Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 2

Darwin a slavery abolitionist? Aw, come on!

Luther College prof Robert F. Shedinger takes a critical look at Evolution News:

In 2009, noted Darwinian biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore published Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery, and the Quest for Human Origins. They argued the radical new thesis that Darwin’s species work was primarily motivated by an abolitionist desire to combat racist polygenist views of human origins and instead draw all humans together under the umbrella of common descent. This book has been both widely praised and widely criticized…

Shockingly, it turns out that these highly esteemed scholars play fast and loose with their sources and with basic tenets of historiographical research.

Therefore, I offer a series of posts here designed to lay out the evidence in detail. It is not merely that Desmond and Moore are selective in the sources they cite, filtering out only those which support their thesis. Many historians are selective. What I found in their historiography rises, instead, to a different level. – (March 16, 2023)

Note: The slave trade in Britain was abolished in 1807 and slavery through almost all the British empire in 1833 Charles Darwin’s life dates were 1809–1882, so he never knew a time when human beings were literally for sale in his own country. The biggest social issues of 19th century Britain revolved around wage slavery (including countless children) in the factories. It would be more interesting to know what he had to say about that than to hear his fashionable upper class Brit theories about the evils of chattel slavery elsewhere.

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Give Dawkins credit for guts: He is taking on the “gender” claims

Here’s a link to the full interview with Piers Morgan:

He will at least get to experience the world when one is not part of the In crowd.

Richard believes that religion is just a vehicle to try and understand things which are too complex for humans to understand. Piers questions how he can say with such confidence that a God doesn’t exist, Richard replies by saying that it’s possible, just like having “fairies at the bottom of your garden”. Richard then explains that as a biologist who studies evolution, he can say with confidence that when it comes to gender “There are two sexes and that’s all there is to it”. Richard also suggests that people such as JK Rowling have been bullied on social media for standing up for their opinion which he claims is damaging to society by not having the wider debate on the issue.

You may also wish to read: Jerry Coyne defends the sex binary in animals. Gotta hand it to Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, he’s a brave one. He is taking on the Woke claim that sex isn’t really binary in animals.

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Of Dragonflies, Spitfires and Elliptical Wings

The Dragonfly is a marvel of nature, rated to be one of the all time most effective predators. Similarly, the Spitfire was a breakthrough, fighter-interceptor in the skies over Britain, just under eighty-three years ago. And, oddly, both share a common design feature, elliptical wings:

This is of course an interesting convergence of natural and human technologies. Though, the advantages are with the Dragonfly, a natural helicopter.

The Spitfire’s wings:

(More details, here.)

U/D, Mar 23: Note the clipped wings and radial engine of the Hawker Sea Fury (many later Spitfires also had clipped wings):

Notice, the P-47:

also, the MiG 15, showing where onward technological evolution would go:

The Dragonfly:

It’s worth noting on the Pterostigma, a counterweight often seen as a dark block towards the tip of the leading edge:

The action has been summarised by Norberg:

The pterostigma of insect wings usually is a pigmented spot close to the leading edge far out on the wing, having a greater mass than an equally large wing piece in adjacent wing regions . . . A wing having its mass axis behind its torsion axis is very susceptible to self-excited coupled flapping and feathering vibrations, making gliding flight above a critical speed impossible. Due to unfavourable, inertial, wing pitching tendencies, a still lower speed limit is set to active flight. Due to its mass contribution and favourable location, the pterostigma tends to raise these speed limits by causing favourable, inertial, pitching moments during the acceleration phases of wing flapping . . . The function of the pterostigma of raising the critical gliding speed, at which self-excited vibrations set in, was demonstrated in dragonflies. Although contributing only 0.1 % (one pterostigma) of the total dragonfly weight, it raised the critical speed by 10–25% in one species.

The beauty and subtlety of design! END

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Stephen Hawking’s co-author: Hawking thought that his Brief History of Time was wrong

At The Guardian:

In 2002 Thomas Hertog received an email summoning him to the office of his mentor Stephen Hawking. The young researcher rushed to Hawking’s room at Cambridge. “His eyes were radiant with excitement,” Hertog recalls.

Typing on the computer-controlled voice system that allowed the cosmologist to communicate, Hawking announced: “I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective.”

Thus one of the biggest-selling scientific books in publishing history, with worldwide sales credited at more than 10m, was consigned to the waste bin by its own author. Hawking and Hertog then began working on a new way to encapsulate their latest thinking about the universe. – Robin McKie (March 19, 2023)

The outcome is a new book, On the Origin of Time (Penguin Random House, April, 2023).

According to Hertog, the new perspective that he has achieved with Hawking reverses the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics and is “profoundly Darwinian” in spirit. “It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organising entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics.” – Robin McKie (March 19, 2023)

But doesn’t self-organization of the universe, as is now suggested, entail some sort of panpsychism?

You may also wish to read: Why is science growing comfortable with panpsychism (“everything is conscious”)?

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If two snowflakes are identical, does that increase information?

We asked this question among friends and received a variety of answers.

One answer was that there was no further information. Another was that the two snowflakes might differ by one bit. Another was that finding two identical snowflakes would be more meaningful because it would create conversations.

Here’s a longer answer:

Remember the critical distinction between mere “complexity” and “information-bearing sequences.”

Snowflakes carry no information, no matter how many. They perform no function, because their shapes do not conform to an externally specified pattern or set of rules that would enable them to perform any function (like conveying information).

