Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 416

At the Atlantic: Textbook evolution story is said to be WRONG

What’s happening at The Atlantic these days?

Do you remember: “Now what? The Atlantic fails to show proper respect to the Darwin lobby” from a month ago?

And now this:

For 50 years, researchers have thought that moths evolved ears to detect the ultrasonic calls of attacking bats—but a new study shows that ears came first…

A team of researchers led by Akito Kawahara of the University of Florida has now shown that moth ears almost always evolved before bat sonar. They came first, by at least 28 million years. Their original purpose is unclear—but spotting bats wasn’t it. “I think it’s going to be a bit of a bombshell for the field,” Kawahara says.

“Most of the introductions I’ve written in my papers are wrong,” adds Jesse Barber of Boise State University, who has studied bats and moths for years, and was involved in the new study.

Ed Yong, “A Textbook Evolutionary Story About Moths and Bats Is Wrong” at The Atlantic

Hadn’t the Darwin lobby better invade and frogmarch all these little East Coast snots back into line? They must never talk in such a way as to imply that Darwinism could be wrong about anything.

The timing is critical. It takes three to make a trend. The Atlantic could still run a major feature on how Darwinism makes people compassionate or “Darwin led me to a Higher Faith” or… something.

Or… someone should give them Suzan Mazur’s books for Christmas. No one has more painstakingly documented the many scientists who do not find the Darwinian paradigm useful any more. And she isn’t an ID type or religious. But they better decide.

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Did the mega dinosaurs grow so big on a “living fossil” grass?

How did sauropod dinosaurs grow so big before the modern grass foods, paleontologists have wondered. It turns out that very ancient spore-bearing horsetail grass (equisetum) is quite nourishing:

From the paywalled article, based on research presented by University of Bonn researchers at the recent annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology:

Horsetails appeared to be poor fodder in previous tests, which simply burned the plants to measure carbon content, Gee says. Instead, her team adapted the Hohenheim gas test, a method for assessing the quality of fodder for farm animals. They fermented modern horsetails for 3 days to simulate the journey through a sauropod’s gut and measured the volume of gas produced—an indicator of energy content. The researchers were astounded to find that horsetails released more energy than any other plant group, including 16 modern grasses. Equisetum is rich in protein, they say, and far more nutritious than the ferns, cycads, and conifers common in the dinosaur era. Gee argues that horsetails by rivers and lakes would have offered sauropods, especially young ones, “a plentiful, accessible, and extremely nutritious food.”

John Pickrell, “Sauropods get a new diet and a new look” at Science

Equisetum, considered a “living fossil” is the only surviving member of a large family of spore-bearing vascular plants found as early as 150 mya. It’s still here. The giant sauropods not so much.

and

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Aye-aye turns out to be a “six-fingered” primate

In the aye-aye lemur of Madagascar, it’s an extension of the “hitchhike muscle,” attached to the radial sesamoid. FromNational Geographic:

The bone is also topped, the team reported in a study published October 21 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, with an extension of cartilage. Further investigation revealed two other muscles are connected to the radial sesamoid, which allow the bone to move in a gripping motion. Hartstone-Rose and colleagues have named this a “pseudo-thumb,” and suggest that it functions as sixth digit to help the arboreal animals hold onto tree limbs.

Douglas Main, “This bizarre primate has a newly discovered digit” at National Geographic

It sounds like an optional accessory:

But despite all the aye-aye’s bizarre features, their hands are perhaps their strangest attribute. The four fingers are primary thumb are long and spindly. “It kind of looks like a cat walking on spiders,” Hartstone-Rose says…

Hartstone-Rose says pseudo-thumbs are known from a few different animals. All bears used to have these digits, but most living species have lost them as they plodded around on the ground. The giant panda is the only bear that still has a pseudo-thumb, used for gripping the bamboo they feed on. Some rodents also developed pseudo-thumbs for similar reasons, to grasp twigs and grass.

A few species of extinct aquatic reptiles also had pseudo-thumbs to allow them to widen their flippers and improve their swimming efficiency. Some moles also have a pseudo-thumb to allow them to dig better,

Joshua Rapp Learn, “Extra Thumb Discovered on Aye-Aye Lemurs, Giving These Primates Six Fingers” at Smithsonian.com

Will we soon see a big internet Darwin movement for the aye-aye’s finger, alongside the panda’s thumb? Mmmm, a little late for that, perhaps.

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PragerU’s new vid explains science-based doubts about evolution

Steve Meyer explains:

On Monday, PragerU released a video giving two solid scientific reasons to doubt the Darwinian theory of evolution. In the video, Stephen C. Meyer, who earned a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science and who serves as a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, lays out two key flaws in the evolutionary theory that is often taught as gospel truth in may high schools and colleges.

Meyer begins the video by quoting evolutionary biologist and New Atheist Richard Dawkins, who claimed that anyone who does not believe in evolution is either “ignorant, stupid, or insane.” By that criteria, many in the scientific community are losing their sanity…

“In November 2016, I attended a conference in London attended by some of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists. The purpose? To address growing doubts about the modern version of Darwin’s theory,” Meyer recalls in the video. These scientists do not reject the general idea of evolution, but they admitted that the current theory based on Darwin is falling apart. Tyler O’Neil, “New PragerU Video Shows 2 Scientific Reasons to Doubt Evolution” at PJ Media

Meyer is, of course, talking about the Royal Society’s big evolution meet that year, where many prominent specialists talked openly about the challgens to classical Darwinism.

