Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 217

Darwinist simultaneously criticizes ID for lack of testability, while citing his own imagination for evidence of evolution

I wish I were kidding. But I’m not. You must listen to the whole thing.

Outnumbered: Stephen Meyer Debates a Chemist and a Biologist

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Life and Fate: Coming to a Country Near You?

Vasily Grossman was a war correspondent in the Soviet Union during World War II.  After the war he became a novelist, and Life and Fate, about life in the Soviet Union during the Battle of Stalingrad, is considered his masterpiece.  Written in 1960, the novel was suppressed by the KBG and not published until after a manuscript was smuggled to the West in the 70’s. 

Last night I finished watching the 12-part TV series adopted from Life and Fate (Amazon Prime; Russian with English subtitles).  As you might expect, life in Soviet Union under Stalin was a dystopian nightmare where political persecution was so commonplace that various slang terms developed around it.  For example, one character warns another “Don’t you know you could get a ‘tenner’ [ten years in the gulag] for telling that joke?”

It is easy enough to imagine how fortunate we are not to live in such a time and place.  But as I watched the show, it dawned on me that such optimism may not be entirely warranted.  There are disturbing parallels between life under Stalin and life under “progressive” ideology today, and maybe we are in the incipient stages of a revolution that will push us every closer to Uncle Joe’s way of doing things. 

Two examples will suffice to demonstrate my point.  Cancel culture is Soviet-style denunciation writ small.  Nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum is the main character in the series.  Viktor protests when his superiors fire a secretary in his office because she is Jewish.  Despite his brilliant scientific work, his colleagues denounce him as an enemy of the state, and put him on the road to losing his livelihood, exactly like a victim of cancel culture today. 

The other example is the elevation of ideology over reality.  Shtrum’s breakthrough paper in physics is nearly suppressed when one of his superiors concludes the work is not compatible with Leninist materialism.  Today it is a commonplace for so-called intellectuals to publish scholarly articles describing science and mathematics as white western colonial patriarchal hetero-normative social constructs.  But what does the race, gender, etc. of a scientist or mathematician have to do with whether their work gets us closer to the truth about the universe?  Absolutely nothing of course, in exactly the same way the merits of a physics paper is in no way connected with whether is comports with Leninist philosophy.  But to apparatchiks in the Soviet Union then and to progressive academics now, the leftist philosophy comes first and the truth comes later (if at all). 

Yesterday I read that Gallup just released a poll that shows that church membership in the US has fallen below 50%.  Religious observers are now a minority in this country for the first time since Gallup began tracking in the 30s.  The pace of the slide is astonishing.  Membership dropped 20 points in only 20 years.  This put me in mind of another great Russian novelist, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote:

“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval.  But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

I am disturbed by the spiritual, intellectual and political climate in this country.  We have not yet forgotten God, but it seems clear that we are in the process of forgetting.  And the more we forget the worse things become.  How else can we explain why Cardi B, the singer of one of the most obscene pop songs ever released, is not roundly denounced but instead given the “Woman of the Year” award?  How else can we explain the utter corruption of the corporate media, which looks more and more like the American version of Pravda every day?  I could go on and on but I won’t.  Anyone with eyes to see must know there is very good reason for angst.  We have been sliding for some time, and the pace of the slide is accelerating. 

If we don’t reverse the slide where will it end?  Force.  That is where it will end.  We are closer and closer to realizing Orwell’s prediction:  “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. ”  Orwell wrote this fearing that communist rule would come to the West.  Thankfully, we summoned the current to resist (over the vigorous opposition of many on the left) and avoided that fate and obtained a reprieve from totalitarianism that has lasted more than half a century.  But as Reagan famously said, freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. 

Recently, a friend of mine whom I’ve known for over 40 years posted on Facebook that the government should FORCE (her caps) everyone to get a COVID shot.  On the left the impulse for the exercise of raw power is growing stronger with each passing day.  I have gone beyond vague unease.  I am afraid. 

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James Tour tackles the origin of information

Also known as the information enigma re the origin of life.

Equally problematic, even if building blocks naturally joined together and never degraded, no natural process could order the monomers in the correct sequence to contain useful biological information. Each of these challenges represents an insurmountable barrier to any biologically useful macromolecule ever appearing and migrating into the staging ground for life’s origin.

Brian Miller, “James Tour Video Series on the Origin of Life — Properly Combining Building Blocks” at Evolution News and Science Today

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Researchers: Contrary to a century-long assumption, we are more closely related to snails and flies than to starfish

For over a century, the conventional view has been that vertebrates are more closely related to echinoderms (starfishes, sea cucumbers, and sea urchins, for example) than to insects because both groups are “deuterostomes.” The other group, the protostomes, includes “insects, earth worms, molluscs and nematodes.” The basic difference has to do with embryology. In embryos, the mouth comes first in protostomes and second in deuterostomes. But now some researchers beg to differ:

While this textbook view of a close relationship between vertebrates and echinoderms has endured, some unexpected results from recent studies using comparisons of animal DNA to reconstruct evolutionary trees have questioned it. In parallel, some of the specific traits in how embryos develop that had been emphasised as being unique to the deuterostome branch of animals have been discovered in some species of protostomes.

