Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 193

May 30, 2021

Frank Turek looks at Scientism of the gaps

You’ve heard atheistic naturalists and Christian Darwinists talk about the “God of the Gaps,” right?

= Every time it seems like something in the universe looks designed — whether it is the laws of mathematics or the complexity of nervous systems — “science” will come along and show that, sure enough, it all just randomly happened that way.

“The universe can and will create itself from nothing,” as Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow argued in The Grand Design. (Note that it is called The Grand Design even though it argues the opposite. )

So, in the atheistic naturalist’s and the Christian Darwinists’ view, anyone who doubts that Everything Comes About by Accident from Nothing” is undermining people’s faith.

Presumably, people will find out the truth and then they will no longer believe in the God Who Makes No Difference and they will stop going to … Churches No One Goes To Any More Anyway.

Here, apologist Frank Turek of CrossExamined talks about the point of view they all seem to prefer, “Scientism of the Gaps”:

Christians are sometimes accused of the ‘God of the Gaps’ fallacy. In contrast, naturalists are occasionally guilty of a ‘Scientism of the gaps’ fallacy. Watch this! pic.twitter.com/W7Wr6fTSLK
— Frank Turek (@DrFrankTurek) May 28, 2021

To summarize Scientism of the Gaps: No mountain too high, no river so wide that sheer chaos cannot contrive to create an inextricably interlinked system that seamlessly navigates it.

Even though chaos never works that way in your own life, you must believe — if you are really science-friendly — that it works that way at the foundation of all of life, the entire universe and all that.

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 May 30, 2021 08:09

The remarkable expansion of the proteome across the history of life

The key of author of this most interesting paper, Dan Tawfik, died — we are told — in a climbing accident just before its publication:

Across the Tree of Life, life’s phenotypic diversity has been accompanied by a massive expansion of the protein universe. Compared with simple prokaryotes that harbor thousands of proteins, plants and animals harbor hundreds of thousands of proteins that are also longer, multidomain, and comprise a variety of folds and fold combinations, repeated segments, and beta-rich architectures that make them prone to misfolding and aggregation. Surprisingly, the relative representation of core chaperones, those dedicated to maintaining the folding quality of these increasingly complex proteomes, did not change from prokaryotic to mammalian genomes. To reconcile the expanding proteomes, core chaperones have rather increased in cellular abundance and evolved to function cooperatively as a network, combined with their supporting workforce, the cochaperones.
On the evolution of chaperones and cochaperones and the expansion of proteomes across the Tree of Life Mathieu E. Rebeaud, Saurav Mallik, Pierre Goloubinoff, Dan S. Tawfik Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 2021, 118 (21) e2020885118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2020885118

The paper is open access.

A friend writes to draw our attention to this sentence: “Life met this challenge by evolving molecular chaperones that can minimize protein misfolding and aggregation, even under stressful out-of-equilibrium conditions favoring aggregation.”

“Life” is a busy little bee, no? If this were not evolutionary biology, we would talk in terms of purpose and design. Oh but, whoops, they do talk in terms of purpose and design. But none dare call it that.

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Published on May 30, 2021 07:41

Professional skeptic Michael Shermer takes on Stephen C. Meyer and his Return of God Hypothesis

The New Atheist Movement (“public standards of good taste and good sense broken daily!”) appears to have come and gone. But Michael Shermer, a well-known non-profane skeptic, is, we are glad to say, still with us. Here he is, interviewing Steve Meyer on his new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis:

Beginning in the late 19th century, many intellectuals began to insist that scientific knowledge conflicts with traditional theistic belief — that science and belief in God are “at war.” Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer challenges this view by examining three scientific discoveries with decidedly theistic implications. Building on the case for the intelligent design of life that he developed in Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer claims that discoveries in cosmology and physics coupled with those in biology help to establish the identity of the designing intelligence behind life and the universe. Previously Meyer refrained from attempting to answer questions about “who” might have designed life. Now he provides an evidence-based answer to perhaps the ultimate mystery of the universe.

Shermer responds to each claim and a stimulating and enlightening conversation ensues.

Note: It is Dr. Shermer’s intention in his podcast to periodically talk to people with whom skeptics and scientists may disagree. In some episodes Dr. Shermer tries to “steel man” a position held by someone with differing views — that is, he says in his own words what he thinks the other person is arguing — but in this case the other person is in the conversation and can represent his own position clearly, which is what happens. As well, such conversations enable principles of skepticism to be employed in ways constructive to those who hold views not necessarily embraced by skeptics and scientists. Such principles should be embraced by all seekers of truth, and that is why we want to talk to people with whom we may disagree.

