Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 194

May 27, 2021

Cells compared across species — expected to be similar — prove strikingly different

At least according to an algorithm:

Researchers created an algorithm to identify similar cell types from species – including fish, mice, flatworms and sponges – that have diverged for hundreds of millions of years, which could help fill in gaps in our understanding of evolution.

Cells are the building blocks of life, present in every living organism. But how similar do you think your cells are to a mouse? A fish? A worm? …

“I was struck by how stark the differences are between them,” said Tarashansky, who was lead author of the paper and is a Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Fellow. “We thought that they should have similar cell types, but when we try analyzing them using standard techniques, the method doesn’t recognize them as being similar.”

Stanford University, “Bioengineers Develop Algorithm to Compare Cells Across Species – With Striking Results” at SciTechDaily

But now get this:

Tarashansky said a highlight of the research was when they were comparing stem cells between two very different flatworms.

“The fact that we did find one-to-one matches in their stem cell populations was really exciting,” he said. “I think that basically unlocked a lot of new and exciting information about how stem cells look inside a parasitic flatworm that infects hundreds of millions of people all over the world.”

Stanford University, “Bioengineers Develop Algorithm to Compare Cells Across Species – With Striking Results” at SciTechDaily

So by the time they got to flatworms, they actually saw significant similarities. Doesn’t that prompt more questions than answers?

The paper is open access.

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Published on May 27, 2021 21:46

Big Science: Questioning the lab leak theory of COVID-19 is “divisive”

Oh sure.

“Allegations that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab make it harder for nations to collaborate on ending the pandemic — and fuel online bullying, some scientists say”:

Calls to investigate Chinese laboratories have reached a fever pitch in the United States, as Republican leaders allege that the coronavirus causing the pandemic was leaked from one, and as some scientists argue that this ‘lab leak’ hypothesis requires a thorough, independent inquiry. But for many researchers, the tone of the growing demands is unsettling. They say the volatility of the debate could thwart efforts to study the virus’s origins.

Global-health researchers also warn that the growing demands are exacerbating tensions between the United States and China ahead of crucial meetings at which world leaders will make high-level decisions about how to curb the pandemic and prepare for future health emergencies.

Amy Maxmen, “Divisive COVID ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers” at Nature

Reality check: Millions of people have died in this debacle. That’s nothing new for the Chinese Communist Party. But it’s a bit of a kick in the head for the rest of us. If distinguishing between truth and lies is “divisive,” so be it. The Nature article is a shameful display.

Not only should the Wuhan lab be thoroughly investigated by a serious impartial body but any lab working at that level with viruses worldwide should likewise be investigated.

If we don’t think that just anyone with a cause should have nuclear warheads, we should also not think that just anybody who owns a lab coat should be working with deadly viruses.

Let’s hope the pressure increases. Yes, indeed, Big Brother, this is all doubleplusungood. Allthewaydown.

See also: The COVID-19 saga is getting people talking about bogus scientific consensus For some months there has been a bogus consensus that the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan was a crackpot conspiracy theory. Then the dam broke. People may understand the concept better now.

How Big Tech manufactured a science “consensus” against a lab leak of COVID-19. It’s one thing to trust Darwinblither, just to take an example, when nothing immediate is at stake. But if we agree that COVID-19 is a problem, let’s evaluate more carefully what we have been told on the Authority of Science. And take in the fact that Big Tech backed up the Authority of Science when it was obviously way off base.

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Published on May 27, 2021 20:29

At YouTube: How Evolution Can Still Be Evidence of Design

In this video, Dr. Rope Kojonen (philosopher/theologian) and Dr. Zachary Ardern (evolutionary geneticist) explain how evolution can be evidence of design, based on Dr. Kojonen’s forthcoming book, “The Compatibility of Evolution and Design.”

The video is sponsored by Cameron Bertuzzi and went up (at time of writing) nine hours ago.

The point of view they represent was, we are told, pioneered by Asa Gray (1810–1888, pictured), father of American botany. Gray is remembered now only as a foil for Darwin (as portrayed in the Britannica entry below). But he deserves to be remembered and have his views represented fairly in his own right:

Gray was one of the few persons whom Darwin kept fully informed concerning the publication of his Origin of Species (1859). Gray was a devout Christian, however, and, although he did accept natural selection as the cause of new species, he did not believe it to be the only cause of variation, which he considered to be caused by some inherent power imparted in the beginning by divine agency. Indeed, he was one of the first advocates of the idea of theistic evolution, which holds that natural selection is one of the mechanisms with which God directs the natural world. Gray, an excellent writer of philosophical essays, biographies, and scientific criticism, staunchly supported Darwin’s theories and collected his supporting papers into the widely influential Darwiniana (1876, reprinted 1963). – Britannica

A friend writes to say that further instalments are expected.

