Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 37

At SciTech Daily: Surprising New Features of Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Defy Current Understanding

Fast Radio Bursts – A Puzzling and Deepening Mystery

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long cosmic explosions that each produce the energy equivalent to the sun’s annual output. Their perplexing nature continues to surprise scientists more than 15 years after the deep-space pulses of electromagnetic radio waves were first discovered. Now, newly published research only deepens the mystery surrounding them.

Unexpected new observations from a series of cosmic radio bursts by an international team of scientists challenge the prevailing understanding of the physical nature and central engine of FRBs. The researchers, which includes University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) astrophysicist Bing Zhang, published their findings in the September 21 issue of the journal Nature.

The cosmic FRB observations were made in late spring 2021 using the massive Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China. The team detected 1,863 bursts in 82 hours over 54 days from an active fast radio burst source called FRB 20201124A.

THE FIVE-HUNDRED-METER APERTURE SPHERICAL RADIO TELESCOPE (FAST), NICKNAMED TIANYAN (“EYE OF THE SKY/HEAVEN”) IS A RADIO TELESCOPE LOCATED IN THE DAWODANG DEPRESSION, A NATURAL BASIN IN PINGTANG COUNTY, GUIZHOU, SOUTHWEST CHINA. IT CONSISTS OF A FIXED 500-METER DIAMETER DISH CONSTRUCTED IN A NATURAL DEPRESSION IN THE LANDSCAPE. IT IS THE WORLD’S LARGEST FILLED-APERTURE RADIO TELESCOPE, AND THE SECOND-LARGEST SINGLE-DISH APERTURE AFTER THE SPARSELY-FILLED RATAN-600 IN RUSSIA.

Recent observations of a fast radio burst from our Milky Way galaxy indicate that it originated from a magnetar, which is a dense, city-sized neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field. On the other hand, the origin of very distant cosmological fast radio bursts remains unknown. And these latest observations leave scientists questioning what they thought they knew about them.

“These observations brought us back to the drawing board,” said Zhang, who also serves as founding director of UNLV’s Nevada Center for Astrophysics. “It is clear that FRBs are more mysterious than what we have imagined. More multi-wavelength observational campaigns are needed to further unveil the nature of these objects.”

What makes the latest observations surprising to scientists is the irregular, short-time variations of the so-called “Faraday rotation measure,” essentially the strength of the magnetic field and density of particles in the vicinity of the FRB source. The variations went up and down during the first 36 days of observation and suddenly stopped during the last 18 days before the source quenched.

“I equate it to filming a movie of the surroundings of an FRB source, and our film revealed a complex, dynamically evolving, magnetized environment that was never imagined before,” said Zhang. “Such an environment is not straightforwardly expected for an isolated magnetar. Something else might be in the vicinity of the FRB engine, possibly a binary companion,” added Zhang.

To observe the host galaxy of the FRB, the team of astronomers also made use of the 10-m Keck telescopes located at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Zhang says that young magnetars are believed to reside in active star-forming regions of a star-forming galaxy, but the optical image of the host galaxy shows that – unexpectedly – it’s a metal-rich barred spiral galaxy like our Milky Way. The FRB location is in a region where there is no significant star-forming activity.

“This location is inconsistent with a young magnetar central engine formed during an extreme explosion such as a long gamma-ray burst or a superluminous supernova, widely speculated progenitors of active FRB engines,” said Dong.

Full article at SciTech Daily.

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L&FP, 59: Building a body of knowledge in a hyperskeptical, ideologically polarised era that often dismisses truth and objectivity

It’s not hard to recognise that we are in a hyperskeptical, ideologically polarised warped thinking age at war with objective truth and knowledge. Fundamentally, our academics have betrayed us, starting with putting the inferior substitute, skepticism, in the place of prudence. Once that was done, there is no firewal on skepticism so it spiralled into selective hyperskepticism that promotes favoured narratives while finding any excuse to dismiss the despised other.

