Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 30

October 26, 2022

At Science Daily: Seals have a sense of rhythm

Rhythm is important for human music and speech. But are we the only mammal with a sense of rhythm? Researchers show that seals can discriminate rhythm without prior training. Seals’ rhythmic ability may be linked to their ability to learn vocalisations, skills that may have co-evolved in both humans and seals.

Why are we such chatty, musical animals? Evolutionary biologists think that our capacities for speech and music may be linked: only animals that can learn new vocalisations — such as humans and songbirds — seem to have a sense of rhythm. “We know that our closest relatives, non-human primates, need to be trained to respond to rhythm,” explains first author Laura Verga. “And even when trained, primates show very different rhythmic capacities to ours.” But what about other mammals?

Seal rhythm

The researchers decided to test the rhythmic abilities of harbour seals, animals known to be capable of vocal learning. The team first created sequences of seal vocalisations. The sequences differed in three rhythmic properties: tempo (fast or slow, like beats per minute in music), length (short or long, like duration of musical notes) and regularity (regular or irregular, like a metronome vs. the rhythm of free jazz). Would infant seals react to these rhythmic patterns?

The team tested twenty young seals, held at a rehabilitation centre (the Dutch Sealcentre Pieterburen) before being released into the wild. Using a method from human infant studies, the team recorded how many times the seals turned their head to look at the sound source (behind their backs). Such looking behaviour indicates whether animals (or infants) find a stimulus interesting. If seals can discriminate between different rhythmic properties, they might look longer or more often when they hear a sequence they prefer.

The seals looked more often when vocalisations were longer, faster, or rhythmically regular. This means that the 1-year-old seals — without training or rewards — spontaneously discriminated between regular (metronomic) and irregular (arrhythmic) sequences, sequences with short vs. long notes, and sequences with fast vs. slow-paced tempo.

Evolutionary origins

“Another mammal, apart from us, shows rhythm processing and vocalisation learning,” says Verga. “This is a significant advance in the debate over the evolutionary origins of human speech and musicality, which are still rather mysterious. Similarly to human babies, the rhythm perception we find in seals arises early in life, is robust and requires neither training nor reinforcement.”

Next, Verga and her team want to find out whether seals perceive rhythm in vocalisations of other animals, or even abstract sounds. And whether other mammals show the same skills: “Are seals special, or are other mammals also capable of spontaneously perceiving rhythm?”

Science Daily

“Rather mysterious…” Can the forces of nature produce a sense of musicality or the abilities of human speech? Supposing that electrical interactions between bio-molecules gave rise to Mozart or Shakespeare seems to seriously depart from the known limitations of the laws of physics.

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Published on October 26, 2022 10:13

October 25, 2022

How would a Last Universal Common Ancestor not have gone extinct because of mutations?

Let’s suppose there was a first Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) or a small population of it. How did it overcome deleterious harmful mutations, in order not to go extinct?

M.LYNCH (2003): Although uncertainties remain with respect to the form of the mutational-effect distribution, a great deal of evidence from several sources strongly suggests that the overall effects of mutations are to reduce fitness. Indirect evidence comes from asymmetrical responses to artificial selection on life history traits, suggesting that variance for these traits is maintained by downwardly skewed distributions of mutational effects. More direct evidence comes from spontaneous mutation accumulation (MA) experiments in Drosophila, Caenorhabditis elegans, wheat, yeast, Escherichia coli, and different mutation accumulation (MA) experiments in Arabidopsis. All of these experiments detected downward trends in mutation accumulation (MA) line population mean fitness relative to control populations as generations accrued. As far as we know, there is no case of even a single MA line maintained by bottlenecking that showed significantly higher fitness than its contemporary control populations. 2

M.C. Whitlock (2004): The overall effect of mutation on a population is strongly dependent on the population size. A large population has many new mutations in each generation, and therefore the probability is high that it will obtain new favorable mutations. This large population also has effective selection against the bad mutations that occur; deleterious mutations in a large population are kept at a low frequency within a balance between the forces of selection and those of mutation. A population with relatively fewer individuals, however, will have lower fitness on average, not only because fewer beneficial mutations arise, but also because deleterious mutations are more likely to reach high frequencies through random genetic drift. This shift in the balance between fixation of beneficial and deleterious mutations can result in a decline in the fitness of individuals in a small population and, ultimately, may lead to the extinction of that population. As such, a change in population size may determine the ultimate fate of a species affected by anthropogenic change.3

J.C.Sandord (2022): Genetic Entropy is the genetic degeneration of living things. Genetic entropy is the systematic breakdown of the internal biological information systems that make life alive. Genetic entropy results from genetic mutations, which are typographical errors in the programming of life (life’s instruction manuals). Mutations systematically erode the information that encodes life’s many essential functions. Biological information consists of a large set of specifications, and random mutations systematically scramble these specifications – gradually but relentlessly destroying the programming instructions essential to life. Genetic entropy is most easily understood on a personal level. In our bodies there are roughly 3 new mutations (word-processing errors), every cell division. Our cells become more mutant, and more divergent from each other every day. By the time we are old, each of our cells has accumulated tens of thousands of mutations. Mutation accumulation is the primary reason we grow old and die. This level of genetic entropy is easy to understand. There is another level of genetic entropy that affects us as a population. Because mutations arise in all of our cells, including our reproductive cells, we pass many of our new mutations to our children. So mutations continuously accumulate in the population – with each generation being more mutant than the last. So not only do we undergo genetic degeneration personally, we also are undergoing genetic degeneration as a population. This is essentially evolution going the wrong way. Natural selection can slow down, but cannot stop, genetic entropy on the population level.

Apart from intelligence, information and information systems always degenerate. This is obviously true in the human realm, but is equally true in the biological realm (contrary to what evolutionists claim). The more technical definition of entropy, as used by engineers and physicists, is simply a measure of disorder. Technically, apart from any external intervention, all functional systems degenerate, consistently moving from order to disorder (because entropy always increases in any closed system). For the biologist it is more useful to employ the more general use of the word entropy, which conveys that since physical entropy is ever-increasing (disorder is always increasing), therefore there is universal tendency for all biological information systems to degenerate over time – apart from intelligent intervention.1

1. J.C.Sanford: Genetic entropy 2022
2. Michael Lynch: TOWARD A REALISTIC MODEL OF MUTATIONS AFFECTING FITNESS 2003 Mar
3. Michael C. Whitlock: Fixation of New Mutations in Small Populations 2004

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Published on October 25, 2022 10:15

At Phys.org: Astronomers find cosmic rays driving galaxy’s winds

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have discovered an important new clue about how galaxies put the brakes on vigorous episodes of star formation. Their new study of the neighboring galaxy M33 indicates that fast-moving cosmic ray electrons can drive winds that blow away the gas needed to form new stars.

VLA finds cosmic rays driving galaxy's winds

Artist’s illustration of cosmic ray driven winds (blue and green) superimposed on a visible-light image of the Triangulum galaxy M33 (red and white) observed with VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Credit: Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences- IPM & European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Such winds are responsible for slowing the rate of star formation as galaxies evolve over time. However, shock waves from supernova explosions and energetic, black hole-powered jets of material coming from galactic cores have been considered the primary drivers of those winds. Cosmic rays were thought to be minor contributors, particularly in galaxies like M33 that have regions of prolific star formation.

Stars much more massive than our sun speed through their life cycles, ultimately exploding as supernovae. The explosive shock waves can accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, creating cosmic rays. Enough of these cosmic rays can build pressure that drives winds carrying away the gas needed to continue forming stars.

Complete article at Phys.org.

A galaxy’s ability to continue the process of star formation throughout its history is an important factor contributing to its potential habitability. [Reasons.org]

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Published on October 25, 2022 09:36

That inconvenient US State Dept memo on mass correspondence voting — in Ukraine

Yes, they had to know the fire they were playing with — notice, testimony to congress:

Now, you try to tell me that this time and place it’s different. All you will do is raise the question whether you are an empty headed talking point parrot or something worse. Much worse. END

PS, here is my basic political analysis, for those willing to learn from hard bought history:

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Published on October 25, 2022 05:02

October 24, 2022

At Phys.org: NASA announces 16 people who will study UFOs to see what’s natural—and what isn’t

Jordan Mendoza writes:

What is behind all these UFO sightings? We may find out.

