Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 192

June 7, 2021

Fish fins, Christian evolutionism, and the “things that just don’t change, come what may”

At Evolution News and Science Today, we learn that Darrel Falk is still around? Why do people care about Christian evolutionism when even the big Darwin guys like Kevin Laland are looking for non-Darwin answers? Oh well, if Darrel Falk is funded, he is around, right? And we’re not getting dinged for it. So really what?

No surprise, Falk doesn’t like Steve Meyer’s new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis. Anyway, we hear:

In his critical review of Return of the God Hypothesis for BioLogos, to which Brian Miller and I have been responding (here, here, and here), biologist Darrel Falk argued that Stephen Meyer “does not fully appreciate the power of gene duplication and mutation in generating new proteins and changing the way that gene regulatory networks function.” We saw in a previous post that Meyer discussed these topics extensively in both his latest book and his previous book, Darwin’s Doubt. He showed how they do not explain the origin of animal body plans. Falk never addresses Meyer’s specific criticisms of both processes as mechanisms of evolutionary innovation. But he does argue that one “mystery” that seems to be solvable is how fins evolved into limbs.

Casey Luskin, “Revealing Darrel Falk’s Overstatements about Limb Bones in Fish Fins” at Evolution News and Science Today

Some of us have at least a plausible hope of living long enough to hear that limbs evolved first. We shall see.

Fun:

Things that just don’t change come what may? See the best Canadian folk song: Four Strong Winds:

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Published on June 07, 2021 10:27

At Salon: New Atheists accused of intellectual grift and abject surrender

One of the more interesting intellectual movements in recent years was “new atheism,” which came and went — perhaps best known for being the the “godlessness that failed.”

Now, it’s being attacked among the In and the Cool in Salon, mainly for espousing free speech:

What’s sad is that the New Atheist movement could have made a difference — a positive difference — in the world. Instead, it gradually merged with factions of the alt-right to become what former New York Times contributing editor Bari Weiss calls the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a motley crew of pseudo-intellectuals whose luminaries include Jordan Peterson, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, in addition to those mentioned above.

At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about “moral progress,” but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of “free speech,” they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

Phil Torres, “Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right” at Salon (June 5, 2021)

Torres makes quite clear that, to get on at Salon, you’d have to be a stiletto Stalinist. The new atheists have the advantage of at least being interesting people.

Hey, we’ve always given them that. And who cares about Salon anyhow?

The most disgusting trend in recent years has been the loss of interest, among fashionable media dominated by Big Tech, in intellectual freedom. They were never very interested in it but they used to have to pretend. Now they don’t. Being stupid is now officially okay as long as you are fashionably stupid.

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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Published on June 07, 2021 09:49

Evolutionary biologist asks: Is talk of an evolution “revolution” “misguided?”

Well, maybe that depends on what you mean by “revolution”. How about just allowing facts to be stated calmly and without prejudice?:

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Kevin Laland, “Evolution unleashed: Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided?” at Aeon

Holy cow. Whodathunkit?

For sure, in that case, no more persecution for doubt. A lot of us are already sick of you people. Don’t make it worse.

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Published on June 07, 2021 09:17

Can you believe it? The COVID crazy is destroying trust in science experts

Here, we are all falling over in shock:

The trials and tribulations of COVID-19 in America have dealt an irreparable blow to the credibility of America’s ruling class and the ruling class’s implicit appeal to its authority as a coterie of highly trained and capable experts. No single person exemplifies this more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation’s leading immunologist and forward-facing spokesman for our public policy response. As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History, Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic, waffling on what the “science” demands at any given moment while still always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction.

Recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post only underscore the point. Perhaps most damningly, the FOIA requests revealed a February 2020 email to former Obama-era Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell explaining that store-bought face masks are “really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.” He also added that the “typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material.”

Of course, barely over a month after Fauci’s unearthed email to Burwell, Americans were required to wear masks pretty much every time they left their house—and mask-skeptical posts were censored or deleted by the ruling class’s preferred private-sector enforcement arm, Big Tech.