Inevitably, knowledge has fractured.

So, let us again turn to the JoHari window to see how it can help us build a responsible, and often counter-narrative body of knowledge:

Now, steps of thought (adapted from an earlier comment):

1: We must properly understand what knowledge is, including its subtleties, limitations and challenges.

2: This, we can see i/l/o the warranted, credibly true [so, reliable] belief approach, buttressed by the moderated insights from Dallas Willard. To wit:

To have knowledge in the dispositional sense—where you know things you are not necessarily thinking about at the time—is to be able to represent something as it is on an adequate basis of thought or experience, not to exclude communications from qualified sources (“authority”). This is the “knowledge” of ordinary life, and it is what you expect of your electrician, auto mechanic, math teacher, and physician. Knowledge is not rare, and it is not esoteric . . . no satisfactory general description of “an adequate basis of thought or experience” has ever been achieved. We are nevertheless able to determine in many specific types of cases that such a basis is or is not present [p.19] . . . .

Knowledge, but not mere belief or feeling, generally confers the right to act and to direct action, or even to form and supervise policy. [p. 20]

In any area of human activity, knowledge brings certain advantages. Special considerations aside, knowledge authorizes one to act, to direct action, to develop and supervise policy, and to teach. It does so because, as everyone assumes, it enables us to deal more successfully with reality: with what we can count on, have to deal with, or are apt to have bruising encounters with. Knowledge involves assured [–> warranted, credible] truth, and truth in our representations and beliefs is very like accuracy in the sighting mechanism on a gun. If the mechanism is accurately aligned—is “true,” it enables those who use it with care to hit an intended target. [p. 4, Dallas Willard & Literary Heirs, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, Routledge|Taylor& Francis Group, 2018. ]

3: This means, an adequate body of knowledge is ours, independent of what those who object, are skeptical, are selectively hyperskeptical or are outright polarised have to say. Known to us, unknown to others, not yet known to the world at large is still valid knowledge. Thus, knowledge can be counter-narrative and counter cultural. When falsity sits on the throne, sound knowledge will be an exile.

4: At the same time, we are using a commonplace, weak form sense of knowledge, which seeks truth (& may often hit it) but which recognises limitations and possibility for error. So, we need to be our own friendly critics, willing to seek criteria of adequate warrant . . . including, recognising when negative knowledge is what is established, i.e. limits of knowledge and knowing that we do not have positive knowledge. (Where feasible, this may be the framework for a research proposal and project, including pretty informal or simple cases.)

5: Similarly, we welcome responsible, reasonable, friendly “outside” critics, as they help us refine our knowledge base. (Some of these may even be willing to join the body of knowledge project and are part of the emerging school.) But, let us beware the concern troll or idea hit man, sent out to undermine and discredit for advantage.

6: By contrast, hyperskeptical and hostile, irresponsible or dishonest critics lock themselves out. By their tone, tactics, refusal to be reasonable and resulting rotten fruit shall ye know them.

7: Now, adequacy. In an empirical context, we follow Locke on the candle set up in us:

[Essay on Human Understanding, Intro, Sec 5:] Men have reason to be well satisfied with what God hath thought fit for them, since he hath given them (as St. Peter says [NB: i.e. 2 Pet 1:2 – 4]) pana pros zoen kaieusebeian, whatsoever is necessary for the conveniences of life and information of virtue; and has put within the reach of their discovery, the comfortable provision for this life, and the way that leads to a better. How short soever their knowledge may come of an universal or perfect comprehension of whatsoever is, it yet secures their great concernments [Prov 1: 1 – 7], that they have light enough to lead them to the knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own duties [cf Rom 1 – 2, Ac 17, etc, etc]. Men may find matter sufficient to busy their heads, and employ their hands with variety, delight, and satisfaction, if they will not boldly quarrel with their own constitution, and throw away the blessings their hands are filled with, because they are not big enough to grasp everything . . . It will be no excuse to an idle and untoward servant [Matt 24:42 – 51], who would not attend his business by candle light, to plead that he had not broad sunshine. The Candle that is set up in us [Prov 20:27] shines bright enough for all our purposes . . . If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do muchwhat as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.