In an age when the Raging Woke parasitize the world of ideas, banning everyone from Frank Turek through Richard Dawkins from public life (when not out setting fires and assaulting the non-Woke), it is worth nothing that Shermer’s 2020 book Giving the Devil His Due, is a defense of intellectual freedom.

And we sure don’t see that every day.

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Published on May 30, 2021 07:28

Is there a hole at the bottom of math?

Apparently so. See: “This is Math’s Fatal Flaw” (Veritasium, 33:59 min), May 22, 2021

Not everything that is true can be proven. This discovery transformed infinity, changed the course of a world war and led to the modern computer.

Indeed. That was the remarkable insight of Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), which destroyed formerly triumphant positivist philosophy.

When you get to the bottom of the universe (if you do), it’s mostly questions, not answers.

Don’t miss: Gregory Chaitin’s almost-meeting with Kurt Gödel. (Yes, that Gregory Chaitin, of Chatin’s unknowable number.)

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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Published on May 30, 2021 07:07

May 29, 2021

At The Scientist: Trofim Lysenko and “stamping out science” Yes… yesterday. Sure. But what about today?

Who’s stamping out science today? It is, of course, safe here and now to dump on old Soviet Trofim Lysenko:

Lysenko was opposed to the idea of a “substance of heredity,” or genes, explains Loren Graham, a historian of science and professor emeritus at MIT. Instead, Lysenko believed, as had been suggested by some scientists in previous centuries, that plants and other organisms acquired their characteristics by responding to their environments, and that those acquired traits could be inherited by subsequent generations through some nongenetic mechanism. The practical implication, Lysenko argued, was that plants could be trained to develop desirable traits in just a couple of generations. His best-known technique, “vernalization,” involved treating seeds from winter-growing, frost-sensitive plants with moisture and cold to trigger development in the spring—something he believed would become a permanent trait and boost yields…

As his popularity grew, he eliminated rivals. Respected geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who had mentored Lysenko and ran the Academy of Agricultural Sciences before Lysenko took over, was arrested in 1940 after Lysenko and allies complained of his “anti-Soviet” views. Vavilov loyalists were dismissed, imprisoned, or executed; Vavilov starved to death in prison in 1943. Lysenko’s infamous 1948 address accelerated his takeover: scores of Russian geneticists were subsequently fired—some committed suicide or fled abroad—and criticism of so-called Lysenkoism became impossible…

Lysenkoism has since become almost synonymous with political oppression of science. But recently, some of Lysenko’s proclamations have been exhumed in the context of epigenetics and nongenetic mechanisms of inheritance. Some Russian academics claim his 1948 speech was misunderstood, and that he was really a pioneer of developmental biology—arguments that scientists and historians view as grave misrepresentations.

Catherine Offord, “Stamping Out Science, 1948” at The Scientist

Excuse us. From this distance, to whatever extent Lysenko thought epigenetics was a feature of life forms, he was right. To whatever extent Darwinians opposed the idea, they were wrong. The rest is totalitarianism, whether of Lysenkoists or Darwinists.

To get some idea how that sort of thing plays out today, consider the current COVID-19 debacle:

The public-health consensus around COVID-19 and the proper or necessary interventions to take against it shifts all the time. This consensus shapes public policy and leaks out into respectable mainstream news outlets; most insidiously, it becomes encoded as a quasi-official public line that every individual on social media is obliged to repeat and share or else be subject to demonetization, warnings, censorship, and accusations of spreading disinformation. The polarization of our politics and of public-health elites has left us with two categories of thought on COVID: the Science, and dangerous (sometimes racist) conspiracy theories. Half the time, the conspiracy theories become the Science. Belief in the efficacy of masks or in the lab-leak theory made these transitions. But these shifts don’t happen upon the publication of credible new scientific studies. There is almost no public jousting and argument among scientists and researchers. There is just a sliding from one position to another when it becomes safe. Long after these shifts take place, CDC guidance often comes to incorporate them.

Credible scientific evidence that outdoor transmission of the coronavirus was negligible was available late in the spring of 2020, even as newspapers were still shaming people about being on beaches and a solo paddleboarder was arrested in California. But CDC guidance on outdoor activities and outdoor mask-wearing didn’t change for a year. We’ve long had evidence that children under twelve are far less likely to get seriously ill or die from COVID than they are from the flu. The scientific evidence is all there in the open that children are basically safe to gather together, but the mysterious scientific consensus hasn’t developed to the point of making it safe to say this in public.

Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The Fall of Saint Anthony Fauci” at National Review

And the lab leak theory has always been a reasonable idea, not a conspiracy theory. Yet it was treated as a conspiracy theory for purely political reasons…

We’ll get back to our main interests soon. We’ve focused on this issue because it’s a great teaching opportunity on why “trust the science” is not a wise approach when we have no good reason to trust what goes into the science. That’s true across the board, including the issues we regularly focus on

See also: More on the COVID-19 lab leak theory It’s off topic for ID as such. But it is important for helping people work through a general principle that concerns all issues that pertain to science: “Trust the science” is not a good approach when the science is so clearly not bound by any standards of grappling with the facts of nature. (Darwinism anyone?)

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Published on May 29, 2021 07:23

At last! Computer-generated sci babble papers to be “retracted”

Never mind what took them so long. Here’s a coffee room question: Does the word “retraction” properly apply in a situation in which no original thought was, in principle, possible? Anyway, from Nature:

Nonsensical research papers generated by a computer program are still popping up in the scientific literature many years after the problem was first seen, a study has revealed. Some publishers have told Nature they will take down the papers, which could result in more than 200 retractions.

The issue began in 2005, when three PhD students created paper-generating software called SCIgen for “maximum amusement”, and to show that some conferences would accept meaningless papers. The program cobbles together words to generate research articles with random titles, text and charts, easily spotted as gibberish by a human reader. It is free to download, and anyone can use it.

By 2012, computer scientist Cyril Labbé had found 85 fake SCIgen papers in conferences published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE); he went on to find more than 120 fake SCIgen papers published by the IEEE and by Springer.

Richard Van Noorden, “Hundreds of gibberish papers still lurk in the scientific literature” at Nature

The most likely reason one can think of for the persistence of computer-generated gibberish in the science database is that many other papers sound like that — but are in fact authentic human creations — so no one really wants to go there.

How about this: Kim Kardashian’s Paper One Of Top Ten Science Retractions Of 2018

Guys, this wasn’t helping.

Okay. Here’s SCIgen

Here’s how SCIgen works, as Rob Sheldon explains. Robert J. Marks offers some thoughts on why it works.

If it’s any help, SciDetect was developed to spot the sci babble.

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Published on May 29, 2021 04:54

L&FP, 42a: The limit on Mathematical knowledge

Here, a video series explores Godel’s incompleteness results:

The core point is that Hilbert’s scheme collapsed, nicely summarised. The Godel incompleteness results and the Turing machine halting challenge made Mathematics irreducibly complex. So, Mathematics, too, is a venture of knowledge as warranted, credibly true (so reliable) belief, which must be open to correction.

An exercise of rational, responsible faith, not utter certainty on the whole, once a sufficiently complex system is on the table. (Yes, first duties of reason obtain . . . here, there be dragons that love chick peas [Cicero . . .].)

The defeasible [= defeat-able] framework for understanding knowledge extends to Mathematics. A fortiori to Computer Science and Physics, then onward across the spectrum of disciplines and praxis.

We walk by faith, and not by sight. The question, then — given the Agrippa trilemma —

A summary of why we end up with foundations for our worldviews, whether or not we would phrase the matter that way}

. . . is the worldviews question: which core first plausibles, why. END

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Published on May 29, 2021 01:58

May 28, 2021

A unified theory of physics is within reach?

According to a U Michigan prof:

Our observations to date push us in the direction of entertaining the existence of an Ur-theory of nature. Consider the fact that a left-handed electron has an electric charge of -1 under the electromagnetic force, a charge of 2 (a ‘spin charge’) under the weak gauge force, and a charge of 0 under the strong force. At the same time, the right-handed down quark has an electric charge of -1/3, a weak force charge of 0, and a strong force charge of 3 (a ‘3-dimensional unitary group charge’, though the mathematical details don’t need to be understood here). So, between these two particles, we have charges of 0, -1/3, -1, 2 and 3, etc for the different forces arranged in a particular manner. It’s a motley crew of jumbled-up numbers, which doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason to it. However, a school of mathematics known as group theory tells us that this is exactly the collection of charges that are needed to form a new grand unified particle: let’s call it P, which can be represented as P=(left-handed electron, left-handed neutrino, right-handed down quark).