NASA announced the 16 people who will spend the next nine months studying unidentified aerial phenomena, also known as UFOs.

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Using unclassified data, the team will “lay the groundwork for future study” of UFOs by examining how the data is gathered by the public, local government and other sources. The goal is to have a roadmap for NASA’s data analysis on the flying objects, and determine what events are natural or not.

“Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, said in a statement. “Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies. Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable.”

The announcement of the study participants comes amid a renewed interest in UFOs. In June 2021, the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence released a highly anticipated report examining unidentified aerial phenomena, but no “firm conclusions” could be drawn on more than 140 instances.

Still, federal officials continue to monitor UAPs because they are viewed as a potential national security threat, according to Rep. André Carson, D-Indiana. The Department of Defense created the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization in November 2021 to track and analyze UFOs, and in May, Congress held its first public hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years.

While UFOs are commonly associated with aliens, NASA doesn’t think the phenomena are “extra-terrestrial in origin.” But the agency says observations make it difficult to draw scientific conclusions.

Who will study UFOs for NASA?

The research group picked by NASA include astronomers, scientists, aviation officials, as well as a former astronaut, oceanographer and reporter.

The team’s full report is expected to be released to the public in mid-2023.

Full article at Phys.org.

As Paul Nelson comments: “Sorting out phenomena into ‘a sufficient physical [non-intelligent] cause exists’ versus ‘alien [or human] intelligence required’ is design detection, by any construal of the underlying logic.” What would the UFO team decide if they were fed the genetic code from human DNA, perhaps disguised in a format that didn’t reveal it as such?

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Published on October 24, 2022 18:47

What Must We Do When the Foundations Are Being Destroyed?

The twentieth century was drenched in blood. Totalitarian governments cruelly slaughtered over 100 million people and consigned tens of millions more to the camps, where their bodies were broken and their spirits crushed. As the years dragged by in that most miserable of centuries, time and again the world convulsed in the grip of a malignant evil that was unprecedented in its scope and brutality.

Yet, for all its horror, as the century came to a close there were reasons for hope and even optimism. Memories of the Nazi horror were fading. The Soviet Union had collapsed not, as many had feared, in a paroxysm of fire and blood, but with a whimper. In China, Deng Xiaoping unleashed the power of free markets to set his country on a path of stunning economic growth that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and in the West, it was almost universally believed that political freedom would inevitably follow in the wake of this new economic freedom.

Those were heady times. Who can forget Francis Fukuyama’s famous announcement that the world was on the cusp of the “end of history” and the “universalization of Western liberal democracy”? Fukuyama was wrong, of course, and a mere 30 years later, the totalitarian impulse he believed vanquished has reasserted itself with a vengeance. The euphoria of the 90s has been replaced in this century by a simmering miasma of fear and dread. No one believes we are on the verge of a time of peace and prosperity. Instead, there is a widespread sense that the great evil is stirring again, and the world seems to be teetering on the edge of an abyss of madness and destruction.

The resurgence of authoritarianism was demonstrated with startling clarity a few months ago at the UC Hastings Law School. Professor Ilya Shapiro was invited to speak on campus, and on the night of the lecture, dozens of students showed up to disrupt the event. When Shapiro tried to speak, the students screamed and banged on the tables. After enduring this for nearly an hour with no help from the university dean standing in the room, Shapiro gave up and left. More shocking still, UC Hastings Professor Rory Little who was also in the room endorsed and encouraged the students’ actions. This is not an isolated event. We now routinely hear about students at our elite universities shouting down speakers while school officials stand by and do nothing or, worse, actively encourage them.

Some might argue we have nothing to fear from mere college students. If so, they have forgotten their history. Mao’s Red Guard – his shock troops in the Cultural Revolution – consisted mostly of young people who were led by students from China’s elite universities. Millions died. Never underestimate the power of energized youth to wreak havoc.

Still, if the authoritarian contagion were limited to college campuses, I might be more optimistic about our prospects. But it is not. Campus authoritarians are part of a wider resurgence of the authoritarian impulse in our culture. For the first time in American history, an administration is legally persecuting the prior administration. Who thought taking us down the road to banana republic status was a good idea? That same administration took the nation’s first fitful steps at establishing a Ministry of Propaganda.1 People are being hounded from their jobs for refusing to celebrate the radical transgender agenda. Cancel culture reflects the authoritarian desire to silence opposition. Antifa and BLM thugs riot and burn while ruling progressives tell police to stand down.

All of this is chilling because we are not writing on a blank slate. If the twentieth century taught us anything, it is that from small sparks such as these, an all-consuming authoritarian conflagration can be ignited seemingly overnight. In the 1920s, the Brown Shirts showed up at their opponents’ meetings and shouted them down. A few short years later, they were rounding their opponents up, and those not murdered outright were put in camps. In the 2020s wild-eyed barbarians burn cities and silence anyone who tries to stand up to them. Who is to say what the future holds? History has shown it is but a short step from stamping out a man’s voice to stamping out his freedom, or his life.

In 1935 archeologists digging in the ruins of the city of Lachish found a piece of clay with a message written on it 2,500 years earlier when the Babylonian army was rampaging through the land of Judah. An official from a town near Lachish ominously warned his superior that he could no longer see the signal fires from the town of Azeqah. I feel a certain affinity with that ancient official. He surely knew the situation was dire and was probably going to get worse. But so long as he could see the signal fire in Azeqah, he could cling to hope. Day after day, night after night, he looked out from his watchtower, saw that signal, and knew he had time. Then one night he looked, and the fire was gone. How his heart must have fluttered at that moment when he realized his way of life, if not his life itself, was soon to end. And end it did. The message was found in the pile of ash that was left when the city burned.

Hemingway wrote of a man who went bankrupt, and when asked how it happened, he replied, “gradually and then suddenly.” The West has been in the gradual phase of its collapse for several decades. When I see rampant authoritarianism and thuggery running through our culture, sometimes abetted by those charged with protecting the vulnerable, I wonder how far off the sudden part can be. Thankfully, I still see the signal fire from Azeqah. People of goodwill are putting up a stiff resistance, but I must confess that I am afraid. When our cities are put to flame and our institutions are overrun by barbarians, I am reminded of lines from Yeats’ most famous poem which seem to have been pulled from today’s headlines:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The Prophet Hosea declared that his people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. My purpose in writing this article is to hopefully equip the people who are resisting the tyranny with knowledge about how we came to be in this place in history, expose the tactics of our adversaries, and suggest strategies for resisting the evil that has descended upon us.

Men Have Forgotten God

What is the cause of the rise of the new authoritarianism? The answer lies in Tocqueville’s observation that there is hardly any human action that does not originate in some general idea men have conceived about God.2 Such ideas, he wrote, are “the common spring from which everything else emanates.”3 More recently, it has often been noted that politics is downstream from culture which is downstream from religion. This can be shortened to “politics is downstream from religion.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn knew this all too well. In his 1983 speech accepting the Templeton Prize, Solzhenitsyn recalled hearing as a child, older people explaining the great disasters that had befallen Russia with the observation “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Solzhenitsyn continued:

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.’

Lenin declared that “Marxism is materialism. As such, it is relentlessly hostile to religion.”4 In the decades that followed, the Soviet government he founded murdered 60 million people. That is not a coincidence. What does a law student shouting down a speaker have in common with Lenin? They are both thoroughly convinced materialists.5 The overwhelming majority of the intellectual elites in our county (and the world) are thoroughgoing materialists. Our universities, our legal institutions, the media, and just about every other institution in our country are now dominated by people who take materialism for granted. For them, it is hardly even a philosophical theory; it is a settled fact known for certain by all intelligent people.

This should chill you to the core, because, as Stalin and Mao demonstrated with the blood of millions, there is an undeniable link between materialism and the authoritarian impulse. To understand why requires an understanding of what materialism teaches about the human condition. Let us begin by reciting what could be the materialist creed:

In the beginning were the particles, and the particles were in motion, and in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than the particles.

