Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 24

At Phys.org: Anatomy of a superorganism: Ant pupae secrete fluid as ‘milk’ to nurture young larvae

A nest of clonal raider ants with workers, pupae, and young larvae. The workers have placed the young larvae on the pupae, where they feed on pupal secretions. Credit: Daniel Kronauer

Life in an ant colony is a symphony of subtle interactions between insects acting in concert, more like cells in tissue than independent organisms bunking in a colony. Now, researchers have discovered a previously unknown social interaction that unites the colony, linking ants across developmental stages: adults, larvae, and pupae (an immobile stage, not unlike a butterfly’s chrysalis, during which ants transition from larvae to adults).

The study, published in Nature, reveals that pupae secrete a never-before observed fluid that adults and larvae immediately drink. The health of the entire colony appears to hinge on the prompt consumption of this nutrient-packed fluid—the larvae need it to grow and, if adults and larvae fail to drink it, the pupae die of fungal infections as the fluid builds up around them.

The fluid is rich in nutrients, the researchers found, as well as psychoactive substances, hormones, and some components found in the royal jelly that honeybees reserve for queen bee larvae. And while ants of all ages seem to enjoy the fluid, young ant larvae need it—those deprived of the fluid in their first four days of life fail to grow, and many eventually die.

“The first few days after hatching, larvae rely on the fluid almost like a newborn relies on milk,” Kronauer says. “The adults also drink it voraciously and, although it’s not clear what it does to the adults, we’re confident that it impacts metabolism and physiology.”

Anatomy of a superorganism

The ant colony is sometimes referred to as a superorganism—one unified entity composed of many organisms working in concert. Indeed, ants relay information by swapping chemical signals in ways analogous to how cells communicate in tissue. These include pheromones, which often convey short-term information, and social fluids, which have the potential to effect long-term metabolic and behavioral changes. The discovery of the pupal social fluid and its role in connecting adults, pupae, and larvae, adds context to this understanding of ant colonies as interdependent superorganisms.

“Pupal social fluid is the driving force behind a central and hitherto overlooked interaction network in ant societies,” Snir says. “This reveals a new aspect of dependency between larvae and pupae, and pupae and adults.”

“This study only provides a glimpse into the intricate interaction networks of insect societies,” Snir says. “Our long-term goal is to gain a deep understanding of the neural and molecular mechanisms governing social organization, and how these mechanisms evolved.”

Complete article at Phys.org.

Apparently, the survival of the ant colony departs from the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest. In contrast, a high degree of interdependence, “linking ants across developmental stages,” is essential for the survival of the whole colony.

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At Evolution News: For Darwinism, Pregnancy Is the “Mother of all Chicken-and-Egg Problems”

David Klinghoffer writes:

Here’s a really devilish problem to pose to your favorite friend, teacher, or relative who’s a Darwinist true believer. As Your Designed Body co-author Steve Laufmann observes, the relationship between an embryo and its mother is a relationship between unequals. The embryo’s systems are not yet complete so it depends on its mother for its life. This entails communication between the entities. 

But as Laufmann asks, how could such a thing as pregnancy evolve gradually, without guidance or foresight, “when you have to have it in order to have a next generation. Nobody has ever addressed a problem like that.” No, they haven’t, at least not persuasively, which is why Laufmann calls it the “mother of all chicken-and-egg problems.” Darwinian evolution has many of those, as it takes an engineer like Steve Laufmann, or a physician like his co-author Howard Glicksman, to fully recognize. Evolutionary biologists tend to silently glide over such issues, which clearly point to intelligent design. Either that, or they are satisfied by vague speculations. Watch:

Evolution News

I’ve just ordered a copy of Your Designed Body and I look forward to reading it. Perceiving that the human body (or an animal’s body) is a designed system helps keep the wonder of life front and center. The reductionism approach, while useful for gaining knowledge of the biological details, carries the risk of losing sight of the big picture. Gandalf alludes to this in an argument against Saruman, “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” [J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston: 1994), p. 252).

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From MSN: Orion capsule watches the moon eclipse Earth at farthest point of Artemis odyssey

Alan Boyle writes:

Halfway into its 25.5-day uncrewed Artemis 1 mission, NASA’s Orion capsule today recorded a weird kind of Earth-moon eclipse, reached its farthest distance from our planet and began the complicated trek back home.

