Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 195

At Scientific American: We need a treaty with space aliens

To avoid a “cosmic catastrophe”:

The Harvard physicist who claimed the first interstellar visitor in 2017 was an alien craft, although the object has been determined to be a rock, says Earth needs to form treaties with extraterrestrial civilizations in order to keep the peace in space.

The stark warning comes from Avi Loeb in a new Scientific American op-ed, who believes an advanced civilization could create powerful machines that send particles and energy speeding through space that would burn everything in the galaxy – including our own planet.

Stacy Liberatore, “Harvard physicist suggests Earth needs treaties with extraterrestrial civilizations to avoid ‘a cosmic catastrophe’” at Daily Mail (May 25, 2021)

Here’s the op-ed:

In the long term, the need to sign a treaty is only pressing within our galaxy, the Milky Way, and its nearest neighbor, Andromeda; it does not extend beyond the Local Group of galaxies. Even without a treaty signed or honored on extended intergalactic scales, the accelerated expansion of the universe will ultimately save us from the risk of a Planck collider catastrophe. All galaxies beyond “Milkomeda” (the result of an eventual merger between Milky Way and Andromeda, which my colleague T.J. Cox and I named in a 2007 paper) will eventually recede away from us faster than light. As I showed in a 2002 paper, once all other galaxies leave our cosmic event horizon, nothing happening within them could affect us because all causal signals propagate at most at the speed of light. Once the universe ages by another factor of ten, Milkomeda will only be surrounded by dark space.

Avi Loeb, “How to Avoid a Cosmic Catastrophe” at Scientific American (May 23, 2021)

How be someone show us a fossil bacterium on Mars first?

This is part of the big new Trust the Science program, right?

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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Nature’s diversions: Creeping vole has weird sex chromosomes

Most mammals have routine distributions of sex chromosomes but not the creeping vole:

For example, while most placental and marsupial mammals have two X chromosomes in most of their cells, female creeping voles have just the one. Confusingly, where our sex cells halve their chromosome numbers, inside the tissues that produce ova in creeping voles you’ll find a double-X arrangement.

The males, at least according to Ohno, are more like typical mammals with an X and Y in each of the body’s non-sex cells and a single chromosome in the cell lines that give rise to sperm. Only for some reason it’s always the same ‘Y’ chromosome.

Mike McRae, “These Little Creatures Have The ‘Weirdest Sex Chromosome System Known to Science’” at ScienceAlert (May 21, 2021)

We are told this “weirdest sex chromosome system known to science” happened in the past couple of million years but it is not clear why.

The paper is closed access.

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At Evolution News: “Junk DNA” needed for limb formation

Mice that had it knocked out had severe congenital limb deformities:

A 2021 article in Nature, “Non-coding deletions identify Maenli lncRNA as a limb-specific En1 regulator,” reports important new functions for non-coding or “junk” DNA that underlie limb formation. Before we get to the paper itself, consider a description of it on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “Journal Club” blog. The latter describes the research in terms that sound like they could have come directly from an intelligent design source:

“Genes that code for proteins make up only about 2% of the human genome. Many researchers once dismissed the other 98% of the genome as “junk DNA,” but geneticists now know these noncoding regions help to regulate the activity of the 20,000 or so protein-coding genes identified.

“A new study in Nature underscores just how important noncoding DNA can be for human development. The authors show that deletions in a noncoding region of DNA on chromosome 2 cause severe congenital limb abnormalities. This is the first time a human disease has been definitively linked to mutations in noncoding DNA, says lead author Stefan Mundlos, head of the development and disease research group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany.”

The technical paper in Nature describes the research. The investigators examined the chromosomes of people who had naturally occurring limb malformation, and found that these people had deletions of DNA encoding long non-coding RNA sequences (lncRNAs) from human chromosome 2.

Casey Luskin, “Noncoding “Junk” DNA Is Important for Limb Formation” at Evolution News and Science Today

Then they replicated it in some unlucky mice.

The paper is closed access.

See also: Larry Moran’s new book sounds like a scorcher. He thinks there must be something “seriously wrong” with science if people keep looking for new functions for junk DNA. What’s “wrong,” so far as the rest of us can see, is that researchers keep finding new functions that formerly-junk DNA performs, so they keep looking. For the same reasons as fisherfolk return to the well-stocked lake.

