Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 204

Chemist James Tour interviews William Dembski May 3, 5:00 pm EST

(Time zones.)

On information theory. Here:

The Science & Faith Podcast is back with another enlightening episode with Dr. William Dembski. This interview serves as a follow-up to Dr. Tour’s recent Abiogenesis Series, particularly Episode 8 (https://youtu.be/CYiguQYCSio ) and Episode 12.1 (https://youtu.be/IaJo5jWs_6k ), answering questions on the topic of biological information. In this talk, Dr. Tour and Dr. Dembski discuss information theory, information search and probabilities, patterns with underlying specifications, and more. Dr. Dembski is an informatician, trained mathematician, and philosopher, and he holds many degrees, including two Ph.D.s (philosophy & mathematics) and an M.Div. (theology). He has written his fair share of books on information theory (some are linked below). Questions from the audience conclude this very intellectual talk, and don’t forget to check out the links!

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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.
Plugin by Taragana

Researchers report strange life form from a billion years ago

Bicella brasieri turned up in a rock deposit in Scotland:

A team of microscopists, geologists, palynologists, and paleobiologists excavated and described the fossil microorganism, which they named Bicellum brasieri. It appears to be a member of holozoa, the group of organisms that contains animals and their single-celled relatives, but not fungi…

“We have found a primitive spherical organism made up of an arrangement of two distinct cell types, the first step towards a complex multicellular structure,” said Charles Wellman, a paleobiologist at the University of Sheffield, in a university press release, adding that it’s “something which has never been described before in the fossil record.”

Isaac Schultz, “Scientists Find Billion-Year-Old Fossil Life, ‘Something Which Has Never Been Described Before’” at Gizmodo

We’ll come back to this when someone digs deeper and finds a life form with three distinct types of cells that is still older.

Interesting point — it was apparently a freshwater environment:

Earlier discoveries have confirmed the existence of such ancient multicellular life in oceans, some dating back over two billion years; it now seems possible that more than one evolutionary pathway led to the first multicellular lifeforms.

Isaac Schultz, “Scientists Find Billion-Year-Old Fossil Life, ‘Something Which Has Never Been Described Before’” at Gizmodo

That’s dangerously close to saying that all life didn’t begin with a single cell. But weren’t we all ordered to believe that because the origin of life is so fantastically unlikely that it could only have happened once?

The paper is open access.

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.
Plugin by Taragana

Saturday night: Ex-Pentagon whistleblower warns of UFO 9-11

A Pentagon investigator resigned because he felt the UFO issues were not being taken seriously enough:

A former Pentagon investigator who claims to have run a hush-hush UFO program has warned that an upcoming blockbuster report about “unidentified aerial phenomena” could reveal a failure by US intelligence agencies on par with 9/11.

Luis “Lue” Elizondo, former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, has told The Post about the document slated for release in June under a mandate contained in former President Donald Trump’s $2.3 trillion appropriations bill for this year.

The whistleblower said the highly anticipated report will address what UFO believers have been clamoring to discover about Tic Tac-shaped objects the Navy saw in 2004, the strange “cubes within spheres” seen by naval aviators in 2014 and mysterious black triangles reported around the world.

Yaron Steinbuch, “Pentagon whistleblower warns of UFO intelligence failure on ‘level of 9/11’” at New York Post

Now this is interesting: Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, author of Extraterrestrial, put out by a respected publisher, claims that Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial light sail (and we’re too dumb to realize it). Other astronomers think it’s a chunk of nitrogen ice from Pluto. Such dull sticks those other astronomers are…

The remarkable thing is that we haven’t found so much as a fossil bacterium in recent Mars samples. The belief that whatever’s weird out there must be aliens is a sheer act of faith. The same people who would dismiss massive evidence for design in the universe and life forms believe in ET with no evidence at all. That’s probably because, at heart, their commitment is one of the few types of religion that naturalism permits.

See also: Tales of an invented god

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.
Plugin by Taragana

Oldest continuous human habitation pegged at Wonderwerk, 1.8 million years ago

Human habitation of the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa has now been pushed back to 1.8 million years ago:

While tool artifacts at other sites have been backdated as far as 3.3 million years ago, the new findings are now thought to be the earliest sign of continuous prehistoric human living inside a cave – with the use of fire and tools in one fixed location indoors.

David Nield, “Scientists Find Oldest Evidence of Ancient Human Activity Deep Inside a Desert Cave” at ScienceAlert

Probably won’t be the last though.

While ancient evidence of wildfires and human fires might get mixed up in open-air sites, that’s not the case in the Wonderwerk Cave. What’s more, other indicators of humans making fires were found: burnt bones and ash, for example, as well as the tools.

David Nield, “Scientists Find Oldest Evidence of Ancient Human Activity Deep Inside a Desert Cave” at ScienceAlert

Funny how our ancestors get smarter every time we look at them:

The paper is closed access.

