Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 421

Does the Turing test help establish ID theory’s legitimacy?

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

Well, check out what George D. Montañezhad to say in a discussion with Robert J. Marks about his recent paper:

George D. Montañez shows in his paper that if a test can detect intelligence in computers, a test could also detect intelligent design in nature.

The Turing test for design in computers relies on the same principles as the detection of design in nature. The materialist can have, in principle, no intelligence in either computers or nature or possible intelligence in both. But he can’t pick and choose.

“What do the Turing test and intelligent design theory have in common?” at Mind Matters News

Also: Read some excerpts from Can machines think? at How you can really know if you are talking to a computer 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.

Also, by George D. Montañez: AI: Think about ethics before trouble begins. A machine learning specialist reflects on Micah 6:8 as a guide to developing ethics for the rapidly growing profession (George Montañez)

and

On the universe as a computer sim: How do we know that our universe is not a sim world? It’s an interesting idea, say Bradley fellows, but for a number of reasons, it is not credible

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

Charles Sanders Peirce (c. 1891)

A type of reasoning critical in the sciences:

Abductive reasoning, originally developed by an American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), is sometimes called an “inference to the best explanation,” as in the following example:

“One morning you enter the kitchen to find a plate and cup on the table, with breadcrumbs and a pat of butter on it, and surrounded by a jar of jam, a pack of sugar, and an empty carton of milk. You conclude that one of your house-mates got up at night to make him- or herself a midnight snack and was too tired to clear the table. This, you think, best explains the scene you are facing. To be sure, it might be that someone burgled the house and took the time to have a bite while on the job, or a house-mate might have arranged the things on the table without having a midnight snack but just to make you believe that someone had a midnight snack. But these hypotheses strike you as providing much more contrived explanations of the data than the one you infer to.” –
IGOR DOUVEN, “ABDUCTION” AT STANFORD ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY

Notice that the conclusion is not, strictly, a deduction and there is not enough evidence for an induction either. We simply choose the simplest explanation that accounts for all the facts, keeping in mind the possibility that new evidence may force us to reconsider our view.

Now, why can’t computers do that? William J. Littlefield II says that they would get stuck in an endless loop

“A type of reasoning AI can’t replace” at Mind Matters News

Abduction is the kind of reasoning ID uses.

Further reading on computers and thought processes from Eric Holloway:

The flawed logic behind thinking computers:

Part I: A program that is intelligent must do more than reproduce human behavior

Part II: There is another way to prove a negative besides exhaustively enumerating the possibilities

and

Part III: No program can discover new mathematical truths outside the limits of its code

Will artificial intelligence design artificial superintelligence?

Artificial intelligence is impossible

and

Human intelligence as a Halting Oracle

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Genetic Literacy Project: Most epigenetic changes not passed on to offspring

That’s a good thing but never a sure one:

While most epigenetic information is erased and reprogrammed before it can be passed on to offspring, some epigenetic information may escape erasure and may thus be passed on to an individual’s children (and potentially to subsequent generations). In mammals, there are at least two main periods of demethylation and remethylation — once during the development of germ cells (the precursor cells that will become sperm and eggs), and once in the earliest stages of an embryo’s development. During demethylation, ancestral methylation patterns (key epigenetic marks) are almost completely erased. The regions that are not demethylated may represent “hot spots of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance,” according to a 2019 research review on epigenetic regulation by Wang et al. It’s important to note that there has not yet been clear evidence in humans of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, and that the topic of how transgenerational epigenetic inheritance might work in humans is highly debated.

Kristen Hovet, “4 things to know about epigenetics, including that most changes are not passed on to offspring” at Genetic Literacy Project

Well, epigenetics is harder to study in humans because human development takes a long time and researchers are not allowed to do the things to humans that they can do to animals. The amount of information about epigenetic changes inherited by humans is likely to grow over time though.

