Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 215

Is this the beginning of deplatforming Stephen Hawking or of an honest evaluation?

So far, it feels like an honest evaluation:

Once he assumed the mantle of a prophet in the late 1980s, Stephen Hawking would never be ignored. His books were all but guaranteed to sell, whether or not they were well written or even comprehensible. His lectures were typically sold out, with hopefuls packing the aisles to try and get a better look at the famous physicist. He could command an audience like no other scientist; the press and the public would hang on his every word—even when those words didn’t have anything to do with his work on black holes or cosmology, or even betray any deep insight or knowledge.

Hawking managed to convince the public that his opinion always mattered. “[H]is comments attracted exaggerated attention even on topics where he had no special expertise,” wrote Martin Rees, a close friend and colleague of his, “for instance philosophy, or the dangers from aliens or from intelligent machines.” His overweening confidence—and his stubbornness—cost him respect from many of his colleagues, especially late in his career.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Hawking’s transformation into a celebrity, however, was entangled with his disability.

Charles Seife, “The Myth of Stephen Hawking” at Scientific American

But sadly, we never know what the Raging Woke of Cancel Culture, sentenced by a just judgment to endless, visible mediocrity themselves, will try to do.

Note: Yes, Seife has a book just out, Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity (2021).

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Rob Sheldon reflects on skepticism about the findings from research brain scans (fMRI)

Recently, we pointed to neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s thoughts on an essay by a would-be neuroscience student who was discouraged by the nonsense around fMRI imaging. Egnor says she’s right. There is a lot of flapdoodle out there. But, he also says, don’t give up. Qualify — and then critique.

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon also writes to offer some thoughts:

This is an important essay in many ways. It summarizes many of the problems with science—that it claims objectivity, but suffers from subjectivity. There are two common responses:

a) this is a temporary problem, once we get the bugs worked out we can retrieve objectivity;

b) this is a permanent problem, science can never be fully objective, and therefore can never be trusted.

Kelly seems to side with (b), and expresses doubts that she can ever pursue a career in neuroscience. Naturally, Michael Egnor wishes she would work through her difficulties and remain in neuroscience, but Egnor gives no assurances that (a) is possible. So what is the responsible thing to do?

In the Christian community, these two views are reflected in, say, Theistic Evolution and Creation Science. As a goal of the late Phillip E. Johnson, we IDers are contracted with spanning this divide. Yet which describes our position best:

(c) there is a tension between (a) and (b) but we can’t let it affect our overriding purpose;

(d) there is a stable spot between objectivity and subjectivity that, say, permits the objective acknowledgment of subjective bias, or the subjective acceptance of unfounded objectives.

(e) there is a (scientifically) unexplored regime that is neither objective nor subjective which spans the gulf between fact and feeling, that bridges Lessing’s ditch. (e.g. antirealism)

(f) something else?

But before the discussion runs away from this article on fMRI, let’s go back to that dead fish. Is it really true that a dead salmon responds to emotional pictures?

Obviously not. So what is wrong with the science?

Statistics. Yes, it is the nemesis of economists as much as psych majors. Because it is a rather dense mathematical field, it is more often abused than used, and this despite analysis software that does everything but write the paper for you. But statistics can tell you if a dead salmon has feelings–it really can. The real question is whether you want to employ the statistics or not. It is not a fault of statistics if you refuse to analyse the data statistically. In this case, it is a sin of omission, not a sin of commission. And those are the hardest to spot.

Likewise, Kelsey Ichikawa talks about the sin of employing too many statistical searches on the data, also known as “p-hacking”. Once again, the sin is not in using statistics, but rather refusing to tell the world how many searches you made on the data before you settled on this one. Because the significance is not simply the data p-value, but the search space you used in finding it.

Statistics tell the truth, it is scientists who lie by remaining silent.

Okay, now lets go back to the conflict between (a) and (b). The truth, the science is still objective. But now that objectivity includes us. In the case of economics, neuroscience and psychology, we are the objects of study as well as the subjects who study. This means that sins of omission are both easier to commit and easier to overlook. But just because it is easier to lie in neuroscience, doesn’t mean that chemists and physicists are to be trusted. I’ve been fighting the bias in physics for years, and it is only getting worse. As our society slips into the swamp of Cancel Culture, the silver lining is that bias is now becoming obvious. And that gives us the insight needed to resolve the puzzle of how to fulfill Johnson’s contract.

(c) the tension is not external, but internal. It is within us, and in our prior commitments.

