Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 413

The “rise of the greedy-brained ape”?

Reviewing a book by a former colleague at Nature Gaia Vince, Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time (2019) at Nature, the reviewer chooses to title his review that way:

Gaze into a mirror. Reflected is a marvel of evolution: a weak-jawed, bipedal omnivore with a greedy brain, in which 100 billion neurons consume 20% of the body’s energy intake. Science journalist Gaia Vince urges us towards such reflections in Transcendence, a book tracing the journey of Homo sapiens through genes, environment and culture to what might be, she surmises, a new state of being…

We have begun the Anthropocene, and our demands on the planet are not sustainable. That could usher in a new dark age, or a global order in a new shared civilization. We transcend our evolutionary beginnings.

Vince dubs this emerging species Homo omnis, or Homni for short. Her chosen analogue for such a biological super-organism is not flattering: it is the slime mould, in which single cells coalesce as one to move on. The fortunate are protected at the centre; those on the margin become vulnerable to environmental change. Which sounds disturbingly like us.

Tim Radford, “The rise of the greedy-brained ape” at Nature

It’s helpful to be reminded that the science cognoscenti see the rest of us that way. They may see themselves that way, though vanity more likely gets in the way at the last, critical moment. No wonder so many people these days are “anti-science.”

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Astrophysicist Adam Frank: Materialism is on shaky ground

He thinks it is significant that materialism completely fails to explain consciousness:

Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. Regardless of the direction ‘more’ might take, the unresolved democracy of quantum interpretations means that our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of mind. It seems just as likely that the opposite will be the case.

The closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics appears to rest on shaky metaphysical ground.

Adam Frank, “Minding matter” at Aeon

Frank is an expert on the final stages of the evolution of stars like the sun. His computational research group has developed advanced supercomputer tools in order to study how stars form and die. So he would incline to a materialist view, surely? But no, he says, quantum physics blew all that away. And some neuroscientists just haven’t caught up.

He’s right but materialism dies hard. University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank is the author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (2017).

See also: Four researchers whose work sheds light on the reality of the mind The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot, says Michael Egnor. The intellect and will are metaphysically simple

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Sabine Hossenfelder: There is a crisis in physics and it may spread to other sciences

Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray,, thinks that the current crisis in physics is not only about physics:

In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed. Ever since then, the theories we use to describe observations have remained unchanged. Sure, some aspects of these theories have only been experimentally confirmed later. The last to-be-confirmed particle was the Higgs-boson, predicted in the 1960s, measured in 2012. But all shortcomings of these theories – the lacking quantization of gravity, dark matter, the quantum measurement problem, and more – have been known for more than 80 years. And they are as unsolved today as they were then…

Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting forward entirely baseless speculations. Over and over again I have heard them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as “healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work. There is nothing healthy about this. It’s sick science. And, embarrassingly enough, that’s plain to see for everyone who does not work in the field.

This behavior is based on the hopelessly naïve, not to mention ill-informed, belief that science always progresses somehow, and that sooner or later certainly someone will stumble over something interesting. But even if that happened – even if someone found a piece of the puzzle – at this point we wouldn’t notice, because today any drop of genuine theoretical progress would drown in an ocean of “healthy speculation”.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “The crisis in physics is not only about physics” at BackRe(Action)

Many science writers probably like the current state of affairs because nonsense about the multiverse and space aliens is easy to write. Artists might like it because it is easy to illustrate. Only if you cared about physics would you want to spoil the party.

Okay, Hossenfelder cares about physics (sigh.) So she suggests, “I have said many times that looking at the history of physics teaches us that resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs, so that’s what we should focus on. I may be on the wrong track with this, of course. But for all I can tell at this moment in history I am the only physicist who has at least come up with an idea for what to do.”

How would things change, specifically, if her advice were followed?

See also: Sabine Hossenfelder On The Future Of Particle Physics

and

Sabine Hossenfelder Asks If Reductionism Has Run Its Course

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Peering into the origin of time

passage of time, imaged/S. Sepp

Via a curious universal pattern of correlated pairs of objects:

One curious pattern cosmologists have known about for decades is that space is filled with correlated pairs of objects: pairs of hot spots seen in telescopes’ maps of the early universe; pairs of galaxies or of galaxy clusters or superclusters in the universe today; pairs found at all distances apart. You can see these “two-point correlations” by moving a ruler all over a map of the sky. When there’s an object at one end, cosmologists find that this ups the chance that an object also lies at the other end.