Incidentally, several commenters here seem not to understand why epigenetic change and horizontal gene transfer are not Darwinian evolution. They seem to think that Darwinism just means “evolution.” It does not. Darwinism, as understood today (neo-Darwinism) is natural selection acting on random mutations of a life form’s genome. Epigenetics is non-random change due to identifiable causes. Horizontal gene transfer is the successful absorption of alien genes, not changes in the existing genes. But, for whatever reason, we don’t expect the misunderstandings to clear up any time soon.

See also: Epigenetic Learning Appears Confirmed In Nematodes Weismann Barrier Broken

Paper: Sperm Cells Take Up Genetic Material From Outside Themselves

Did you know that much of the diversity of the human brain results from epigenetics

and

Epigenetic change: Lamarck, wake up, you’re wanted in the conference room!

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Are some galaxies more hospitable to life than others?

dwarf spiral galaxy/NASA

Some researchers are trying to narrow it down:

Large spiral galaxies are one galaxy type that researchers think may be good for developing life. Our own planet is the only known example of life arising in such a galaxy, but spirals pack relatively high amounts of the heavy elements needed to form rocky planets.

However, life in a spiral galaxy can have its downsides, too. These galaxies form new stars more actively and have more dangerous cosmic events, like supernova explosions, compared to other galaxies. Those kinds of disasters can spew harmful radiation into nearby space and potentially destroy planets’ biospheres.

So, perhaps galaxies with less active star formation, and fewer cosmic explosions, might be calmer, safer places that allow planets more time to develop life.

Erika K. Carlson, “Which Galaxies are Best Suited for the Evolution of Alien Life?” at Discover Magazine

When the researchers tested the thesis by studying 100,000 simulated galaxies, they found that small or dwarf galaxies with comparatively abundant heavy elements offered the best chance.

Some of us would settle for a single fossil bacterium on Mars and forget all the theories.

See also: Once Upon A Time, Venus (Might Have) Had Life, Say Researchers

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Michael Egnor: The Nobels this year were another win for design in nature

Michael Egnor

One gets the impression that he doesn’t feel dreadfully sorry for the Darwinists:

After more than a century of shut-outs at the Nobel Prizes, it’s understandable that Darwinists are a bit dejected. It’s embarrassing that the “greatest idea anyone ever had” and the “theory that explains all of biology” can’t in a century garner even one of science’s most distinguished awards. Instead, it must make do with wordplay, as we saw with last year’s Prize in Chemistry for “directed evolution.” (See Ann Gauger’s post, “It’s Not ‘Evolution’ — A Nobel Prize for Engineering Enzymes.”)

It’s understandable why Darwinian scientists spend so much time in court silencing scientists and teachers who question their theory. In the arena of world-class science, Darwinism is a joke, and it wouldn’t last a day unless challenges to it were silenced by force.

On the other hand, the inference to design won big again this year. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2019 was awarded jointly to William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe, and Gregg L. Semenza “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.” Their work as described in Forbes was elegant reverse-engineering: …

Michael Egnor, “It’s Another Great Nobel Year for Design” at Evolution News and Science Today

But Darwinists can console themselves that, no matter what else happens, pop science mags will probably stay faithful. Darwinism means always having a folk tale with a simple moral to tell about the animal world. How about “The Darwinbird of pop science,” for example?

See also: A Darwin snark for a new Nobelist. If one is just looking for something to be snarky about, it is best not to engage with any serious issues. In that case, puffing popular Darwinism at every opportunity is the best choice available. But there’s sure no Nobel for that.

