Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 31

At The College Fix: Canceled intelligent design professor returns to Ball State U. with message: ‘God’s Not Dead’

Here.

A physics professor whose class considering intelligent design thrust Ball State University into the national spotlight years ago is scheduled to return to his old campus, which had shut down his popular “Boundaries of Science” course.

And Professor Eric Hedin’s topic de jour when he steps foot on his old stomping grounds? Intelligent design.

Hedin is slated to appear at Ball State on Oct. 26 as part of a “God’s Not Dead” nationwide tour of college campuses.

“I see this situation as a testimony to how God has worked things for good, even when it may have seemed like a loss at the time,” Hedin told The College Fix in an email Thursday.

Yes, that’s Eric Hedin, our “Caspian”!

Somebody will need to go sit with Jerry Coyne, who really wanted Hedin Canceled. Psst: The short straw will be the one third from the left when the straws are fanned…

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At Bio-Complexity: The Cardiovascular System of Antarctic Icefish Appears to Have Been Designed to Utilize Hemoglobinless Blood

Abstract: Viscosity is inversely related to temperature. The circulatory system of Antarctic icefish may have been designed to prevent high blood viscosity at low temperatures by taking advantage of the increased solubility of oxygen at low temperatures, allowing use of hemoglobin-free blood. This necessitates a high-output, high-velocity, low-pressure, low-resistance circulation. High-velocity flow requires adequate viscosity to minimize loss of laminar flow and increased friction. This creates an interesting design problem: in other animals, hemoglobin determines blood viscosity via the hematocrit, whereas in icefish, blood viscosity is produced largely by antifreeze glycoproteins. The effect of inappropriate blood viscosity on maximal cardiac output is seen in experiments with a related fish, Pagothenia borchgrevinki. In this species, acclimation to a particular temperature involves tailoring blood viscosity to cardiac power, which varies with the availability of oxygen and temperature. The factorial scope for cardiac output—i.e., the ratio of maximal to basal cardiac output—is greater in acclimated than unacclimated fish despite the similar availability of oxygen. Experiments also suggest that blood viscosity determines the maximum tolerable temperature in Antarctic fish. Those experiments demonstrate that blood viscosity is actively controlled. It is part of what the physiologist Claude Bernard called the milieu intérieur. The hemoglobinless phenotype requires simultaneous customization of the heart, vasculature, and blood, including its viscosity. Simultaneous, coordinated acquisition of multiple unique features, as required by the absence of hemoglobin, is inconsistent with Darwinian evolution, which postulates that species develop by small, incremental changes over time.

The author is Gregory Sloop. The paper is open access.

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At City Journal: Review of book attempting to scuff out the lab leak theory ew COVID-19

The book is Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster, 469 pp., $29.99). Quammen admits to friendships that almost certainly get in the way of his judgment:

In the three years or so since Covid-19 appeared, it has become increasingly clear, despite the protestations of virologists who do this kind of work, that the causative virus was probably the result of genetic manipulation in a lab. In other words, it is not a natural virus that spilled into humans from some wild animal host, but one that escaped from the Chinese laboratory in which it was being souped up as part of a high-risk scheme to predict future epidemics.

The case that Covid originated in a lab is not yet proven, but as circumstantial evidence goes, it’s pretty good. Few people appreciate quite how compelling this case is (see the outline below) because science journalists who work for the mainstream press have, by and large, failed to present it in full to their readers…

A particularly egregious example of this asymmetry is David Quammen’s Breathless. Quammen is a well-regarded and widely published writer about viruses and natural history, but he has grown too close to his sources, as many science writers do. He fails to consider the possibility that scientists can be swayed by the same monetary or careerist motives that drive lesser mortals. The lab at Wuhan, where researchers were manipulating Covid-type viruses, received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Could Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the NIH’s senior officials, have had any possible motive for suppressing their experts’ initial conclusion that the Covid virus was probably artificial? Could that explain why they apparently told no one else in government about their experts’ findings and excluded from their discussions then-CDC director Robert R. Redfield, who believed from the start that the virus was a lab escapee? Quammen does not think to raise such impolite questions.