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Published on May 27, 2021 19:39

Do we really understand what intelligence in life forms is?

Thinking about Jeff Hawkins‘s new book, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (Basic Books 2021), championing the mammalian neocortex, for example, one might ask, what does the iconic mammalian neocortex do that equivalent systems in birds and octopuses can’t do? That’s not clear:

It’s not even clear any more that intelligence (never mind consciousness, a bigger and much more difficult issue) has a systematic mechanical relationship to the brain. Smart birds are now a staple of discussions of animal intelligence and so are smart octopuses (invertebrates). They have quite different brain arrangements from mammals.

That’s assuming a brain is even needed, depending on the task. We’ve also discovered that one-celled life forms with no nervous system or brain can learn. Slime molds can make decisions collectively without any central brain. Even bacteria show intelligence in some situations. And plants form communities with extensive relationships and communications without the question of a brain even coming up.

Many life forms, especially mammals, birds, and — for example — octopuses, can be shown to have not only intelligence but some level of consciousness and emotion (minimal self) though not specifically human levels of cognition.

Meanwhile, our human consciousness remains something of a mystery. It has no apparent seat in the brain. People are conscious in a human way with split brains, half a brain, or almost no brain. If our mammalian neocortex features a thousand brains, as Hawkins suggests, none seems explicitly tied to human consciousness in particular.

News, “Intelligence: A thousand brains — or a thousand theories?” at Mind Matters News

And human intelligence is something different again.

Takehome: Jeff Hawkins’s approach — applying AI concepts to the neocortex — offers interesting analogies but seems to leave the central questions untouched.

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Published on May 27, 2021 18:51

May 26, 2021

Origin of Life: Brian Miller’s take on debate between James Tour and Dave Farina

Occasioned, of course, by YouTube science educator Dave Farina’s video series and synthetic organic chemist James Tour’s responding video series. Miller discusses the conflict with host Eric Anderson:

Tour has argued that no one — not even the most elite of origin-of-life scientists — has a clue how life could have arisen through blind natural forces on the early Earth. Farina created a YouTube response on his channel arguing that Tour is wrong and that origin-of-life researchers are well on their way to solving the mystery of life’s origin. Tour responded in his own YouTube video series. Now Miller and Anderson boil it all down and argue that Tour is right and Farina wrong on multiple levels.

Brian Miller, “Origin of Life: Brian Miller Distills a Debate Between Dave Farina and James Tour” at Evolution News and Science Today (May 25, 2021)

Podcast here.

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Published on May 26, 2021 20:48

Are there really any “primitive” animals?

Our philosopher and photographer friend Laszlo Bencze proposes a cultural reason why Darwinism sounds believable. He points out that Charles Darwin lived in an era of continuous mechanical improvements. Did that shape his — and others’ — optimism about things that “just sort of happen” in nature? He writes,

I have argued on this site that Darwin would have been heavily influenced by the advances in steam technology that occurred during his lifetime. The engines prevalent during his youth in the 1830s would have been superseded by far more advanced and more efficient engines during his maturity in the 1870s. Being an intelligent and well read gentleman who probably subscribed to several popular and scientific journals, he would have encountered articles touting such improvements as high pressure steam, the compound beam engine, and its successor, the horizontal reciprocating steam engine. Each step in this cascade of improvement gained greater efficiency, power, and safety. And of course there would have been countless minor improvements, each one displaying engineering cleverness and adding a little bit of refinement. By the end of the 19th century steam technology was a world away from the primitive machines of 1830.

We can call the early steam engines primitive based on objective criteria. The early Newcomen engines of the 18th century had an efficiency of 0.5% to 1.0%. These engines operated by condensing steam drawn into the cylinder with an injection of cold water. This created a partial vacuum which allowed the atmospheric pressure to push the piston into the cylinder. We might ask how such poor performance could possibly have been accepted. The answer is that despite the low efficiency, the Newcomen engines were much better than using horses. Also, they were well suited to the poor machining technology of the times. The piston did not have to fit perfectly into the cylinder. A leather piston ring would make it tight enough to function well. The Watt steam engine (based on Newcomen’s design) doubled the efficiency to 2%. Further advances by Oliver Evans and other engineers incrementally improved efficiency until it had attained 17% by 1900, an 850% improvement.

