Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 420

October 13, 2019

Nathaniel Comfort, fresh off an op-ed in Nature, skewers pop Darwinian Steven Pinker

Readers may recall Nathaniel Comfort arguing against scientism in Nature. Now this from his satire site, whose subhead is “here lies truth”:

I’m now used to the ritual of Jerry Coyne (@whyevolutionistrue) attempting a takedown of my stuff. To my perverse delight, though, the Harvard psychologist and hair model Steven Pinker took a poke at me. Couldn’t resist that. What follows is the tweet stream I sent out in response, clarifying some points in the article and differentiating further between science and scientism.
So @sapinker is talking trash about me, re: my piece in #Nature150 (https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...). The delicious comic beauty is how well Pinker’s tweet makes the central argument in my @Nature article. Here’s the tweet in question.
I write satire from time to time, and I’d be hard-put to parody Pinker’s language. So let’s break down his own words: “Unlike past anti-scientism rants in lit/cult/pol mags, this [my piece] is in Nature.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
My piece is not a rant, @sapinker, either in tone or in argument. It’s an analysis and a plea for more good science
Nathaniel Comfort, “Science, Scientism, and Steven Pinker” at Genotopia

It’s getting so that Darwinians are being treated like ordinary folk who could actually be wrong about some things. What is the world coming to? Where is Queen Umpadeedle when they need her?

Hat tip: Pos-darwinista

See also: At Nature: An honest attempt to come to terms with Darwinism’s role in eugenics. With eugenics, as with racism, all critics want is an honest acknowledgment of the sources, not butt-covering bafflegab. It doesn’t matter now except for the butt-covering bafflegab.

and

Is violence really declining, as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker claims?

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Published on October 13, 2019 10:39

Real science vs pseudoscience—according to pop science

This paragraph has got to be the most absolute boilerplate published in a long time:

For most of us, it’s easy to distinguish between real science and pseudoscience. Real science requires testing hypotheses, a rigorous analysis of the results, and peer review, after which the findings are either debunked, tweaked, or accept as fact. Pseudoscience dresses itself up in the clothes of science but doesn’t play by the same rules, particularly when it comes to abandoning ideas that fail to pass peer review.
Matt Davis, “https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/strangest-scientific-theories” at Big Think

To which we have a one-word response: multiverse. And peer review makes no difference when such evidence-free assertions are science.

Davis goes on to identify exploded science theories, for example:

4. The spontaneous generation of life
Originally developed by Aristotle, the theory of spontaneous generation persisted only until Louis Pasteur disproved it in the mid-19th century. In essence, it declared that life could and regularly did form from non-living matter spontaneously. Aristotle, for instance, claimed that scallops were generated from sand. Others made the observation that maggots grew in dead flesh — nobody ever saw maggots travel to dead flesh, and it took a surprisingly long time for people to understand that maggots were laid there by other flies.
Matt Davis, “https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/strangest-scientific-theories” at Big Think

But stop, wait! The very doctrine of the natural origin of life from inanimate materials teaches precisely this. Is Davis saying that the one true doctrine of naturalism on the subject is wrong?

As a matter of fact, the belief in spontaneous generation is a very reasonable naturalist (nature is all there is, often called “materialism”) theory. It’s just probably not true, as Pasteur demonstrated. So where does that leave the smartass pop science tone that Davis adopts throughout?

See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.

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Published on October 13, 2019 06:19

Nathan Lents plugs Joshua Swamidass’s book on Adam and Eve at USA Today

Readers may remember anti-ID duo Nathan Lents and Joshua Swamidass and here they back again, this time with a book:

The scriptural challenge is that Adam and Eve are purported to be the ancestors of everyone “to all the ends of the earth,” by the year 1 BCE. But we know with as much certainty as scientifically possible that our species does not descend from a single couple and instead has its origin in Africa around 300,000 years ago. We have evolved through a long line of ancestry that connects with all other living things going back nearly 4 billion years.

So there’s that.