Nicholas Wade, “Friends in Viral Places” at City Journal (October 21. 2022)

Too close to his sources? Just the man for the job then!

File under: Why you’d be crazy to “trust science.”

You may also wish to read: Why did the New York Times discredit the lab leak theory? The Times led the way in zealously discrediting the quite reasonable COVID-19 lab leak theory. But what underlay its zeal?

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Question for materialists

It’s been a while since I’ve been “out here” and I am wondering if materialism is still considered by some to be a rational position to hold. I understand “materialism” to be the idea that every existing thing is comprised of the periodic table of elements (rearranged in a vast number of ways described by the standard model and general relativity) and no more. Is this a fair definition? Thanks.

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At Mind Matters News: What Happens When You Feed a Translation Program Utter Nonsense?

Indiana University cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter had a lifelong acquaintance with and admiration for the Swedish language and with the help of Swedish friends, became conversant with it. That led him in turn to try an experiment on machine translation programs such as Google Translate and DeepL. At Inference Review, he tells us, “although — or perhaps because — these programs have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, I greatly enjoy discovering and poking fun at their many unpredictable weaknesses.”

Thus the author of author of Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) constructed a paragraph of pure nonsense in made-up Swedish, something like Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” which plays around similarly with English:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Most of the words don’t exist and the sentence has no meaning. But it is phrased as grammatically correct English verse. 

On August 15, he fed it to Google Translate and asked for the English…

DeepL and the Chinese translation giant Baidu came up with entirely different complete nonsense. The comparisons of utter nonsense are breathtaking.

Well, in fairness, the machine translation systems could not have noticed that the original paragraph was meaningless either. A human translator, by contrast, would pick up the phone…

He draws out the significance:

And yet they were all produced by sober, no-nonsense, deadpan, tone-deaf, and stone-dead programs that have nonetheless been trumpeted in many prestigious and influential publications — such as the New York Times, the Economist, and others — as being astonishingly powerful and supremely accurate translators.

Along the lines of Robert J. Marks’s recent book, Non-Computable You, the difference between sense and nonsense is not a matter of computation. Pretending that it is won’t end well.

See full article at Mind Matters News.

AI is apparently blind to what would be obvious even to an adolescent human, when it comes to recognizing language versus nonsense. A similar distinction arises in the field of cryptography, although the process of recognition is more subtle. In a conversation I had with a retired U.S. cryptographer, he said that it’s possible to discern whether an encoded message contains an intelligent message or is just gibberish. The difference has to do with our understanding of and familiarity with language as a medium of communication between conscious and intelligent minds.

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At Evolution News: Is Consciousness a “Controlled Brain Hallucination”?

Michael Egnor writes:

Philosopher David Chalmers famously divided the problem of understanding how consciousness is related to the brain by distinguishing between the easy and hard problems of consciousness.

The easy problem of consciousness is typically faced by working neuroscientists — i.e., what parts of the brain are metabolically active when we’re awake? What kinds of neurons are involved in memory? These problems are “easy” only in the sense that they are tractable. The neuroscience necessary to answer them is challenging but, with enough skill and perseverance, it can be done.

The hard problem of consciousness is another matter entirely. It is this: How can first-person subjective experience arise from brain matter? How do we get an “I” from an “it”? Compared with the easy problem, the hard problem is, from the perspective of materialist neuroscience, intractable.

Evading the Hard Problem

Many neuroscientists evade the hard problem by denying its relevance to neuroscience.

Let’s just stop here and consider the scientific approach of “solving” a hard problem by denying its relevance. This wouldn’t even fly with more objective problems in science, such as, “How does a nascent solar system shed its excess angular momentum as it continues to form?” But to take the most fundamental aspect of our existence as humans – our consciousness – and to dismiss it as an irrelevant phenomenon is to put on blinders that perpetuate ignorance, in the guise of science.

See complete article at Evolution News .