So now I must ask whether there is a biological equivalent to the Newcomen engine. Has there ever been a plant or animal which functioned at such a low level of efficiency that it was barely getting along? The fossil record certainly does not reveal any such living thing. We find vast populations of trilobites that seem to have thrived over wide areas of the oceans. There’s no sign that they were on the knife edge of extinction. The same is true for the immense forests of ferns of the Carboniferous era. Everywhere we look, we find beautifully adapted biology that persists robustly for millions of years. There really are no primitive sharks, dinosaurs, or mammals. They all seem to have been exquisitely well suited to their environments.

When we call anything primitive we are merely revealing our prejudices. The amoeba which Darwin would have characterized as a primitive life form consisting of a simple cell wall and protoplasm turns out to be an astonishingly complicated chemical factory equipped with sophisticated feedback systems that allow it to chase prey and maneuver to safety. Being small and unicellular is not the same as being primitive in terms of technology.

I propose that the concept of “primitive” which applies very well to technology—think of your first computer with its puny 40 MB of memory—does not at all apply to living things. By allowing the analogy with technology to inform his understanding of biology Darwin made a major error. Unfortunately, this error has not been noticed among scientists because they are so committed to the fundamental notion of incremental improvement. They see Newcomen engines everywhere.

Not that the industrial transformations just sort of happened, of course. But perhaps we can count on a gentleman not to have noticed all those nobodies toiling away…

See also: How can life forms show intelligence with no brain? A Wall Street Journal piece points to the flatworm as an example.

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Published on May 26, 2021 20:25

How Big Tech manufactured a science “consensus” against a lab leak of COVID-19

Because it is becoming dangerous now to just “Trust the Science” without knowing what goes into it:

Facebook was especially aggressive in this regard. Last spring, the company flagged as false and then banned a New York Post column by Steven Mosher making the case for the plausibility of the lab-leak theory. Mosher argued that the virus’s emergence in a city where gain-of-function research was being conducted on coronaviruses found in bats, the Chinese government’s reaction to it, and the historical record all suggested that its proliferation in people might very well be due to human error in a laboratory setting…

In September, Facebook also fact-checked an article from WION — an English-language Indian television channel and website — featuring quotes from Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese doctor who has alleged that the virus did escape from a lab in Wuhan. While some of Yan’s scientific work and explanations for her specific version of the theory have been widely criticized, that is not what ultimately earned the fact check. Instead, it was Yan’s claim that the Chinese government was silencing medical doctors about the virus that Facebook found objectionable.

It’s unclear why. It has been common knowledge since the very beginning that China has suppressed scientists who have tried to get information about the disease out to the rest of the world.

Isaac Schorr, “How Big Tech Silenced the Earliest Lab-Leak Theory Proponents” at National Review

It’s one thing to trust Darwinblither, just to take an example, when nothing immediate is at stake. But if we agree that COVID-19 is a problem, let’s evaluate more carefully what we have been told on the Authority of Science.

And let’s take in the fact that Big Tech backed up the Authority of Science when it was obviously way off base.

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Published on May 26, 2021 19:39

Physicist Brian Cox: Maybe we are all holograms…

At least some media types noticed that such a claim is pretty far out:

Professor Brian Cox left This Morning viewers scratching their heads today after making a bizarre claim that humans ‘might be holograms’.

The British physicist, 53, appeared on the programme to promote his new live tour Horizons: A 2021 Space Odyssey, which will explore profound questions such as how the universe began.

While discussing the role of black holes in the evolution of the universe, Brian claimed the universe ‘might not be at all the way we perceive it to be’ and suggested we could all be holograms – but failed to elaborate before host Ruth Langsford moved the conversation on.

Monica Greep, “Professor Brian Cox baffles This Morning viewers with bizarre theory that the universe ‘may not be the way we perceive it to be’ and suggests all humans are actually HOLOGRAMS” at Daily Mail

Brian Cox, the “rock star scientist who made particle physics cool” may be par for the course now. Actually, for cosmology, he may be tame. The “science” we are all supposed to trust, as in “believe the science” features a good deal of this stuff now. Even the media are possibly beginning to wonder.