Josh Hammer, “COVID-19 Has Forever Destroyed Americans’ Trust in ‘Experts’” at American Greatness (June 3, 2021)

Learned:

Many bureaucrats relished enforcing rules that made no sense whatever. Dying aged people couldn’t see their young relatives. Bars were open but churches were closed. Some places had curfews; others did not. In some places, schools were closed; in others, they were not.The main effect of Big Tech censorship was to make discussing the problems difficult.Far more of our fellow citizens than many of us would have thought possible simply accepted the crazy, then cowered, and hid. For no reason other than rank, irrational fear.Among more thoughtful people, the term “science” has taken one heck of a beating. When this is all over, we hope it still means something other than “whatever bureaucrats enforce.”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.
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Published on June 07, 2021 08:52

At the Epoch Times: A mom tries understanding “evolution” schoolhouse lessons

Not happy with what she hears:

According to PBS’s Evolution website, “The Darwinian theory of evolution has withstood the test of time and thousands of scientific experiments; nothing has disproved it since Darwin first proposed it more than 150 years ago.”

Really? I remember my science teacher said that, if a statement is too absolute, it is likely unscientific.

As of April 2020, more than 1,100 scientists and researchers in chemistry, biology, medicine, physics, geology, anthropology, paleontology, statistics and other fields have signed a scientific dissent from Darwinism. It reads, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

Jean Chen, “A Mom’s Research (Part 5): A Deep Dive into Evolution” at Epoch Times (June 4, 2021)

Chen’s onto something there.

See, I couldn’t prove to you that the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist. Or that he does.

It is very difficult to prove a negative apart from mathematics and you might justifiably reject any positive evidence I offered for his existence as capable of an alternative explanation.

Now, as for random movements of nature resulting in complex machinery, we know from experience that it is overwhelmingly unlikely in real life. Lots of time will not bridge that gap. So, apart from philosophical commitments favoring belief, Darwinism is overwhelmingly unlikely to be true.

Millions of doctoral shouts in Darwinism’s favor are not the same thing as evidence. If I had to cite one reason for not teaching Darwinism in schools, I would say that it encourages the incorrect belief that an “overwhelming consensus” is the same thing as evidence.

Consider a court case: Learned Counsel for the Defence can show that Harvey Scuzz, accused, was nowhere near the scene of the crime on the night in question (because he was dead drunk at the bottom of his landlady’s stairs, as attested by several emergency services personnel, who responded to her call).

If you believe these people are telling the truth about Scuzz’s position and condition on the night in question, that settles the matter. It doesn’t matter what 1000 PhD’s think about the probability of Scuzz being “just the sort of man who would do that.” They might be right but it doesn’t matter.

If no one has ever been able to demonstrate in real life that an alarm clock assembles itself all by itself, why should I believe that a life form does? Why should that be taught in school? Can’’t we just say that we don’t know? It’s really a matter of belief. Or not, as the case may be. No one should be persecuted for doubt in such a case.

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Published on June 07, 2021 08:06

But didn’t Darwinists tell us that men kill other guys’ kids to have their own, thus spreading their selfish genes?

It turns out women do most of the killing of kids:

We know that all men are not monsters, and figures from the Australian Institute of Criminology show that more mothers kill their children than do their fathers. This sounds so counterfactual in today’s fevered anti-man climate that I shall quote from the author of the 2019 study, “Filicide in Australia, 2000-2012: A National Study”, Thea Brown. She summarises her research as follows: “mothers killed more children than fathers; stepfathers killed the next largest group; and parents or step-parents acting jointly the smallest group.”

In short, I repeat, the most likely group to kill children is mothers. The explanations for this in psychological literature vary from the real such as post-partum psychosis, to the outrageous gendered notion of “altruistic killing”.

But no killing is altruistic. After mothers the next biggest group of child killers are in police-talk the “unrelated resident male”, who unfortunately in recent Australian statistics is lumped in as “partner”. The least likely is the child’s father.

Angela Shanahan, “Feminist extremists have declared war on men. Don’t believe them.” at MercatorNet

Of course the Darwinian will grab “The least likely is the child’s father” to shout Aha! The Selfish Gene, you see!

Overlooked, because it is politically incorrect, is the fact that — most likely — the father of the child was not even on the scene.

In reality, if the selfish gene mattered much, Dad would have been on the scene. The situation is indistinguishable from people not caring enough to make a difference.

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Published on June 07, 2021 07:44

Summary of Some of Fauci’s Many Lies

Anthony Fauci is a liar. No reasonable person doubts that. Yet he remains an icon of progressives, who continue to hang on his every utterance. This is mystifying. Or it would be if we did not know that for progressives the “narrative” is for more important than the truth.

Here is a convenient summary of some of his most egregious whoppers.

A trove of thousands of emails released as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request show that, since the beginning of COVID-19, Anthony Fauci has been just as mendacious as some of his worst critics have alleged.