And yet, in his upcoming book, “The Genealogical Adam & Eve,” Swamidass makes an audacious claim: A de novo-created Adam and Eve could very well be universal human ancestors who lived in the Middle East in the last 6,000-10,000 years. This is not the first attempt to reconcile the Garden of Eden story with science, but rarely does someone with Swamidass’ credentials do what most scientists would deem unthinkable: Take the story seriously. However, some atheist scientists are taking Swamidass seriously.
Nathan H. Lents, “Upcoming book leaves scientific possibility for existence of ‘Adam and Eve’” at USA Today

Actually, it would make way more sense to take Adam and Eve seriously than to take the multiverse seriously, as many atheists do. Everyone is familiar with the type of human behavior Adam and Eve are said to have engaged in. No one knows what a universe that literally makes no sense would be like.

Note: The book is due December 10, 2019.

See also: Nathan Lents: Nathan Lents is still wrong about sinuses but is still writing about them (A neurosurgeon tries to help him understand the anatomy.)

and

Biologist Wayne Rossiter on Joshua Swamidass’ claim that entropy = information

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Published on October 13, 2019 05:50

Rob Sheldon on whether true religion and correct science can contradict each other

Last Sunday, we ran a piece in which we discussed two scholars advancing the view that one could hold two contradictory views on the age of the Earth at the same time: “In our lives, and in our teaching, we reject that divide. As the Jewish New Year approaches and we welcome in the Hebrew year 5780, we don’t feel at all confused about when the world was created: It was formed around 5 billion years ago, and it is also 5,780 years old. Why, we ask, must we choose?”

Here’s our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon’s view:

—

It’s a great pity that after 80 years of discussing the Great Schism between religion and science (CP Snow) or 20 years since the warfare thesis was exploded, this article tells us to get used to it, all the great thinkers were schizophrenic. I’m reminded of Empress Theodora and her unsuccessful battle defending Egyptian Monophysites from the schizophrenic Niceans. In other words, this debate is truly ancient, crucially trinitarian, and will never go away.

What does it mean to say it is crucial?

If all we want is a cease-fire between the warring tribes of science and humanities, then schizophrenia is a well-tried method, requiring only the annual sacrifice of those who transgress the boundaries. But if we want progress in either theology or science, then we must wrestle with these borderline cases.

Einstein discovered relativity principally because he was willing to reject Newton and Kant’s metaphysics with its 3D phenomenal universe for some 4D hyperbolic spacetime. Cantor, handing off to France, Moscow, and finally to Goedel were able to stop the bulldozer of logical positivism by rejecting Plato’s (and Aristotle’s) metaphysical infinities. The real infinities of an uncreated eternal universe were shattered by Lemaitre’s (and later Hawking’s) proof of a cosmic beginning. JEDP fragmentation of the Old Testament was finally laid to rest by linguistic and archaeological discoveries of the last 50 years. Bultmann and Barth many other 20th century schizophrenics were upended by, among other things, reluctant discoveries of NT texts dated to 90AD. It was Chesterton who said, “He who marries the culture will soon be a widower.” Schizophrenia may allow you to keep your job, but you will have to wear black the rest of your days.

—

Rob is also the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent, Vols 1 and 2.

See also: Two contradictory figures for the age of the Earth can be true at the same time? Many of us simply avoid getting involved except to try to blunt the persecution of unpopular views. For one thing, it isn’t self-evident that geologists are always right either. I regret the fact that scientists were once ridiculed for believing that the Earth has tectonic plates.

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Published on October 13, 2019 05:17

Talking to a computer? Marks and Montañez offer tips on how to tell

George Montañez with Michael Behe at the Walter Bradley Center launch in July 2018

Robert J. Marks (from the Evolutionary Informatics Lab) and George Montañez (ID is like the Turing test) offer some thoughts on how you can really know if you are talking to a computer:

First, claims that a given program has “passed the Turing test” should be treated skeptically because a program can be optimized to pass the Turing test without demonstrating any particular intelligence at all.

Robert J. Marks: It’s always easy to determine if you are talking to a computer or a human. You can just ask them to compute the square root of 30 or something because a human would take a while to get the square root of thirty …

Hint: Humans, even very gifted ones, must think in order to do difficult calculations. A machine dedicated to calculations does not think; it produces a correct answer to any calculation very quickly— provided that the mechanism enables it.
“How you can really know you are talking to a computer” at Mind Matters News

Otherwise, it would produce nothing. There’s a place to start. But it gets better.

