Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 40

Royal Society lecturer says what Richard Weikart has been saying for years?

Weikart has written a number of books in his long academic career on the links between Darwinism and malign social trends like elitism and racism. See, especially, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.

Now a friend writes to say that in this recent lecture at the Royal Society, Adam Rutherford is saying similar things:

It’s nice when people start getting the story right.

For an instance of a bunch of people getting the story all wrong, see RichardWeikart on the non-religious racism that anti-racists ignore: “While researching my book, Darwinian Racism, I examined the websites and publications of many neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and alt-right individuals and organizations. What I discovered was that most white nationalists and white supremacists today embrace a social Darwinist version of scientific racism and vehemently oppose Christianity.”

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At Mind Matters News: Philosopher: I’m neither me, myself nor I… Yet I give interviews!

Michael Egnor: Theoretical philosopher Thomas Metzinger tells his interviewer “Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality”:

“Michael W. Taft: You’ve written at great length about the experience of selfhood in human beings. So let’s start off by asking, What is the self?

“Thomas Metzinger: The first thing to understand, I believe, is that there is no thing like “the self.” Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality. Selves are not something that endures over time. The first person pronoun “I” doesn’t refer to an object like a football or a bicycle, it just points to the speaker of the current sentence. There is no thing in the brain or outside in the world, which is us. We are processes… the self is not a thing but a process.”

Michael Egnor, “Philosopher: I’m neither me, myself nor I… Yet I give interviews! ” at Mind Matters News

So Egnor asks,

What could Metzinger possibly mean by “there is no thing like ‘the self’”? Myself is the term I use to refer to me. I (and my self) are very much a part of reality, and I most certainly endure over time. I am an object like a football — in a sense — in that I exist in the world, I have mass and shape, and I have come into existence and will someday go out of existence in this world. Obviously, I have many abilities that a football doesn’t have — I have a sum of powers (physiological, sensory, motor, emotional, mnemonic, and rational) that comprise my soul. I am a composite of matter and soul, just as all things in the world are composites of matter and form.

And Metzinger’s claim that we are not selves (“things”) but processes is unintelligible. A process is a state of change, and change presupposes a being that exists continuously through the process of changing.

Michael Egnor, “Philosopher: I’m neither me, myself nor I… Yet I give interviews! ” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: If Metzinger is an evanescent process without substantial enduring reality, does he refuse to pick up his paycheck? How real is “not part of reality” here?

You may also wish to read: Interview with a woman (or women) formerly called Susan Blackmore. A professor of psychology argues that there is no continuity between our present selves and our past selves. If her denial of personal continuity made sense, the video interview would be with Susan Blackmores or with countless women, one of whom was Susan Blackmore.

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When progressivism hit the science journals…

… they bust down part of the wall to let the Trojan Horse in:

Earlier this month, Science, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, published an editorial that could have appeared in the Nation or Washington Post on . . . how to fix the United States Supreme Court that has grown too conservative. From “Save the Supreme Court and Democracy,” by Maya Sen — a Harvard social scientist, meaning not a “scientist” at all:

“The US Supreme Court has been busy. It recently overturned a nearly 50-year-old precedent protecting abortion rights, upheld the right to carry guns outside the home, and hamstrung the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate emissions—all while signaling an aversion to contemporary empirical evidence and instead favoring “history and tradition.” Although the majority of Americans disagree with many of these decisions, the court has only just begun to reshape the country. When it resumes in October, the court will be poised to outlaw affirmative action, undercut federal regulations regarding clean water, and possibly allow state legislatures to restrict voting rights without oversight by state courts.”

With the exception of environmental regulation, none of that has anything to do with actual science. Science isn’t about politics, opinion polls, or subjective opinions. It is supposed to be about adducing facts about the natural world and applying them. Whether to permit, outlaw, or regulate abortion isn’t a question that science can answer. That issue belongs to the realms of morality, ethics, and politics. Ditto gun policy.

Wesley J. Smith, “Progressivism Colonizes the Science Journals” at National Review (August 31, 2022)

“Prestige” is gradually coming to mean “prestigious because of its prestigiousness,” not because of its content. Maybe they’ll get round to the war on math before long.

You may also wish to read: Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.