Materialism is an anti-god and Carl Sagan is its prophet: “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.”

If this is true, certain conclusions inevitably follow. The first of these is that humans are not, in essence, different from non-living things. The standard model of cosmology posits that the universe began in an infinitely hot dense singularity that began expanding with the “big bang.” As the universe expanded, gravity pulled lighter elements together to form stars, and in the nuclear furnaces at the center of those stars heavier elements were fused. Eventually, some of those stars burned out, leaving the heavier elements behind. Planets were formed from these heavier elements, and eons later on one of those planets a simple single celled living organism somehow spontaneously arose from non-living matter. The descendants of that first simple cell evolved into more and more complex living things until, at last, a species of clever hairless apes arose. Those hairless apes call themselves “humans.”

Many of those humans believe they are special because they have an immaterial spirit, but the materialist says they are wrong. He insists that like everything else in the cosmos, humans consist only of the particles that make up their bodies. Ultimately, like everything else, a human is nothing but an amalgamation of burnt-out star dust.6

What about consciousness (i.e., the state of being self-aware) and free will? Surely even a materialist will concede that these attributes set humans apart from mere particles in motion. Not so says the materialist. The second conclusion compelled by his premises is that “mental” is not a separate category from “physical.” This means that when a person perceives his own consciousness, what he is perceiving can be explained solely by the electro-chemical processes of his physical brain. Everything about us, including our sense of having an inner self and free will, is caused by those purely physical processes. Particles are not aware, and they do not choose.

Materialists do not deny that everyone feels they are conscious, but as famous atheist Sam Harris explains, a person’s experience that he is “an autonomous individual with a coherent identity and sense of free will” is an illusion. Harris’ statement is the ultimate counterintuitive conclusion. But, to his credit, Harris does not run from the conclusions compelled by his materialist premises. He admits that he feels self-awareness like everyone else, but he insists that feeling is a trick played on him by the burnt-out star dust that makes up his physical body.

What about morality? Surely that sets us apart from the rocks. No, replies the materialist, it does not. The third conclusion that follows inevitably from materialist premises is that objective morality cannot exist. Have you ever met an immoral rock? Your body is nothing but burnt-out star dust, and dust is neither good nor bad. It just is. Richard Dawkins assures us that in a universe of blind physical forces, “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Of course, every sane person feels strongly that some things are “right” and some things are “wrong.” Again, materialists do not deny that strong moral feelings exist. But, as with consciousness and free will, they insist that anyone who believes that those feelings point to something real beyond physical brain processes is deluded. Morality, like everything else, is the product of blind, purposeless material processes. The moral feelings a person has are an evolutionary holdover, like their appendix. A person has an appendix because at some point in evolutionary history it somehow gave his ancestors a reproductive advantage. He has a strong moral feeling that torturing kittens is wrong for the same reason.

At this point you might think I am exaggerating what materialism teaches. I assure you I am not, and to demonstrate this I will allow arch-materialist William Provine to sum up the materialist worldview. He wrote: “Humans are complex organic machines that die completely with no survival of soul . . . [Their choices] are determined by the interaction of heredity and environment and are not the result of free will. No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.”7

Stalin believed the road to his collectivist utopia would need to be paved with the corpses of the kulaks, and so he ordered the “liquidation of kulaks as a class.” Millions were slaughtered. History teaches us that authoritarian leftist utopians like Stalin and Mao never hesitate to order murder on an industrial scale when it suits their purposes. How can any sane person command the liquidation of millions with such breathtakingly insouciant disregard for human life? The point of the discussion so far has been to lay a foundation for answering that question. And the answer is simply this: Stalin and Mao were committed materialists who took their materialism seriously. Materialist beliefs, taken to their logical extreme, have consequences, some of which I explained in an article titled Psychopath As Übermensch Or Nietzsche At Columbine”8

Let us assume for the sake of argument that metaphysical naturalism is a true account of reality. What if a person were able to act based on a clear-eyed and unsentimental understanding of the consequences outlined above? If that person had the courage not to be overwhelmed by the utter meaningless of existence, he would be transformed. He would be bold, self-confident, assertive, uninhibited, and unrestrained. He would consider empathy to be nothing but weak-kneed sentimentality. To him others would not be ends; they would be objects to be exploited for his own gratification. He would not mind being called cruel, because he would know that “cruelty” is an empty category, the product of mere sentiment. Is the lion being cruel to the gazelle? No, he is merely doing what lions naturally do to gazelles. In short, he would be what we call a psychopath.

Materialism taken to its logical end effectively turned Stalin and Mao into psychopaths. That is why millions died at their hands. Think about that the next time you see a video of rampaging wild-eyed social justice warriors. Is it so hard to believe that given their passionate hatred for everyone who refuses to toe the DEI line, they would be tempted by a similar impulse?

The “Universal Acid” of Materialist Philosophy

It is impossible to overestimate how radically transformative materialist ideas are if one follows them through to their logical entailments. If it is true that in the entire universe nothing exists but particles in motion, all traditional ideas about practically everything are overthrown. Vocal atheist academic Daniel Dennett puts it this way: Materialism is a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways . . .”9 Many volumes could be written about how this Universal Acid has corroded the ideas and institutions of Western civilization, leaving a hollowed-out teetering shack where once stood a magnificent edifice. For my present purposes, I will limit the discussion to what happens when the Universal Acid of materialism is poured on our laws and politics.

The Declaration of Independence

The basic principles on which the United States was founded are set forth in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which famously states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

For nearly 200 years after the American Founding, it was almost universally recognized that the American form of government rests on two self-evident transcendent truths: (1) All men are created equal. (2) The Creator has endowed all men with certain rights. But the rise of materialism among our intellectual elite in the last several decades has undermined that consensus. Under the materialism they take for granted, Jefferson’s propositions are not self-evidently true. Indeed, they are self-evidently false. If the universe is a closed system of natural causes, there is no room for a creator who creates men with equal moral status and endows them with rights.

Where do universal rights come from if not from God? For the materialist, they come from nowhere because they simply do not exist. Instead, what we all “rights” are privileges rulers extend to those they rule, and those privileges can be revoked at any time. To be sure, materialists talk about rights all the time. But it is important to keep in mind that materialists often use the same words the rest of us use while meaning vastly different things. For example, when I say, “murder is evil,” I mean that the act of murder transgresses a transcendent unchangeable objective moral law woven by God into the very warp and woof of the universe. When a materialist says, “murder is evil,” he means his evolutionary programing has caused him to have strong feelings of revulsion by the act of murder.

Suppose a materialist were asked on what basis his subjective revulsion to murder is superior to the Nazi’s subjective preference in favor of murder in some instances? The materialist has no answer, because his principles preclude him from acknowledging the existence of an objective moral code by which to judge between his preferences and the Nazi’s. “Holocausts are not my cup of tea,” the materialist says, “but I cannot explain to you why my tea preferences are superior to a national socialist’s.”

So what do materialists mean when they engage in “rights” talk? Political scientists often say rights are correlative of duties. This means that for any right there is a corresponding moral duty to respect that right. “I have a right to life” is another way of saying “You have a duty not to murder me.” Your right to free speech implies my moral duty not to silence you. But as we have seen, under materialism, moral duties are not objectively real. They are strong feelings caused by evolutionary programing. And these feelings can be discarded where they do not serve the materialist’s purposes.

The materialist says there are no universal moral principles guiding our relations in society. It follows from this premises that the Declaration is wrong when it insists that self-evident universal rights exist. This is why a progressive can assert mutually contradictory positions regarding rights without a hint of irony. For example, not long ago, progressives were the great champions of the right to freedom of expression. Now, howling progressive barbarians try to stifle all dissenting speech. For a progressive, this is not a contradiction. When they were not in charge, they championed freedom. Now that they have power, they crush their opponents. They never regarded freedom of expression as a universal principle to be upheld for its own sake. It is a tool to be used in the power game, and when that tool has served its purpose, it is put on the shelf like a wrench after the bolt is tightened. All that matters ultimately is to have and wield power.