Orion capsule watches the moon eclipse Earth at farthest point of Artemis odyssey

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson marveled at the milestones achieved in the Artemis program, aimed at sending astronauts to the lunar surface by as early as 2025.

“Artemis 1 has had extraordinary success and has completed a series of history-making events,” he told reporters at a news briefing. “For example, on Friday, for the first time, a human-rated spacecraft successfully entered that orbit for Artemis, one called a distant retrograde orbit. And then, on Saturday, Orion surpassed the distance record for a mission with a spacecraft designed to carry humans into deep space. … And just over an hour ago, Orion set another record, clocking its maximum distance from Earth, 270,000 miles.”

The mission evokes the spirit of the Apollo program, which sent NASA astronauts to the lunar surface 50 years ago. To cite just one example, Artemis 1 broke the distance record set by Apollo 13 back in 1970. “Artemis builds on Apollo,” Nelson said. “Not only are we going farther and coming home faster, but Artemis is paving the way to live and work in deep space in a hostile environment, to invent, to create, and ultimately to go on with humans to Mars.”

MSN.com

Exploration–the fascination of discovery and accomplishment, the challenge of reaching new heights–who could imagine the potential of such endeavors? Imagination is to see beyond the present reality; from where did this gift come? Without it, would we ever seek progress, would we ever venture beyond what we already know?

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From Evolution News: Prigogine’s Self-Organization vs. Specified Biological Complexity

This excerpt addresses some issues raised in a recent UD post and its comments.

Physicist Brian Miller writes:

Other scientists, such as Ilya Prigogine, have attempted to compare the order in cells to the order created by such self-organizing processes as the formation of a funnel cloud in a tornado. These attempts also fall short since such appeals can only explain the order of a repeating or chaotic pattern but not that of specified information.

Yockey pointed out that Prigogine and Nicolis invoked external self-organizational forces to explain the origin of order in living systems. But, as Yockey noted, what needs explaining in biological systems is not order (in the sense of a symmetrical or repeating pattern), but information, the kind of specified digital information found in software, written languages, and DNA. (Signature in the Cell, p. 255)

Others, such as complex-systems researcher Stuart Kauffman, have attempted to generate complex patterns out of self-organizing or autocatalytic systems and then relate them to life. However, all such attempts require that the initial conditions or arrangement of molecules is precisely specified. In other words, specified structures cannot be generated unless information is provided.

Thus, to explain the origin of specified biological complexity at the systems level, Kauffman has to presuppose a highly specific arrangement of those molecules at the molecular level as well as the existence of many highly specific and complex protein and RNA molecules. In short, Kauffman merely transfers the information problem from the molecules into the soup. (Signature in the Cell, p. 264)

All such attempts to explain life by natural processes make a fundamental error. They fail to distinguish between the order created by natural processes, such as water freezing to form a snowflake, and specified complexity. The former results from natural laws directing the arrangement of molecules. However, for a medium to contain information/specified complexity, it must have the freedom to take on numerous possible arrangements of parts. Correspondingly, law-like processes determine outcomes making arrangements that are highly probable, but the presence of information corresponds to patterns that are highly improbable.

Instead, information emerges from within an environment marked by indeterminacy, by the freedom to arrange parts in many different ways. As the MIT philosopher Robert Stalnaker puts it, information content “requires contingency”…the more improbable an event, the more information its occurrence conveys. In the case that a law-like physical or chemical process determines that one kind of event will necessarily and predictably follow another, then no uncertainty will be reduced by the occurrence of such a high-probability event. Thus, no information will be conveyed. (Signature in the Cell, p. 250-251)

This confusion has been pointed out by such experts in the field as Herbert Yockey, who was one of the founders in applying information theory to biology. In particular, he pointed out why order generated from natural processes could not explain the biological encoding of information. Meyer cites him on this:

Thus, as Yockey notes: “Attempts to relate the idea of order…with biological organization or specificity must be regarded as a play on words that cannot stand careful scrutiny. Informational macromolecules can code genetic messages and therefore can carry information because the sequence of bases or residues is affected very little, if at all, by [self-organizing] physicochemical factors.” (Signature in the Cell, p. 257)

The described technical details are important, but the basic challenge is easily understood by anyone via a simple analogy. Physical processes can produce various types of order, such as that seen in a hurricane. But no one has ever run to a lumber yard before a hurricane expectantly waiting for the oncoming winds to arrange the lumber into a new house. Instead, they wait in dread to see how a hurricane might demolish a home into a pile of debris. The same tendency holds true for life. Physical processes tend to break apart complex biological structures into simpler chemicals. None will organize a wide variety of molecules into fantastically improbably configurations that achieve such functional goals as processing energy, building molecular machines, and maintaining homeostasis. Only intelligence can build such complex structures for such purposeful ends.