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At Mind Matters News: Yes, plants may be conscious too, says researcher

Paco Calvo has authored many papers in respected journals; his view is another instance of panpsychism overtaking materialism in science:

We are now told in science publications that bees feel and think and that spiders dream. As science edges slowly toward panpsychism (all life forms participate in consciousness), we even learn — in science journals — that viruses are intelligent and cells are cognitive.

So who would now be surprised by the race to demonstrate that plants are conscious? University of Murcia researcher Paco Calvo, described at ResearchGate as a “a leading figure in the philosophy of plant behavior and signalling” has developed, with colleagues, what he argues is a test of consciousness for plants: …

They think they have discovered what they are looking for in climbing bean plants: …

News, “Yes, plants may be conscious too, says researcher” at Mind Matters News (August 29, 2022)

Takehome: It’s not so much that consciousness in plants is being demonstrated as that what it means to be conscious is changing so as to include plants.

You may also wish to read:

What does it mean to say bees “feel and think”? The New Scientist reviewer is unsure that we are ready for such a radical message. Unsure? At one time, it would have been “not science!” In The Mind of a Bee, behavioral ecologist Lars Chittka makes a claim that shows that science is slowly embracing panpsychism as a successor to materialism.

and

Scientists: Plants are notconscious! No, but why do serious plant scientists even need to make that clear? What has happened? Quite simply, the need to see humans as equivalent to animals has now spread to the need to see us as equivalent to plants.

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L&FP 58: Knowledge (including scientific knowledge) is not a simple concept

. . . as a result of which, once there is an issue, complex questions and limitations of the philosophy of knowledge — Epistemology — emerge. Where, in particular, no scientific theory can be even morally certain. (Yes, as Newtonian Dynamics illustrates, they can be highly empirically reliable in a given gamut of circumstances . . . but as Newtonian Dynamics [vs. Modern Physics] also illustrates, so can models and frameworks known to be strictly inaccurate to reality. Empirical reliability is something we can know to responsible certainty.)

So, it is important for us to understand the subtleties and limitations of knowledge and of knowledge claims.

As we have discussed previously, on balance, a good definition of knowledge (beyond merely one’s strong sense of certitude) . . . and particularly informed by Scientific, forensic and historical cases . . . is that:

knowledge is warranted, credibly true [and so, reliable] belief.

For, first, if we do not actually accept, we cannot know. If we [collectively] do not have a good and responsible reason to hold credibly true and reliable, we cannot know. Of course, having good warrant does not mean, consensus or even consensus of experts. If we do not have good reason in particular to hold claimed knowledge reliable and an accurate description of relevant entities and states of affairs of reality, we cannot know. Where, as Aristotle noted, truth says of what is, that it is; and of what is not, that it is not. But, given responsible usage as noted, what we claim to know is subject to being found to have limitations, errors and so needing to be corrected.

Knowledge is not empty dogmatism, even as we must acknowledge that there are certain limited points of knowledge that are self-evident or otherwise undeniably certain beyond correction. Then, too, post Godel, we must ever be aware of that which may be true but is beyond the reach of any given set of first principles or may be beyond our ken as finite, fallible thinkers.

To illustrate, consider a now fairly common denial of objective knowledge, that is of warrant sufficient that we are responsible to accept a warranted claim as known.

It turns out that the assertion or inference or implication or conclusion, there is no objective truth — in general, for morality, for any particular identifiable domain of thought, etc. — is actually precisely what it tries to deny: a claimed, warranted, credible truth. So it is self referential, incoherent and self defeating. The minimal first truth for any given identifiable domain of thought is, that objective knowable truth exists regarding that domain. It may be hard to unearth and validate but it is there. Nihilism or cynicism about knowledge and truth, fail. So do radical skepticism/global hyperskepticism or selective hyperskepticism, or radical relativism or subjectivism or emotivism, or attempts to dismiss knowledge claims as meaningless, etc. No, the narrator looking on at the blind men groping at an elephant implies objective knowledge on his own part. The abuse of this parable fails, too.

The steersman/kubernetes steers the ship . . .

Let’s add, that it is an error of our age, to grant skepticism seniority over knowledge. Often, rooted in the futile quest for utter, indisputable certainty, which by its very nature cannot succeed. Skepticism is not an intellectual virtue, though it has become the inferior substitute for one, prudence. Prudence, being the cardinal virtue of being habitually governed by responsible, rational, care-taking reasonable consideration on matters. Thus, it becomes the steersman/sailing master, the kubernetes of the virtues. A wellspring of wisdom.