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Another Darwinian who should surely be Canceled! by the Righteous Woke!

If they are even Darwin now, what chance does lesser light George Romanes have?

We hope we don’t get into some kind of trouble for even passing this on without fifty warning stickers. Or… would eighty maybe be enough?:

Popular Science Monthly Volume 31 July 1887 (1887) Mental Differences of Men and Women by George John Romanes

I will now briefly enumerate what appeared to me the leading features of this distinction in the case of mankind, adopting the ordinary classification of mental faculties as those of intellect, emotion, and will.

Seeing that the average brain-weight of women is about five ounces less than that of men, on merely anatomical grounds we should be prepared to expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the former.[1] Moreover, as the general physique of women is less robust than that of men—and therefore less able to sustain the fatigue of serious or prolonged brain-action—we should also, on physiological grounds, be prepared to entertain a similar anticipation. In actual fact we find that the inferiority displays itself most conspicuously in a comparative absence of originality, and this more especially in the higher levels of intellectual work. In her powers of acquisition the woman certainly stands nearer to the man than she docs in her powers of creative thought, although even as regards the former there is a marked difference. The difference, however, is one which does not assert itself till the period of adolescence—young girls being, indeed, usually more acquisitive than boys of the same age, as is proved by recent educational experiences both in this country and in America. But as soon as the brain, and with it the organism as a whole, reaches the stage of full development, it becames apparent that there is a greater power of amassing knowledge on the part of the male. Whether we look to the general average or to the intellectual giants of both sexes, we are similarly met with the general fact that a woman’s information is less wide, and deep, and thorough, than that of a man …

Yawn. Move over and make room for Cancel!ed Romanes.

Sure it’s all nonsense but so?

Has anyone noticed what a bore Woke Cancel! culture is becoming? Well, an American comedian has:

Lots of language warnings here but Bill Maher has more or less got Cancel Culture right:

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.

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?

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Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit offers a shrewd assessment of Stephen Hawking and pop physics

In relation to Charles Seife’s new book Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity.

Hawking 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.”

Hawking was a huge world-wide celebrity, widely considered by the public and the press to be the modern-day analog of Einstein, dominating the field of theoretical physics. His personal story, involving a long life battling a disease that left him quadraplegic and severely disabled, added greatly to the phenomenon he became. His life has been the subject of various books, films and TV shows, but only now, three years after his death, has something appeared that gives an account of this life corresponding not to myth but to reality.

The reality of this story is that Hawking was a very good theorist, with a high point of his career his work on Hawking radiation in 1974. I remember attending lectures by him at Princeton in the early 1980s, when he was actively working on Euclidean quantum gravity. His speech was hard to follow, so one of his graduate students or postdocs would translate for the audience. Unfortunately, the disease continued to take its toll, and after he nearly died from it in 1985, losing the ability to speak to a tracheostomy, all evidence I’ve seen is that he was no longer able to continue to do research at the highest level. From then on he lived a remarkable and full life for another 33 years, including some collaborative work with other theorists, but he was no longer the driving force behind any new research programs. Seife quotes extensively many physicists who worked with Hawking during this time, including Andy Strominger and Hawking’s student Marika Taylor, who give a fairly good idea of what it was like to work with him.

Peter Woit, “Hawking Hawking” at Not Even Wrong (April 8, 2021)

Apparently, Hawking was hopeful for certain conclusions but didn’t really know much about “what was going on in string/M-theory.”

The reality, as Woit points out, is that Hawking probably did not write a good deal of what is attributed to him. In short, Hawking’s corpus was, in large part, what various popular science writers wanted us to accept. And people accepted it because it seemed acceptable. Nobody checked. Most did not want to.

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Can the universe learn?, physicists ask

Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics explains:

The universe could be teaching itself how to evolve into a better, more stable, cosmos. That’s the far-out idea proposed by a team of scientists who say they are reimagining the universe just as Darwin revamped our view of the natural world.

The controversial new idea attempts to explain why the laws of physics are as we see them using a mathematical framework to describe various proposed theories in physics, such as quantum field theories and quantum gravity. The result is a system similar to a machine-learning program.

Mara Johnson-Groh, “Can the Universe Learn?” at RealClearScience

If the universe is really similar to a machine learning system, as they suggest, then, no question, it was designed. All machine learning systems are designed. Are the physicists prepared to unpack that?