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Physicist loses bet with science writer: No Nobel for string theory by 2020

Calabi-Yao manifold

What’s interesting is why Horgan won and Kaku lost—and what Horgan expects to happen:

Below are the arguments that Kaku and I presented in 2002. In my argument I predicted that “over the next twenty years, fewer smart young physicists will be attracted to an endeavor that has vanishingly little hope of an empirical payoff.” I’m not sure we’ve reached that point yet. But I hold by my prediction that someday we will look back at the search for a unified theory as a “religious” rather than scientific quest, which never had any hope of being fulfilled…

[2002:] The dream of a unified theory, which some evangelists call a “theory of everything,” will never be entirely abandoned. But I predict that over the next twenty years, fewer smart young physicists will be attracted to an endeavor that has vanishingly little hope of an empirical payoff. Most physicists will come to accept that nature might not share our passion for unity. Physicists have already produced theories-Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, nonlinear dynamics–that work extraordinarily well in certain domains, and there is no reason why there should be a single theory that accounts for all the forces of nature. The quest for a unified theory will come to be seen not as a branch of science, which tells us about the real world, but as a kind of mathematical theology. By the way, I would be delighted to lose this bet.

John Horgan, “String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Bet” at Scientific American

Aw come on! Delighted to lose the bet? That’s icing the cake way too thick, Horgan!

Researchers: Big data shows math laws that underlie life’s unity

From ScienceDaily:

Limits to growth lie at the heart of how all living things function, according to a new study. The diversity of life is staggering. From microscopic algae to elephants, life has devised countless ways to thrive in every environment on the planet. But while biologists have tended to focus on the many varied forms that species have evolved, the age of ‘big data’ offers an unprecedented view of some surprisingly common features shared by all creatures, great and small.

A new paper, published this week in PNAS, brings together data from many thousands of studies to show that underlying the endless variety of living things, many of the most important features of life follow universal laws. The work, led by Ian Hatton at ICTA-UAB in Barcelona, shows how metabolism, abundance, growth and mortality all follow strikingly consistent relationships with body size from the tiniest bacteria to the blue whale.

“The fact that we find these simple mathematical relationships that span all life, points to some fundamental process at the heart of living systems that we don’t yet fully understand,” explains Hatton. …

“What is so astounding is that no matter where you look, no matter what kind of living system, everything seems to follow the same growth law,” says Hatton. “We can’t yet explain it, but we know it has deep implications.”
Paper. (open access) – Ian A. Hatton, Andy P. Dobson, David Storch, Eric D. Galbraith, Michel Loreau. Linking scaling laws across eukaryotes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019; 201900492 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1900492116 More.

Abstract: Scaling laws relating body mass to species characteristics are among the most universal quantitative patterns in biology. Within major taxonomic groups, the 4 key ecological variables of metabolism, abundance, growth, and mortality are often well described by power laws with exponents near 3/4 or related to that value, a commonality often attributed to biophysical constraints on metabolism. However, metabolic scaling theories remain widely debated, and the links among the 4 variables have never been formally tested across the full domain of eukaryote life, to which prevailing theory applies. Here we present datasets of unprecedented scope to examine these 4 scaling laws across all eukaryotes and link them to test whether their combinations support theoretical expectations. We find that metabolism and abundance scale with body size in a remarkably reciprocal fashion, with exponents near ±3/4 within groups, as expected from metabolic theory, but with exponents near ±1 across all groups. This reciprocal scaling supports “energetic equivalence” across eukaryotes, which hypothesizes that the partitioning of energy in space across species does not vary significantly with body size. In contrast, growth and mortality rates scale similarly both within and across groups, with exponents of ±1/4. These findings are inconsistent with a metabolic basis for growth and mortality scaling across eukaryotes. We propose that rather than limiting growth, metabolism adjusts to the needs of growth within major groups, and that growth dynamics may offer a viable theoretical basis to biological scaling.

They don’t quite say that this is evidence for structuralism. But it sounds like evidence for structuralism.

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Early humans lived in a different ecosystem, researchers say

From ScienceDaily:

Eastern Africa is a boon for mammal fossils, making it an ideal region to piece together ancient ecosystems over the past 7 million years. With their extensive database of both ancient and modern mammal communities, the researchers focused on three traits: diet, body size, and digestive strategy. For all of these traits, they found that the makeup of ancient herbivore communities differed significantly from those of today. This is key, as herbivores directly shape the structure of ecosystems in ways that impact a wide variety of animal and plant species.