See also: Computer guy/philosopher: AI can’t do abductive reasoning,

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Published on October 13, 2019 05:01

October 12, 2019

At Scientific American: We did find life on Mars in the ‘70s. Rob Sheldon weighs in

Gilbert V. Levin, principal investigator of the Viking mission Labeled Release experiment, tells us,

On July 30, 1976, the LR returned its initial results from Mars. Amazingly, they were positive. As the experiment progressed, a total of four positive results, supported by five varied controls, streamed down from the twin Viking spacecraft landed some 4,000 miles apart. The data curves signaled the detection of microbial respiration on the Red Planet. The curves from Mars were similar to those produced by LR tests of soils on Earth. It seemed we had answered that ultimate question.
When the Viking Molecular Analysis Experiment failed to detect organic matter, the essence of life, however, NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life. Inexplicably, over the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA’s subsequent Mars landers has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results. Instead the agency launched a series of missions to Mars to determine whether there was ever a habitat suitable for life and, if so, eventually to bring samples to Earth for biological examination…
NASA has already announced that its 2020 Mars lander will not contain a life-detection test. In keeping with well-established scientific protocol, I believe an effort should be made to put life detection experiments on the next Mars mission possible. I and my co-experimenter have formally and informally proposed that the LR experiment, amended with an ability to detect chiral metabolism, be sent to Mars to confirm the existence of life: non-biological chemical reactions do not distinguish between “left-handed” and “right-handed” organic molecules, but all living things do.
Gilbert V. Levin, “I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s” at Scientific American

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, who has long been convinced that Gil Levin is onto something, responds:

Everything Gil says is true. He’s a solid, kind and generous man who has had to put up with inexplicable NASA administrators for 44 years, refusing to acknowledge that his experiment worked perfectly. For the first 20 years, they threatened him with cutting off his funding if he announced life. After retirement, he started publishing papers and they simply ignored him. They also put a ban on any Mars mission to redo Gil’s work or to search for life. You can search for “an hospitable environment” but not life itself. That’s why Mars 2020 won’t have any life-detection experiments.

And Gil isn’t bitter about it. In fact, this is the first blog I’ve seen where he is asking people to petition NASA to fly a life-detection experiment. I’m not nearly as patient as Gil, which I suppose is why I haven’t had NASA funding for 20 years.

Some of us have difficulty understanding the story because we wonder, why wouldn’t NASA want to declare life found on Mars? Did so many people may need to spin the story out in their own interests that it took this long? Like, stupid (but maybe well-paid) seminars about how religious people would react if life were found on Mars? With no one to spoil the party by pointing out that most religious people wouldn’t really care? (It’s not like being told NOT to feed the hungry or something, right?)

And can we now discuss the possibility that they found life on Mars but ignored it?

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent.

See also: Signs of life on Mars from 4 billion years ago

Did Viking discover life on Mars forty years ago?

and

Ethan Siegel at Forbes: Was life found on Mars 40 years ago?

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Published on October 12, 2019 16:02

At Nature: An honest attempt to come to terms with Darwinism’s role in eugenics

As part of a series on how science has shaped ideas in the modern world:

It was in the seventh issue — 16 December 1869 — that Huxley advanced a scheme for what he called ‘practical Darwinism’ and we call eugenics. Convinced that continued dominance of the British Empire would depend on the “energetic enterprising” English character, he mused about selecting for a can-do attitude among Britons1. Acknowledging that the law, not to mention ethics, might get in the way, he nevertheless wrote: “it may be possible, indirectly, to influence the character and prosperity of our descendants.” Francis Galton — Darwin’s cousin and an outer planet of Huxley’s solar system — was already writing about similar ideas and would come to be known as the father of eugenics. When this magazine appeared, then, the idea of ‘improving’ human heredity was on many people’s minds — not least as a potent tool of empire.
Huxley’s sunny view — of infinite human progress and triumph, brought about by the inexorable march of science — epitomizes a problem with so-called Enlightenment values. The precept that society should be based on reason, facts and universal truths has been a guiding theme of modern times. Which in many ways is a splendid thing (lately I’ve seen enough governance without facts for one lifetime). Yet Occam’s razor is double edged. Enlightenment values have accommodated screechingly discordant beliefs, such as that all men are created equal, that aristocrats should be decapitated and that people can be traded as chattel.
I want to suggest that many of the worst chapters of this history result from scientism….
Nathaniel Comfort, “How science has shifted our sense of identity” at Nature

With eugenics, as with racism, all critics want is an honest acknowledgment of the sources, not butt-covering bafflegab. It doesn’t matter now except for the butt-covering bafflegab. Which suggests that people are hanging onto something they should just let go of.