(d) the stable spot is more than simply acknowledgment of our bias, it is a commitment to turn the spotlight on ourselves, to let statistics tell us when we are wrong. It is the willingness to believe an evil report about our heart, knowing that through the fire of statistics we can retrieve the precious metal of truth.

(e) yes there is unrealized path out of the tension, but no, I do not think it is philosophy, a substance, a force field, or a fifth dimension. Rather, I think it is an attitude, or if you will, a spirit. But not “the spirit of the age” or just any spirit–I think it must be a holy spirit. Science is a religious enterprise, and it matters.

(f) perhaps there is something else, I need a humble attitude, but I am not passively waiting for it. I act on what I know, recognizing that future discoveries may spin me 180 degrees, but passivity like omission, is also a sin.

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II.

See also: Michael Egnor: Why a budding neuroscientist is skeptical of fMRI brain scans She’s right to wonder: The research ones may not be telling us what we might think:

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Stan Robertson’s paper on black holes is free for download

Here.

Readers may remember that yesterday evening our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon introduced some doubts about the evidence base for black holes, based on Stan Robertson’s research:

Abstract: Proof that black holes exist will likely require confirmation of the existence of event horizons. The common assumption that the mere existence of large compact masses proves the case for black holes is an unwarranted extrapolation of General Relativity into a strong-field regime where it has not been adequately tested. Neither the large compact masses of galactic nuclei nor the massive compact objects of stellar mass in the x-ray binaries prove the existence of black holes. In contrast to the case for galactic nuclei, we have the necessary tools for obtaining either proof or disproof of event horizons in the x-ray binaries. Observations of kHz QPOs may decide the event horizon issue very quickly. If not, we can still obtain proof by comparing predictions of gravity theories that differ primarily by the presence or absence of an event horizon. Detailed analysis of models of x-ray binaries would then decide the issue.

One factor that one needn’t be a physicist to see is that black holes became a “thing” in popular culture, in a way that “red dwarfs” and “white dwarfs” never did. No one says that red dwarfs, for example, are a gateway to another universe. That sort of thing may affect people’s willingness to evaluate the evidence base critically. Cf Darwinism.

See also: Rob Sheldon takes aim at black holes: How much is really known? It is most unfortunate that both scientists themselves and the popular press discuss black holes (bh) as if they are (a) a scientifically defined object; and, (b) an experimentally observed one.

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Horizontal gene transfer between vertebrates: herring and smelt

Unexpected, of course:

The recent assembly of the herring genome suggests this fish acquired its antifreeze protein gene by horizontal transfer and then passed a copy on to the smelt. The direction of gene transfer is confirmed by some accompanying transposable elements and by the breakage of gene synteny…

The sequential transfer of an advantageous gene between fishes leads us to suggest that these events, while extremely rare, might happen as consequence of external fertilization in a medium containing the shed DNA of all the ecosystem’s inhabitants. It will be worth examining fish for other examples of HGT.

Laurie A. Graham, Peter L. Davies, Horizontal Gene Transfer in Vertebrates: A Fishy Tale, Trends in Genetics, 2021, ISSN 0168-9525, ttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2021.02.006. The paper is open access.

We don’t know that HGT is “extremely rare” in vertebrates. We know that it was unexpected so no one was looking for it.

We also know that it is extremely inconvenient for a discipline that invested so heavily in natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism).

Now, many must pretend that horizontal transfer is the same thing as vertical transfer. Good luck with that.

See also: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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Rob Sheldon takes aim at black holes: How much is really known?

Does just being exotic make them winners?

Further to yesterday’s discussion of Sabine Hossenfelder’s views as to whether Stephen Hawking should have won the Nobel Prize, our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon weighs in on the current difficulties with the black hole as a concept:

It is most unfortunate that both scientists themselves and the popular press discuss black holes (bh) as if they are (a) a scientifically defined object; and, (b) an experimentally observed one. Stan Robertson, a retired cosmologist from Oklahoma University, wrote some papers a few years back (b) pointing out the problems and suggesting (c) an alternative.

(a) Black Holes are not scientifically defined.

(i) They have several mathematical discontinuities. The first is the “singularity” at the center which is still not defined, either physically or mathematically. If I had a theory with a mathematically undefined region, it would be banished as “unphysical” but somehow the BH crowd gets a pass. I do not understand why.

(ii) the second discontinuity is the “event horizon.” The speed of light becomes zero on this surface, which makes anything that depends on the speed of light also discontinuous. This is often pooh-poohed as a mathematically excluded point that makes no difference to the physics. “If an astronaut were falling through the event horizon he wouldn’t feel a thing” is a common rejoinder, “because it is only a mathematical, not a physical surface.”