Sabine Hossenfelder offers some less far out thoughts:

This duality has been mathematically confirmed for some specific cases, but pretty much all string theorists seem to believe it is much more generally valid. In fact, a lot of them seem believe it is valid even in our universe, even though there is no evidence for that, neither observational nor mathematical. In this most general form, the duality is simply called the “holographic principle”.

If the holographic principle was correct, it would mean that the information about any volume in our universe is encoded on the boundary of that volume. That’s remarkable because naively, you’d think the amount of information you can store in a volume of space grows much faster than the information you can store on the surface. But according to the holographic principle, the information you can put into the volume somehow isn’t what we think it is. It must have more correlations than we realize. So it the holographic principle was true, that would be very interesting. I talked about this in more detail in an earlier video.

The holographic principle indeed sounds a little like optical holography. In both cases one encodes information about a volume on a surface with one dimension less. But if you look a little more closely, there are two important differences between the holographic principle and real holography:

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Is the universe REALLY a hologram?” at BackRe(Action) (March 27, 2021)

That sounds like a long circuit around “fashionable malarkey.”

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 26, 2021 19:04

May 25, 2021

The COVID-19 saga is getting people talking about bogus scientific consensus

For some months there has been a bogus consensus that the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan was a crackpot conspiracy theory:

About two weeks ago, 18 highly respected scientists wrote to Science Magazine that “we must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously.”

And no less an authority than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the very talisman of science for roughly half the country, has now reversed himself and no longer rules out the lab theory.

The science writer Nicholas Wade wrote a long article on Medium earlier this month that was a breakthrough in the debate. He noted that a letter in The Lancet in February 2020 and another letter in Nature Medicine a month later had huge roles in ruling the lab theory out-of-bounds, even though the missives were premature or otherwise flawed…

It’s not as though a lab leak is a scenario out of science fiction. Wade notes it is dismayingly common: “The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960s and 1970s, causing 80 cases and three deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since.

Rich Lowry, “Beware of bogus scientific consensus” at Jewish World Review (May 26, 2021)

Most people, understandably, don’t care that much about bogus consenses that don’t affect them. So it’s hard to talk about the problem. A bogus consensus around a life-threatening disease may be, unfortunately, what is needed to get their attention for the problem in general.

See also: Getting to the bottom of what happened in China China knowingly violated the terms of a World Health Organization (WHO) disclosure agreement.

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Published on May 25, 2021 20:48

Michael Flannery on the attack on Darwin’s Descent of Man in AAAS’s mag Science

The science historian offers congratulations and bit of reading advice:

I must congratulate the prestigious journal Science for reiterating many of those points in a recent editorial, “‘The Descent of Man,’ 150 Year On,” by Princeton anthropologist Augustin Fuentes. He is quite correct when he says, “Darwin portrayed Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia as less than Europeans in capacity and behavior. Peoples of the African continent were consistently referred to as cognitively depauperate, less capable, and of a lower rank than other races.” Moreover, Fuentes charges Darwin with going “beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through ‘survival of the fittest.’ This too is confounding given Darwin’s robust stance against slavery.”

I agree. But as I pointed out, historically one cannot confidently trace a straight line from opposing slavery to supporting racial equality. I emphasized this years ago in my review of Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s misguided Darwin’s Sacred Cause.Furthermore, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s indefatigable “Bulldog,” wrote a shameful essay on May 20, 1865, shortly after the conclusion of the American Civil War. He suggested that the South should be relieved given that it was no longer responsible for the care and “protection” of the now-former slaves. He declared that “no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.” A reform-minded American Darwinist, Charles Loring Brace, concurred.

Michael Flannery, “Congratulations to Science Magazine for an Honest Portrayal of Darwin’s Descent of Man” at Evolution News and Science Today

All which said, Michael Flannery is not calling for the book to be Cancel!ed. He makes some sensible recommendations for reading and study, making use of Ashley Montagu’s distillation and critique.

See also: Attack on Darwinism at AAAS’s flagship mag “Science” re racism and sexism Let’s pass over the question of why Cool People never noticed that stuff about Charles Darwin for nearly a century and a half. Noticing now? Good. Then what does Agustín Fuentes suppose should replace Darwinism? A war on science? A war on math? A war on people who think getting right answers is a good thing? What’s supposed to be the next step?

and

Another Darwinian who should surely be Canceled! by the Righteous Woke! Yawn. Move over and make room for Cancel!ed George Romanes. Or… Whatever Cancel Culture demands that we do, let’s all just stop doing it. Soon, they will be looking for really small holes to hide in.

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Published on May 25, 2021 20:08

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