These general results then set a context for onward understanding of and discussion regarding topics of scientific or general interest where there are disputes and the like.

Including of course on the main focus of this forum, Intelligent Design. That domain of scientific study that addresses the question, are there reliable, observable signs that strongly indicate design as key cause? To which, the well warranted (but hotly disputed) answer is, yes. For simple example we know the difference between complex text in English and randomly typed gibberish — ryja5ikjwrgdsueqgm,tuwtagmduktuk, or repetitive patterns sdsdsdsdsdsd.

So, knowledge is not simple and therefore no domain that is claimed to be knowledge can be simple. END

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At Astronomy Now: Frank Drake, SETI pioneer, 1930–2022

Frank Drake, the radio astronomer who pioneered the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), died yesterday (2 September) at the age of 92.

Frank Drake and his eponymous equation for estimating the number of technological civilisations in the Milky Way Galaxy. Image: SETI Institute.

Born on 28 May 1930 in Chicago, Drake was working at the Green Bank Radio Telescope during the early days of radio astronomy, in the late 1950s, when he was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous 1959 paper in Nature about using radio transmissions at 21cm wavelength to communicate across interstellar distances. Encouraged by the director of Green Bank, Otto Struve, Drake conducted the first ever radio SETI search in April 1960. Called Project Ozma, the search utilised the 26-metre dish at Green Bank to scan two nearby stars, epsilon Eridani and tau Ceti, for extraterrestrial radio transmissions. Drake thought he had hit pay-dirt on day one, with the detection of an anomalous, pulsed signal coming from the direction of epsilon Eridani. However, the signal turned out to be from a high-altitude aircraft instead. 

If extraterrestrial life existed, then it seemed reasonable to expect that it would live on planets, orbiting stars, so knowing the rate at which stars form seemed a good starting point. Then, how many of those stars form planets? How many of those planets are temperate like Earth, and how many ultimately develop simple life? Then, now how many of those worlds does that simple life evolve into complex, intelligent life? What fraction of those intelligent civilisations develop the technology for interstellar communication? And finally, how long do alien civilisations exist for, because the Universe is very old, and if technological civilisations don’t last long, the chances of our existence coinciding with theirs might be slim.

Drake wrote this all down, and realised he’s come up with an equation to estimate how many technological, communicative, extraterrestrial civilisations there may be out there. Though most of the factors in what has become known as the Drake Equation are completely unknown, meaning we can only guess at their values, that’s exactly the point. Unlike other scientific equations, it was never intended to provide an accurate answer, but rather to expose our ignorance and how much we still need to learn. Even to this day, we only know accurate values for the first two factors.

In his later years he continued to be prominent in the SETI community, acting as a public figurehead. Often called the ‘father of SETI’, his name will live on in his contributions to how we think about life beyond Earth, and how we search for evidence that we are not alone. Although we are continue to be met with silence, Drake never lost his optimism, as he showed in his words in Is Anyone Out There? 

“The silence we have heard so far is not in any way significant,” he and Sobel wrote. “We still have not looked long enough or hard enough. We’ve not explored a large enough chunk of the cosmic haystack … The goal is not beyond us. It is within our grasp.”

See Astronomy Now for the complete article.

Frank Drake will be remembered for pioneering a scientific approach to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A subsequent posting will address his famous equation and consider its predictions.

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Queen Elizabeth II, of the UK and Commonwealth Passes

UNITED KINGDOM – CIRCA 1945: Princess Elizabeth (born in 1926), future queen Elizabeth II of England, learning how to change a car wheel as an auxiliary-officer of the English Army, 1945. (Photo by Roger Viollet via Getty Images)

. . . after 70 years, two hundred fourteen days on the throne, and at age ninety-six. Her Husband, Prince Consort Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, passed on a year ago. Her Majesty was the most admired political and personal figure in the UK. She was immediately succeeded by Charles, Prince of Wales, who may choose a different regnal name.

This marks the passing of an era. END

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At Phys.org: Glaciers flowed on ancient Mars, but slowly

The weight and grinding movement of glaciers has carved distinctive valleys and fjords into Earth’s surface. Because Mars lacks similar landscapes, researchers believed ancient ice masses on the Red Planet must have been frozen firmly to the ground. New research suggests they were not stuck in place, but just moved very slowly.

Because of Mars’ unique conditions, its ancient glaciers likely flowed very slowly, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. A range of ice features exist on the Red Planet today. Credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech/University of Arizona.

