Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 4

Junk DNA has yet another job – keeping mouse embryos alive

At Nature:

“We provided functional evidence that transcriptional activation of MERVL is essential for progression of development in mouse preimplantation embryos. Depletion of MERVL transcripts [retrotransposons] results in embryonic lethality with profound defects in development and is associated with dysregulation of MERVL including their adjacent transcripts, and retaining two-cell-like transcriptome and chromatin state (Fig. 6i). These findings suggest the possibility that MERVL transcription in totipotent cells may act as a switch for the transition from totipotency to pluripotency and is responsible for the onset of differentiation and ontogeny.” – Akahiko Sakashita et al. (March 2, 2023)

The paper is open access.

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Paranthropus: But, on the other hand, ARE those stones actually tools?

At The Hill:

A new study published on Friday in Science Advances suggests the possibility that a critical hallmark of human tool use happened by accident — potentially blurring the line between tool use by early humans and our primate relatives.

The Thai monkeys produced stone artifacts “indistinguishable from what we see at the beginning of the [human] archeological record — what we see as the onset of being human,” said Lydia Luncz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a co-author on the study.

The monkeys — long-tailed macaques — seem to have made their artifacts by accident, not by design. But in many ways, that only makes the finding more disruptive. – Saul Elbein (March 10, 2023)

That implies that some of the very old “tools” identified may not in fact be evidence of human behavior. Pseudo-tools? Stay tuned.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: At VICE: Our view of intelligent [human] life upended by tools find? So it’s sort of like your great-uncle and aunt made the tools, not your great-grandparents. And that’s supposed to make all the difference? Meanwhile, another “subhuman” candidate to scratch off the list.

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At VICE: Our view of intelligent [human] life upended by tools find?

By discovery of three million year old tools?:

“A set of ancient stone tools may have been made by a species unrelated to modern humans, a new finding suggests.”

For years, researchers have believed that human ancestors in Ethiopia were the first beings to use crude stone tools, about 2.6 million years ago. But a recently-published study introduces new findings that suggest tool-making occurred over 300,000 years prior, in a completely different location, and by a species that isn’t even an ancestor to modern humans.

So-called Oldowan tool-making is often portrayed as something of a landmark in history, allowing for efficient processing of food. The advent of these advanced (at the time) tools is widely seen as a milestone in the development of culture, and has remained a touchstone in scientists’ investigations into the timeline of the emergence of human intelligence…

Most incredibly, the paper also chronicles the team’s discovery of Paranthropus molars. The Paranthropus genus is not an ancestor to modern Homo sapiens, but rather a kind of evolutionary cousin. The molars are the oldest fossilized Paranthropus remains ever found. – Hannah Docter-Loeb (March 9, 2023)

So it’s sort of like your great-uncle and aunt made the tools, not your great-grandparents. And that’s supposed to make all the difference?

Meanwhile, another promising subhuman candidate to scratch off the list.

The paper requires a fee or subscription. Here’s the Abstract:

The oldest Oldowan tool sites, from around 2.6 million years ago, have previously been confined to Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle. We describe sites at Nyayanga, Kenya, dated to 3.032 to 2.581 million years ago and expand this distribution by over 1300 kilometers. Furthermore, we found two hippopotamid butchery sites associated with mosaic vegetation and a C4 grazer–dominated fauna. Tool flaking proficiency was comparable with that of younger Oldowan assemblages, but pounding activities were more common. Tool use-wear and bone damage indicate plant and animal tissue processing. Paranthropus sp. teeth, the first from southwestern Kenya, possessed carbon isotopic values indicative of a diet rich in C4 foods. We argue that the earliest Oldowan was more widespread than previously known, used to process diverse foods including megafauna, and associated with Paranthropus from its onset.

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Does the order of nature point to a divine mind?

Prof Saleem Ali of the University of Delaware is author of Earthly Order: How natural laws define human life. He describes the way order in the universe drives order in human and social settings. He engages with Dr Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, whose book The Return of the God Hypothesis makes the case that order in nature points to a divine mind.

With Justin Brierley at the Unbelievable? podcast.