In order to have a universe that evolves, the researchers proposed an idea called the autodidactic universe — a universe that is self-learning. In this case, the learning would happen similar to how a machine-learning algorithm works, where feedback at one stage influences the next, with the goal of reaching a more stable energy state.

“We’re trying to change the conversation much the way that Darwin the biologist had to change the conversation to get a deeper understanding for the subject,” said author Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Canada.

Mara Johnson-Groh, “Can the Universe Learn?” at RealClearScience

But guys, Darwin would say you had killed his baby.

Never mind. Keep talking. Just keep talking.

The paper is open access.

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Will dualists win the consciousness argument?

Quantum mechanics requires that the observer be part of the measurement; thus quantum measurements must include consciousness:

Angus Menuge: Well, likewise, what if physics will conclude finally that we can’t reduce consciousness to any ordinary physical phenomena? We just recognize it as its own kind of thing. And in fact, we need it in order to have a complete physics. After all, if you want the theory of everything that Stephen Hawking wants, in the end, as Thomas Nagel said, the theory of everything has to include the scientist as well as the world the scientist observes.

If I am going to have an account that fully explains what’s going on when a scientist measures a system in quantum physics and deals with entanglement and all these other things, what if it turns out that that account must appeal to consciousness? Does consciousness then become part of physics?

If it does, then — in a way — the debate between physicalists and dualists dissipates because the physical has just absorbed consciousness.

But the dualists would have won in the sense that consciousness doesn’t reduce to any of these other things. That is what they’ve been claiming for a few centuries…

News, “ Can a materialist consciousness theory survive quantum mechanics?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: If quantum measurements must include consciousness, the dualists are correct, says philosopher Angus Menuge: Consciousness exists in its own right.

Here are the earlier discussions in this podcast:

Part 1: Angus Menuge explains why “red” is such a problem in philosophy. “Red” is an example of qualia, concepts we can experience that have no physical existence otherwise. Materialism would be easy if it weren’t for concepts like “red” which are quite real but abstracted from physical reality.

Part 2: Panpsychism is, in Angus Menuge’s view, a desperate move. But he thinks it is worth keeping an eye on as an understandable reaction to materialism. Menuge argues that one problem for panpsychism is that consciousness is unitary; it does not seem composed of innumerable tiny proto-conscious elements.

Part 3: Can quantum mechanics help decipher consciousness? Free will? Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, among others, looked to the quantum world for models. Angus Menuge thinks that physicists John von Neumann’s and Henry Stapp’s models of quantum mechanics provide some directions.

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Is total control over thought via technocracy possible?

The Chinese Communist Party is trying it. Religion is their test case:

The U.S. Department of State’s just-released 2020 Annual Report on the state of religious freedom around the world devotes 136 pages to China. That’s because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses an extensive network of surveillance cameras coupled with facial recognition software — as well as cell phone tracking, internet and message monitoring, and biometric profiling — to persecute adherents of non-state-sanctioned organizations. Advances in collecting and storage of massive amounts of data to be sifted by algorithms have made this possible…

Westerners find it difficult to understand the persecution of groups like the Falun Gong, the Church of Almighty God, and others that offer no apparent political threat. But the persecution of “heterodox groups” does not turn on their aims or beliefs so much as the number of their members and whether those members could organize. Ultimately, the CCP wants everyone to adhere to its ideology, so violent actions are more about quelling potential resistance than about regulating beliefs. …

China scholars note that the CCP is very interested in studying how other authoritarian governments were toppled. The CCP, and Xi Jinping in particular, are obsessed with the fall of the Soviet Union. They don’t see the collapse as due to inherent weakness but rather due to tolerance of dissent. To them, it shows the importance of weeding out dissent and corruption as well as controlling the military from the top down. The military and other government elites must not have split loyalties, even religious loyalties. Thus they must be avowedly atheist and study Xi Jinping Thought. Even retired CCP officials and veterans are prohibited from practicing any religion.

Heather Zeiger, “Why the Chinese Communist party feels it must destroy religion” at Mind Matters News

Takehome points:

– Persecution of religious groups is not based on what they actually teach but on whether their separate existence could pose a threat to the Communist Party

– Obsessed with the fall of the Soviet Union, Party leaders are determined to use new laws and technologies to render religious influence impossible.