Motion is part of the definition of a glacier. On Earth, meltwater gathers below glaciers and ice sheets, lubricating the downhill slide of these rivers of ice. The new study modeled how Mars’ low gravity would affect the feedback between how fast an ice sheet slides and how water drains below the ice, finding under-ice channels would be likely to form and persist. Fast water drainage would increase friction at the interface of rock and ice.

This means ice sheets on Mars likely moved, and eroded the ground under them, at exceedingly slow rates, even when water accumulated under the ice, the authors said. The new study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

“Ice is incredibly non-linear. The feedbacks relating glacial motion, glacial drainage and glacial erosion would result in fundamentally different landscapes related to the presence of water under former ice sheets on Earth and Mars,” said Anna Grau Galofre.

Although Mars does not have the obvious U-shaped valleys that mark Earth’s glacial landscapes, Grau Galofre said, researchers have found other geologic traces suggesting glacier-like ice masses in Mars’ past, including gravel ridges called eskers and potential subglacial channels.

“Whereas on Earth you would get drumlins, lineations, scouring marks and moraines, on Mars you would tend to get channels and esker ridges under an ice sheet of exactly the same characteristics,” Grau Galofre said.

Grau Galofre and her co-authors modeled the dynamics of two equivalent ice sheets on Earth and Mars with the same thickness, temperature and subglacial water availability. They adapted the existing physical framework that describes the drainage of water accumulated under Earth’s ice sheets, coupled with ice motion dynamics, to model Martian conditions and learn whether the subglacial drainage would evolve toward efficient or inefficient drainage configurations, and what effect this configuration would have on glacial sliding velocity and erosion.

“Going from an early Mars with presence of surface liquid water, extensive ice sheets and volcanism into the global cryosphere that Mars currently is, the interaction between ice masses and basal water must have occurred at some point,” Grau Galofre said. “It is just very hard to believe that throughout 4 billion years of planetary history, Mars never developed the conditions to grow ice sheets with presence of subglacial water, since it is a planet with extensive water inventory, large topographic variations, presence of both liquid and frozen water, volcanism, [and is] situated further from the Sun than Earth.”

The findings of this modeling effort demonstrate how glacial ice masses would drain their basal meltwater much more efficiently on Mars than Earth, largely preventing any lubrication of the base of ice sheets that would lead to fast sliding rates and enhanced glacial erosion. Indeed, typical lineated landforms found on Earth would not have time to develop on Mars, according to this study.

The work also has implications for the survival of possible ancient life forms on Mars, according to the authors. An ice sheet could provide a steady supply of water, protection and stability to any subglacial water bodies like lakes, shelter from solar radiation in the absence of a magnetic field, and insulation against extreme temperature variations.

Phys.org

It’s fascinating to consider an entire planet, only slightly dissimilar to Earth geologically (considering the wide range of non-earthlike exoplanets discovered in recent years), that as far as evidence shows, has ended up completely barren. Whether one maintains a belief in ID or not, the stark contrast between the vibrancy of life on Earth and the desolation of our nearest planetary neighbors is worth a moment of reflection and gratitude.

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Evolution News reports on The Electric Cell: More Synergy with Physics Found in Cellular Coding

David Coppedge writes:

New imaging techniques down to the picometer scale are permitting the detection of previously unknown alliances of cellular software with electrostatics and mechanics. Such knowledge was unattainable until biophysicists gained the ability to measure phenomena at the atomic level. What they are finding multiplies the information content embedded in the molecules of life.

Early depictions of molecules in the nucleus showed them drifting around aimlessly. How could molecules do otherwise without membranes to hold them together? Organelles are defined by their lipid membranes. The simplified picture of molecules in lipid cages, like animals in a zoo, raised questions about how enzymes locate their substrates in regions that, at their scale, would be distant.

The Electric Cell

New findings reported in PNAS by Toyama et al. are uncovering a role for electrostatics in enzymatic activity. Simultaneously, the discovery may offer insight into the function of so-called “disordered proteins” that never fold into stable structures, and other proteins containing disordered regions that would seem to flail about like loose cables. But there is order in the disorder! How big is this discovery?

Electrostatic interactions play important roles in regulating a plethora of different biochemical processes and in providing stability to biomolecules and their complexes.