Slowly, fewer thinkers want to go to the mat for Darwin’s theory. It’s becoming okay to discuss that.

See also: So Who’s In And Who’s Out At Royal Society 2016 “Rethink Evolution” Meet?

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Can a novelist help scientists write better papers?

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist sometimes edited papers at the Santa Fe Institute and a couple of biologist, one theoretical and one evolutionary, offer some recollections of his approach, including

Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn’t be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn’t fool anyone into thinking you’re being objective: “Earth is the centre of this Solar System” isn’t any more objective or factual than “We are at the centre of our Solar System.”

Van Savage and Pamela Yeh, “Novelist ’s tips on how to write a great science paper” at Nature

It’s not clear how many science editors would go for the level of readability he urges scientists to strive for.

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Asked seriously: What if plants are smarter than we think?

They probably are:

Trees can differentiate between threats, as well. They respond differently to a human breaking off one of its branches than they do to an animal eating at them—with the former, it will try to heal; with the latter, it will try to poison. Plants even share space with one another. In a 2010 study, when four Cakile edentula, or “sea-rocket plants,” were put in the same pot, they shared their resources, moving their roots to accommodate the others. If the plants were just acting evolutionarily, it would follow that they would compete for resources; instead, they seem to be “thinking” of the other plants and “deciding” to help them.

Cody Delistraty, “The Intelligence of Plants” at The Paris Review

This is really a riff on the question asked here yesterday: Is a brain really needed for thinking?

Depends on the type of thinking, maybe.

It’s true that plants can be as smart as animals. They even use the neurotransmitter glutamate to speed transmission within themselves. But that doesn’t mean that “salad is murder.”

The question is not whether plants are “as smart as smart animals” (no) but whether many plants can use information to the same degree as many animals can (yes). It would make more sense to see that the reason they can is that nature is full of intelligence (not personal intelligences). And that the intelligence clearly did not get there by Darwinian means, as the above example illustrates.

See also: Is a brain really needed for thinking? The “blob,” now on display at the Paris Zoo, forces the question. In addition to the many puzzles we face in understanding the relationship between the immaterial human mind and the material human brain, we are discovering some life forms that can manage “sensory integration, decision-making and now, learning” without a physical brain.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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Hossenfelder, did you know that, for some, the search for dark matter is an act of faith?

3-D impression of dark matter via Hubble

Couldn’t help thinking of theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s question, “Could the problem with dark matter come down to using wrong equations?”

What if, for some, it’s an act of faith?

“My sense,” I say to Christopher, “is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science.”

“I grew up as a very serious Christian,” Christopher says. “Then I lost my faith almost entirely when I found physics. Now that faith has returned, but in a much-changed form. It’s true that we dark-matter researchers have less proof than other scientists in terms of what we seek to discover and what we believe we know. As to God? Well, if there were a divinity then it would be utterly separate from both scientific enquiry and human longing.” …

“No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence.” He gestures at the data read-out. “If there is a god, we should not be able to find it. If I detected proof of a deity, I would distrust that deity on the grounds that a god should be smarter than that.”

Robert MacFarlane, “Is the Search for Dark Matter an Act of Faith?” at Nautilus

With the dark matter project, it may be difficult to separate the science from the religion.

Note: Sabine Hossenfelder is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.

Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling

Researcher: The search for dark matter has become a “quagmire of confirmation bias” So many research areas in science today are hitting hard barriers that it is reasonable to think that we are missing something.

Physicists devise test to find out if dark matter really exists

Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter

What if dark matter just doesn’t stick to the rules?

A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion

and

Proposed dark matter solution: “Gravity is not a fundamental governance of our universe, but a reaction to the makeup of a given environment.”

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Rob Sheldon on the end of the internet Golden Age

The questions raised by a recent Analysis feature at Mind Matters News, by a long-time tech maven, affect everyone who gets most of their information from the internet:

Blogging, certainly “citizen blogging,” is dead—haven’t you noticed? So too a host of other enthusiasms and ideas that once seemed poised to transform culture. In 2006, Wired editor Chris Anderson predicted a coming new economy in niche markets, the so-called long tail of online consumerism. Turns out, the long tail of indy bookstores, out-of-the-mainstream music choices, and other products mostly ended up on Amazon, the behemoth sometimes accused of strong-arming smaller companies into contracts favorable to its bottom line. The grassroots, 2005-ish internet, full of opportunity—the sweet smell of revolution and change in the air—well, disappeared. Slowly at first, then seemingly all at once (like falling in love), we now have the Big Five: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft.

What happened? Remembering the prophecies for the web in the halcyon days of ten or (better) fifteen years ago is strangely painful and disorienting, like a hangover, largely because we so silently abandoned its ideals. Following endless feelgood clickstreams, we marched happily into big advertising and data monopolies. What happened to the collaborative culture, decentralized markets, and wisdom of crowds that bestsellers prophesied fifteen years ago?