8: Now, much of what we do turns on inference to best current, empirically anchored explanation and associated models. That is,

9: on current observed, recorded and shared facts O1, O2, . . . On, predictions, P1, P2, .n . . Pm and trajectory of investigations I(t), we can see which of live option explanations/models E1, E2 . . . Ek account well for the O’s, has a good track record in translating P’s into correctly predicted O’s, and of these, which is coherent and explanatorily elegant [neither ad hoc nor simplistic].

10: Of these we may have a few short listed E’s {Es} or a best one Eb, which then are focal for onward investigation.

11: In our relevant case, when an Eb emerges, we have an epistemic right to accept it on abduction/ inference to best explanation, though we remain open to adjustment and correction.

12: On either case, we have a body of knowledge, the set {Es} are our candidate alternatives, known to be the collective best, and if we have an Eb, that is saying {Es} has become a singleton. Obviously, a good rival Er, would open out the set to {Eb, Er}.

13: With this in hand, we see that the negative knowledge case of Eb, is a special case, let’s call it E0.

14: We thus see how a body of knowledge can be built even in the face of objection or hostility.

15: It then confers “the right to act and to direct action, or even to form and supervise policy.”

FAIR COMMENT: ID has attained that state, though it faces sharp and too often irresponsible objection. A capital illustration is the point recognised by Lehninger’s literary heirs:

“The information in DNA is encoded in its linear (one-dimensional) sequence of deoxyribonucleotide subunits . . . . A linear sequence of deoxyribonucleotides in DNA codes (through an intermediary, RNA) for the production of a protein with a corresponding linear sequence of amino acids . . . Although the final shape of the folded protein is dictated by its amino acid sequence, the folding of many proteins is aided by “molecular chaperones” . . . The precise three-dimensional structure, or native conformation, of the protein is crucial to its function.” [Principles of Biochemistry, 8th Edn, 2021, pp 194 – 5. Now authored by Nelson, Cox et al, Lehninger having passed on in 1986. Attempts to rhetorically pretend on claimed superior knowledge of Biochemistry, that D/RNA does not contain coded information expressing algorithms using string data structures, collapse. We now have to address the implications of language, goal directed stepwise processes and underlying sophisticated polymer chemistry and molecular nanotech in the heart of cellular metabolism and replication.]

Knowledge is a challenge, especially in an ideologically polarised era. END

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At Mind Matters News: Bacterial growth patterns can spell out our inmost thoughts

Crazy? No. Researchers reduced them to an alphabet and you can test it for yourself:

Bacterial growth patterns toss off a code for sending abstract ideas and only a “powerful AI” can crack it. So we live in a world of information, not matter.

—

You may also wish to read: In what ways are bacteria intelligent? As antibiotic resistance grows, researchers are discovering that these microbes are not just single, simple cells. We must understand the surprisingly complex ways bacteria “think” in order to keep them in check.

and

Why do many scientists see cells as intelligent? Bacteria appear to show intelligent behavior. But what about individual cells in our bodies?

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At Mind Matters News: Machine uses live hawk moth antenna for smell detection

Human-created sensors are not sensitive, fast, or discerning enough to identify and process smells in the danger zones for which the Smellicopter was designed. While the machine worked quite well with moth antennae, it was tested only on floral scents.

Getting a moth antenna to seek anything else may be the challenge.

You may also wish to read: The Bionic Man was science fiction; the bionic hand is not. A recent internet-savvy bionic hand, developed by an American neuroscientist and computer engineer, is the most flexible yet, with sensory feedback. The trouble is, if the new bionic hands are going to help most of the world’s amputees , they can’t cost six million dollars, as in the old TV show.