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At Evolution News: Intelligent Design and Planetary Timing

David Coppedge writes:

Yesterday I considered the matter of timing as evidence of design. Michael Denton’s book The Miracle of Man pulls together an astounding collection of requirements for complex life that are fulfilled ideally on Earth. Some of these, like plate tectonics, have a timing component; one paper calculates the onset of plate tectonics at 700 million years ago out of the planet’s consensus lifetime of 4.5 billion years. Another temporal factor is a magnetic field, which according to measurements over 160 years, is decreasing in strength. Even if its polarity reverses from time to time and is generated by an internal dynamo as most geophysicists believe, the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that it must lose energy to heat and eventually weaken. Indeed, some of the other moons and planets (like Mars) appear to have lost their magnetic fields. Without the protection of a magnetic field, our atmosphere and life itself would be severely threatened.

Photo: Geysers on Enceladus, via NASA.All in the Timing

Some of the “coincidences” discussed by Denton, like the nature of water, rely on laws of nature and do not have temporal dimensions, but others might. Earth’s atmospheric density and composition, ozone layer, hydrologic cycle, and availability of key minerals at the surface are satisfactory now, but when did they first become optimal? How long can they persist? When was the Earth ready to open shop, and how long can life on Earth take these perfections for granted?

Dynamical perturbations to Earth’s orbit could also affect habitability. Some scientists calculate cyclical changes in eccentricity, obliquity, and precession that could have affected past climate (NASA). A sufficiently extreme perturbation could render Earth inhospitable, as apparently has affected some exoplanets observed to have wildly eccentric orbits, likely due to a gravitational disturbance from a nearby gas giant. Astrophysicists also tell us that many stars go through periods of extreme flare activity, which could destroy Earth’s atmosphere and life. And eventually, they say, our star will balloon outward as a red giant and burn up the Earth. They assure us that we have several billions of years before that happens, but it does point out that our “continuously habitable zone” is a temporary blessing.

Our Solar System

A bizarre twist on the moon’s origin appeared this month from NASA. According to computer simulations at the Ames Research Center, researchers posit that the moon could have formed by a collision in a matter of hours! The collision theory has been the leading contender for the moon’s origin for years, but to consider the moon forming that fast should raise eyebrows. They say the lucky collision occurred billions of years ago. It already seemed like special pleading to expect a lucky strike from just the right sized impactor, with just the right composition, coming in at just the right angle and velocity to create our unique moon. But to have it occur on one lucky day exactly long enough before human beings appeared on the Earth observing perfect solar eclipses — now there’s a screenplay that’s hard to swallow.

I remember in 2008 asking a well-known planetary scientist about his attempt to extend the lifetime of Saturn’s rings. He admitted to me that his motivation was philosophical. If the rings were as young as some other scientists were deducing from Cassini data, it would imply that humans live at a special time when the beautiful rings are visible. That conclusion made him feel uncomfortable and motivated his attempt to extend the lifetime of the rings by proposing that they were denser than believed at the time. Unfortunately, later measurements in 2016 disconfirmed his proposal (JPL). But even if his proposal had been confirmed, Cassini witnessed ephemeral rings such as the E-ring (formed by Enceladus) and the F and G rings, as well as other short-lived phenomena like ring rain, propellers, and shepherd moon perturbations that could not persist for billions of years. These temporary phenomena have given planetary scientists a wealth of opportunities to learn about the dynamics and composition of ring particles. 

The Case of Enceladus

Enceladus is an especially fascinating case. Nearly 100 geysers of water ice are currently jetting out of its south pole at supersonic speed, creating the vast E-ring between Mimas and Titan. The particles are subjected to enormous forces from Saturn and its magnetic field. If the geysers stopped, the E-ring would dissipate within a few tens of years. So why do they exist now when scientists can watch the dynamic changes in the geysers and the E-ring? Enceladus is not alone in this regard. Jupiter has thin “gossamer” rings composed of smoke-size particles. Both Uranus and Neptune also have sparse rings. Planetary rings are temporary phenomena that humans are privileged to observe and learn from at a time they can use telescopes and launch spacecraft to observe them. While the temporal brevity of these phenomena does not in itself prove design, it adds to the number of solar system coincidences that seem to be fortuitously timed for scientific discovery.