The Declaration derives its logical force from the fundamentally Christian idea of the equality of all persons as image bearers of God. Dennett’s Universal Acid has chewed through this concept as well, and I hope you will pardon a lengthy quotation as we watch atheist Yuval Noah Harari pour on the acid in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:

[T]he American Founding Fathers . . . imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.

It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and ‘commoners’ is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal? . . .

According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently’.

Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals.

Harari’s analysis is remarkably candid. He admits that under materialism, human dignity does not exist; universal principles of justice and equality do not exist; human rights do not exist; liberty does not exist. All of these things are social constructs resulting from entirely contingent physical processes. Is it any wonder that dictators who actually believe this do not blanch at the death of millions?

The Constitution

The Constitution sets forth the fundamental law of the United States. It does so by means of language. It is a text. The words of that text mean one thing and not another. But this commonsense conclusion is hotly disputed, even denied, every time a progressive talks about the “living constitution.” Of course, there is no such thing as a “living constitution.” The progressive lawyers, judges and law professors who use that phase recognize that the text of the real Constitution limits their power to impose their policy preferences on the people. They don’t like that and to get around those limits they created the idea that the Constitution is a sort of magical “living” document whose words may mean one thing today and something completely different tomorrow. A progressive judge is not bothered even a little when he uses this ruse to usurp the power that is reserved to the people.

As Judge Bork noted in The Tempting of America, the moment of temptation for a judge comes when he is faced with the choice between whether he or the people should rule. That choice is fundamentally a moral choice. Given materialism, morality is an illusion, a mere adaptive mechanism foisted on us by blind natural forces. And if a judge really believes that, then shouldn’t he do “wrong” in service of the higher “good” of imposing by judicial fiat whatever progressive policy his progressive colleagues could not get legislatively enacted? When “wrong” and “right” do not exist in any meaningful sense, power is all there is. The “living constitution” is not a method of interpretation. It is a mask progressive judges use to cover their usurpation of power that belongs to the people.

Law

For centuries the English (and subsequently the American) common law was based on the “premise that the law existed before any attempts to express it,” and a judge’s job was not to “make” law but to “find” preexisting law.10 The moral principles of natural law were the preeminent source from which law was to be found.11

The application of the Universal Acid to our institutions usually takes place over a long period of time and involves many actors. This is not the case in this instance. Here, we can identify the man who poured out the acid. Enter Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., perhaps the most consequential judge in American history. Holmes was a convinced materialist who took his philosophy to its logical conclusions. As we have seen, one of the conclusions compelled by materialist premises is that morality is not based on an objective moral code, but is an evolutionary adaptation. Holmes took this view, as demonstrated in a letter he wrote to a friend in which he said “[I] think morality a sort of higher politeness, that stands between us and the ultimate fact – force…. Nor do I see how a believer in any kind of evolution can get a higher formula than organic fitness at the given moment.”12

Holmes did not believe morality was real. Therefore, in a monumentally consequential 1897 article entitled The Path of the Law, he announced that it was time to jettison any notion that the law has anything to do with morality. Holmes wrote, “For my own part, I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law.”

With The Path of the Law Holmes founded the school of “legal realism,” which, in a remarkably short time, came to be the predominate theory of jurisprudence in the United States. Legal realism denies the existence of any objective principles of ethics or admitted axioms to guide a judge’s rulings. In other words, the law is not based upon principles of justice that transcend time and place; it is nothing more than what willful judges do.

Untethered from an obligation to any authority other than their personal predilections, progressive judges have wreaked havoc on our democratic norms by substituting their own preferences for actual rules of law. Some judges are remarkably candid about what they have done. Judge Richard Posner, for example, said this about his judicial philosophy: “I pay very little attention to legal rules, statutes, constitutional provisions. . . . A case is just a dispute. The first thing you do is ask yourself – forget about the law – what is a sensible resolution of this dispute? The next thing . . . is to see if a recent Supreme Court precedent or some other legal obstacle stood in the way of ruling in favor of that sensible resolution. And the answer is that’s actually rarely the case. When you have a Supreme Court case or something similar, they’re often extremely easy to get around.”

Of course, by “sensible resolution,” he meant “what I want.” And if that outcome conflicts with a law or legal precedent, no problem, because that is “easy to get around.” This is what happens when the Universal Acid dissolves the tether linking law to morality. Judges routinely violate their oaths to uphold the law and then brag about it. This is not a mere theoretical concern, as Holmes himself demonstrated when he authored his infamous opinion in the case of Buck v. Bell. That case upheld a law mandating sterilization of mentally “inferior” people. Holmes concluded his opinion with the chilling words, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Holmes’ materialism was on full display.

Politics

In a world where universal moral truths governing human relations do not exist, all relationships are reducible to power dynamics. In other words, in a cosmos where the word “justice” is ultimately meaningless, only power remains. To use Holmes’ terms, differences are resolved by “the ultimate fact – force,” and the strong dominate the weak.

Nearly 80 years ago in his book, The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis anticipated the corrosive effect materialism would have on politics in the West. He envisioned a time when progressives (whom he called “Conditioners”) would simultaneously recognize no abstract limits on their power and no basis other than their own subjective whims for exercising that power. He wrote “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means . . . the power of some men to make other men what they please.” But what motivates the Conditioners? Lewis’ answer: “The [progressives] must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. . . [For] those who stand outside all judgments of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.”

We are faced with a stark choice. Either the universal moral principles announced in the Declaration are true or they are false. We can have freedom under law only if we choose “true,” because if they are false there is, by definition, no abstract restraint on power. Our politics will degenerate into a bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all) in which the weak succumb to the strong. Lewis put it this way:

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao [Lewis’ word for the transcendent objective moral code], or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

Lewis was prophetic. Today, progressives jettison centuries of tradition based on the latest fad that catches their fancy. For example, the latest progressive fad is to insist that parents should be free to have their children surgically mutilated as a sacrifice to transgender ideology. And worse, where parents do not want this outcome, minors should have the right to make that decision behind their parents’ back.

Does anyone really believe that a child has the capacity to decide whether to have radical irreversible gender surgery that will make them sterile and scar both body and mind? Of course not. The mutilation does not reflect the child’s choice. It reflects hyper-progressive certainty, forced on society with no regard for moral debate. This is a pristine example of what Lewis was talking about, and we can recast his thought with minimal changes: “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means . . . the power of [progressives] to make [children] what they please.” God help us.

How Should We Respond?

Discerning readers will have realized that the title of this article is an allusion to Psalm 11:3. “When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” I find it interesting that when the Psalmist asks this question, he does not, as one might expect, provide a plan of action. He does not tell us what to do; he enjoins us to know. He writes, “The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord is on his heavenly throne.” Do not lose heart when it seems like the whole world is spinning out of control and falling to pieces around you. God is on His throne. He is in control.

Knowledge is key, and this is the main thing we must know about our authoritarian adversaries. They are unconstrained by any commitment to telling the truth, and we must be constantly ready to expose their lies. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

Here is an example of what I mean. The next time Nancy Pelosi13 stands up and says this or that conservative proposal is a “threat to democracy,” call out the two lies embedded in that one statement. The first lie is implied – that Nancy Pelosi values democracy and means to protect it. Nancy Pelosi cares not one whit for democracy. Indeed, she is working to undermine our democracy by pushing the Democratic Party’s bill mandating a federal takeover of all elections and the elimination of election security. Pelosi wants to eliminate election security because she believes Democrats will win more elections if the integrity of the vote is suppressed. Like all authoritarians, the only thing she cares about is raw power, and she will do anything to hold it, including undermining the very democracy she claims to want to protect. Her actions belie her words. She does not want free and fair elections. It is clear she would prefer communist-style elections in which the Party’s chosen candidate always wins with 99% of the vote.

The second lie in Pelosi’s statement is the more obvious one. Everyone knows that not every policy proposal she disagrees with is an existential threat to our constitutional order. Do not make the mistake of dignifying her lies by engaging with them as if they were anything but what they obviously are. Our response to a lie is not to engage with – and thereby give traction to – the lie. Our response is to call out the lie for what it is and to heap scorn and contempt upon the liar.