Many StrawMan attacks against ID theory will tend to focus solely on complexity alone and then use examples like snowflakes to debunk the claim that natural processes cannot produce mere complexity. But that is not ID theory, but a Straw Man.

Now, It might TAKE information to CAUSE two snowflakes to have identical shapes, because the undirected physical processes that form them have so many variables that the odds of producing two identical ones naturally are remote. ID theory may infer that intelligent/intentional causation would be required to produce two literally identical snowflakes, if one could calculate the probability of natural forces to produce that pattern twice.

Even then, the odds may be low but not impossibly low, and so the inference they were designed would not be strong. Ten identical snowflakes would produce a stronger inference.

But if the two “snowflakes” were plastic snowflake replicas like those sold in stores around Christmas, then knowing nothing in the physical processes associated with melted plastic congealing requires them to have that shape, coupled with the fact that both conform to the EXTERNALLY SPECIFIED pattern of what we imagine a stylized snowflake looks like, and the odds against a pool of melted plastic just happening to cool in those specific shapes not just once, but twice, would be astronomically remote. Design is obvious in those cases.

Even then, though, those plastic snowflakes contain no information, as they perform no function, not even communication. They simply exist.

Thoughts?

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Joseph Miller: ChatGPT Still Can’t Process Basic Logic (if God is mentioned)

At More Than Cake:

January 9th

ChatGPT To those unfamiliar with logic, the argument I presented to ChatGPT is a textbook example of a logically valid argument that is unsound.

“Is this a logically valid argument.

All red beings exists.

Bob is a red being.

Therefore, Bob exists.”

The good news is that ChatGPT gets it right. This argument is valid because it has the proper form. But when I exchange the word “God” for “Bob” then ChatGPT goes off the rails. (March 18, 2023)

Hmmm. A machine doesn’t do that. Something did it but it isn’t the machine.

And, as Miller tells it, when tested again in March, ChatGPT could no longer recognize a logically valid argument. Wow. Progress.

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Otangelo Grasso’s new book, Confirming Yeshua

In two volumes.

Blurb: “Confirming Yeshua” Volume 1 is an invaluable resource for readers seeking a deeper understanding of the evidence supporting the reality of Jesus Christ. Volume 1 explores one by one the fulfillment of over 300 prophecies about the Messiah in the life of Jesus, examines the historical reliability of the gospels, and provides evidence for the events surrounding the resurrection of Christ. With careful analysis of archaeological findings and textual evidence, the book demonstrates strong evidence supporting the historicity of Jesus and the accuracy of the Gospel accounts. In a world where misinformation and wrong claims are widely disseminated, “Confirming Yeshua” provides a comprehensive and evidence-based response to objections raised against the historicity of Jesus and his resurrection.

Also discussed here.

Confirming Yeshua Volume 1, Kindle version

As a paperback (493 pages).

Confirming Yeshua Volume 2, Kindle version

As paperback (414 pages)

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A review of Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion

Due May 16, 2023:

At UK Spectator:

So this is a profoundly puzzling book. Spencer knows his history of science. He recounts the set pieces of any such story – the trial of Galileo, Huxley vs Wilberforce, the Scopes monkey trial – with bravura. He has a good grasp of how science has changed over time, and he also understands that the word ‘religion’ meant very different things to Cicero, Augustine and the author of The Golden Bough. But he doesn’t seem to grasp that the pared down, purely ‘spiritual’ religion he defends has virtually nothing in common with that of Augustine, Calvin, Loyola and Newman.

What this book marks, in fact, is the quiet triumph of meta-science over faith, for faith in the Bible as history, in the great eschatological drama of redemption, has been replaced here by faith, not in a creator and redeemer God, but in the peculiar specialness of human beings. Perhaps we are special; but there’s more to religion than an insistence that, because we make our lives meaningful, the universe must have a meaning. Though Spencer finds the idea repugnant, maybe we are just peculiar machines whose functioning depends on producing, in endless succession, deepity after deepity. If there is one thing that is clear about human beings, after all, it is that we have a remark-able talent for self-deception – and what is religion but a trick we play on ourselves? – David Wootton (March 18, 2023)

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At Vox: What is life? Scientists still can’t agree

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Featuring science writer Carl Zimmer:

“No one has been able to define life, and some people will tell you it’s not possible to,” says New York Times columnist and science reporter Carl Zimmer on Unexplainable — Vox’s podcast that explores big mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown.

It’s not for a lack of trying. “There are hundreds, hundreds of definitions of life that scientists themselves have published in the scientific literature,” says Zimmer, who wrote about them in his book Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. They include everything from simple definitions like “Life is a metabolic network within a boundary” to sentences that seem to require a PhD to decipher: “Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last common universal ancestor and includes all its descendants.” – Brian Resnick (March 16, 2023)

Here’s the book (Dutton, 2022). Here’s the podcast (26 min).

You may also wish to read: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.

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Skeptic argues free will is real

At Skeptic.com:

Here I will try to convince you that free will is real and not an illusion. I’ll argue that far from being exemplars of rationality and skepticism, the main arguments against free will make unjustifiable logical leaps and are naïve in the light of cutting-edge scientific findings.

Throughout the philosophical literature,8 resolving the question of whether or not we have free will has often revolved around two criteria for free will:

We must be the true sources of our own actions.

We must have the ability to do otherwise.

I argue that humans meet both criteria through two concepts: scale and undecidability. – Stuart T. Doyle (March 16, 2023)

We don’t usually hear skeptics arguing FOR free will. What’s changed?

You may also wish to read: How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice?

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