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At Mind Matters News: One way human vision is better than a machine’s

The problem machine vision has with understanding what things should look like creates risks for traffic video safety systems, researchers say. “Frankensteins” — models of life forms that are distorted in some way — help researchers test the limits of machine vision for safety-related tasks.

The fact that humans and other life forms “want” things may underlie the superiority of natural vision systems to machine vision systems. It will be interesting to see how easy the gap is to close — if it can be done at all.

You may also wish to read: Researchers: Deep Learning vision is very different from human vision. Mistaking a teapot shape for a golf ball, due to surface features, is one striking example from a recent open-access paper. The networks did “a poor job of identifying such items as a butterfly, an airplane and a banana,” according to the researchers. The explanation they propose is that “Humans see the entire object, while the artificial intelligence networks identify fragments of the object.” Also: Mis-seeing can include mistaking a schoolbus for a snowplow.

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At Quanta Magazine: By Losing Genes, Life Often Evolved More Complexity

Viviane Callier writes:

Two surprising analyses that appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution early this year have hammered home just how inessential genes can be, and how creatively evolution can deal with losing them. By analyzing hundreds of genomes from across the animal kingdom, researchers in Spain and the United Kingdom showed that a startling degree of gene loss pervades the tree of life.

Their results suggest that even early animals had relatively complex genomes because of an unprecedented spurt of gene duplication early in life’s history. Later, as lineages of animals evolved into different phyla with distinct body plans, many of their genes began to disappear, and gene loss continued to be a major factor in evolution thereafter. In fact, the loss of genes seems to have helped many groups of organisms split away from their ancestors and triumph over new environmental challenges.

Recognition that gene loss has been important to evolution throughout the animal kingdom opens new doors for research. 

Use It or Lose It

Gene losses in evolution may sound like damaging events, since genes confer the traits that make life and health possible. It’s true that if individuals lose a genuinely essential gene, they may die or fail to flourish, and natural selection will weed them out of the population. But in reality, the majority of gene losses during evolution are likely to be neutral, with no fitness consequences for the organism, says Michael Hiller, an evolutionary genomicist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany.

The reason is that evolutionary gene losses often occur after some change in the environment or behaviors makes a gene less necessary. If a key nutrient or vitamin suddenly becomes more available, for example, the biosynthetic pathways for making it may become dispensable, and mutations or other genetic accidents may make those pathways disappear. Losses can also occur after a chance gene duplication, when the superfluous copy degenerates, since selection no longer preserves it.

Plants offer abundant examples of this “use it or lose it” strategy, because many plant species have undergone whole genome duplications followed by waves of gene loss, explains Lydia Gramzow, a plant biologist at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Sometimes the duplicate copies persist for many millions of years before being lost, for reasons that Gramzow and Thießen are still investigating.

The Miscellanista

One of the best examples of adaptive gene loss in animals can be seen in cetaceans (the order of aquatic mammals including whales and dolphins), which have lost 85 protein-coding genes seen in other mammals, as Hiller reported last year. Many of these losses are probably neutral, but some seem linked to diving-related adaptations, like the narrowing of blood vessels during diving. One of the lost genes, KLK8, is interesting because it is involved in the development both of sweat glands in the skin and of the hippocampus in the brain; cetaceans lost it during their transition from land back to water. The loss of this gene is linked to the development of a thicker epidermis and the loss of hair (hair is not adaptive in aquatic environments, where it creates drag and does not preserve body heat as it does in terrestrial animals).

Note: The statement, “hair is not adaptive in aquatic environments, where it creates drag and does not preserve body heat as it does in terrestrial animals,” explains why river otters are so slow and cumbersome and seem so poorly designed to be able to thrive in water.”

The article goes on with other examples, and states:

The different solutions to metabolic or developmental puzzles that evolution has achieved by subtracting key genes could do more than reveal new biological insights; they could inspire new biomedical interventions for human disease.