“Large herbivores aren’t just passive parts of an ecosystem, we know that they can shape the landscape. They’re eating the plants, and the biggest ones are knocking down trees or trampling soils, which collectively influences vegetation structure, fire regimes, nutrient cycling, and impacts other organisms, including humans,” said Faith.

For example, modern African ecosystems are dominated by ruminants — relatives of cows and antelopes that have four compartments in their stomachs to thoroughly break down food. Non-ruminants equipped with simple stomachs are comparatively rare, with at most eight species coexisting in the same area today. Non-ruminants, including relatives of elephants, zebras, hippos, rhinos and pigs, are like digestive conveyor belts, said Faith. They eat larger quantities of plants to make up for their inefficient digestion. In contrast to the present-day pattern, eastern African fossil records document landscapes rich in non-ruminant communities, with dozens of species co-existing within the same area.

Fossil and modern communities were also vastly different in terms of body sizes. The fossil records document lots more megaherbivores than their modern counterparts. A steady decline of megaherbivores began 4.5 million years ago until they represented a more modern distribution 700,000 years ago.

What is the impact of these eating machines all living together in the same places, when it’s not the case today?

“These ancient herbivore communities were probably consuming far more vegetation, which means less fuel for wildfires. Because fire is an important part of modern ecosystems in Africa and favors grasslands over woodlands, it’s going to fundamentally alter how things are working at the level of entire ecosystems, starting with the plant communities,” adds John Rowan, co-author and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Paleontologists have been aware of that, but until now, no one’s really tried to measure just how different the past was compared to the present.” Paper. paywall – J. Tyler Faith, John Rowan, Andrew Du. Early hominins evolved within non-analog ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019; 201909284 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909284116 More.

Most interesting. If that’s true, claims that our behavior stems from challenges faced by our ancestors may need to be scrutinized. Our ancestors may not have faced the same challenges.

Check out the competition: Eating fat, not meat, led to bigger human type brains, say researchers. Theories of the evolution of the human brain are a war of trivial explanations that no one dares admit are too trivial for what they purport to explain. It’s like blaming World War II on indigestion, only monstrously bigger.

Earlier discussion of the fat theory.

Starchy food may have aided human brain development

Do big brains matter to human intelligence?

Human evolution: The war of trivial explanations

and

What Taragana

A Darwin snark for a new Nobelist

Jim Peebles/Juan Diego Soler ( CC BY 2.0 )

Well, the Darwinists are not going into that good night gently. James Peebles got the prize because he, in the Wall Street Journal’s words, “developed precise models of cosmic creation, transforming cosmology ‘from speculation to science,’ ” which invited a critical response from a Darwin spear-carrier, Kevin Williamson, impaling himself on Mt. Improbable for no particular reason:

Williamson refers to Peebles, a Canadian by birth, and the pair of fellow physicists who shared the prize with him:

Goodness, look at that: a couple of dodgy Europeans and a @#$%&! immigrant at Princeton!

They probably don’t even buy into “intelligent design,” either.

Harrumph, etc.

Yet, insofar as Peebles’s work helped to strengthen the evidence for a cosmic beginning, it is actually part of the argument for intelligent design made by, among others, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer in his next book, The Return of the God Hypothesis. As Meyer and fellow ID proponents have pointed out, a starting point to physical existence, which is what the Big Bang represents, is among the most persuasive evidences against a materialist perspective on reality. Taken together with the remarkable fine-tuning data, it suggests a purposeful cause operating intelligently outside nature, responsible for creation. That is why materialists resisted it until the gathering evidence, developed in Peebles’s field, made it impossible them for to do so any longer.