Hat tip: Heather Zeiger

See also: Was Neanderthal man fully human? The role racism played in assessing the evidence

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Published on October 12, 2019 14:59

Citation cartels?

Well, that seems like a strong way of putting it until we look at the stakes:

Coercive citation has drawn increased attention in recent years. Last month two researchers at the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier published a study, titled “When Peer Reviewers Go Rogue,” that examined the citation patterns of nearly 55,000 reviewers for its journals. They found that 433 of those reviewers — less than 1 percent — consistently had their own work cited in papers they reviewed. …

Coercive citation is rare, the study suggests, but when it does occur, it’s egregious. Analysis of Elsevier’s reviewer network found one scholar who had requested in 120 separate reviews that the authors add “multiple irrelevant citations” to their papers. Only four of the authors refused to do so.

Faced with his own coercion dilemma, Fong, who’s now an associate professor, wound up adding the superfluous citations to his paper — and he did the same when a reviewer on another paper asked for more citations. He felt he couldn’t refuse. “I would not be here today if I didn’t succumb to the pressure of the editors. Without those publications, my record probably would not have been deemed tenurable,” Fong says. “I’m not saying that makes my decision right, but that’s the pressure that I was under.” … Paul Caron, “Meet the Researchers Fighting Back Against Rogue Peer Reviewers And ‘Citation Cartels’” at TaxProf Blog

Readers should decide for themselves whether, under these circumstances, coercive citation is likely to be rare.

See also: To understand how citation cartels come to exist, it’s helpful to recall Goodhart’s Law, as explained by Robert J. Marks: Why it’s so hard to reform peer review: Reformers are battling numerical laws that govern how incentives work. Know your enemy!

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Published on October 12, 2019 14:18

October 11, 2019

Do Jeffrey Shallit’s writings offer more information than a blank page?

Michael Egnor wonders whether that’s true. But he faces the difficulty of convincing anti-ID mathematician Jeffrey Shallit, that he, at least, ought to think they do:

The irony is that in denying that information content is increased by carving a sculpture, Shallit implicitly denies that information content is increased by carving words on a computer screen or equations in a book. Shallit blogs regularly, and he writes books and papers, and by his own analysis, he has added no information to the world by doing so. Is Dr. Shallit sure that he adds no information to computer screens and pages in a text?
We can rephrase Dr. Marks’s observation as follows:
“We all agree that a page of Dr. Shallit’s textbook contains more information than a blank page.”
Dr. Shallit doesn’t agree. The one point in Dr. Shallit’s defense is that it may be argued that his blog posts add no useful information at all. That may be true, and it would not be a stretch to say that Shallit’s blog posts subtract information, like little self-refuting black holes.
Michael Egnor, “Rankled by Mount Fuji, Darwinist Jeffrey Shallit Offers Little Self-Refuting Black Holes” at Evolution News and Science Today

See also: Jonathan Bartlett replies to Jeffrey Shallit’s pedantry

and

Jeffrey Shallit also holdsforth on Yale’s David Gelernter

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Published on October 11, 2019 17:11

How “single-study stories” build up science’s Neverland

A science writer reflects:

THE RECENT ANNOUNCEMENT that scientists discovered water on the planet K2-18b, 110 light years away, prompted a media swoon. News stories, including a piece written by me, billed it as the first detection of water on a “potentially habitable” planet outside our solar system.
The blowback from the astronomy community was swift. A chorus of critics stated on Twitter that, although K2-18b orbits its host star within a distance range astronomers call the habitable zone, the planet is most likely too hot and under too much pressure to support life…
But in describing K2-18b as a potentially habitable planet, journalists were accurately reporting the views of the scientists who led one of the research studies. Those scientists repeatedly stated to reporters that the planet was “potentially habitable” — and they continued to say so when the specific criticisms of their peers’ were put to them.
Pallab Ghosh, “Exoplanets, Life, and the Danger of a Single Study” at Undark

A longstanding problem is that science writers tend to act as cheerleaders instead of constructive critics. Most of the probing questions that could have been asked about many hyped claims do not require advanced degrees, just a tendency to compare different teams’ findings and ask the tough questions.

See also: In case you wondered why so much science journalism sounds like PR

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Published on October 11, 2019 16:48

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