Complete article available at Quanta.

I’ll first take issue with the title of the Quanta article – genes involve complex specified information; the loss of genes, even unused ones, constitutes a loss of information and complexity, not an evolution of new complexity. To see this, just imagine continuing the process of gene loss: how much complexity would an organism have if it lost all of its genes? The unanswered question in the article is, “How did the genes develop in the first place?” We know from probability analysis that it couldn’t have happened by chance within the limited spacetime of our universe.

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At Evolution News: Gene Sharing Is More Widespread than Thought, with Implications for Darwinism

David Coppedge writes:

Evidence is growing that organisms share existing genetic information horizontally, not just vertically. This has immense implications for neo-Darwinian theory that are not yet fully recognized. If traits can be shared across species, genera and even phyla, they are not being inherited from common ancestors. The findings might also cast stories about convergence and co-evolution in a completely different light. Let’s look at some of the news on this front.

Introgression

Last month, Current Biology posted a Primer on Introgression by four authors. Introgression refers to “lasting transfer of DNA from one of the species into the genome of the other” by means of hybridization and backcrossing. Basically, it describes “the incorporation of the DNA from one species into another.”

Kleptomania

In news from the Florida Museum of Natural History, biologists discussed how a new genome for ferns reveals “a history of DNA hoarding and kleptomania.” The article is classified under “Evolution” but what is Darwinian about it? 

Photo credit: Clyde Gravenberch via Unsplash.

The article references a 2014 study that showed another instance of kleptomania. Ferns seem to have inherited genes for thriving in shade from distantly related plants, but “exactly how organisms separated by millions of years of evolution are able to swap fully functional genes remains unclear.” 

“The mechanisms behind horizontal gene transfer remain one of the least investigated areas of land plant evolution,” Doug Soltis explained. “Over evolutionary timescales, it’s a bit like winning the lottery. Any time a plant is wounded, its interior is susceptible to invasion from microbes, but for their DNA to be incorporated into the genome seems amazing.”

These examples illustrate a sea change in thinking about horizontal gene transfer (HGT), which was formerly thought to be restricted to microbes. 

Library Books

A related preprint by Haimlich et al. on bioRxiv investigated “Widespread horizontal gene transfer between plants and their microbiota.” Finding 180 genes that indicated “prevalent horizontal gene transfer,” they concluded,

Our results suggest that horizontal gene transfer between hosts and their microbiota is a significant and active evolutionary mechanism that contributed new traits to plants and their commensal microbiota.

Crediting evolution seems stretched, though. Information shared is not the same as information innovated, nor is borrowing a book as difficult as writing one.

From Division of Labor to Expertise Sharing

Speaking of bacteria, Duke University proclaims that “Microbial Communities Stay Healthy by Swapping Knowledge.” How and why microbes do this prompted a metaphor that portrays intelligent action:

Put another way, a construction crew could be extremely resilient to electricians quitting if the plumbers on site also knew how to wire a building. But the same crew would be even more resilient if the remaining electricians could simply transfer their expertise to anyone on the job when needed, no matter their profession.

Dr. Lingchong You at Duke considers HGT a “dynamic division of labor” by which bacteria maintain their health in nature.

Human Sharing

With these reassessments of heredity in mind, how much of assumed “human evolution” could be explained by gene sharing instead of by the neo-Darwinian mutation-selection model? Have human beings been sharing library books or downloading each other’s software apps instead of writing them from scratch?

News from the University of Tübingen says that paleoanthropologists are considering the degree to which genetic hybridization affected the human skeleton and skull shape.

Many people living today have a small component of Neanderthal DNA in their genes, suggesting an important role for admixture with archaic human lineages in the evolution of our species. Paleogenetic evidence indicates that hybridization with Neanderthals and other ancient groups occurred multiple times, with our species‘ history resembling more a network or braided stream than a tree. Clearly the origin of humankind was more complex than previously thought.