David Klinghoffer, “Physics Nobel Prize Invites Snark from the Anti-ID Peanut Gallery” at Evolution News and Science Today

It takes no great familiarity with arguments around the Big Bang hypothesis to know that the chief reason it is widely hated is its theistic implications. And the main reason that fine-tuning of the universe is hated for its design implications. Many cosmologists would far rather see science through to its assisted suicide via claims about a multiverse than live with either.

But if one is just looking for something to be snarky about, it is best not to engage with any serious issues. In that case, puffing popular Darwinism at every opportunity is the best choice available. There’s sure no Nobel for that.

See also: The Big Bang: Put simply,the facts are wrong.

Kevin Williamson? Oh yes, here, from the files: “Rube-Bait” Kevin Williamson vs. David Klinghoffer, Round 3

Note: The Darwinian spear-carrier thing riffs off, yes, Berlinski.

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Horizontal gene transfer: Cholera bacterium steals 150 genes at once

From ScienceDaily:

In 2015, EPFL researchers led by Melanie Blokesch published a seminal paper in Science showing that the bacterium responsible for cholera, Vibrio cholerae, uses a spring-loaded spear to literally stab neighboring bacteria and steal their DNA. They identified the spear mechanism to be the so-called “type VI secretion system” or T6SS, also used for interbacterial competition by many other bacteria.

V. cholerae uses its T6SS to compete with other bacteria in its aquatic environment and acquire new genetic material, which the pathogen absorbs and exchanges against some parts of its own genome. This mode of “horizontal gene transfer” leads to rapid evolution and pathogen emergence. The pathogen V. cholerae has caused seven major cholera pandemics since 1817 and, according to current WHO data, still kills more than 100,000 people each year and infects up to 4 million others, mostly in poor or underdeveloped countries.

Now, Blokesch’s group has discovered the extent of DNA that V. cholerae can steal in a single attack: more than 150,000 nucleic acid base pairs, or roughly 150 genes in one go (the cholera bacterium carries around 4,000 genes in total). The researchers calculated this number by sequencing the entire genome of almost 400 V. cholerae strains before and after stealing DNA from their neighboring bacteria…

The authors conclude that the environmental “lifestyle” of V. cholerae enables exchange of genetic material with enough coding capacity that it can significantly accelerate the evolution of the bacterium.

“This finding is very relevant in the context of bacterial evolution,” says Blokesch. “It suggests that environmental bacteria might share a common gene pool, which could render their genomes highly flexible and the microbes prone to quick adaption.”
Paper. (open access) – Noémie Matthey, Sandrine Stutzmann, Candice Stoudmann, Nicolas Guex, Christian Iseli, Melanie Blokesch. Neighbor predation linked to natural competence fosters the transfer of large genomic regions in Vibrio cholerae. eLife, 2019; 8 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.48212 More.

Relevant in more ways than one. Remember that recent Atlantic article where the writer was grousing that her school didn’t teach “evolution” (Darwinism)?:

[Glenn] Branch [of NCSE, the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby] says lacking a knowledge of human evolution might make it harder for, say, doctors to understand superbugs, or for farmers to understand the nuances of agriculture. I’m a little skeptical of that argument. There are great doctors in Texas, and certainly plenty of great farmers too. The internet wasn’t as ubiquitous when I was in high school, but it was still possible to read and explore on one’s own. Today, that’s even easier.

Olga Khazan, “I Was Never Taught Where Humans Came From” at The Atlantic

She’s right to be skeptical and it’s even worse than she thinks: Dangerous bacteria like cholera seem to use methods much faster than Darwinism to do their stuff. But how many “evolution” lobbies besiege school boards to teach horizontal gene transfer? Is that because they can’t use it the way they can use Darwinism, to front the idea that humans are just animals? Nah. Must be something else…

See also: A cry from grievance culture: She never learned Darwinism in school. If Darwinists had been in charge of Khazan’s education, she would mainly have a bunch of stuff to unlearn.

and

Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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