Evolution News

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At SciTech Daily: Scientists Solve an Origin of Life Mystery

Seawater might have supplied the phosphorus required for emerging life.

Researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Cape Town may have found a solution to the mystery of how phosphorus came to be an essential component of life on Earth by recreating prehistoric seawater containing the element in a laboratory.

Their findings, which were published in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that seawater may be the missing source of phosphate, suggesting that it could have been present in sufficient quantities to support life without the need for particular environmental conditions.

Phosphate is a crucial component of DNA and RNA, which are the building blocks of life, although it is one of the least common elements in the universe relative to its biological significance. Phosphate is also relatively inaccessible in its mineral form – it can be difficult to dissolve in water so that life can utilize it.

Scientists have long suspected that phosphorus became part of biology early on, but they have only recently begun to recognize the role of phosphate in directing the synthesis of molecules required by life on Earth, “Experiments show it makes amazing things happen – chemists can synthesize crucial biomolecules if there is a lot of phosphate in solution,” said Tosca, Professor of Mineralogy & Petrology at Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.

However, there has been debate over the precise circumstances required to create phosphate. According to some research, phosphate should actually be even less accessible to life when iron is plentiful. However, this is disputed since the early Earth’s atmosphere was oxygen-poor and iron would have been widespread.

They used geochemical modeling to simulate the early Earth’s conditions in order to understand how life came to rely on phosphate and the kind of environment that this element would have evolved in.

The article goes on in this vein, but one wonders if it got written just for the sake of the overstated title.

For example, “chemists can synthesize crucial biomolecules…” – but how much intelligent intervention is required by the trained chemists to reach their desired goal?

Also, “the early Earth’s atmosphere was oxygen-poor and iron would have been widespread.” – Does this make any sense at all?

Again, why do intelligent scientists fall into the assumption that finding a chemical ingredient in the environment that is necessary for life equates with the ability of natural processes to form all the biomolecules necessary for life, and without guidance to arrange these into coordinated functionality in a microscopic locality so that the outcome is a living cell? So many steps in this imagined process are mediated against by the known laws of physics, that to suggest it happened naturally is to depart from scientific credibility.

Full article at SciTech Daily.

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At Evolution News: Fine-Timing as Evidence of Intelligence Design

David Coppedge raises an important point about “timing,” in addition to “tuning”:

Often in movies a scene depicts some highly improbable event on which the plot pivots (see some example below). Viewers suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment while knowing that the coincidences are matters of contrivance by screenwriters. In real life, though, how many coincidences would it take to convince a reasonable person that something non-random is going on? 

Image credit: vancarlosfr, via Pixabay.

I’ve witnessed two total solar eclipses so far, in 1991 and in 2017 (another is coming to America in 2024). I concur with Guillermo Gonzalez that a total eclipse “summons all the senses” and becomes one of the most emotional celestial events one can experience. Many have noted the remarkable coincidence between apparent sizes of the moon and sun from Earth that make perfect total eclipses possible. Moreover, the size of the sun and the moon are intimately tied to the habitability of the Earth. As a G2 main sequence star, our sun’s size and temperature determines the radius of the habitable zone where liquid water can exist. And the moon plays vital roles in governing the ocean tides and stabilizing Earth’s tilt. In The Privileged Planet, co-authored by Jay Richards, Gonzalez noted that “the requirements for complex life on a terrestrial planet strongly overlap the requirements for observing total solar eclipses” (p. 7). As they further argue, these requirements also overlap with the ability to do scientific discovery.

A Gondola on Saturn

Gonzalez calculated all possible instances of eclipses between bodies in the solar system, 64 in all. On page 11 of The Privileged Planet he included a graph of the results: the only other possible eclipsing body the right size to produce perfect eclipses is Saturn’s tiny moon Prometheus. If one were to be riding a gondola in Saturn’s cloud tops at the right position, one might get a half second total eclipse as Prometheus crossed the sun. On Earth, by contrast, the duration of totality can last up to 7.5 minutes. 