The second thing we need to know about authoritarians is that they are very often hypocrites, and we must expose their double standards tirelessly. When John Kerry flies his private plane to Reykjavik to pick up a climate award, mock him mercilessly. When elites mandate masks and throw parties where only the waitstaff are required to wear them, hold them up for the contempt they deserve.

Third, authoritarian “arguments” are frequently not arguments at all but veils covering their exercise of raw power. The next time a progressive says that the right to free speech does not protect hate speech, ask them what they mean by the phrase “hate speech.” Invariably, the answer will be hate speech is speech they find offensive. Let me get this straight, you are all for protecting speech you agree with but want to shut down speech you find offensive? That is absurd. As the Supreme Court has said many times, anodyne speech that offends no one requires no protection. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect unpopular speech, especially unpopular political speech. Expressing opinions that inflame passions is precisely why it is needed. You are not in favor of free speech at all if you are not in favor of allowing speech you despise. So it turns out that the progressive “argument” for controlling speech is, at bottom, nothing but a mask to cover their exercise of force to silence anyone who disagrees with them. That is why the students at UC Hastings Law School feel perfectly justified when they used fascist tactics to shut down a political debate.

Finally, and most importantly, by definition, authoritarians deny the foundation for universal rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence, and we must stand ready to expose their betrayal of our founding principles. Let us end where we started. “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Our Republic is in tatters and the evil of authoritarianism is reasserting itself because men have forgotten God.

There was a time in our nation’s history when the Judeo-Christian foundation upon which our constitutional edifice rests was unquestioned by the vast majority of people. Nearly everyone took the Declaration seriously when it declared that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That is no longer the case. Of all the beliefs, habits and traditions the Universal Acid has dissolved, its most baleful effect has been eroding this understanding of the foundation of our rights. Before the acid was poured out, we rested secure in the belief that our rights were vouchsafed by God. While this is still widely believed by the average citizen, the overwhelming majority of our so-called elites reject the idea as a quaint superstition. What do they propose as a substitute foundation for our rights? Absolutely nothing. As we have seen, for the materialist “rights” talk is just so much babbling by clever hairless apes that ultimately has no basis in any conception of the real world in which we live. For the materialist, the only real thing is power, and as Lewis wrote, the only thing guiding his exercise of power is his emotional impulses.

As I stated before, the Declaration derives its logical force from the Christian idea of the equality of all men as image bearers of God. Once that foundation is removed, the entire structure crashes to the ground. Yes, our opponents talk about “rights,” but they do not believe in rights in any meaningful sense. For example, I take it that most progressives will say they believe in the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. But just today I read that a progressive Virginia legislator is trying to pass a law to send parents to prison if they refuse to allow their children to be surgically mutilated when a government employee decides that is in the child’s best interest. I am not making this up.

Materialism of one stripe or another has been with us for centuries. When the Judeo-Christian foundation of our Republic was taken for granted, even by our elites, the materialist cancer was an irritant, a nuisance but not a danger. The cancer has now metastasized to stage IV. A person with stage IV cancer sometimes survives, but their prospects are dim. Nancy Pelosi is right about one thing. Our democracy is under assault. But the assault is coming from the opposite direction she claims. It is time to man the barricades.

What does this mean as a practical matter? It means two things. First, we must stop living by lies. Call “transition surgery” on minors what it really is – child abuse. When someone insists that we bow the knee to the transgender gods by using “correct” pronouns, we must refuse! Do not allow yourself to say “Oh, it’s just polite and I don’t want to offend anyone.” The madness will stop only when enough people stand up and refuse to be sucked into the maelstrom. Someone must be first to say, the Emperor has no clothes. Yes, there might be consequences. You might lose your job. But refuse to participate in the lie even if it hurts. And if you don’t? Solzhenitsyn again:

And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a merited figure, or a general –let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and warm.

Solzhenitsyn was writing in the Soviet Union in 1974. He knew the decision to defend his soul by refusing to participate in lies would have consequences. But he insisted on it nevertheless. He wrote: “It will not be an easy choice for a body, but it is the only one for a soul. . . And if we get cold feet, even taking this step, then we are worthless and hopeless, and the scorn of Pushkin should be directed to us: ‘Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.’”

The second thing we must do is to insist that our leaders support the Declaration. We must ensure that they agree that our rights come from our Creator. We must never support any politician whose principles expose his belief that the Declaration’s rights talk is nothing but soothing noises one hairless ape makes to another. But won’t that violate the separation of church and state? Absolutely not! The Establishment Clause is a restraint on government from establishing a national church. It was never intended to be a restraint on the people. It is inconceivable that the men who wrote the Establishment Clause in 1789 – some of whom were present at the signing of the Declaration only 13 year earlier – intended that clause to prevent the people from insisting that their elected leaders actually believe the principles set forth in the Declaration upon which the Republic was founded.

The materialist rot is well advanced. But there is still hope. The signal fire in Azeqah burns still. But time is growing short. I do not know how much time we have left, but I am certain it is less than many people believe. After the constitutional convention, Benjamin Franklin famously announced that we were to have a republic, “if you can keep it.” We have forgotten God and are a house divided as we have not been since the 1860s. The question of whether we can keep it is very much in doubt. I pray that it is not too late. I pray that we remember the God we have forgotten, and that in Lincoln’s famous words, this nation, under that God “shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”

__________________

1 They called it the “Disinformation Governance Board,” but in everything but name it was intended to be a Ministry of Propaganda.

2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book Two, sec. 1, ch. 5.

3 Id.

4 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion, May 13, 1909.

5 “Materialism” is a shorthand term to describe metaphysical monism. There are other terms such as naturalism and physicalism that get at roughly the same idea – the physical universe is all that exists. I believe materialism is not merely a false account of reality; I believe it is incoherent. But it is not my purpose in this article to explain why I believe materialism is false. Rather, I am trying to get my readers to focus on the dire consequences that can follow when materialist principles are taken as true and acted on. Of course, I do not know that all of the law students were materialists. I do know that metaphysical materialism is taken for granted in our elite institutions of higher education, and their actions tell me that even if they are not affirming materialists, their ideas have been infused with that idea.

6 I am not claiming that the standard model of cosmology that I have sketched here is unique to materialism or inconsistent with theism. Nor am I claiming that certain theories of evolution are inconsistent with theism. Obviously, however, a strictly materialist theory of evolution that denies the ontological gulf between humans and other things is incompatible with the tenants of Christianity. Indeed, this is the fundamental dividing line between Christians who take the truths espoused in the Declaration seriously and materialists who must only ever give those truths lip service. The Christian believes that every human has an immaterial spirit that is created Imago Dei, in the image of God. The materialist insists that belief is superstitious nonsense.

7 William Provine, Scientists Face It! Science and Religion are Incompatible (1988), 10.

8 https://uncommondescent.com/intellige...

9 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), 63. Dennett was speaking of “Darwin’s idea,” but in context, it is clear that Dennett’s “Universal Acid” is not Darwinian evolution as such but the metaphysical materialism underlying that idea. Dennett says that it was always inevitable that materialism would “leak out” from Darwin’s idea and offer answers to questions in everything from cosmology to psychology.

10 Emily Kadens, Justice Blackstone’s Common Law Orthodoxy, 103 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1553, 1557 (2009).

11 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries 46-7.

12 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to Harold Laski, May 13, 1926, in Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916–1935, 2 vols., ed. Mark DeWolfe Howe [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953], 2:837

13 Yes, Pelosi claims to be a “devout” Catholic and it would at first glance appear to be anomalous to lump her in with materialist authoritarians. But her claim is deceptive, and inspired by Machiavelli, who advised the Prince that “There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious” but he must always be prepared to act against religion when he exercises power. Pelosi is the perfect example of the Machiavellian politician, appearing to be religious without actually being so. How can we know that Pelosi is not actually religious? That should be obvious. For decades she has been in scandalous opposition to the Catholic church’s most sacred doctrines, especially those concerning life, marriage, family and the proper ordering of human sexuality. Either she is remarkably stupid and has not noticed the scandal or the scandal does not bother her because she does not take the Church’s doctrines seriously. Nancy Pelosi is many things. Stupid is not one of them. Her actions show her to be as effectively a materialist as the most ardent atheist.