Similar conclusions are being reached at North Carolina State University where a news item says that “Ancient DNA caused a revolution in how we think about human evolution.” Out is the old single-file march of progress from ape to man. In is the “a series of streams that converge and diverge at multiple points.” The “exploratory study” going on at NC State is changing the view that evolution is driven by external environmental factors, such as climate, and toward the view that internal gene flow causes the variations in human anatomy.

A question arises whether these variations and combinations of variations are random when introduced by gene flow instead of mutation. If the latter, then old-school Darwinians might argue that they are merely additional manifestations of neo-Darwinism’s unguided process of random variation and selection. 

But if these shared genes are instead modular pieces of functional information that are pre-adapted to join up in certain ways, then biologists will need to consider whether the source of that information requires an intelligent cause. The case for intelligent design in instances of gene flow can be further strengthened by observing whether newly incorporated genes are epigenetically regulated, targeted to functional loci, and responsive to signals from the environment. If so, organisms have been equipped with mechanisms to ensure robustness to changing conditions. That implies Foresight.

Full article available at Evolution News.

The analogy of gene sharing with taking a book from a library implies not only that the borrowed book was already written, but that the borrower knows how to read it and to apply the information in a beneficial way. Such abilities are consistent with pre-existing intelligence (a divine Creator) actively coordinating the design of living organisms.

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At Reasons.org: Did the initial findings of the JWST repudiate the big bang creation model?

Astrophysicist Hugh Ross reports:

It’s been widely rumored that the initial images from the JWST have repudiated the big bang creation model of the universe. This rumor was sparked in an online article by Eric Lerner, author of the book, The Big Bang Never Happened.1 In this book, Lerner, a committed atheist, claimed that electromagnetism, not gravity, dominates, and has dominated, the dynamics of the universe. Shortly after the book was released, I debated Lerner on the big bang on a radio show. In the fourth edition of The Creator and the Cosmos I cited several measurements establishing that galactic and intergalactic magnetic fields are much, much too weak to sustain any of Lerner’s speculations.2

In Lerner’s online article, he wrote concerning the initial JWST images that “to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising—not at all what was predicted by theory. In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”3 Lerner concluded, “The hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since.”4

Stephans Quintet by the HST (left) and the JWST (right). Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA

The preprint paper whose title began with the word “Panic!” does not, as Lerner implies, communicate either in the abstract or the paper itself any panic or worry about the big bang creation model.5 The first part of the paper’s title is a pun. It reads “Panic! At the Disks,” which is a pun on the name of a pop band, Panic! at the Disco. The sixteen authors, including Rogier Windhorst, who has endorsed one of my books on the big bang, express confidence that the JWST will deliver a more refined and detailed big bang creation model. That is, they express their belief that the JWST will provide more, not less, evidence for the big bang.

Do these recent JWST discoveries debunk the big bang? Not at all. There are many big bang creation models that predict exactly these discoveries. It’s even possible that the discoveries do not refute any big bang creation models. Billion-solar-mass compact galaxies in the universe may yet prove to be relatively rare. Likewise, large, well-formed spiral galaxies may prove to be relatively less abundant in the early universe than what the initial JWST images show. Such galaxies are the easiest ones to detect in the early universe. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised that they show up in the first JWST images of the early universe.

As an example of such early, unexpected discoveries, I’m old enough to remember the discovery of the first quasar, 3C 273. It was so bright and only 2.4 billion light-years away that astronomers first deemed it a problem for several big bang creation models. Such models predicted that quasars like 3C 273 should be rare. Well, six decades later, 3C 273 has indeed proven to be rare. It still ranks as the optically brightest quasar in the sky and one of only a few quasars less than 2.5 billion light-years away.