These results suggest that the evidence that echinoderms are the closest relatives of vertebrates may perhaps be weaker than has long been believed …

To see whether the DNA data convincingly supports a close relationship between vertebrates and echinoderms, we looked at the number of changes in DNA that were found in both the vertebrates and the echinoderms but not in other animals. These shared characters, if found, would be evidence that would support the close relationship.

Looking at about 5,000 different genes, for approximately 70%, the protostome branch had more unique changes supporting it than the deuterostome branch did. That means the animals on the protostome branch share lots of unique changes to their DNA – and so this branch is very well supported by the DNA evidence. The close relationship between vertebrates and echinoderms, in contrast, is supported by much weaker evidence – they share relatively few unique DNA changes.

Max Telford, Paschalia Kapli, “Are we more closely related to starfish or insects? Our study questions 100 years of consensus” at The Conversation

They end up concluding,

What we conclude is that the confidence in a close relationship between vertebrates and echinoderms – in the textbooks for more than a century – is misplaced. We have shown that this evolutionary problem is particularly difficult to solve and that we vertebrates might turn out to be more closely related to snails and flies than we are to the starfish.

Max Telford, Paschalia Kapli, “Are we more closely related to starfish or insects? Our study questions 100 years of consensus” at The Conversation

If things are really uncertain at such a fundamental level (protostomes vs. deuterostomes), evolutionary biology could do with a lot less dogmatism in addressing the public.

The paper is open access.

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Researchers: Trilobites breathed through their legs

[image error]Trilobites illustration (stock image).
Credit: © auntspray / stock.adobe.com

According to new research on well-preserved fossils:

A new study has found the first evidence of sophisticated breathing organs in 450-million-year-old sea creatures. Contrary to previous thought, trilobites were leg breathers, with structures resembling gills hanging off their thighs.

Trilobites were a group of marine animals with half-moon-like heads that resembled horseshoe crabs, and they were wildly successful in terms of evolution. Though they are now extinct, they survived for more than 250 million years — longer than the dinosaurs.

Thanks to new technologies and an extremely rare set of fossils, scientists from UC Riverside can now show that trilobites breathed oxygen and explain how they did so. Published in the journal Science Advances, these findings help piece together the puzzle of early animal evolution.

“Up until now, scientists have compared the upper branch of the trilobite leg to the non-respiratory upper branch in crustaceans, but our paper shows, for the first time, that the upper branch functioned as a gill,” said Jin-Bo Hou, a UCR paleontology doctoral student who led the research.

Among the oldest animals on earth, this work helps situate trilobites on the evolutionary tree more securely in between older arthropods, a large group of animals with exoskeletons, and crustaceans.

University of California – Riverside, “450-million-year-old sea creatures had a leg up on breathing” at ScienceDaily

How this finding situates trilobites more securely between older arthropods and crustaceans is unclear. Apparently, crustaceans don’t breathe through their legs. Did the older arthropods breathe through their legs? In any event, this find implies that the crustaceans underwent a dramatic switch in breathing mechanics, of which we apparently don’t have an account. How could we? We only found out about what the trilobites do very recently.

And how long would it take to evolve gills by purely Darwinian methods?

The paper is open access.

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Gregory Chaitin asks, if the universe is information, not matter, does that help explain consciousness?

Gregory Chaitin is best known for Chaitin’s Unknowable Number, a paradoxical truth that Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) would have liked.

Here he asks how mathematics can help with the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”:

Robert J. Marks: I’ve always looked at panpsychism as kind of a weird philosophy. I’m wondering if there’s any way that it can be tested. I doubt it. It’s going to be interesting to see if it can. But it is the position that consciousness is part of the universe just like mass and energy and all of the other stuff.

Gregory Chaitin: Well, they’re idealistic philosophies, which say that the universe is spirit really and matter is sort of an illusion. So that’s sort of related to an idea that I’ve been backing, which is the universe is made from information, that that’s the basic ontological basis.

The normal view if you dabble in metaphysics is that the universe is made from mathematics. That’s a Pythagorean idea, that God is a mathematician. And I prefer to say God is a … a computer programmer or a programmer.

There’s a book by a theologian, an Italian theologian, a priest, on this subject called Bit Bang. La nascita della filosofia digitale [2013]. It’s a wonderful book. Unfortunately, it’s only in Italian.

It’s saying that the universe is built out of information is like saying that the universe is really built out of spirit or the universe is in the mind of God; it’s not a material object. And the new version that physicists love is to say the universe is built out of quantum information. They want to try to get everything out of quantum information, including spacetime due to entanglement between qubits, for example. That’s a fashionable topic.