As it turns out, this statement is just plain wrong. Hawking has his radiation emitting from this surface, and Leonard Susskind challenged him that it made hash of information theory and thermodynamics. This led to proposals that said this surface was “a wall of fire.” Hawking fought tooth and nail to keep his radiation, and in the end admitted that the event horizon wasn’t real (but his radiation was). This is documented in Susskind’s 2008 book, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. Then Hawking died, and it seemed no one wanted to keep fighting this battle. But it hasn.t gone away.

(b) Black Holes are not Experimentally Observed

There have been many observations of very dense objects — we have extensive data on neutron stars where the mass of our Sun would be compressed down to an object about 13 miles wide. But a BH event horizon is even tinier than that.

(i) the “Event Horizon Telescope” image of the BH that was widely circulated a few years ago does not actually measure the event horizon (the diameter of a black hole). The resolution was about 3X too poor to measure the actual event horizon. So experimentally speaking, a neutron-star at the center of the galaxy could account for the observations just fine. The counter-argument might be that theorists don’t think neutron stars are stable at that size, but from an experimentalist’s point of view, the all-important density is just too unknown to call it a definitive black hole. That is, its mass is measured but not its radius.

(ii) the BH at the center of our galaxy has also not had its radius measured. There were several stars that got close to Sg A*, but none that were anything like 3X the event horizon. So once again, the 2020 Nobel prize was incorrectly awarded for experimental verification.

(iii) the gravity wave experiment, LIGO, sees two BH spiralling around each other and emitting a faster and faster wave that rises in pitch. The LIGO team argued that if these putative BH were fatter and less dense, then they would collide before they finished their death spiral, and we’d see an abrupt end to the sequence. Therefore, they argued, the gravity waves are not only validation of the wave-equation solution to Einstein’s gravity law, but validation of BH themselves.

The fly in this ointment is that the waves are swamped by noise. Not just noise=signal, not even noise = 10x signal, or noise=1000x signal, but noise=10,000x signal. Now I work for the DoD where radar SNR is often very noisy. But they’d laugh you out of the room if you said you could retrieve a signal that was 1/10,000 of the noise.

Unfortunately the LIGO team work for the NSF. And what the LIGO people say is that they just “know” the signal is in there, so they apply a mask to the noise that is modelled on a binary BH, and this helps to get rid of the noise. It’s called a “matched filter.”

It also means that whatever signal they find will look exactly like a merging BH.

Which is why I do not believe that any results from LIGO are real. None. And one day they will admit this. But not, I suppose, until the funding dries up.

Therefore, both theoretically and experimentally, we do not have evidence of BH, but instead have evidence AGAINST Black Holes.

(1) no Hawking radiation (evidence against event horizons)
(2) no solution to singularity
(3) no solution to information problem at the event horizon
(4) no measurements of BH that are compact enough to rule out neutron stars (or whatever they are)
(5) observed magnetic fields in BH (denied by the “no-hair” theorem)

c) Replacement. Stan Robertson has a model where, as a star contracts, the magnetic field internally resists gravity. In that case, most candidates for BH in our universe are magnetically contracting objects (he uses the acronym MECO). Since most BH are also magnetic, this makes perfect sense to me. Stan also argues that these objects have no singularity, have no event horizon (and no information paradox), and are only 15% larger than an equivalent BH, so they fit inside the volume of all BH candidates.

What’s there not to like?

But black holes are so much a part of our culture that we must preserve them somehow!

Note: Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II.

See also: Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Should Stephen Hawking have won the Nobel? Rob Sheldon weighs in. Rob Sheldon: Hawking did not get the Nobel, however, because he hung his hopes on the radiation emitted by BH [black holes]–the so-called “Hawking radiation”. And it was never observed. Sabine tries to explain why. But one argument that Sabine doesn.t make, is that Hawking radiation may never have been observed because BH are themselves never observed.

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Gregory Chaitin: Why “impractical” things like philosophy are actually quite useful

Chaitin argues that the human spirit is capable of doing both practical things and impractical things which may have practical consequences later:

At least for me, it was purely philosophical. I was interested in incompleteness. I was interested in more practical stuff, but it looked very difficult. And now what is it? Algorithmic information theory goes back to the 60s. What are we now?

It’s 60 years later. Hector McNeil and his collaborators are using practical approximations to this ideal theory and for practical applications.