See also: Timing Of Human Use Of Fire Pushed Back By 300,000 Years “ Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years ago at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.” (2012)

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.
Plugin by Taragana

At Mind Matters News: Neuroscientist: We are closing in on the secret of self-awareness…

But then he turns around and admits that we are frustratingly far from understanding how it all works. His frustration is understandable. In an excerpt from his new book, Know Thyself, Stephen J. Fleming points to two areas in the prefrontal cortex that may provide a clue:

In experiments at his lab at University College in London, he found that when volunteers were asked to think about themselves or remember events while under a scanner two key parts of the association cortex showed changes in activation (the medial PFC and the medial parietal cortex). But then he says… “we are still maddeningly far from a full understanding of how this machinery works” …

“Maddeningly far?” It’s not hard to see why Fleming finds the situation frustrating…

One thing we know is that complex thought processes like creativity are not necessarily localized. Even something as basic as vision seems to occur partly in the frontal lobes and partly in the visual area in the back of the brain.

And what about people who function with only half a brain or less? Even when we have fully present and functioning brains, there are good reasons for skepticism about how much brain scans can tell us about them (beyond whether parts are there or not and other basic information).

News, “We are closing in on the secret of self-awareness” at Mind Matters News

You may also wish to read:

Why the mind can’t just be the brain. Thinking it through carefully, the idea doesn’t even make sense. (Michael Egnor)

and

Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

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.
Plugin by Taragana

How to be a Materialist

Hint:  Don’t think very hard about the conclusions that are logically compelled by your metaphysical premises.

Today, frequent commenter Seversky gave us an example of a materialist employing this stratagem.  UD News posted about Professor Granville Sewell’s observation that the materialist account of the origin of life is a provably unprovable proposition.  In advancing this proposition, Dr. Sewell states:

All one needs to do is realize that if a solution were found, we would have proved something obviously false, that a few (four, apparently) fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into libraries full of science texts and encyclopedias, computers connected to monitors, keyboards, laser printers and the Internet, cars, trucks, airplanes, nuclear power plants and Apple iPhones.

Is this really a valid proof? It seems perfectly valid to me, as I cannot think of anything in all of science that can be stated with more confidence than that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could not have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones

To which Sev responded “I agree . . .”

Wow, this is amazing.  An inveterate materialist who has been advancing the materialist line literally night and day for 13 years has given up on the proposition that material forces, by themselves, can account for the origin of life.  With this stunning admission Sev has just given away the materialist evolutionary store.  Cause for celebration, no? 

Not so fast.  As ellipses often do, I have elided the actual substance of the quotation.  Allow me to set it out in full.  Sev, actually said:

I agree, but then that is not what is being claimed, is it? The claim is that life-forms arose from inanimate chemical precursors and they evolved into increasingly complex creatures that could eventually design and build Apple iPhones.

So Sev agrees 100% with Dr. Sewell that by themselves a few fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could not have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into Apple iPhones.  But wait.  He thinks he has an answer to this objection.  The fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone did not rearrange the fundamental particles of physics into Apple iPhones.  Nope, not at all.  Instead, Sev avers, the fundamental forces only arranged the fundamental particles into “inanimate chemical precursors.”  And from those “inanimate chemical precursors,” increasingly complex life forms arose that eventually could design and build Apple iPhones.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

Here is where we get to the part where it is revealed that after years of debating the topic, it is glaringly obvious that Sev has not thought very hard about the conclusions that are logically compelled by his metaphysical premises.  Let’s tease out the logic underlying Sev’s rejoinder to Dr. Sewell.

Sewell:  The claim that the fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone cannot rearrange the fundamental particles of physics into Apple iPhones is provably unprovable. 

Sev:  I agree. But that is not the claim.  The claim is that that the fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into “inanimate chemical precursors” of life forms.  Then life forms arose from these chemical precursors and evolved into increasingly complex creatures.  And it was these creatures – not the fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics – that eventually designed and built Apple iPhones.

In summary, Sev argued that the fundamental forces of physics had to carry the causal ball only so far.  Those forces only had to rearrange the fundamental particles to the point where life forms arose.  Then, those life forms evolved into intelligent agents, and those intelligent agents picked up the causal ball that resulted in Apple iPhones.

Where did Sev’s logic go off the rails?  Sev blundered when he introduced the (unspoken) premise that there was a fundamental ontological discontinuity between “inanimate chemical precursors” and the lifeforms that arise from those precursors.  Nothing should be clearer than that under materialist metaphysics there was not any such discontinuity.  Indeed, the whole point of materialism is that there can never be such a discontinuity.