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Published on October 24, 2022 10:18

At Evolution News: Can Physics Account for Our Whole Reality?

If only we could reduce the world to an equation — preferably one that is solvable — many think we would understand life better.

University of Durham philosopher Nancy Cartwright takes issue with that, arguing that the universe is “beautifully dappled, and requires a dappled science to explain it.” She is the author, most recently, of A Philosopher Looks at Science (Cambridge University Press, 2022). And she says,

If physics is to have total dominion, she must not only help out with chemical bonding, signal transmission in neurons, the flow of petrol in a carburettor, and the like. She must be able in principle to entirely take over the disciplines that usually study these things, to explain and predict the rise in teenage pregnancies, the current level of inflation, the Protestant Reformation, and the fate of migrants crossing the channel. Plus, she must be able to get me off the hook for shouting at my daughter: after all, I was just obeying the laws of physics. NANCY CARTWRIGHT, “PHYSICS CAN’T DEAL WITH REALITY’S COMPLEXITY” AT IAI. NEWS (OCTOBER 17, 2022)

Now that She Mentions It

Pop psychology has indeed featured many theories that tie together disparate phenomena like inflation, the Reformation, and shouting at loved ones. It’s comparatively easy to link very complex events to one another if we are allowed to choose any link we wish. Some might link Hurricane Ian with municipal elections in Vancouver and with high-starch diets in Texas. It takes creativity but many people have plenty of that.

Physics sets itself a harder goal: showing the numbers (serious numbers, not pop stats) and a rigorous theory behind them. That necessarily means leaving out a great deal, assuming that what is omitted is subsumed in the theory. But is it?

The idea of physics as queen of all that happens has powerful implications about just what the world we live in must be like. It must be a world made up entirely of the basic entities of physics — fundamental particles, curved space-time and the like — entities that have only the mathematical features that physics equations describe, features that often have no names of their own other than the names of the mathematical objects that are supposed to represent them, like the “quantum state vector” and the “metric tensor” of general relativity. The world has to be that way since these are the kinds of features that physics can rule. NANCY CARTWRIGHT, “PHYSICS CAN’T DEAL WITH REALITY’S COMPLEXITY” AT IAI. NEWS (OCTOBER 17, 2022)

The World We Live In

Cartwright offers an alternative approach:

Instead of supposing that physics must be queen of all we survey, I recommend we construct our image of what an ultimate science might be like on the basis of what current science is like when it is most successful, from putting people on the moon to devising and carrying out a plan for the complete evacuation of the Royal Marsden Hospital (which took just 28 minutes when called into play by a gigantic fire, 2 January 2008)… This is a world in which irritability, generosity and social exclusion can affect what happens just as gravity and electromagnetic repulsion can. NANCY CARTWRIGHT, “PHYSICS CAN’T DEAL WITH REALITY’S COMPLEXITY” AT IAI. NEWS (OCTOBER 17, 2022)

As she says, that’s the world we actually live in, a world of many tiny, intersecting worlds where causes can include anything from fundamental physics to social psychology.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News , published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Evolution News

Nancy Cartwright’s thesis, that the laws of physics can’t account for the realm of reality that includes ourselves, corresponds with the thesis of intelligent design – that our reality is consistent with one in which an intelligent mind (with the attributes of God) not only caused the physical reality of our universe, but has intervened within it to bring about outcomes that would not have arisen without intervention. We ourselves, as intelligent agents, continuously manipulate the material of this physical universe to produce outcomes that nature would never produce on its own (such as the laptop I’m typing on now).

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Published on October 24, 2022 08:44

October 23, 2022

Bill Dembski offers some guidance on reading Darwinian Jason Rosenhouse

Here:

Jason Rosenhouse’s Whoppers: More Guidance on Reading Rosenhouse

Jason Rosenhouse wrote a book of over 90,000 word for Cambridge University Press, which was released in May 2022 and titled The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. I wrote an 18,000-word review here on this blog that appeared in June 2022. It was simultaneously posted, in a serialized form, on Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Views blog. I thought it was a pretty good review. A bit long, to be sure, but Rosenhouse got so many things wrong that it seemed worth spending the space to set things right.

I’ve reviewed my share of books over the years, in scholarly as well as more popular forums. I used to have an open door at First Things when Fr. Richard John Neuhaus ran it. I also had ready access to Books & Culture when John Wilson ran it. The very first review Wilson asked me to write, on Mark Steiner’s The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem, received the Evangelical Press Association first place award for 1999 in the category “Critical Reviews.” You can see several such reviews listed here. Go to Amazon, and you’ll find my review of Erik Larson’s The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, which to date remains the review voted most helpful to readers.

So when I saw that in early July of 2022 Rosenhouse had written a reply to my review, I decided to hold off reading or responding to it. I knew what to expect, and I knew if I read it, I would be spending more time responding to him. I was largely satisfied with what I had written. I had spent enough time reviewing the book. And I had other work that I needed to get back to. Moreover, Brian Miller responded to Rosenhouse’s reply at EvolutionNews.org, convincingly refuting it, at least from what I could tell…

So much in Rosenhouse’s book is careless, sloppy, giving no indication that he has carefully studied and adequately comprehended my work or that of my colleagues. No matter. Darwinism can do no wrong and intelligent design can do no right. Thus, in predictable Darwinian fashion, Rosenhouse turns the tables, insisting that my review is 100 percent in error: “It is a person [= yours truly] of rare talent who can write at such length without getting anything right.” Concede nothing is the Darwinist policy. I’ve seen it with Ken Miller. I’ve seen it with Eugenie Scott. I’ve seen it with many other Darwinists. And it’s on robust display in Rosenhouse’s book as well as in his reply to my review.

Enjoy the rest. Why on Earth would a mathematician be a Darwinian anyway? It’s the sort of thing one expects of incurious biology profs who wouldn’t want to be members of any club that would admit them.

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Published on October 23, 2022 18:15

At SciTech Daily: Supernova Explosions Reveal Precise Details of Dark Energy and Dark Matter

A powerful new analysis has been performed by astrophysicists that places the most precise limits ever on the composition and evolution of the universe. With this analysis, dubbed Pantheon+, cosmologists find themselves at a crossroads.

Pantheon+ convincingly finds that the cosmos is made up of about two-thirds dark energy and one-third matter — predominantly in the form of dark matter — and is expanding at an accelerating pace over the last several billion years. However, Pantheon+ also cements a major disagreement over the pace of that expansion that has yet to be solved.

By putting prevailing modern cosmological theories, known as the Standard Model of Cosmology, on even firmer evidentiary and statistical footing, Pantheon+ further closes the door on alternative frameworks accounting for dark energy and dark matter. Both are bedrocks of the Standard Model of Cosmology but have yet to be directly detected. They rank among the model’s biggest mysteries. Following through on the results of Pantheon+, researchers can now pursue more precise observational tests and hone explanations for the ostensible cosmos.

G299 was left over by a particular class of supernovas called Type Ia. Credit: NASA/CXC/U.Texas

Pantheon+ is based on the largest dataset of its kind, comprising more than 1,500 stellar explosions called Type Ia supernovae. These bright blasts occur when white dwarf stars — remnants of stars like our Sun — accumulate too much mass and undergo a runaway thermonuclear reaction. Because Type Ia supernovae outshine entire galaxies, the stellar detonations can be glimpsed at distances exceeding 10 billion light years, or back through about three-quarters of the universe’s total age. Given that the supernovae blaze with nearly uniform intrinsic brightnesses, scientists can use the explosions’ apparent brightness, which diminishes with distance, along with redshift measurements as markers of time and space. That information, in turn, reveals how fast the universe expands during different epochs, which is then used to test theories of the fundamental components of the universe.