News, “Can mathematics help us understand consciousness?” at Mind Matters News

See also (more Chaitin):

Why human creativity is not computable. There is a paradox involved with computers and human creativity, something like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems or the Smallest Uninteresting Number. Creativity is what we don’t know. Once it is reduced to a formula a computer can use, it is not creative any more, by definition.

The paradox of the first uninteresting number. Robert J. Marks sometimes uses the paradox of the smallest “uninteresting” number to illustrate proof by contradiction — that is, by creating paradoxes. Gregory Chaitin: You can sort of go step by step from the paradox of the smallest “uninteresting” number to a proof very similar to mine.

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Jonathan Bartlett: The Fundamental Problem with Common Core Math

Jonathan Bartlett, an ID theorist who blogs here, is also, wearing another hat, well respected as a calculus teacher. See, for example, “The needless complexity of modern calculus. Meanwhile:

Intuition, he says, relies on skill, not the other way around:

In other words, students are frustrated because they are being asked to learn formulas and equations for things that have no connection to their present or future, whose sole purpose seems to be jumping through an arbitrary hoop set up to make them fail.

What Common Core is supposed to bring to the table is a deeper understanding of mathematics, so that students recognize how mathematical thinking is part of thinking in general. While this is a worthwhile goal, common core radically misfires on several accounts.

First of all, Common Core tries to teach the concepts first, and to incorrectly-aged students.

Jonathan Bartlett, “The Fundamental Problem with Common Core Math” at Mind Matters News

His takehome point: “Common Core is not as radical as the New Math of the 1950s, but both make the fatal error of prioritizing the thoughts of adults over those of students.”

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Stephen Meyer in the Federalist Today

Explaining how as science has advanced, the existence of God has become more probable, not less.

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American Museum of Natural History: Whale and hippo skin adaptations evolved independently

Paintings of dolphin (top), early extinct cetacean (middle), and hippo (bottom) Credit: Carl Buell

Their similar skin did not come from a a “shared amphibious ancestor”:

A new study shows that the similarly smooth, nearly hairless skin of whales and hippopotamuses evolved independently. The work suggests that their last common ancestor was likely a land-dwelling mammal, uprooting current thinking that the skin came fine-tuned for life in the water from a shared amphibious ancestor. The study is published today in the journal Current Biology and was led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Riverside; Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics; and the LOEWE-Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics (Germany).

“How mammals left terra firma and became fully aquatic is one of the most fascinating evolutionary stories, perhaps rivaled only by how animals traded water for land in the first place or by the evolution of flight,” said John Gatesy, a senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Vertebrate Zoology and a corresponding author on the study. “Our latest findings contradict the current dogma in the field—that relatives of the amphibious hippo might have been part of the transition as mammals re-entered life in the water.” …

“When you look at the molecular signatures, there is a striking and clear answer,” said study co-corresponding author and evolutionary genomicist Michael Hiller, from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and the LOEWE-Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics in Germany. “Our results strongly support the idea that ‘aquatic’ skin traits found in both hippos and cetaceans evolved independently. And not only that, we can see that the gene losses in the hippo lineage happened much later than in the cetacean lineage.”

American Museum of Natural History, “Skin deep: Aquatic skin adaptations of whales and hippos evolved independently” at Phys.org

Out of curiosity, how much of the middle painting above — and its relationship to the other two — is fact and how much is conjecture?

In any event,

One less lectern …
One less lectern to pound, pound …

(To the tune of “One more river… ”)

The paper is open access.

See also: Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?

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Horizontal gene transfer: Human gut microbes exchange genes more frequently in urban areas

Urban people have less diverse populations of microbes:

The researchers analyzed bacterial DNA to identify recent cases of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), a process that allows individual cells to mix up their genomes and acquire new functions from other bugs in the microbial community without having to reproduce. The team found that species in the gut frequently exchange genetic material, and that they do it more if they’re living inside people in industrialized or urban societies than if their hosts reside in rural or less developed environments.

“What’s novel and really impressive here” is the team’s use of whole-genome sequencing to study thousands of individual bacterial genomes, says Gladstone Institutes data scientist Katie Pollard, who was not involved in the study. While the results themselves aren’t unexpected given findings from previous work on HGT and industrialization in the context of the human microbiome, “this paper brings it all together and confirms it in a more rigorous way.”

Catherine Offord, “Gene Exchange Among Gut Bacteria Is Linked to Industrialization” at The Scientist

It’s not yet clear why there are fewer types of microbes in urban people’ guts or why they favor horizontal gene transfer more often.

But note: At one time, the researchers would be trying to explain it all in terms of Darwinism. That alone shows how much has changed without people really noticing.

The paper is open access.

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

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