View entire article at Evolution News.

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At Big Think: Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement

Elizabeth Fernandez writes:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

 Most neuroscientists believe that the brain operates in a classical manner. However, if brain processes rely on quantum mechanics, it could explain why our brains are so powerful. A team of researchers possibly witnessed entanglement in the brain, perhaps indicating that some of our brain activity, and maybe even consciousness, operates on a quantum level.

Supercomputers can beat us at chess and perform more calculations per second than the human brain. But there are other tasks our brains perform routinely that computers simply cannot match — interpreting events and situations and using imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Our brains are amazingly powerful computers, using not just neurons but the connections between the neurons to process and interpret information.

And then there is consciousness, neuroscience’s giant question mark. What causes it? How does it arise from a jumbled mass of neurons and synapses? After all, these may be enormously complex, but we are still talking about a wet bag of molecules and electrical impulses.

Some scientists suspect that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s enormous power, and its ability to generate consciousness. Recently, scientists at Trinity College Dublin, using a technique to test for quantum gravity, suggested that entanglement may be at work within our brains. If their results are confirmed, they could be a big step toward understanding how our brain, including consciousness, works. 

Quantum processes in the brain

Amazingly, we have seen some hints that quantum mechanisms are at work in our brains. Some of these mechanisms might help the brain process the world around it through sensory input. 

Despite such intriguing findings, the brain is largely assumed to be a classical system. 

If quantum processes are at work in the brain, it would be difficult to observe how they work and what they do. Indeed, not knowing exactly what we are looking for makes quantum processes very difficult to find. 

Seeing entanglement in the brain may show that the brain is not classical, as previously thought, but rather a powerful quantum system. If the results can be confirmed, they could provide some indication that the brain uses quantum processes. This could begin to shed light on how our brain performs the powerful computations it does, and how it manages consciousness. 

Complete article at Big Think.

As a physicist whose research involved computational nano-electronics, for which the entire physical schema relied upon quantum mechanical transport of electrons through molecular structures, it would seem to be a “no-brainer” that quantum processes (including entanglement) are prevalent in brain activity.

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At Science Daily: Exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life living in caves

Summary: For millennia, caves have served as shelters for prehistoric humans. Caves have also intrigued scholars from early Chinese naturalists to Charles Darwin. A cave ecologist has been in and out of these subterranean ecosystems, examining the unique life forms — and unique living conditions — that exist in Earth’s many caves. But what does that suggest about caves on other planetary bodies? In two connected studies, engineers, astrophysicists, astrobiologists and astronauts lay out the research that needs to be done to get us closer to answering the old-age question about life beyond Earth.

Is there life in Martian caves?

It’s a good question, but it’s not the right question — yet. An international collaboration of scientists led by NAU researcher Jut Wynne has dozens of questions we need asked and answered. Once we figure out how to study caves on the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies, then we can return to that question.

Wynne, an assistant research professor of cave ecology, is the lead author of two related studies, both published in a special collection of papers on planetary caves by the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets. The first, “Fundamental Science and Engineering Questions in Planetary Cave Research,” was done by an interdisciplinary team of 31 scientists, engineers and astronauts who produced a list of 198 questions that they, working with another 82 space and cave scientists and engineers, narrowed down to the 53 most important. Harnessing the knowledge of a considerable swath of the space science community, this work is the first study designed to identify the research and engineering priorities to advance the study of planetary caves. The team hopes their work will inform what will ultimately be needed to support robotic and human missions to a planetary cave — namely on the Moon and/or Mars.

What we know about extraterrestrial caves

There are a lot of them. Scientists have identified at least 3,545 potential caves on 11 different moons and planets throughout the solar system, including the Moon, Mars and moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Cave formation processes have even been identified on comets and asteroids. If the surrounding environment allows for access into the subsurface, that presents an opportunity for scientific discovery that’s never been available before.

