-referential absurdity [e.g. trying to deny one’s self-aware consciousness and the associated testimony of conscience or crushing of conscience],
– moral absurdity [trying to evade the message of the sadly real world case of a kidnapped, sexually tortured, murdered child]
– etc, there is no end to the rhetoric of evasion.

6] So, SET’s are not private subjective, GIGO-limited, readily dismissible opinions or dubious notions. They are objective and in fact warranted to certainty backed up by patent absurdity on attempted denial. More than objective, they are certainly true, and especially as regards first principles and first duties of right reason, they are inescapably authoritative and antecedent to reasoned thought or argument.

7] Indeed, self-evident first truths and duties of reason are before proof and beyond refutation. The attempt to object or evade, inescapably, implicitly appeals to their authority in attempting to get rhetorical traction, and attempts to prove equally cannot escape their priority, the first truths and duties are part of the fabric of the attempted proof. So, we are duty bound to acknowledge them, to be coherently rational.

Of course, we are always free to choose to be irrational and/or irresponsible. And others are equally free to note the fact and duly reckon the loss of credibility. Where, cheap shot turnabout projections only confirm the loss of credibility.

As a final point, SET’s are relatively rare, so rare in fact that they cannot by themselves frame a worldview or school of thought. So, what we use them as is plumb lines that test our thinking, especially when we are tempted to make a crooked yardstick into our imposed standard for what political correctness, newspeak word magic, agit prop and lawfare call truth, right, rights, tolerance, conspiracy theories, follow the science, X-phobias, facts, knowledge etc. So, pardon another oldie but goodie:

Self-evident truths are important and precious. Let us therefore prize and use them aptly. END

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

The latest from the journal Nature, of all places: An engineering theory of evolution

”Evotypes:”

Biological technologies are fundamentally unlike any other because biology evolves. Bioengineering therefore requires novel design methodologies with evolution at their core. Knowledge about evolution is currently applied to the design of biosystems ad hoc. Unless we have an engineering theory of evolution, we will neither be able to meet evolution’s potential as an engineering tool, nor understand or limit its unintended consequences for our biological designs. Here, we propose the evotype as a helpful concept for engineering the evolutionary potential of biosystems, or other self-adaptive technologies, potentially beyond the realm of biology.

Castle, S.D., Grierson, C.S. & Gorochowski, T.E. Towards an engineering theory of evolution. Nat Commun 12, 3326 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23...

A friend in science says that he couldn’t have imagined Nature publishing anything like this thirty years ago.

How long will it be before people discover?: Engineering without engineers, taken seriously, means — among other things — that the consciousness of engineers is an illusion.

Otherwise, there is no design without intelligence.

The paper is open access.

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

Physicist: Fine tuning explains the ugliness of the Standard Model of the universe

Well, ugly is as ugly does:

I say string theory is ugly in the sense that mathematical elegance and physical elegance are two different things. A mathematically elegant theory is simple on paper, but it may lead to complex and confusing predictions that aren’t observed in real experiments. A physically elegant theory is one that explains the data in as simple a way as possible no matter how complex the math needs to be and no matter how many experimental parameters have to be inserted. (I say explains the data not predicts the data because I don’t claim to be a logical positivist. A theory that makes good empirical predictions but tells you nothing deeper is only a useful tool waiting for an explanation. I do not see the Standard Model as such a theory, albeit it is abstract.)

From this perspective, the Standard Model is mathematically troubling but physically very elegant. It explains exactly what we see in experiments, and, while it is confounding to many physicists that it predicts no more, there is some elegance in that. After all, it does explain the world we live in. Since the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012, the Standard Model’s overall predictions have been confirmed to astounding degree of accuracy.

Tim Andersen, “Our universe’s fine tuning may be why the Standard Model is so mathematically ugly” at Medium

Of string theory, he says,

String theory has been, in many ways, a dream for a mathematically elegant description of nature where experimental parameters are predicted rather than measured, and the laws of the world we live in become, not one set of many possibilities, but the only possible ones.

Tim Andersen, “Our universe’s fine tuning may be why the Standard Model is so mathematically ugly” at Medium

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

and

Post-modern physics: String theory gets over the need for evidence

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

When science becomes religion, science journalists write the scriptures

Asked at Aeon, “Are we part of a dying reality or a blip in eternity? The value of the Hubble Constant could tell us which terror awaits”:

What determines our fate? To the Stoic Greek philosophers, fate is the external product of divine will, ‘the thread of your destiny’. To transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, it is an inward matter of self-determination, of ‘what a man thinks of himself’. To modern cosmologists, fate is something else entirely: a sweeping, impersonal physical process that can be boiled down into a single, momentous number known as the Hubble Constant.

The Hubble Constant can be defined simply as the rate at which the Universe is expanding, a measure of how quickly the space between galaxies is stretching apart. The slightest interpretation exposes a web of complexity encased within that seeming simplicity, however. Extrapolating the expansion process backward implies that all the galaxies we can observe originated together at some point in the past – emerging from a Big Bang – and that the Universe has a finite age. Extrapolating forward presents two starkly opposed futures, either an endless era of expansion and dissipation or an eventual turnabout that will wipe out the current order and begin the process anew.

That’s a lot of emotional and intellectual weight resting on one small number.

Corey S. Powell, “Fate of the Universe” at Aeon

Bet on them all being wrong. That’s probably the only thing that has happened lots of times before.

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

What will the long-term effect be of science journals playing useful idiots around COVID-19?

Some of us have been reflecting on the effect of the COVID-19 panic on the public estimation of science. Here’s an article on the useful idiot problem among science journals:

Only now is acceptance emerging that the science establishment colluded to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory, assisted by prominent experts with clear conflicts of interest, patsy politicians and a pathetic media that mostly failed to do its job. And yet, at the heart of this scandal lie some of the world’s most influential science journals. These should provide a forum for pulsating debate as experts explore and test theories, especially on something as contentious and fascinating as the possible origins of a global pandemic. Instead, some have played a central role in shutting down discussion and discrediting alternative views on the origins, with disastrous consequences for our understanding of events…

Nature’s stance has been especially questionable. Around the same time as Daszak’s letter was printed, a statement started appearing at the top of some previously-published papers such as one on “gain of function research” by US virologist Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli, the “batwoman” expert from Wuhan, entitled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence”. This carefully-crafted note said such papers were being used as “basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing Covid-19 was engineered”, adding “there is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus”.

Ian Birrell, “Beijing’s useful idiots” at Unherd

Will it become a matter of life-and-death not to “trust the science”?

And, wouldn’t you know, distrust is rising among Americans:

– 33% of people think the information given by the CDC is completely untrustworthy compared to 23% 10 months ago, and only a slight majority of respondents think the CDC is trustworthy.

– 18-24 years old were most likely to trust CDC guidelines, but only at 58%. – 50% of women trust the CDC, compared to 38% of men and 22% of non-binary respondents. ,

“CDC Guidelines, Reopening and Stimulus Checks – How People Really Feel” at Invisibly

Any serious discussion would need to include what the Establishment did wrong, not just what assorted scapegoats can be stuck with.

One problem is that when people are really corrupt, they often don’t realize it and their system may be irreformable. But it may not be too late. We shall see.

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

Quote of the Day

Put this one in the “the more things change, the more they stay the same” category.  Though he was speaking to an English audience nearly 90 years ago, Churchill could have very well been addressing the American people yesterday afternoon.

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without.  They come from within . . . They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.  Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement, into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our intellectuals.  They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians.  But what do they offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of Utopias?

Winston Churchill

“England”

Speech to the Royal Society of St. George

London, April 24, 1933

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