The simplest explanation for the correlations traces them to pairs of quantum particles that fluctuated into existence as space exponentially expanded at the start of the Big Bang. Pairs of particles that arose early on subsequently moved the farthest apart, yielding pairs of objects far away from each other in the sky today. Particle pairs that arose later separated less and now form closer-together pairs of objects. Like fossils, the pairwise correlations seen throughout the sky encode the passage of time — in this case, the very beginning of time

Natalie Wolchover, “Cosmic Triangles Open a Window to the Origin of Time” at Quanta

Some physicists think we should have found more arrangements involving three or even four particles.

[image error]

Our physics color commentator and author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II ,Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts on trying to exactly guess the origin of the universe:

Once upon a time, the universe was static, eternal, and unchanging. Then came Genesis, and there was light. No, no, said the wise men, it has no creator, it is eternal. Then came Einstein, Lemaitre and Pope Pius XII and there was light. No, no, said the wise men, the cosmos is dynamic and eternal. Then came Peebles, Dicke and Penzias and there was light. No, no, said the wise men, the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be, it is cyclic and eternal. Then came Hawking and Penrose, and there was light. No, no said the wise men, it is dark, really dark: dark energy, dark matter, and dark multiverses; dark string theory, dark time, dark inflation, dark purposes and yes, even dark math.

[image error]

Well then how can anyone know anything about the cosmos? Theorist Daniel Baumann explains,

” He compared the primordial universe to a system like water or a magnet very near the critical point where it undergoes a phase transition. “We live in a very special place,” he said.”

And there was light.

Don’t like that story? Just wait. There are others.

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Ola Hössjer and Ann Gauger sketch genetic scenarios for Adam and Eve

They offer a couple of ways we could have a founding human pair:

There are a couple ways you could have a founding human pair. One is a slender evolutionary bottleneck. First, ancient apes evolved into proto-humans. Then, due to a migration or catastrophe, a larger population was reduced to two. And from that pair came all humans. A second scenario involves a first human pair created from scratch — Adam and Eve, if you will.

Many Darwinists insist the “Adam and Eve” scenario is wrong because it cannot be reconciled with human genetics. But Gauger and Hössjer say an Adam and Eve model fits with the genetic data they studied.

When testing an Adam and Eve scenario, there’s a follow-up question. Were Adam and Eve genetically similar or dissimilar? Gauger and Hössjer plugged both possibilities into their model. If similar, then the founding couple lived much longer ago. If the first pair were created with genetic diversity built in, then they lived more recently, near the time that Neanderthals appeared on the scene.

Gauger says that her and Hössjer’s work is ongoing. They plan to add other things to their model, including the effects of natural selection.

To learn more about the paper and its back story, go here, here and here. And here.
Jonathan Witt , “New Research: Our DNA Doesn’t Rule Out Adam and Eve” at The Stream

Paper. (open access)

Wow. The Darwin trolls’ll miss Halloween to go after this one.

See also: Controversial claim: First humans came from what is now Botswana One is tempted to wonder, how would “storytelling” differentiate the Garvan team from many other human evolution researchers?

and

We could have come from two parents

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Controversial claim: First humans originated in what is now Botswana

Dr Eva Chan & Professor Vanessa Hayes

A number of science media sources are weighing in:

Hayes and her team analyzed the DNA of 1,217 people from southern Africa who represent a particularly important and poorly studied slice of human genetic diversity. By using that DNA to create a family tree, the team calculated that anatomically modern humans originated in the Makgadikgadi wetlands about 200,000 years ago. They then stayed put for about 70,000 years, before climatic changes allowed some of them to venture outward to other parts of Africa, and eventually to other continents.

But her claims are proving controversial, and other researchers I contacted were either skeptical or outright mad. The study, they noted, is based on just a sliver of DNA from living people, and doesn’t account for the rest of the genome, DNA from ancient human specimens, fossils, or stone tools and other cultural artifacts—all of which suggest that humans arose much earlier, and in a variety of locations.

Ed Yong, “Has Humanity’s Homeland Been Found?” at The Atlantic

From the Australia-based Institute where Vanessa Hayes works:

A study has concluded that the earliest ancestors of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) emerged in a southern African ‘homeland’ and thrived there for 70 thousand years.

The breakthrough findings are published in the prestigious journal Nature today.

The authors propose that changes in Africa’s climate triggered the first human explorations, which initiated the development of humans’ genetic, ethnic and cultural diversity.

“It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200 thousand years ago. What has been long debated is the exact location of this emergence and subsequent dispersal of our earliest ancestors,” says study lead Professor Vanessa Hayes from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and University of Sydney, and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria.