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Science journalists are paid not to be skeptical?

The COVID coverups revealed that. At Tablet:

It’s impossible to know from the email but one can speculate that if Fauci wanted to control the narrative about the outbreak of COVID-19 it would have been a monumental and near impossible task. Reporters could find public records showing the connections between his office at the NIH and China’s WIV. Fauci might be able to find a few journalists credulous enough to simply dismiss the fact that COVID was first reported in the city containing China’s largest facility for producing coronaviruses, but surely there was no way he could get the entire media to go along. If he had, he may have revealed just how dysfunctional and bought-off science journalism has become, a reality that Americans would be well advised to confront before the next pandemic.

The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists.

From the beginning of the pandemic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other leading mainstream outlets were taking their cues—including their facts and their seemingly unflappable certainties—from peer-reviewed publications with authoritative professional reputations like Nature, Science, and The Lancet.

It was this small handful of peer-reviewed science and medical journals—and to a shocking extent just these three—on which the consumer media based key narratives, like the idea that SARS-CoV-2 could not possibly have come from a lab. Boiled down, “the science” on a given issue was often conclusively reduced to whatever these journals published. – Ashley Rindsberg (March 8, 2023)

The science writers’ behavior around the origin of COVID raises the question: About what other, less immediate but more profound topics, are these professional non-skeptics obfuscating things?

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A classic in scientism: ‘In Science Lives Hope.’

At The Stream, a comment on a local billboard slogan for the city’s star research hospital:

‘In Science Lives Hope.’

I don’t want to make too much of a local city advertising campaign, but do you see the reflection of scientism in this billboard? It’s not just that science is a valuable pursuit. We live in a culture that thinks science is the pathway to hope.

This is the ultimate promise of scientism. And the first thing you should notice is that it’s not a scientific claim. You can’t do a science experiment to prove that “in science lives hope.” And you can’t use science to show that science is the only way to know things. That’s because those kinds of claims aren’t scientific. At best, they are philosophical. And in the end, they’re really religious. – Bob Perry (March 11, 2023)

Other bad things follow too (cf the potential risks of any religion):

Science gets defined as “hope,” no matter what is really going on.Actual science gets suppressed in favour of an Establishment “hope parade.”People who call out the bad stuff become heretics, not just critics. We saw plenty of that during the COVID crazy.

But hey, they voted for it, paid for it, they own it so…

Meanwhile, heartfelt apologies from a newly Unwokened writer. There is hope but it is not from “Trust the Science!”

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Astrophysicist: The Big Bang says nothing about how the cosmos came to be

At Big Think:

We are often told that the Big Bang is a theory of cosmic creation. But in reality, cosmology says nothing about how the cosmos came to be. The Big Bang Theory is remarkably successful at describing what happened after the beginning, providing a detailed roadmap for how a super-high-temperature, super-high-density Universe expanded and cooled. – University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank (March 9, 2023)

Has Frank just given away the store to theists? The situation is exactly what we would expect if the cosmos is designed by a supernatural intelligence. We can learn how it works but the inventor exists and works at a higher level. We get only scattered, partial insights as to that.

From C.S. Lewis (1898–1963):

This, and perhaps this alone, fits in with the fact that Nature, though not apparently intelligent, is intelligible—that events in the remotest parts of space appear to obey the laws of rational thought. Even the act of creation itself presents none of the intolerable difficulties which seem to meet us on every other hypothesis… – C.S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Touchstone, 1996), pp. 45–47

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Theoretical astrophysicist re dark energy: The zero-point energy of empty space is not zero.

And, as Ethan Seigel goes on to say at Big Think, “Even with all the physics we know, we have no idea how to calculate what it ought to be.”