Remembering the prophecies for the web in the halcyon days of ten or (better) fifteen years ago is strangely painful and disorienting, like a hangover, largely because we so silently abandoned its ideals.

More.

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon, author of Genesis: The Long Ascent, responds:

—

If you are a millennial, or a parent/friend to a millennial, this article captures the depression/frustration of millennials perfectly. The quote from “The Great Gatsby” at the end is pitch perfect.

Because what our culture faces has been seen before, has happened before in the Roaring Twenties. I never understood Fitzgerald until now, and then, only through the eyes of my millennial children. There is a deep despair running like an ice-covered river through the heart of our culture, as cause after cause is revealed to be just another windmill, another machination of men. Our hope is that this despair can lead to identifying the real causes of human achievement, the real design of a marvellous cosmos, the real purposes of a human life. This is not the end, nor the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.

—

Response from O’Leary for News: Monopoly control is bound to have a dramatic effect on newsgathering and dissemination, just as it did in the days of the “one-paper town.” We thought we had gotten past that but here we all are again.

Many people will believe what they wanna believe. It was ever thus. The critical question is, assuming you want to know as much as possible about what is really happening, how easy is it? Russ White has some useful ideas about how not to live in a news bubble anyway, at least for now: How to know if you are trapped in a news bubble and how to escape it.

It may surprise some that the concept isn’t new/Frederick Burr Opper (1894)

Hyper claims about “fake news” miss the point of the problem created by monopoly social media. All news that harms a political candidate’s chances is “fake,” so far as the candidate is concerned. The critical question for the rest of us is, how many independent streams of information does the voter genuinely have access to?

See also: Part I: What is fake news? Do we believe it?

Part II: Does fake news make a difference in politics?

Part III: What can we do about fake news that would not diminish real news?

Extra! Extra! A handy guide to the normal fake news

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Is there no self without a soul?

  Are We Bodies or Souls?  (2019

That’s the final view of Richard Swinburne, an Oxford philosopher:

For example, in an interview, he talks about the problem of locating the self as a physical thing:

“If the self is located in the body, Swinburne asks, where exactly can we find it? If it’s in a part of your brain, what happens if you transplant that bit? Or what if you enhance a part of your brain with technology? Do “you” then cease to exist? Swinburne argues that if there is such a thing as “you” it can’t be found in the purely physical. “I claim that it is plausible to suppose that there is a law of nature which brings it about that at a certain stage of its development each human foetus gives rise to a connected soul.” – Joe Humphreys, “How Do You Know You Actually Exist?” at Irish Times

News, “Without a soul, there is no self” at Mind Matters News

Materialist neuroscience creates big problems. And it is not as if materialists have a big solution that others are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge.

Reasonable discussions pertaining to the existence of the soul:

An Oxford neuroscientist explains mind vs. brain Sharon Dirckx explains the fallacies of materialism and the logical and scientific strengths of dualism

Neuroscientist Michael Graziano should meet the P-Zombie To understand consciousness, we need to establish what it is not before we create any more new theories

Theologian, battling depression, reaffirms the existence of the soul. J. P. Moreland reasons his way to the evidence and captures his discoveries in a book

and

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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ID-themed science fiction explores mind-matter collision

Eric Holloway

ID-friendly philosopher Eric Holloway wrote ID As A Bridge Between Francis Bacon And Thomas Aquinas here, which garnered a lot of attention. But in science fiction, he turns his attention to the consequences of a materialist vs. a non-materialist interpretation of the human mind. For example, Part 4 of the TruMind series:

The old man could buy anything but youth. Until now, maybe…

Ned knew a secret about the teleporters. They did not work only on the physical plane. Scientists had discovered, through trial and error, that the human mind, whatever it consists of, did not always show up at the other end. Sometimes a completely intact body would arrive, but whatever had inhabited the body had left, never to return.

Through a very intricate and arcane operation that only one person in the world fully understood, this flaw had been fixed, allowing mind and body to be seamlessly teleported together. Ned spent many of his free evenings at home unraveling this mysterious process and he had discovered that he could swap minds and bodies. So, while the astronauts were teleporting around the universe, Ned had quietly swapped bodies with Elvira’s boyfriend.

The lights slowly began to brighten and Johann became aware of his surroundings again. The nervous turtle was standing a little too close to him. He said, “The movie is fictional but what if I told you that the technology is real?” More.

The earlier episodes:

Ghost in the Nuke: Weapons have no souls, thus greater power ensures our safety…? —a tale: Arctang’s grip tightened on the throttle. This was it. No going back. The Fortress loomed, gigantic towers gazing down on him, laser dots peppering his window.

The brain: Junkyard, watch, or antenna? A warped genius reviews the options, as he seeks ultimate power—a tale: After many dead ends, Flim realized that all forms of human power are ultimately controlled by the human mind. Thus, if he could harness the power of the mind, he would finally be able to create anything his heart could desire.

and

Neuroharvest – a tale. TruMind engineers had discovered a new science: editing the very fabric of reality

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