The breakthrough discovery in 1998 of the universe’s accelerating growth was thanks to a study of Type Ia supernovae in this manner. Scientists attribute the expansion to an invisible energy, therefore monikered dark energy, inherent to the fabric of the universe itself. Subsequent decades of work have continued to compile ever-larger datasets, revealing supernovae across an even wider range of space and time, and Pantheon+ has now brought them together into the most statistically robust analysis to date.

Taking the data as a whole, the new analysis holds that 66.2 percent of the universe manifests as dark energy, with the remaining 33.8 percent being a combination of dark matter and matter. To arrive at even more comprehensive understanding of the constituent components of the universe at different epochs, Brout and colleagues combined Pantheon+ with other strongly evidenced, independent, and complementary measures of the large-scale structure of the universe and with measurements from the earliest light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background.

Pantheon+ and SH0ES [another supernovae study] together find a Hubble constant of 73.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec with only 1.3% uncertainty. Stated another way, for every megaparsec, or 3.26 million light years, the analysis estimates that in the nearby universe, space itself is expanding at more than 160,000 miles per hour.

However, observations from an entirely different epoch of the universe’s history predict a different story. Measurements of the universe’s earliest light, the cosmic microwave background, when combined with the current Standard Model of Cosmology, consistently peg the Hubble constant at a rate that is significantly less than observations taken via Type Ia supernovae and other astrophysical markers. This sizable discrepancy between the two methodologies has been termed the Hubble tension.

The new Pantheon+ and SH0ES datasets heighten this Hubble tension. In fact, the tension has now passed the important 5-sigma threshold (about one-in-a-million odds of arising due to random chance) that physicists use to distinguish between possible statistical flukes and something that must accordingly be understood. Reaching this new statistical level highlights the challenge for both theorists and astrophysicists to try and explain the Hubble constant discrepancy.

“We thought it would be possible to find clues to a novel solution to these problems in our dataset, but instead we’re finding that our data rules out many of these options and that the profound discrepancies remain as stubborn as ever,” says Brout.

The Pantheon+ results could help point to where the solution to the Hubble tension lies. “Many recent theories have begun pointing to exotic new physics in the very early universe, however, such unverified theories must withstand the scientific process and the Hubble tension continues to be a major challenge,” says Brout.

Overall, Pantheon+ offers scientists a comprehensive look back through much of cosmic history. The earliest, most distant supernovae in the dataset gleam forth from 10.7 billion light years away, meaning from when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age. In that earlier era, dark matter and its associated gravity held the universe’s expansion rate in check. Such a state of affairs changed dramatically over the next several billion years as the influence of dark energy overwhelmed that of dark matter. Dark energy has since flung the contents of the cosmos ever farther apart and at an ever-increasing rate.

“With this combined Pantheon+ dataset, we get a precise view of the universe from the time when it was dominated by dark matter to when the universe became dominated by dark energy,” says Brout. “This dataset is a unique opportunity to see dark energy turn on and drive the evolution of the cosmos on the grandest scales up through present time.”

Studying this changeover now with even stronger statistical evidence will hopefully lead to new insights into dark energy’s enigmatic nature.
Complete article at SciTech Daily.

Despite current difficulties in sorting out details of the history and development of our universe, the point remains that the properties of our universe have taken on values that have allowed life on earth to exist over nearly 4 billion years, culminating in a global, technologically advanced society of human beings. Luck has never been a scientific explanation. Necessity (meaning our existence was a predetermined outcome of the laws of physics and initial conditions) is not supported by our knowledge of these laws. Why, then, are we here?

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Published on October 23, 2022 14:53

Is there evidence for natural selection?

From a new book Otangelo Grasso is working on – comments welcome:

I am looking for comments, if my conclusion is sound, that evolution cannot be a theory. It cannot be tested, on how natural selection influences differential reproduction and the fitness landscape.
Is there evidence for natural selection?

According to Darwin’s Theory, the main actors that drive evolution, is natural Selection, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow. Natural selection depends on variation through random mutations. Inheritance, differential survival, and reproduction ( reproductive success which permits new traits to spread in the population). The genetic modification is supposed to be due to: Survival of the fittest, in other words, 1. higher survival rates upon specific gene-induced phenotype adaptations to the environment, and 2. higher reproduction rates upon specific evolutionary genetic modifications. Keep in mind that these are two different, distinct factors. It’s a fact that harmful variants, where a mutation influences negatively health, fitness, and reproduction ability of organisms diminish. These are sorted out, or die through disease. In that regard, natural selection is a fact. That says nothing however about an organism gaining more fitness ( reproductive success ) through the evolution of new advantageous traits.

Definitions of fitness:
J. Dekker (2007): 1. The average number of offspring produced by individuals with a certain genotype, relative to the numbers produced by individuals with other genotypes. 2: The relative competitive ability of a given genotype conferred by adaptive morphological, physiological, or behavioral characters, expressed and usually quantified as the average number of surviving progeny of one genotype compared with the average number of surviving progeny of competing genotypes; a measure of the contribution of a given genotype to the subsequent generation relative to that of other genotypes
A condition necessary for evolution to occur is variation in fitness of organisms according to the state they have for a heritable character. Individuals in the population with some characters must be more likely to reproduce, more fit. Organisms in a population vary in reproductive success. We will discuss fitness in Life History when we discuss competition, interference and the effects of neighbor plants.

Three Components of Fitness. These different components are in conflict with each other, and any estimate of fitness must consider all of them:
1. Reproduction
2. Struggle for existence with competitors
3. Avoidance of predators 2

S.El-Showk (2012): The common usage of the term “fitness” is connected with the idea of being in shape and associated physical attributes like strength, endurance or speed; this is quite different from its use in biology. To an evolutionary biologist, fitness simply means reproductive success and reflects how well an organism is adapted to its environment.The main point is that fitness is simply a measure of reproductive success and so won’t always depend on traits such as strength and speed; reproductive success can also be achieved by mimicry, colorful displays, sneak fertilization and a host of other strategies that don’t correspond to the common notion of “physical fitness”.

What then are we to make of the phrase “survival of the fittest”? Fitness is just book-keeping; survival and differential reproduction result from natural selection, which actually is a driving mechanism in evolution. Organisms which are better suited to their environment will reproduce more and so increase the proportion of the population with their traits. Fitness is simply a measurement of survival (which is defined as reproductive success); it’s not the mechanism driving survival. Organisms (or genes or replicators) don’t survive because they are fit; rather, they are considered fit because they survived. 3

The environment is not stable, but changes. Science would need to have the knowledge of what traits of each species are favored in a specific environment. Adaptation rates and mutational diversity and other spatiotemporal parameters, including population density, mutation rate, and the relative expansion speed and spatial dimensions. When the attempt is made to define with more precision what is meant by the degree of adaptation and fitness, we come across very thorny and seemingly intractable problems.

As Evolution. Berkley explains: Of course, fitness is a relative thing. A genotype’s fitness depends on the environment in which the organism lives. The fittest genotype during an ice age, for example, is probably not the fittest genotype once the ice age is over. Fitness is a handy concept because it lumps everything that matters to natural selection (survival, mate-finding, reproduction) into one idea. The fittest individual is not necessarily the strongest, fastest, or biggest. A genotype’s fitness includes its ability to survive, find a mate, produce offspring — and ultimately leave its genes in the next generation. 1

Claim: Adam Eyre-Walker (2007): All organisms undergo mutation, the effects of which can be broadly divided into three categories. First, there are mutations that are harmful to the fitness of their host; these mutations generally either reduce survival or fertility. Second, there are ‘neutral’ mutations, which have little or no effect on fitness. Finally, there are advantageous mutations, which increase fitness by allowing organisms to adapt to their environment. Although we can divide mutations into these three categories, there is, in reality, a continuum of selective effects, stretching from those that are strongly deleterious, through weakly deleterious mutations, to neutral mutations and then on to mutations that are mildly or highly adaptive. The relative frequencies of these types of mutation are called the distribution of fitness effects (DFE)5

R. G. Brajesh et.al., (2019): Mutations occur spontaneously during the course of reproduction of an organism. Mutations that impart a beneficial characteristic to the organism are selected and consequently, the frequency of the mutant allele increases in the population. Mutations can be single base changes called point mutations like substitutions, insertions, deletions, as well as gross changes like chromosome recombination, duplication, and translocation 7

Reply: How can random mutations give rise to higher fitness and higher reproduction of the individuals with the new allele variation favored by natural selection, and so spread in the population? This seems in fact to be a core issue that raises questions. The environmental conditions of a population, the weather, food resources, temperatures, etc. are random How do random events, like weather conditions, together with random mutations in the genome, provoke a fitness increase in an organism and a survival advantage over the other individuals without the mutation?