Here in our expanding Universe, ultra-distant objects aren’t just speeding away from us, the rate at which they’re speeding away is increasing: teaching us that the Universe is accelerating. When we examine how the Universe is accelerating, we find that it’s behaving as though the Universe is filled with some sort of energy inherent to space: dark energy, or a cosmological constant. But theoretically, we have no idea how to calculate what the value of dark energy ought to be. Its extremely small but non-zero value remains a tremendous puzzle in fundamental physics. (Intro) – Theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel (March 7, 2023)

Well, that’s the assured results of modern science for you…

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon kindly writes to say, “As I’ve said before, Siegel is a mouthpiece of the status quo, which includes virtual particles, exotic dark mattter, dark energy, and inflation. As many have pointed out, there’s a host of contradictory data that deny the existence of all four. Yet like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, they rampage through physics destroying both experiment and theory, both funding and graduate students, our present and future. If you think our politics has collectively lost its mind, so have our physicists.”

Fair cop?

See also: Rob Sheldon: Are “multiple measurements ”closing in on dark energy? Nope.

Researchers: Either dark energy or string theory is wrong. Or both are. But dark energy is so glitzy! Isn’t it a line of cosmetics already?

Researchers: The symmetrons needed to explain dark energy were not found

Rob Sheldon: Has dark energy finally been found? In pop science mags?

Are recent dark energy findings a blow for multiverse theory?

and

Science at sunset: Dark energy might make a multiverse hospitable to life… if it exists

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As panpsychism takes hold in science, plant minds become a focus

At a Kinds of Minds seminar:

Planta sapiens, homo stupidus (abstract)

Abstract. Cognitive science provides the means to make headway in the quest for plant intelligence. Contrary to common belief, plants are not merely acted upon; they rather take action autonomously according to their own needs. To do so, self-propelled mobility is needed—although, unlike animal locomotion, plant movement takes the form of growth and development. Unfortunately, the default understanding of the relation between mobility and cognition is by resorting to an orthodox information-processing paradigm. By having an informed debate about the ‘architecture of plant cognition’, we may engage with empirical investigations somewhat differently. Recent research in neural network theory, theoretical neuroscience and perceptual psychology pinpoints parallel distributed processing, predictive processing, and ecological psychology as fruitful models of cognition. At MINT Lab we re-situate the quest for plant intelligence into a broader approach in cognitive science, as represented by these schools of thought. Plant science can graft onto these investigations and benefit from integrating their theoretical and methodological paradigms. On the other hand, the evolution of sentience has become a hot topic of research in recent years. Cognitive science cannot rule out non-animal forms of life having structures that promote awareness. My talk explores the very possibility and consequences of plant sentience. This approach may ultimately bear upon our understanding of life and cognition more broadly, reaching all the way from single cell organisms to human beings, including plants. – Paco Calvo, described at ResearchGate as a “a leading figure in the philosophy of plant behavior and signalling” (March 13, 2023)

There are many instances of this sort of thing from recent years, along the lines that all living cells are “cognitive.”

We’re still learning and one question that arises is this: Is the growing presence of panpsychism in science an effort to get away from naturalism or to rescue it?

You may also wish to read: Why panpsychism is starting to push out naturalism. A key goal of naturalism/materialism has been to explain human consciousness away as “nothing but a pack of neurons.” That can’t work. Panpsychism is not dualism. By including consciousness — including human consciousness — as a bedrock fact of nature, it avoids naturalism’s dead end.

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“Murder” on the Serengeti?

A classic, at NPR:

A new study of violent behavior in more than 1,000 mammal species found the meerkat is the mammal most likely to be murdered by one of its own kind. – Rebecca Hersher (September 28, 2016)

Murdered? When and where did a meerkat stand trial for murder?

To be clear, the study’s authors did not set out to prove (or disprove) a theory of meerkat violence; they were investigating what mammalian data might tell us about humans. But Ed Yong at The Atlantic organized the study’s exhaustive list of mammals to make this helpful chart ranking animals by their murderousness. – Rebecca Hersher (September 28, 2016)

Could someone please post the Meerkat Ten Commandments? Ten Suggestions even?

All this rhetorical obfuscation is mainly in aid of denigrating humans and the outcome will not be fortunate for humans or meerkats.

You may also wish to read: Can Animals Be Held Criminally Responsible for Their Acts? While the idea is handled provocatively in philosophy literature, in practice, animals are envisioned as plaintiffs, not defendants, in animal rights cases.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

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