“Mitochondrial DNA acts like a time capsule of our ancestral mothers, accumulating changes slowly over generations. Comparing the complete DNA code, or mitogenome, from different individuals provides information on how closely they are related.” This study provides a window into the first 100 thousand years of modern humans’ history.

In their study, Professor Hayes and her colleagues collected blood samples to establish a comprehensive catalogue of modern human’s earliest mitogenomes from the so-called ‘L0’ lineage. “Our work would not have been possible without the generous contributions of local communities and study participants in Namibia and South Africa, which allowed us to uncover rare and new L0 sub-branches,” says study author and public health Professor Riana Bornman from the University of Pretoria.

“We merged 198 new, rare mitogenomes to the current database of modern human’s earliest known population, the L0 lineage. This allowed us to refine the evolutionary tree of our earliest ancestral branches better than ever before,” says first author Dr Eva Chan from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, who led the phylogenetic analyses.

By combining the L0 lineage timeline with the linguistic, cultural and geographic distributions of different sublineages, the study authors revealed that 200 thousand years ago, the first Homo sapiens sapiens maternal lineage emerged in a ‘homeland’ south of the Greater Zambezi River Basin region, which includes the entire expanse of northern Botswana into Namibia to the west and Zimbabwe to the east.

Media Release, “The homeland of modern humans” at Garvan Institute of Medical Research

Paper. (paywall)

Others wonder how they can be so sure:

As NewsHour notes, mitochondrial DNA tells only a fraction of humans’ history, and scientists are not universally convinced by the paper’s conclusions. Speaking with The Guardian, the University of Pennsylvania’s Sarah Tishkoff took issue with the limited genetic sample. “How can they know that there aren’t old lineages in other regions if they’re not included in the study?” she says.

Kerry Grens, “The First Modern Humans Came from What Is Now Botswana: Study” at The Scientist

Accusations of “storytelling” are flung at the authors:

The study revives a long-simmering debate about exactly where in Africa modern humans emerged, and it has drawn sharp criticism from several scientists. They point out that although all humans alive today have mitochondrial DNA passed on from a common ancestor—a so-called Mitochondrial Eve—this is just a tiny fraction of our total genetic material. So even if the proposed founder population described in the new study is the source of our mitochondrial DNA, many others likely contributed to today’s genetic pool.

“The inferences from the mtDNA data are fundamentally flawed,” Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at the University College London, says via email, adding that in his view, the study amounted to “storytelling.”

Maya Wei-Haas, “Controversial new study pinpoints where all modern humans arose” at National Geographic

One is tempted to wonder, how would “storytelling” differentiate the Garvan team from many other human evolution researchers?

See also: We could have come from two parents

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Videos from the ID conference in Austria

Imagine, an ID conference in Austria:

As a kick-off for the founding of a new German-speaking scientific society (Zentrum für BioKomplexität & NaturTeleologie), dedicated to the study of teleology and design in nature, we held a large conference in Austria this past May. Evolution News reported on the event (Klinghoffer 2019, Gauger 2019, Bechly 2019). Several prominent members of the ID movement presented talks at the conference, including Stephen Meyer, Ann Gauger, Michael Denton, and Brian Miller. Siegfried Scherer and I initiated this new association.

Now, video recordings of most of the talks presented at the conference have been made available at the YouTube channel of the new society. Only a few talks could not be uploaded due to copyright issues or career concerns.

Günter Bechly, “Watch: Videos Now Available from the Recent ID Conference In Austria” at Evolution News and Science Today

Abstracts and links to most of the talks here.

And they weren’t chased from city to city either, as happened with that ID-friendly Brazilian scientist Marcos Eberlin, whose conference got chased out of Portugal.

Just think, it’s becoming increasingly possible to hold a civilized discussion of evolution. Maybe the trolls got sent semi-accidentally to the wrong address?

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Red algae thrives despite losing 1/4 of genes, a billion years ago

From ScienceDaily:

You’d think that losing 25 percent of your genes would be a big problem for survival. But not for red algae, including the seaweed used to wrap sushi.

An ancestor of red algae lost about a quarter of its genes roughly one billion years ago, but the algae still became dominant in near-shore coastal areas around the world, according to Rutgers University-New Brunswick Professor Debashish Bhattacharya, who co-authored a study in the journal Nature Communications.

The research may assist in the creation of genetically altered seaweeds that could be used as crops, help to predict the spread of seaweed pests and — as the climate warms and pollution possibly increases — control invasive seaweeds that blanket shorelines.