The discoveries in these caves could be massive. Caves may one day allow scientists to “peer into the depths” of these rocky and icy bodies, which will provide insights into how they were formed (but also can provide further insights into how Earth was formed). They could also, of course, hold secrets of life.

“Caves on many planetary surfaces represent one of the best environments to search for evidence of extinct or perhaps extant lifeforms,” Wynne said. “For example, as Martian caves are sheltered from deadly surface radiation and violent windstorms, they are more likely to exhibit a more constant temperature regime compared to the surface, and some may even contain water ice. This makes caves on Mars one of the most important exploration targets in the search for life.”

See complete article at Science Daily.

Spelunking on Mars? I’m sure it could be fascinating, but it bears keeping in mind that environment doesn’t produce life.

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The Thought that Stops Thought

Eric Hedin writes:

Do we believe that rational thought is possible?

We may at times reason badly, but we do not thereby mistrust the existence or efficacy of reason.

www.dreamstime.com

There are those, however, who do dismiss reason. “There is a thought that stops thought,” wrote G. K. Chesterton.[i] It’s the idea that there is no fundamental basis for reason. Such a self-destructive thought is aided and abetted by thinking nature is all that there is. If nature is only particles in the void obeying mindless regularities, where in that scenario is there any room for rational inquiry?

The atheist rejects faith in God and holds that reality is limited to objective scientific reasoning within the constraints of the laws of nature and the material universe.

Perhaps not all who call themselves atheists are consistent atheists, but a consistent atheist would necessarily adhere to the view that the thoughts in his brain are only the result of interactions between charged particles governed by the laws of physics.

G. K. Chesterton wrote, “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”[ii] Thought itself requires a separateness from the mechanism of thinking. If naturalism is true, then our thoughts are not real in themselves; they are only random physical states of the molecules which make up the neurons of our brains. With such an assumption, we could not think. Our thoughts would only be interactions following the laws of nature, unguided by anything higher than the forces between atoms.

What becomes, then of “you”? Naturalism allows no identity of the individual beyond the probabilistic output of the three pound collection of atoms between our ears. “You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought,” Chesterton continued. “Descartes said, ‘I think; therefore I am.’ The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, ‘I am not; therefore I cannot think.’”[iii]

Our minds, however, are unnatural in at least one important sense: they have the ability not only to comprehend nature, but also to transform nature’s elements into objects and machines that would never assemble themselves in that way. This fact is underscored by the common distinction between natural and artificial, between nature and artifice.

Years ago, I read something that brings the claims of naturalism into a stark light: Naturalism insists that hydrogen gas, given enough time, will turn into people. And since people make the technological marvels of our culture, we can extend this claim of naturalism to say that hydrogen gas, given enough time, will turn into cars, computers, and cathedrals. That’s one explanation on the table. The question is whether we are willing to consider another possibility, that mind is as much behind our finely tuned, unfolding universe as it is behind cars, computers, and cathedrals—the possibility, as C.S. Lewis put it, that “human thought is… God-kindled.”[iv] If so, then reason has a foundation far better than hydrogen gas, far better than particles in the void.

[i] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Hollywood, FL: Simon & Brown, 1908, 2010), 28.

[ii] Chesterton, Orthodoxy (2010), 28.

[iii] Chesterton, Orthodoxy (2010), 29.

[iv] C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Harper Collins, 1947, 2001), 44.

Excerpted and adapted from Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See, by Eric Hedin (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021), ch. 11.

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At Evolution News: Intelligent Design and Man’s Free Will

Granville Sewell writes:

I believe that the unhappiness in this world attributable to “acts of God” (more properly called “acts of Nature”) is small compared to the unhappiness which we inflict on each other. Reform the human spirit and you have solved the problems of drug addiction, drunk driving, war, broken marriages, child abuse, neglect of the elderly, crime, corruption, and racial hatred. I suspect that many (not all, of course) of the problems which we generally blame on circumstances beyond our control are really caused by, or aggravated by, man — or at least could be prevented if we spent as much time trying to solve the world’s problems as we spend in hedonistic pursuits.

God has given us, on this Earth, the tools and resources necessary to construct, not a paradise, but something not too far from it. I am convinced that the majority of the things which make us most unhappy are the direct or indirect result of the sins and errors of people. Often, unfortunately, it is not the guilty person who suffers.