Let’s see what happens in China. This could be an important test of human exceptionalism.

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Repackaging Buddhism for Darwinists… Or Darwinism for Buddhists?

Bronze statue of Buddha at Kamakura, Japan/Vilam Skarolek

Atheistic naturalists sometimes try to co-opt Buddhism. An attempt to naturalize the non-materialist doctrine of reincarnation for a soul-free universe seems to be one result:

But taking reincarnation seriously doesn’t just mean thinking about the ecological or political potential of its doctrines. It also means thinking seriously about the failure of any doctrine to realise its mission. This is another reason why we shouldn’t excise reincarnation from the modern understanding of Buddhism. Consider, as an example, the work of the writer and scholar Robert Wright and his popular book Why Buddhism Is True (2017). According to Wright, Buddhism is true because it understands something very specific about the effect of natural selection on the human condition. Namely, that evolution is driven by fleeting pleasure. Humans seek satisfaction through eating and copulating, only to find that the pleasure from these activities is remarkably evanescent. And yet, nevertheless, we get up and try to find satisfaction through them every day. Wright says that this is a neat trick of natural selection, which is driven simply by the blind will of the species to continue. If we were completely sated by our meals or sexual encounters, we wouldn’t have the same urge to keep doing them. So evolution tricks us into thinking that we’ll achieve satisfaction, when we never will. The trouble is that this cycle of pleasure, satisfaction and dissatisfaction is, well, rather unsatisfying. And this is what Buddhism understands and what mindfulness meditation can help cure. To perpetually pursue satisfaction is suffering. To become aware of this process and gain distance from it through mindfulness provides relief.

Early in his book, Wright makes a qualification about what he thinks is true in Buddhism. He writes: ‘I’m not talking about the “supernatural” or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism – reincarnation, for example.’ But if we look at the story that he’s told us about the truth of Buddhism, we will actually see reincarnation at work. First, in the sense that every human bears traces of historical processes that happened long before any of us were alive. Second, in that humans are driven by a fundamental process of the endless reincarnation of pleasure. Third, that when we think we’re moving past a problem, we’re often just creating a new version of it. Thus evolution, for example, solved the problem of how to keep the species going by creating other problems of survival for that very species – whether through epidemics of obesity or the greed for pleasure that leads people to pillage and destroy others.

Avram Alpert, “Reincarnation now” at Aeon

Trying to accommodate Buddhism with Darwinian natural selection is something a person would only do if the true commitment is to natural selection.

It shows that the faith persists, despite worldly obstacles.

See, for example, 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?

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Barack Obama implies, maybe, keep the space alien thing going…

This seems to be space aliens night. Everyone’s here except the aliens. Which is typical. In fact, so, far, universal.

Barack Obama offered, on James Corden’s Late Late Show:

“When it comes to aliens, there are things I just can’t tell you on air,” Obama said.

He elaborated, adding: “The truth is that when I came into office, I asked. I was like, ‘Is there a lab somewhere where we’re keeping the alien specimens and space ships?’

“They did a little bit of research and the answer is no.”

The former president did share some tangible information in a more serious manner.

“But what is true – and I’m actually being serious here – is that there’s footage and records of objects in the sky that we don’t know exactly what they are,” he said.

“We can’t explain how they move, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. I think people still take seriously [the task of] trying to investigate and figure out what that is. But I have nothing to report to you today.”

Clémence Michallon, “Barack Obama answers questions about aliens on James Corden’s show” at MSN

We wonder, if former president Donald Trump had said it, would the same people take the aliens seriously? How much of this is just cultural folklore?

Say what you want, the aliens are good for the cultural fluff news business, whether they exist or not. Better, on the whole, if they don’t. Just like if you own an inn and you can somehow get a reputation for it that it is haunted, you’ll get lots of free publicity (= advertising).

See also: At Science: Water bears most likely did not survive a crash land on the moon. What impact does the test have on panspermia, the hypothesis that life might travel between planets via comets? “some parts of a meteorite impacting Earth or Mars would experience lower shock pressures that a tardigrade could live through, Traspas says.”

and

Christian Scientific Society webinar May 29: Topic is space aliens The title is “Is there intelligent life in outer space? What are the stakes?” Free with registration.

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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