Likewise, we can analyse more particles in the Standard Model, such as right-handed electrons, right-handed up quarks and left-handed up and down quarks. After many measurements, we find another set of willy-nilly values for the charges they display under all three gauge forces. But upon closer inspection using group theory mathematics, we find that those numbers also magically fit exactly into a single grand unified particle: W=(right-handed electron, left-handed down quark, right-handed and left-handed up quarks). It’s as though 10 very raggedy puzzle pieces scattered on the floor were pieced together to make a perfect circle.

It didn’t have to be this way. The charges of the elementary particles in our Universe could have been such that there was no way to unify any two or more of them into a single unified particle. It’s the combination of observational data and mathematics that offers us strong hints that the charges for elementary particles in the standard model aren’t arbitrary, but rather arise by virtue of being embedded into a grand unified theory framework.

James Wells, “Unified Universe” at Aeon

Well, isn’t that an argument for God? Join the line.

But others say, the idea of such a theory is discredited.

See also: Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit offers a shrewd assessment of Stephen Hawking and pop physicsHawking was looking for a unified theory and Woit thinks the idea is pretty much discredited now: “We now live in an environment where the idea that there may be a deeper, more unified theory has become completely discredited, through the efforts of many, with Hawking playing an unfortunate part.”

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Published on May 28, 2021 20:05

At Mind Matters News: More on the COVID-19 lab leak theory

It’s off topic for ID as such. But it is important for helping people work through a general principle that concerns all issues that pertain to science:

“Trust the science” is not a good approach when the science is so clearly not bound by any standards of grappling with the facts. (Darwinism anyone?)

But in this case, millions of people died. Millions of people would not have died over some silliness involving the tyrannosaur or the trilobite.

As Heather Zeiger reports, many scientists were discouraged from openly discussing the possibility of a lab leak, which hindered serious investigation:

The WSJ editorial board wrote that it is a shame that it has taken so long for the Biden administration to reopen an investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology “because the suspicious facts have been apparent from the start.” The board outlined circumstantial evidence that was dismissed because of political preferences rather than the strength of the evidence and pointed out that “news reports relished the divisions between the White House and scientific advisors.” Significantly, previous viral pandemics like SARS and MERS were traced to an animal source but so far, an animal origin for SARS-CoV-2 has not been found: “This scrutiny should have started a year ago, but media partisanship derailed fair discussion. Many ‘experts’ made political calculations and fell prey to groupthink rather than following the science.”

Heather Zeiger, “Covid-19 lab leak theory upgraded from conspiracy to plausible” at Mind Matters News

But “following the science ” has become a problematic concept. It does not seem to mean “following the evidence”:

Lab leaks happen. For example, in January of this year, Nicholson Baker, who has written about biological and chemical warfare based on public historical records of past lab accidents, wrote an article for New York Magazine making an excellent case for why a lab leak is plausible. He does not believe that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon, but based on his research of past lab accidents, he is confident that this pandemic was caused by an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

“A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical. Proposing that something unfortunate happened during a scientific experiment in Wuhan — where COVID-19 was first diagnosed and where there are three high-security virology labs, one of which held in its freezers the most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world — isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory. It merits attention, I believe, alongside other reasoned attempts to explain the source of our current catastrophe.

Nicholson Baker, “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?” at New York Magazine (January 4, 2021)

Baker talked to several experts who doubted the claimed consensus that SARS-CoV-2 originated outside a lab. Alina Chan with MIT and Harvard believes a lab leak is a reasonable assumption but she is also pessimistic about knowing for sure. Jonathan King, a molecular biologist and biosafety advocate from MIT, said that he and some colleagues were concerned about a lab leak but they had experienced subtle and intense pressure to not speak out. Baker also talked to three other molecular biologists and immunologists, one from NIH, another from University College of Medicine in Adelaide, Australia, and another from Rutgers, all of whom thought the lab leak was a valid possibility.

If you didn’t hear anything like this, for your own sake, change the science channels you listen to.

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Published on May 28, 2021 19:15

Wuhan ID Research Funded by Feds

See story here. A government probe last year into the origins of the coronavirus found practically no evidence COVID-19 originated from nature, former State Department official David Asher told Fox News on Thursday.

“We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19,” he told “America Reports.” . . .

Asher, the lead contractor on the subject, said the team investigated the two chief hypotheses for the virus’ origins, the other being the lab-leak theory that has gained credence after widespread media dismissal over the past year. . . .

“The data disproportionately stacked up as we investigated that it was coming out of a lab or some supernatural source,” he said.

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Published on May 28, 2021 06:35

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