One of Our Highest Blessings

But our evil actions are also the inevitable result of one of our highest blessings — our free will. C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, says:

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having…. Someone once asked me, ‘Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?’ The better stuff a creature is made of — the cleverer and stronger and freer it is — then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong.

Why do a husband and wife decide to have a child? A toy doll requires much less work, and does not throw a temper tantrum every time you make him take a bath or go to bed. A stuffed animal would be much less likely to mark on the walls with a crayon, or gripe about a meal which took hours to prepare. But most parents feel that the bad experiences in raising a real child are a price worth paying for the rewards — the hand-made valentine he brings home from school, and the “I love you” she whispers as she gives her mother and father a good night kiss. 

They recognize that the same free will which makes a child more difficult to take care of than a stuffed animal also makes him more interesting. This must be the way our Creator feels about us. The freedom which God has given to us results, as an inevitable consequence, in many headaches for Him and for ourselves, but it is precisely this freedom which makes us more interesting than the other animals. God must feel that the headaches are a price worth paying: He has not taken back our free will, despite all the evil we have done. Why are there concentration camps in the world that God created? How could the Christian church sponsor the Crusades and the Inquisition? These terribly hard questions have a simple answer: because God gave us all a free will.

Wheat and Tares

Jesus told a parable about “wheat and tares,” which seems to teach that the weeds of sin and sorrow cannot be eliminated from the Earth without destroying the soil of human freedom from which the wheat of joy and goodness also springs. It is impossible to rid the world of the sorrow caused by pride, selfishness, and hatred without eliminating the free will which is also the source of all the unselfishness and love that there is in the world. Thought itself is an expression of our free will, and to say that God ought to prevent us from doing evil is to request that our ability to think be withdrawn. If we ask God to take back the free will which He has given us, we might as well ask Him to turn us into rocks.

If we base our view of mankind on what we see on the television news, we may feel that good and evil are greatly out of balance today; that there is much more pain than joy in the world, and much more evil than goodness. It is true that the amount of pain which exists in our world is overwhelming, but so is the amount of happiness. And if we look more closely at the lives of those around us, we will see that the soil of human freedom still produces wheat as well as weeds. 

The dark night of Nazi Germany gave birth to the heroism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie ten Boom, and many others. The well-known play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds is about two sisters raised by a bitter mother who suffocates ambition and discourages education. One sister ends up following the path to destruction taken by her mother; the other refuses to be trapped by her environment, and rises above it. It may seem at times that our world is choking on the weeds of pain and evil, but if we look closely we will see that wheat is still growing here.

Again we conclude that evil and unhappiness are the inevitable by-products of one of our most priceless blessings: our human free will. 

Evolution News

Our freedom to choose evil – to hurt others and ourselves – is not the end of the story. God also has freedom of choice, and he made the choice to respond to our selfishness and sin with sacrificial love. Now, anyone who comes to God in humility and asks for grace is given not only forgiveness, but eternal life, with a new nature remade in the likeness of God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

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According to sources: Sam Harris has deleted his Twitter account

Here: “The move comes after the Waking Up podcast host was slammed for stating that he hated Trump to such an extent that he wouldn’t have cared if Hunter Biden “had the corpses of children in his basement” in the lead up to the 2020 election.”

Readers may better remember Harris as a prominent new atheist.

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Man-ape chasm of differences

Michael Egnor, Professor of Neurosurgery, writes:

Image credit: John Vetterli (originally posted to Flickr as Sumatran Orangutan) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Human beings have mental powers that include the material mental powers of animals but in addition entail a profoundly different kind of thinking. Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not. Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts. Human beings are rational animals.

Human rationality is not merely a highly evolved kind of animal perception. Human rationality is qualitatively different — ontologically different — from animal perception. Human rationality is different because it is immaterial. Contemplation of universals cannot have material instantiation, because universals themselves are not material and cannot be instantiated in matter.,,,
It is a radical difference — an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference.

We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm.,,, Systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are partly immaterial beings who are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man.
The assertion that man is an ape is self-refuting. We could not express such a concept, misguided as it is, if we were apes and not men.

See full article at Evolution News.

Thanks to “bornagain77” for referencing this article.

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