Scientists believe the 25 percent loss in genetic material resulted from adaptation by the red algal ancestor to an extreme environment, such as hot springs or a low-nutrient habitat. That’s when the genome of these algae became smaller and more specialized. So, how did they manage to escape these challenging conditions to occupy so many different habitats?

“It is a story akin to Phoenix rising from the ashes, and the study answers an important question in evolution,” said Bhattacharya, a distinguished professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “This lineage has an amazing evolutionary history and the algae now thrive in a much more diverse environment than hot springs.” Paper. (open access) – JunMo Lee, Dongseok Kim, Debashish Bhattacharya, Hwan Su Yoon. Expansion of phycobilisome linker gene families in mesophilic red algae. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12779-1 More.

This is a classic story of devolution, where an organism thrives by losing information, as Michael Behe explains in Darwin Devolves. Devolution is a form of evolution; it just isn’t glitzy.

See also: Devolution: Getting back to the simple life

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The mammals who crawled out after the dinosaurs died, 66 mya

Due to a lucky find, paleontologists are putting the pieces together:

Lyson: I see this rock, this concretion on the ground. The very first one that I pick up and I crack it and it was amazing.

I just found a mammal skull.

Narrator: And that was just the beginning.

Ian Miller: It was crazy the way it happened. I mean, you could go your entire career as a mammal paleontologist and not find a skull from this time period. That’s how rare they are.

Lyson: We found I think 5 or 6 mammal skulls within about a 10-minute time span

.Ana Aceves, “Mammal Fossils Fill in Missing Piece of the Timeline of Life” at PBS Transcript

Here’s the vid.

It’s been hard to find remains from immediately after the K-T extinction that felled the dinosaurs 66 million years ago:

But an analysis of extraordinary deposits in Colorado, published in the journal Science, tracks life in exquisite detail over the crucial first million years after the K-T extinction

“If you had to choose one million years in Earth’s history that you really want to look at carefully, this would be it,” says palaeobotanist Ian Miller from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Dyani Lewis, “How mammals inherited the Earth” at Cosmos

Now, will those remains bolster textbook Darwinism or help sink it? Or in-between? We shall see.

See also: New evidence found for the asteroid that deep-sixed the dinosaurs

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Rob Sheldon dumps cold water on the “planetary autopsy” that says ET life is common

Remember the “planetary autopsy” that told us that rocky dead planets are common, therefore ET life is common? Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, an experimental physicist who is also the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent, vols 1 and 1, offers some thoughts on their assumptions:

I haven’t had a chance to comb through the science paper that this journo article is based on, but it appears to have a huge assumption in the middle of it. That is, it never actually sees any evidence of rocky planets, gas planets, water planets, or planets of any kind. What it actually finds is evidence of oxygen ions in a white-dwarf star. Now white-dwarfs are pretty hot–which is why they are white–so any oxygen will be ionized and emit light. But the “standard model” for a white-dwarf lifecycle has them forming from stars no more massive than our Sun, which don’t get big enough to make oxygen. Therefore seeing oxygen in a white dwarf is presumably due to a thin layer of ground-up planets laying on the surface.

As I argued several years ago when the BICEP2 results claimed to have observed gravitational waves, a theory can have one whopping assumption, one tooth-fairy, but no theory is allowed to have 2 tooth-fairies. Why? Because I can prove anything with 2 assumptions, or to say it differently, if each assumption is of low probability, then two assumptions are an even lower probability than their product.

And this analysis has a minimum of 2 tooth fairies. First it makes an assumption that all white dwarfs are made the same way (despite evidence to the contrary). Then it makes the assumption that observed oxygen has to come from planets (rather than, say, comets, nearby supernovae, giant molecular clouds, etc.) and that the planet had to have lots of oxygen on it (despite, say, the examples of Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). And finally it has to assume that the planet only recently accreted onto the white dwarf (despite the previous existence of a white dwarf as a sun-type star living for billions of years with the same planets).

I would argue that this is a very weak argument, mostly trying to jazz up a very boring data set or at least distract the audience from remembering the “standard candle” Nobel Prize assumed that all white dwarfs were identical. Either way, its a preposterous story attempting to distract from its most distressing results.

Researchers: Rocky dead planets common, therefore ET life common In case you thought this field was “settled science,” see also, recently: “‘Evolution’ says we are alone” and “Once again, for the thousandth time, we are “closing in” on alien life

In case you thought this field was “settled science”: “Evolution” says we are alone

and

Once again, for the thousandth time, we are “closing in” on alien life

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