T.Bataillon (2014): The rates and properties of new mutations affecting fitness have implications for a number of outstanding questions in evolutionary biology. Obtaining estimates of mutation rates and effects has historically been challenging, and little theory has been available for predicting the distribution of fitness effects (DFE); Future work should be aimed at identifying factors driving the observed variation in the distribution of fitness effects. What can we say about the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations? For the distribution of fitness effects DFE of beneficial mutations, experimentally inferred distributions seem to support theory for the most part. Distribution of fitness effects DFE has largely been unexplored and there is a need to extend both theory and experiment in this area. 4

The above confession demonstrates that a key question, namely how mutations in fact affect fitness has not been answered. I go further and say: Darwin’s Theory can in reality not be tested, nor quantified. The unknown factors in each case are too many, and the variations in the environment, and population and species behavior vary too. It cannot be defined what influence the given environment exercises in regard to specific animals and traits in that environment, nor how the environmental influence would change the fitness and reproduction success of each distinct animal species. Nor how reproduction success given new traits would change upon environmental changes. What determines whether a gene variant spreads or not would depend theoretically on an incredibly complex web of factors – the species’ ecology, its physical and social environment, and sexual behavior. A further factor adding complexity is the fact that high social rank is associated with high levels of both copulatory behavior and the production of offspring which is widespread in the study of animal social behavior.

As alpha males have on average higher reproductive success than other males, since they outcompete weaker individuals, and get preference to copulate if other (weaker) males gain beneficial mutations (or the alphas’ negative mutations) as the alphas can outperform and win the battle for reproduction, thus selection has an additional hurdle to overcome and spread the new variant in the population. This does not say anything about the fact that it would have to be determined what gene loci are responsible for sexual selection and behavior, and only mutations that influence sexual behavior would have an influence on fitness and the struggle to contribute more offspring to the next generation. It is in praxis impossible to isolate these factors and see which is of selective importance, quantify them, plug them in (usually in this context) to a mixed multivariate computational model, see what’s statistically significant, and get meaningful, real-life results. The varying factors are too many and nonpredictive. Darwin’s idea, therefore, depends on variable, unquantifiable multitude of factors that cannot be known, and cannot be tested, which turns the theory at best into a non-testable hypothesis, which then remains just that: a hypothesis. Since Darwin’s idea cannot be tested, it’s by definition, unscientific.

If fitness is a relative thing, it cannot be detected and proven that natural selection is the mechanism that generates variations that produce more offspring, and therefore the new trait spreads in the population. Therefore, mutations and natural selection cannot be demonstrated to have the claimed effects. What is the relation between mutations in the genome, and the number of offspring? What mutations are responsible for the number of offspring produced? If the theory of evolution is true, there must be a detectable mechanism, that determines or induces, or regulates the number of offspring based due to specific genetic mutations. Only a specific section in the genome is responsible for this regulation.

There are specific regions in the genome responsible for each mechanism of reproduction, being it sexual, or asexual reproduction, that is:

1. Regulation and programming of sexual attraction ( hormones, pheromones, instinct, etc.)
2. Frequency of sexual intercourse and reproduction
3. The regulation of the number of offspring produced

What influence do environmental pressures have on these 3 points? What pressures induced organisms to evolve sexual, and asexual reproduction? Are the tree mechanisms mentioned not amazingly various and differentiated, and each species have individual, species-specific mechanisms? Some have an enormous number of offspring that helps the survival of the species, while others have a very low reproduction rate ( whales ? ) How could environmental pressures have induced this amazing variation, and why? That means also on a molecular level, enormous differences from one species to the other exist. how could accidental mutations have been the basis for all this variation? Would there not have to be SPECIFIC environmental pressures resulting in the selection of SPECIFIC traits based on mutations of the organism to be selected that provide survival advantage and fitness? ( genome or epigenome, whatever ) AND higher reproduction rates of the organism at the same time?

What is the chance, that random mutations provoke positive phenotypic differences, that help the survival of the individual? What kind of environmental factors influence the survival of a species? What kind of mutations must be selected to guarantee a higher survival rate?

The lack of predictive power of natural selection is due to different environmental conditions that turn it impossible to quantify the effects and measure their outcome.

Ivana Cvijović (2015):Temporal fluctuations in environmental conditions can have dramatic effects on the fate of each new mutation, reducing the efficiency of natural selection and increasing the fixation probability of all mutations, including those that are strongly deleterious on average. This makes it difficult for a population to maintain specialist adaptations, even if their benefits outweigh their costs. Temporally varying selection pressures are neglected throughout much of population genetics, despite the fact that truly constant environments are rare. The fate of each mutation depends critically on its fitness in each environment, the dynamics of environmental changes, and the population size. We still lack both a quantitative and conceptual understanding of more significant fluctuations, where selection in each environment can lead to measurable changes in allele frequency. 6

More problems: R. G. Brajesh (2019): The genotypic mutational space of an organism is so vast, even for the tiniest of organisms like viruses or even one gene, that it becomes experimentally intractable. Hence, studies have limited to studying only small parts of the genome. For example, experiments have attempted to map the functional effect of mutations at important active site residues in proteins, like Lunzer et al. engineered the IDMH enzyme to use NADP as cofactor instead of NAD, and obtain the fitness landscape in terms of the mutational steps. Other experiments have attempted to ascertain how virulence is affected by mutations at certain important loci in viruses. However, due to the scale of the genotypic mutational space, it has been extremely difficult to experimentally obtain fitness landscapes of larger multicomponent systems, and study the statistical properties of these landscapes like the Distribution of Fitness Effects (DFE). Attempts have also been made to back-calculate the underlying DFE by experimentally observing how frequently new beneficial mutations emerge and of what strength, but the final results were inconclusive. As a result, how the beneficial, neutral, and deleterious mutations and their effects are distributed, when the organism genotype is at different locations on the fitness landscape, has remained largely intractable.7

And more problems: Adam Eyre-Walker (2007): The distribution of fitness effects DFE of deleterious mutations, in particular the proportion of weakly deleterious mutations, determine a population’s expected drift load—the reduction in fitness due to multiple small-effect deleterious mutations that individually are close enough to neutral to occasionally escape selection, but can collectively have important impacts on fitness. The DFE of new mutations influences many evolutionary patterns, such as the expected degree of parallel evolution, the evolutionary potential and capacity of populations to respond to novel environments, the evolutionary advantage of sex, and the maintenance of variation on quantitative traits, to name a few. Thus, an understanding of the DFE of mutations is a pivotal part of our understanding of the process of evolution. Furthermore, the available data suggest that some aspects of the DFE of advantageous mutations are likely to differ between species. 5

Conclusion: The effects of natural selection on differential reproduction cannot be tested, since too many unknown variables have to be included, and that cannot lead to meaningful, quantifiable results that permit a clear picture.

1. Evolution.Berkley: Evolutionary fitness
2. J.Dekker: www.agron.iastate.edu/~weeds/AG517/Content/WeedEvol/NaturalSelection/natselect.html” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>Natural Selection and its Four Conditions 2007
3. S.El-Showk: Natural selection: On fitness (2012)
4. Thomas Bataillon: Effects of new mutations on fitness: insights from models and data 2014 Jul
5. Adam Eyre-Walker: The distribution of fitness effects of new mutations August 2007
6. Ivana Cvijović: Fate of a mutation in a fluctuating environment August 24, 2015
7. R. G. Brajesh: Distribution of fitness effects of mutations obtained from a simple genetic regulatory network model 08 July 2019

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Published on October 23, 2022 05:18

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