The JWST’s initial images do show that the most distant galaxies are smaller in size than nearby galaxies. However, this is not a problem for the big bang as Eric Lerner has claimed. It’s what all big bang creation models predict. The farther away astronomers observe, the farther back in time they see, owing to the finite velocity of light. In big bang cosmology, many of the first stars form clusters. These first-formed star clusters merge to form larger star clusters. The larger star clusters merge and pull in gas clouds to form dwarf galaxies. Many of the dwarf galaxies merge to form larger galaxies. Thus, big bang models predict that while dwarf galaxies will remain the most common galaxy type in the universe, the number and sizes of galaxies will tend to increase as the universe ages.

Primary Scientific Missions
The rationale for constructing and launching the JWST was for it to achieve at least six primary scientific missions which, to date, no other telescope could achieve. These six primary missions are:

To determine how the universe’s first stars form, the relative sizes of the first stars, and the number density of the first starsTo determine how and when the first galaxies form and what types of galaxies comprise the first galaxiesTo determine in specific detail how, when, and where stars form in the present universeTo determine the chemical composition of the atmospheres and hydrospheres of exoplanets of various typesTo determine how planetary systems form and evolveTo search for more carbonaceous molecules in giant molecular clouds that may serve as the “building blocks of the building blocks” of life and to measure the relative abundance of these molecules

Attaining these objectives will yield far more evidence of the structure and history of the universe. That evidence will show which cosmic creation models are correct.

See the full article at Reasons.org.

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At Medical Express: First direct evidence that babies react to taste and smell in the womb

A study led by Durham University’s Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, UK, took 4D ultrasound scans of 100 pregnant women to see how their unborn babies responded after being exposed to flavors from foods eaten by their mothers.

Researchers looked at how the fetuses reacted to either carrot or kale flavors just a short time after the flavors had been ingested by the mothers.

Fetuses exposed to carrot showed more “laughter-face” responses while those exposed to kale showed more “cry-face” responses.

A 4D scan image of the same fetus (as in the laughter-face baseline image) showing a laughter-face reaction after being exposed to the carrot flavour. Credit: FETAP (Fetal Taste Preferences) Study, Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, Durham University.

Their findings could further our understanding of the development of human taste and smell receptors.

The researchers also believe that what pregnant women eat might influence babies’ taste preferences after birth and potentially have implications for establishing healthy eating habits.

The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.

Humans experience flavor through a combination of taste and smell. In fetuses it is thought that this might happen through inhaling and swallowing the amniotic fluid in the womb.

Mothers were given a single capsule containing approximately 400mg of carrot or 400mg kale powder around 20 minutes before each scan. They were asked not to consume any food or flavored drinks one hour before their scans.

Facial reactions seen in both flavor groups, compared with fetuses in a control group who were not exposed to either flavor, showed that exposure to just a small amount of carrot or kale flavor was enough to stimulate a reaction.

“Previous research conducted in my lab has suggested that 4D ultrasound scans are a way of monitoring fetal reactions to understand how they respond to maternal health behaviors such as smoking, and their mental health including stress, depression, and anxiety.

“This latest study could have important implications for understanding the earliest evidence for fetal abilities to sense and discriminate different flavors and smells from the foods ingested by their mothers.”

The researchers say their findings might also help with information given to mothers about the importance of taste and healthy diets during pregnancy.

They have now begun a follow-up study with the same babies post-birth to see if the influence of flavors they experienced in the womb affects their acceptance of different foods.

Medical Express

These findings seem to support the conclusion that the unborn are alive and human. But does the flavor of carrots make you smile?

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At Evolution News: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel Sells “Something from Nothing”: I’m Not Buying

Physicist Rob Sheldon writes, beginning with a reference to Siegel’s stance that quantum mechanics allows the formation of something from “nothing.”

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains how “70-year-old quantum prediction comes true, as something is created from nothing:”

Whoever said, “You can’t get something from nothing” must never have learned quantum physics. As long as you have empty space — the ultimate in physical nothingness — simply manipulating it in the right way will inevitably cause something to emerge. Collide two particles in the abyss of empty space, and sometimes additional particle-antiparticle pairs emerge. Take a meson and try to rip the quark away from the antiquark, and a new set of particle-antiparticle pairs will get pulled out of the empty space between them. And in theory, a strong enough electromagnetic field can rip particles and antiparticles out of the vacuum itself, even without any initial particles or antiparticles at all.