Oh, this is the biggest joke of all: The halting probability Omega is totally unknowable. It’s uncomputable, but you can calculate it in the limit from below. You look at more and more programs, you see which ones hold and that way, the halting probability keeps going up, your estimate keeps going up. But it’s very, very slow this process. But in the limit of infinite time, you can calculate it in the limit from below.

Well, the joke is that Hector McNeil has proposed using this as a new cryptocurrency that he calls Automacoin. This is a serious proposal because Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, uses an immense amount of computing power. Really scary amount of computing power that didn’t even exist before. But it’s all going for this. It’s not terribly useful computation except for financial transactions. But what Hector’s Neil has basically proposed is to calculate the bits of Omega in the limit from below.

This gives you a cryptocurrency where what you calculate is very, very useful. It’s useful in the way that Marvin Minsky pointed out, that it tells you the best theories for things. The most concise programs with things. That can be used for making predictions.

News, “Why “impractical” things like philosophy are actually quite useful” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Gregory Chaitin reflects on the fact that if he had to do practical work 60 years ago, there wouldn’t be practical research today based on the Omega number.

But that raises a question: If materialism were true, why does theoretical stuff matter so much?

See also: Omega number: Getting to know the unknowable number, more or less

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Researchers: Babies can understand complex language before they can speak

Contrary to what was previously thought.

Before uttering their first word, a new study suggests, children can understand what groups of words mean together:

In a recent study of 11–12 month olds published in Cognition, researchers found that infants on the verge of saying single words themselves can already process complete sentences such as “Clap your hands.” The research sheds light on the difficulties adults have learning second languages if they focus too intensely on single words …

Twenty-three of 36 infants passed the comprehension test. While the researchers don’t spell this out, the study provides evidence that more is going on in a child’s mind at that age than many of us might at first suppose.

A sentence is not just a signal like Hi! “(You) clap your hands” is a complete thought: It is subject-verb-object, in traditional grammar terms. The ability to understand sentences is an essential foundation for higher-order thinking skills.

Other researchers have found that our brains are “prewired” to recognize words

News, “Babies can understand whole sentences before they can speak” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: The new findings challenge the idea that children progress from words to phrases to sentences. They also provide insight into second language learning.

Further takehome: This should be set against tortuous efforts to show that chimpanzees really talk. If they did, they wouldn’t need the tortuous efforts.

You may also wish to read:

Researchers: Human brains are prewired to recognize words Contrary to what psychologists had supposed, the ability to seek meaning is built in, not taught

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Michael Egnor: Why a budding neuroscientist is skeptical of fMRI brain scans

She’s right to wonder: The research ones may not be telling us what we might think:

She points to one of the fundamental problems with fMRI: statistical excess:

The problem of statistical excess, called multiple comparisons, looms large over this part of the analysis… Multiple comparisons means too many statistical tests. The problem of multiple comparisons is like surveying 100,000 strangers about whether they know Beyoncé personally. None of those 100,000 people are actually acquainted with her, but for each person you ask, there is a 5 percent chance they will lie and say they are, just for kicks. In the end, you tally 5,000 friends of Beyoncé, even though the ground truth is that zero of those people are friends with her. If you had asked 100 strangers, you would only end up with five incorrect measurements, but because of sheer numbers and the probability of random deception, surveying 100,000 strangers results in 5,000 incorrect measurements.

KELSEY ICHIKAWA, “THE TROUBLE WITH BRAIN SCANS” AT NAUTILUS

fMRI data is often unreliable in this same way:

One person’s brain data has hundreds of thousands of voxels. By the sheer number of voxels and random noise, a researcher who performs a statistical test at every voxel will almost certainly find significant effects where there isn’t really one.

KELSEY ICHIKAWA, “THE TROUBLE WITH BRAIN SCANS” AT NAUTILUS

Ichikawa points to a famous fMRI study in which researchers, using standard statistical methods, found brain activity in a dead salmon.

Michael Egnor, “Why a budding neuroscientist is skeptical of brain scans” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: If people are judging what the rest of us think based on this, stop letting them. It could get beyond a joke.

Michael Egnor: After reading her perceptive essay about the problems in fMRI imaging in neuroscience, I’m sad that a gifted student has doubts about a career in the field. Neuroscience badly needs skeptics to show how unreliable technology, biased handling of data, and materialism’s conceptual mess frustrate science.

—

You may also wish to read: Why are some scientists turning away from brain scans? Sometimes, brain scans just sound like popular opinion. What’s wrong?

and

Brain scans can read your mind — in a dozen conflicting ways. A recent study involving 70 research groups identified sharp limitations in the value of brain imaging (fMRI) in understanding the mind.