The most fundamental premise of materialism – the premise from which everything else follows – is that everything that exists, without exception, can be explained in reductionist terms.  In other words, the cause of everything that exists can be traced back in purely material terms to the interaction of the fundamental forces with the fundamental particles.  There can be no exception to this causal chain, because if there were even one exception the whole materialist house of cards would come tumbling down.

So, Sev, it really is the claim under materialism that Apple iPhones were caused by nothing but the fundamental forces of nature rearranging the fundamental particles.  And if, as you say, you agree with Dr. Sewell that that is provably unprovable, then you have conceded his argument.

Here is the grand irony of Sev’s argument.  It is a DESIGN ARGUMENT.  In its most basic terms, the ID argument boils down to this: It is unlikely that the fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone can rearrange the fundamental particles of physics into complex specified information and irreducibly complex artifacts. This has certainly never been observed to have happened. On the other hand, there are countless trillions of examples of intelligent agents creating complex specified information and irreducibly complex artifacts.  Therefore, we make an abductive inference. The best explanation for the existence of any particular instance of complex specified information or an irreducibly complex artifact (such as an iPhone) is “act of intelligent agent.”  It turns out that Sev agrees with this line of thinking even as he frenetically tries to undermine it.

Back to the title of this post.  Materialists must work very had to avert their gaze from the logical conclusions compelled by their metaphysical premises.  One of those conclusions is that genocide and sacrificial love are equally meaningless, because there is no objective moral standard by which to judge the difference between them.  Another is that blind unguided physical forces are competent to produce iPhones, because under their premises there is no other candidate for the job.

As I have often said before, no sane person acts as if materialism is actually true.  No one believes that genocide and sacrificial love are equally meaningless.  No one believes that blind unguided physical forces can produce iPhones.  And occasionally the façade slips and a materialist will admit as much, as Sev unwittingly did today.

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.
Plugin by Taragana

Granville Sewell on origin of life as a provably unsolvable problem

Mathematician Granville Sewell uses a concept from mathematics by which a problem is proved to be unsolvable:

All one needs to do is realize that if a solution were found, we would have proved something obviously false, that a few (four, apparently) fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into libraries full of science texts and encyclopedias, computers connected to monitors, keyboards, laser printers and the Internet, cars, trucks, airplanes, nuclear power plants and Apple iPhones.

Is this really a valid proof? It seems perfectly valid to me, as I cannot think of anything in all of science that can be stated with more confidence than that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could not have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones. In the first half of my video “Why Evolution Is Different” I argue with a bit more scientific sophistication, and a bit more scientific detail, that problem #3 has no solution, but my arguments are still very simple. Unfortunately, most biologists don’t seem to be impressed by such simple proofs; they don’t believe it is possible to reject all solutions to a difficult problem without looking at the details of each. But mathematicians know that sometimes it is possible.

Granville Sewell, “Some Problems Can Be Proved Unsolvable” at Evolution News and Science Today

It’s been said that many biologists are poor mathematicians.

Here’s a vid where he makes the case:

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.
Plugin by Taragana

Why has Nature started endorsing violent Woke politics?

That’s sure what this sound-off from vaccine scientist Peter Hotez sounds like:

The United Nations and the highest levels of governments must take direct, even confrontational, approaches with Russia, and move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States.

Efforts must expand into the realm of cyber security, law enforcement, public education and international relations. A high-level inter-agency task force reporting to the UN secretary-general could assess the full impact of anti-vaccine aggression, and propose tough, balanced measures. The task force should include experts who have tackled complex global threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks and nuclear armament, because anti-science is now approaching similar levels of peril. It is becoming increasingly clear that advancing immunization requires a counteroffensive.

Peter Hotez, “COVID vaccines: time to confront anti-vax aggression” at Nature

First response: Stuff it. Absolutely. Stuff it.

Given the way governments goofed big time throughout the pandemic, doubt about vaccines is a reasonable reaction, if not a correct one. As noted here earlier:

In Ontario, the schools were shut but in BC they were open. In Ontario the churches were open but the schools were shut. In both provinces, the bars were open. In Quebec, there was a curfew, seriously enforced with many arrests.

From all this, the trusty Follower of Science can glean: All variants of coronavirus are teetotallers so they never go to bars. The Ontario version is Woke so it has joined the war on literacy and numeracy. The BC virus is cool with literacy and numeracy but hates religion. The Quebec virus has tiny viral wristwatches that tell it the time so it can attack people at night.

The crazy has changed in various ways recently in the above Canadian jurisdictions. But it’s still crazy. If it made any sense, there would be a national strategy, not just varied, constantly “evolving” provincial panics. And Canada is probably not that different from many other places. No wonder many people doubt.

Okay, now let’s look at the U.S.: A recent poll shows that nearly half of the vaccine doubters are worried about side effects.