But don’t forget “the rest of the story” about Prometheus. Gonzalez notes that its “highly elongated shape compromises the view of the chromosphere” (p. 10). Sure enough, when the Cassini mission, on which I worked at JPL, took photos of Prometheus, its irregular potato-like shape was revealed in detail. Prometheus would never, therefore, be able to cover the sun exactly. That leaves Earth alone as the only place in the solar system where a perfect total eclipse can occur. In the Privileged Planet documentary, Gonzalez remarked, “the one place that has observers is the one place that has the best eclipses.”

Getting the Right Moon at the Right Time

But there’s another aspect of this “coincidence” not often discussed: the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth at 3.8 cm per year (The Conversation). Over time, the moon would be too far away to exactly cover the sun’s disk. After that, all eclipses would be annular. Simultaneously, Gonzalez points out, the sun’s diameter is increasing. “These two processes, working together, should end total solar eclipses in about 250 million years, a mere 5 percent of the age of the Earth” (p. 18). But consider too that eclipses will become progressively shorter long before that deadline, and therefore less useful for scientific discovery. On the other hand, if we can extrapolate the recession speed far into the past, the moon would have appeared too big to produce some of the special effects that eclipse watchers and scientists love, like Bailey’s beads, the flash spectrum, and the “diamond ring” effect. We can witness perfect solar eclipses, Gonzalez concludes, during a “fairly narrow window of Earth’s history, including the present” (p. 9).

The narrow window for perfect solar eclipses leads us to consider the matter of timing as evidence of design. Where else are coincidences of timing discernable?

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Evolution and Imagination

An interesting exercise is to read through a brief introduction to the origin of multicellular organisms, such as the Wikipedia article linked here.

Although a more rigorous analysis of the issues of the origin of multicellular organisms would be found elsewhere, Wikipedia, with its naturalistic predilection, still makes it plan that a scientific explanation is lacking.

When we consider the system-level functionality of even the simplest animals, we can use our imaginations to propose scenarios that might lead to their origin.  The Wikipedia article mentions several imaginative proposals:

“Multicellular organisms arise in various ways, for example by cell division or by aggregation of many single cells.”

“One hypothesis for the origin of multicellularity is that a group of function-specific cells aggregated into a slug-like mass called a grex, which moved as a multicellular unit.”

“A unicellular organism divided, the daughter cells failed to separate, resulting in a conglomeration of identical cells in one organism, which could later develop specialized tissues.”

The symbiotic “theory suggests that the first multicellular organisms occurred from symbiosis (cooperation) of different species of single-cell organisms, each with different roles.”

“The colonial theory of Haeckel, 1874, proposes that the symbiosis of many organisms of the same species (unlike the symbiotic theory, which suggests the symbiosis of different species) led to a multicellular organism.”

The oxygen availability hypothesis “suggests that the oxygen available in the atmosphere of early Earth could have been the limiting factor for the emergence of multicellular life.”

“The snowball Earth hypothesis in regards to multicellularity proposes that the Cryogenian period in Earth history could have been the catalyst for the evolution of complex multicellular life.”

All of these imagined scenarios, and others not mentioned, fail to fill in the void with any mechanism consistent with known laws of physics explaining how unguided natural processes resulted in functional biological systems that had never been seen (or imagined) before on Earth.

Imagine a world in which the existence of anything other than single-cell organisms is absent from reality.  What natural process, consistent with the action of the laws of physics, would cause single cells to move towards the unimagined goal of differentiating themselves into all of the needed types of cells that then organize themselves into an creature that possesses a digestive system, or a circulatory system, or a nervous system, or an immune system, or a reproductive system?

Does the committed evolutionist unconsciously impute their imagination into the supposed biological outworkings of the laws of nature? Should scientists imagine that a higher partial pressure of a certain gas can cause the origin of complex functional biological systems? 

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