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Brian Keating on the problem with “Follow the Science”

Readers might remember that Brian Keating recently interviewed Steve Meyer but here he himself is interviewed:

As another example, Keating reminds us that “In the 20th century some of the most respected scientists in the world, including Nobel prize winners, believed in eugenics, the reprehensible idea that the human race could be improved by selective breeding. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the Rockefeller Foundation supported it. By the middle of the century it had been thoroughly rejected as quackery. No reputable scientist would have anything to with this idea.”

“So, we all need to get over this notion that just because someone — be it a politician, a bureaucrat, or even a scientist — employs the phrase ‘science says’ means whatever they’re saying is right,” Keating notes. “It might be right. But it might also be wrong. And if it’s wrong, it won’t necessarily be a bunch of scientists who say it’s wrong. It might be one guy.”

Keating then references Einstein, who quipped after 100 German scientists argued that his theory of relativity was flawed, “If I were wrong, then one would’ve been enough.” Prager U, “Scientist Unpacks The Problem With ‘Follow The Science’” at DailyWire

The craziness around COVID-19 will either cure people of “trust the science” for good or demonstrate that they are unable to think critically and therefore beyond help.

See also: Asked of Steve Meyer: If humans are so important to God, why did they take so long to develop? In the book, Meyer argues from three scientific discoveries to an inference to a personal God. If God is the creator, Keating wants to know, why was He so patient as to wait billions of years, during which not much that was very interesting happened, for the fulfillment of His purpose in initiating the universe to begin with?

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Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Should Stephen Hawking have won the Nobel? Rob Sheldon weighs in

Hossenfelder thinks he should have:

Before he worked on black hole evaporation, Hawking worked with Penrose on the singularity theorems. Penrose’s theorem showed that, in contrast to what most physicists believed at the time, black holes are a pretty much unavoidable consequence of stellar collapse. Before that, physicists thought black holes are mathematical curiosities that would not be produced in reality. It was only because of the singularity theorems that black holes began to be taken seriously. Eventually astronomers looked for them, and now we have solid experimental evidence that black holes exist. Hawking applied the same method to the early universe to show that the Big Bang singularity is likewise unavoidable, unless General Relativity somehow breaks down. And that is an absolutely amazing insight about the origin of our universe.

I made a video about the history of black holes two years ago in which I said that the singularity theorems are worth a Nobel Prize. And indeed, Penrose was one of the recipients of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. If Hawking had not died two years earlier, I believe he would have won the Nobel Prize together with Penrose. Or maybe the Nobel Prize committee just waited for him to die, so they wouldn’t have to think about just how to disentangle Hawking’s work from Penrose’s? We’ll never know.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Should Stephen Hawking have won the Nobel Prize?” at BackRe(Action)

Meanwhile, our physics commentator Rob Sheldon offers,

Sabine’s take was that the 2020 Nobel prize for Black Hole theorizing was given to Penrose, but had Hawking been alive, he would have shared it. I mentioned at the time that the other two recipients were experimentalists who measured the gravitational attraction of the Sagittarius A* attractor in the middle of the Milky Way. All this 2020 prize was belated, because an earlier Nobel prize was given for Gravity Waves, which were modelled as orbiting black holes. It seemed odd to have a Nobel for discovery of waves given off by BH without a Nobel for BH themselves, hence the 2020 award.

Hawking did not get the Nobel, however, because he hung his hopes on the radiation emitted by BH–the so-called “Hawking radiation”. And it was never observed. Sabine tries to explain why. But one argument that Sabine doesn’t make, is that Hawking radiation may never have been observed because BH are themselves never observed. Yes, there’s something massive in the center of the Milky Way galaxy and other observed galaxies, but it doesn’t have to be a BH. And the lack of Hawking radiation anywhere in the universe may be because there are no BH anywhere in the universe. Stan Robertson showed me alternative solutions to the Einstein gravitational equations that explain all the astronomical phenomena without any BH event horizons or Hawking radiation. It just requires the existence of that nemesis of astrophysicists–a magnetic field.

Now that the Event Horizon telescope reports magnetic fields in their famous “Black Hole photograph”, and a paper was published last week saying magnetic fields could explain Dark Energy, the time may be right to advertise the demise of black holes. Stan calls them MECO, but I’ve grown attached to “blue holes”–because it has the same acronym, and because artists always draw magnetic fields with blue shading.

So should Hawking have received the Nobel prize?

Sabine says he didn’t have to, he’s already famous in his own right. Which is an admission that the purpose the Nobel has always been about publicity. The rest of us will get our reward in heaven.

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II.

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