On Jan. 1, 2020, Fauci received a credible warning from a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, Kristian Anderson, that some of SARS-COV-2’s features “(potentially) look engineered” and that she and her colleagues “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” . . .

Besides his lies about the well-supported lab origin theory for COVID, Fauci misled the public about asymptomatic spread being a major driver of the outbreak, as a Feb. 4, 2020 email revealed. He lied about masks working, as “the virus is small enough to pass through the material,” according to a Feb. 5, 2020

He admitted outright he moved the goalposts on herd immunity based on what he thought the public was “ready to hear,” and he continues to lie about herd immunity being a necessity given that vaccine’s purported efficacy, much less a goal that must be achieved through mass administration of an experimental vaccine.

Que the materialist defenses of Facui’s mendacity.

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Published on June 07, 2021 06:54

June 6, 2021

ID Science Applied Practically

ID science is being applied at a practical level to determine if COVID-19 is a natural or artificial organism. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, we get everything short of an explicit reference to Dembski’s explanatory filter:

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

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Published on June 06, 2021 12:59

D-Day, Normandy + 77 years, let us remember

The invasion:

Live radio feeds:

We must not forget the price paid to recover liberty under law. END

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Published on June 06, 2021 08:34

June 2, 2021

L&FP43: Big-S Science, Official Consensus and the pessimistic induction

It is highly relevant and timely to now ponder “Big-S Science and appeals to official consensus i/l/o the logic of the pessimistic induction and what warrant entails,” with “degrees of warrant, open mindedness and tolerance/diversity.”

It is probably best to start with the pessimistic induction, here, via SEP:

If one considers the history of scientific theories in any given discipline, what one typically finds is a regular turnover of older theories in favor of newer ones, as scientific knowledge develops. From the point of view of the present, most past theories must be considered false; indeed, this will be true from the point of view of most times. Therefore, by enumerative induction (that is, generalizing from these cases), surely theories at any given time will ultimately be replaced and regarded as false from some future perspective. Thus, current theories are also false . . . [Scientific Realism, SEP]

While I don’t buy the “surely,” we need to soberly ponder what a scientific theory is and what degree of warrant attaches to such. In commenting on the Cells thread, I noted:

Theories are constructed explanatory narratives that may be tested and supported or falsified by observations [subject to Lakatos’ issues on auxiliary theories etc] but are not themselves facts of observation, they simply are not in the same category. Yes, the span of tested empirical reliability of a theory may well be a further fact of observation, but that is not the theory itself and is subject to the next observation. Besides, as one who worked with engineering models, e.g. of electronic circuits, I know that many models are deliberately false simplifications that can be highly reliable for similar gamuts of testing. A theory, one suspects, may be definable as a potentially true model of the world or of a relevant aspect. Though, the pessimistic induction haunts all such suggestions.

Now, while there is often a suggestion that there is material continuity between past, once successful theories and their current successors — call this the germ of truth thesis — in fact there may be a lot more replacement than is recognised or acknowledged . . . call that the myth of progress rebuttal. Further, the underlying issue lies in the logic of abductive reasoning underlying scientific theorising:

Notice, the implication direction, from theory to current observations [O = {o1,o2, . . . on}] and predicted facts of observation [P = {p1, p2, . . . pm, . . . }]:

T => O AND P

While O is at a given point a closed set, P is open to the future. Lakatos’ adjustment, of course is that T is also composite, involving a protected core and a belt of auxiliary hypotheses so that often the auxiliaries can be treated as sacrificial, protective armour belts that soak up the damage. So, it is hard to directly empirically refute a core theory. Objecting colleagues to Galileo could readily argue that the imperfections of his telescopes rendered his claims suspect. Reportedly, some refused to look through same.

The underlying issue, however, is a logical one, T => O + P, O+P so T, strictly speaking affirms the consequent. Even, ignoring the open-endedness of P. What instead we are doing is arguing by way of reliable empirical support for T as best current explanation. Across time, Candidates will change and the best current explanation may be a refinement or a replacement.

That is, empirical warrant in science is provisional, defeat-able. We hope, that there is a possibility of truth, but cannot show it to certainty. Where, empirical reliability is an observable and we can be confident of that, on an assumption of stability.

Science, in short, is never settled and progresses by the breaking of former consensus. The tendency of officialdom to appeal to settled Big-S Science and/or consensus as gold standard of knowledge, though understandable sometimes, is misdirected.

Again, it is time for fresh thinking. END

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Published on June 02, 2021 12:43

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