Photo credit: http://www.cgpgrey.com / CC BY (https://creativecommons)

What the team from the University of Toronto found, discussed below, was only made possible by “solution NMR spectroscopy.” This technique allows them, for the first time, to measure the near-surface electrostatic potentials of individual atoms in proteins and follow changes in those potentials during an enzyme’s action.

Our results collectively show that a subtle balance between electrostatic repulsion and interchain attractive interactions regulates CAPRIN1 phase separation and provides insight into how nucleotides, such as ATP, can induce formation of and subsequently dissolve protein condensates. [Emphasis added.]

This remarkable revelation begins to give insight into the participation of cell coding with electrophysics. Get a charge out of that!

CAPRIN1 coexists with negatively charged RNA molecules in cells and, along with FMRP and other proteins, is implicated in the regulation of RNA processing and translational activity. Thus, electrostatics play a central role in modulating the biological functions of this protein, and measurement of electrostatic potentials at each site along its backbone, as reported here, provides an opportunity to understand in more detail the important role of charge in this system.

The paper only investigated one enzyme, so caution is advised before generalizing. The authors feel, though, that this electrical code model will help explain many other processes that require molecules to come together, perform their work, and then separate. It’s the new Electric Cell.

Coded Mechanics, Too

Another case of physics in cellular processing was uncovered by a team from the University of Washington who also published their work in PNAS. And once again, it was new creative imaging at the atomic scale that made the discovery possible.

This team worked on a helicase enzyme named PcrA, which unwinds DNA for transcription. This enzyme works so fast (1000 bases per second!) it’s been like trying to describe the blur of a racecar speeding down a track. Using a new technique called “single-molecule picometer-resolution nanopore tweezers” (SPRNT), they were able to slow down the action and watch the racecar move with its “inchworm mechanism” one base at a time. This blends chemistry with another branch of physics, mechanics: “mechanochemistry.”

[Design advocates] look past the magical thinking and see the operation of a designing mind with foresight and purpose, intimately familiar with the laws of physics, able to write code to utilize those laws in precision operations. Now, it becomes clear that the precision goes deeper than previously known.

The full article at Evolution News contains further details. The significant takeaway, however, is that new research is discovering profound layers of complexity in cellular function that confounds the assumption of unguided interatomic forces as responsible for life.

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At Science Daily: What makes the human brain different?

What makes the human brain distinct from that of all other animals — including even our closest primate relatives? In an analysis of cell types in the prefrontal cortex of four primate species, Yale researchers identified species-specific — particularly human-specific — features, they report Aug. 25 in the journal Science.

Baby chimpanzee (stock image).
Credit: © Patrick Rolands / stock.adobe.com

And they found that what makes us human may also makes us susceptible to neuropsychiatric diseases.

For the study, the researchers looked specifically at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), a brain region that is unique to primates and essential for higher-order cognition. Using a single cell RNA-sequencing technique, they profiled expression levels of genes in hundreds of thousands of cells collected from the dlPFC of adult humans, chimpanzees, macaque, and marmoset monkeys.

“Today, we view the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex as the core component of human identity, but still we don’t know what makes this unique in humans and distinguishes us from other primate species.”

To answer this, the researchers first asked whether there are there any cell types uniquely present in humans or other analyzed non-human primate species. After grouping cells with similar expression profiles they revealed 109 shared primate cell types but also five that were not common to all species. These included a type of microglia, or brain-specific immune cell, that was present only in humans and a second type shared by only humans and chimpanzees.

The human-specific microglia type exists throughout development and adulthood, the researchers found, suggesting the cells play a role in maintenance of the brain upkeep rather than combatting disease.

An analysis of gene expression in the microglia revealed another human-specific surprise — the presence of the gene FOXP2. This discovery raised great interest because variants of FOXP2 have been linked to verbal dyspraxia, a condition in which patients have difficulty producing language or speech. Other studies have also shown that FOXP2 is associated with other neuropsychiatric diseases, such as autism, schizophrenia, and epilepsy.

“FOXP2 has intrigued many scientists for decades, but still we had no idea of what makes it unique in humans versus other primate species.”

Full article at Science Daily.

Research into comparative brain chemistry to try to determine what makes a human different than a chimpanzee will certainly yield some interesting results. But I believe that there’s something deeper than chemistry that makes us uniquely human. The worldview that excludes non-material realities will never perceive the God-breathed human spirit, without which we could only be dust.

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