They’re not part of a broad conspiracy to undermine All That’s Good. They realize that if they are stuck with the side effects, well, they are stuck with them. Lord knows, the establishment media has done quite enough to play up the side effects. And the U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control have hardly been a beacon of light in all this…

Striking a more reasonable note, Nature’s American sidekick Scientific American, offers a piece pointing out that ”Few Would Fear COVID Vaccines if Policy Makers Explained Their Risks Better.”

Yes, exactly. Some of us run into people every day who hesitate about the vaccines. But mostly that arises from confused messaging and incompetent management on the part of authorities, not from listening to crackpots or Russian operatives on the internet.

Bottom line: Hotez and others like-minded should back off. Lots of politicians messed up big time dealing with COVID-19 and damaged the trust of constituents. This isn’t the time to dump on the constituents.

And if all some commentators want is to play tough, lots can play that game. Best not to get into it. How about this: Go after Big Goof-Up and Big Panic instead. That’d be far more useful to the rest of us right now.

See also: “Follow the science” is becoming a jibe in the age of COVID panic. At ACSH: Rather shamelessly, the Washington Post has also offered tips to stop yourself from spreading “misinformation.” And the Guardian has even recommended “10 ideas to rebuild our broken internet.” Let’s add an eleventh: Media, take your own advice and stop running sloppy stories because they attract eyeballs.

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.
Plugin by Taragana

What? Some viruses use an “alternative” genetic alphabet?

They replace adenine with “so-called diaminopurine”:

“It’s been known that there’s this phage that doesn’t have adenine in its genome . . . and it’s been an unsolved mystery about how it does that,” says Jef Boeke, a molecular biologist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine who was not involved in the work. These papers “spell that out in glorious molecular detail,” he tells The Scientist. Plus, the authors “have done an amazingly comprehensive job of showing that this is not one crazy outlier, but there’s a whole group of bacteriophages that have this kind of genetic material.” …

“There are a lot of questions that remain unanswered,” says Kaminski. In a paper that came out earlier this month on which he’s a coauthor, researchers shed light on one of those questions—how the S-2L genome is copied—by identifying the relevant polymerase. But Kaminski explains that one of the most difficult questions to answer will be when this mechanism evolved. “It’s supposed to be ancient because it roots deeply in the phylogenetic tree and because of the similarity of the [enzymatic] structures,” but it’s not clear whether Z or A genomes came first.

Abby Olena, “Some Viruses Use an Alternative Genetic Alphabet” at The Scientist

This is a problem, all right. But really, why do these, or any life/quasi-life forms, have a “genetic alphabet” (an alphabet of life, not learning) at all if everything happened by natural selection acting on random mutation, as the textbooks claim? Let alone an alphabet of life they can just substitute some other letters for? Is there anyone out there who can do the math?

This is like discovering that your new Newfoundland Rescue Dog speaks English with an Eastern Canadian accent.

Of course, if you are a good Darwinist, it’s the accent you focus on, right, not what the dog just said…

See also: Interesting finding: COVID-19 populations show high convergent evolution. Researchers: We find that two particular mutation rates, G →U and C →U, are similarly elevated and considerably higher than all other mutation rates, causing the majority of mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and are possibly the result of APOBEC and ROS activity.

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.
Plugin by Taragana

At Mind Matters News: Abduction: A thinking skill you can do but computers can’t

Abduction forms part of the basis of ID reasoning. A Norwegian police detective fills us in on how to use abduction for better thinking:

Fahsing point outs that criminal investigations are generally abductive rather than deductive. The detective is not given a hard arithmetic problem to work out. A computer could do that. Rather, the detective has a series of facts to make sense of. That involves creativity in organizing one’s research and thinking strategies. Computers don’t do creativity.

Here are a couple of the many tips he offers:

“You should always create a short outline of all the possible alternative explanations you can think of for the situation you are trying to solve”

“Try to eliminate as many explanations or lines of inquiry as you can. Just like in science, theories can be truly tested only through falsification.”

News, “The underrated thinking skill that you can do but computers can’t” at Mind Matters News

Curiously, among the Woke in science, isn’t there a sort of war on falsification? But of course there is. Why wouldn’t there be?

Takehome: Abductive reasoning, reasoning from effects to causes, is a powerful mechanism for reasoning in the absence of complete knowledge.

Also from Mind Matters News, today:

Young filmmaker tackles the hype about computing the brain. In Silico, in which Noah Hutton sorts hope from hype, goes livestream today. The main thing Hutton tries to convey is that ambition and flashy hype are no match for the sheer complexity of the human brain.

and

How Erik Larson hit on a method for deciding who is influential. The author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence decided to apply an algorithm to Wikipedia — but it had to be very specific
Many measures of influence depend on rough measures like numbers of hits on pages. Larson realized that influence is subtler than that.

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.
Plugin by Taragana