Previously, it was thought that the highest particle energies of all would be needed to produce these effects: the kind only obtainable at high-energy particle physics experiments or in extreme astrophysical environments. But in early 2022, strong enough electric fields were created in a simple laboratory setup leveraging the unique properties of graphene, enabling the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all. The prediction that this should be possible is 70 years old: dating back to one of the founders of quantum field theory, Julian Schwinger. The Schwinger effect is now verified, and teaches us how the Universe truly makes something from nothing.

Photo credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Dotter.

You can read the rest at Big Think. According to his bio, Siegel is a “science communicator, who professes physics and astronomy at various colleges.” He has become quite adept at blogging on physics from the “establishment position.” Part of his appeal is backing up the status quo, which in today’s world means the mainstream media, Nature editorials, and the like. And regarding the origin of the universe, the status quo position is “anything but God.” So naturally Ethan is going to offer the Lawrence Krauss gimmick of selling “a universe from nothing.”

Changes to the Dictionary

In order to push this, he has to make some pretty big changes to our normal dictionary definition of what “nothing” means, just as Krauss did and got ridiculed for it. The new item is graphene. Supposedly graphene is so marvelous that it makes particles out of electric fields. But need I point out that graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms? And the “holes” are actually displacements of carbon atoms? So we are making waves out of carbon atoms and calling this “something from nothing.” Really?

Matter and Energy

What about particle physics and mesons and all that? It is true that E = mc2, so we can make matter out of energy, and vice versa, energy from matter. We’ve done this ever since the uranium atom was split in 1939 by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, and the pieces weighed less than the uranium atom did. For the forces that hold the uranium atom together are pretty strong and therefore massive. But mind you, the fields are massive, and it is simply a trick of physics to approximate these forces and fields with subatomic particles. What you are doing is modifying potentials and calling these modifications “particles.” You aren’t making particles; you are manipulating fields.

Ethan is saying we can put those forces to work in a graphene sheet, whereas it’s a lot harder to work with uranium nuclei. True, but that is just saying, “If I make my sheet ring by hitting it with a hammer, I’m making phonons from nothing.” It isn’t nothing, it’s a sheet of graphene. If you want to call waves of atoms moving “particles,” then what you are really doing is making a press release out of nothing.

The Casimir Force

And now a comment about the Casimir force invoked by Ethan, and often taken as proof of the existence of vacuum virtual particles. When you hold two conductors close to each other, they attract with a 1/R4 attraction that Hendrik Casimir attributed to “virtual particles” appearing out of the vacuum in between the plates. 

First of all, virtual particles are just a math trick to truncate an infinite sum which describes the field. So, they are virtual in more ways than one. Secondly, there’s a perfectly valid way to describe this attraction without invoking virtual particles: random motion of electrons in one plate set up transient dipole fields that induce transient dipole fields in the other plate, so the attraction is a dipole-dipole interaction maintained by thermal instabilities. 

[A] theoretical physicist also looked for virtual particles affecting starlight. Stars (and our sun) emit correlated light, but the kiloparsecs of empty space should produce enough vacuum virtual particles to collide and decohere it. So, he looked for decoherence. Nope, not there either. So no, I think that invoking the Casimir effect is proof that Ethan doesn’t understand thermodynamics and has too great a confidence in the existence of “virtual particles.”

Full article at Evolution News.

Anyone having some familiarity with Einstein’s general relativity theory knows that what is called “empty space” is not nothing. Space is the fabric out which our universe is made; it can warp and flow and expand. Space can carry galaxies apart from one another. Any claim that empty space can create something from nothing is dubious.

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