Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 422

Sabine Hossenfelder on the future of particle physics

Theoretical physicist Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, thinks that the fact that the Large Hadron Collider found only the Higgs, and not where it was expected, offers an insight:

Before the LHC turned on, particle physicists had high hopes it would find something new besides the Higgs boson, something that would go beyond the standard model of particle physics. There was a lot of talk about the particles that supposedly make up dark matter, which the collider might produce. Many physicists also expected it to find the first of a class of entirely new particles that were predicted based on a hypothesis known as supersymmetry. Others talked about dark energy, additional dimensions of space, string balls, black holes, time travel, making contact to parallel universes or “unparticles”. That’s particles which aren’t particles. So, clearly, some wild ideas were in the air.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “What does the future hold for particle physics?” at BackRe(Action)

Yeh. Thems was wild times.

The reason that many particle physicists believed in these speculations is that they mistakenly thought the standard model has another problem which the existence of the Higgs would not fix. I am afraid that many of them still believe this. This supposed problem is that the standard model is not “technically natural”. This means the standard model contains one number that is small, but there is no explanation for why it is small. This number is the mass of the Higgs-boson divided by the Planck mass, which happens to be about 10-15. The standard model works just fine with that number and it fits the data. But a small number like this, without explanation, is ugly and particle physicists didn’t want to believe nature could be that ugly.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “What does the future hold for particle physics?” at BackRe(Action)

Is “ugliness” really the issue here? Or is it something else?

What happens to particle physics now probably predicts the future of other sciences. Will particle physicists go on to do more precise measurements at lower energies and the study of particles, accepting the reality, as Hossenfelder goes on to suggest they do? Or will theory increasingly untether itself from reality?

We may be living in the decline of science. After all, the Millennials are into astrology.

See also: Has the Large Hadron Collider broken physics? Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, responds to philosopher David Wallace’s claim to the effect “ any such naturalness failure threatens to undermine the entire structure.” At bottom, the Collider produced useful data but did not, it seems, support the cosmologies that various theoretical physicists’ careers depend on.

and

Incidentally, how come millennials, educated in Darwin-only science classes, are big on astrology? We’re not claiming it’s a cause. Just noticing that aggressive defense of Darwinism and other kinds of naturalism proves no deterrent to nonsense

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Stick insects’ “remarkable camouflage” postdates mammals and birds

From ScienceDaily, concerning a study of over 2000 genes from various species, rather than just a handful:

Stick and leaf insects are a diverse and strikingly bizarre group of insects with a world-wide distribution, which are more common in tropical and subtropical areas. They are famous for their impressively large body size, compared to other insects, and their remarkable ability to camouflage themselves as twigs, leaves or bark in order to hide from potential predators. A team of international researchers led by the University of Göttingen has now generated the first phylogenomic tree of these insects. The results have been published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

The most surprising finding is that the relationships between the early emerging groups of stick and leaf insects largely disprove the earlier assumptions. In fact, the genealogy reflects more the geographic distribution than the anatomical similarity of the animals. The authors revealed a New World lineage of purely North and South American species and a group of Old World origin that comprises species from Africa to New Zealand.

The biogeographic history was reconstructed by Sarah Bank, PhD student at the University of Göttingen and coauthor of the study, which resulted in further unexpected results: “The flamboyant stick insects of Madagascar, for instance, descended from a single ancestral species who colonised the island approximately 45 million years ago.”

The age estimation of the phylogenetic tree suggests that most of the old lineages emerged after the dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago. Thus, the remarkable camouflage of stick and leaf insects most probably evolved afterwards as adaptation against predatory mammals and birds.

“Stick insects become more and more important as model organisms for evolutionary research. The new comprehensive molecular dataset won’t be exhaustively analysed for quite some time and will provide exciting insights into the function of the numerous detected genes,” explains Bradler with regard to future studies.
Paper. (open access) – Sabrina Simon, Harald Letsch, Sarah Bank, Thomas R. Buckley, Alexander Donath, Shanlin Liu, Ryuichiro Machida, Karen Meusemann, Bernhard Misof, Lars Podsiadlowski, Xin Zhou, Benjamin Wipfler, Sven Bradler. Old World and New World Phasmatodea: Phylogenomics Resolve the Evolutionary History of Stick and Leaf Insects. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2019; 7 DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2019.00345 More.

Of course, they don’t come right out and say this but if the stick insects’ amazing camouflages developed after they started to be eaten by predatory mammals and birds, there was not as much time as was thought for the Darwinian claim:

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Once calculation becomes possible, Darwinism will usually fail. Something else is happening.

See also: Unlike the furtive ants, stick insects really have, allegedly, gone a million years without sex

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Can we engineer consciousness into a robot?

Michael Egnor

Michael Egnor thinks not:

The assertion that we can do so is based on functionalism, which would seem to be Graziano’s theory of mind, to the extent that he has a coherent one. It posits that the mind is generated by the organizational state of the brain. Colloquially, one might say, the mind is what the brain does.

Functionalism is not the only materialist theory of the mind on offer. There is also identity theory (the mind is the brain), behaviorism (“let’s ignore the mind”), eliminative materialism (“the mind doesn’t exist”), and mysterianism (“who the hell knows!”—yes, that’s a real theory). Functionalism, in contrast to the others, is usually expressed in terms of computation. The brain is a computer and the mind is what it computes. The brain is to the mind as hardware is to software.

Functionalism is an error.

If the timing strikes you as a revealing coincidence—we just discover that the mind is computation in the same era that we discover computation—you’d be right. Ancient philosophers thought the mind was fire (not too long after the discovery of fire). Early modern philosophers thought the mind was a machine (just as the machine age got started). Humans have an amusing tendency to attribute the mind to whatever dominates the technology chatter of the era. Perhaps in the next few decades, the mind will be an iPhone or a Tesla autopilot. “Neuroscientists finally discover how mind works—read about it in Popular Science!”

But metaphors are lousy metaphysics. …

Michael Egnor, “[article title]” at Mind Matters News

We actually don’t know what consciousness is, so it feels odd to speak of “engineering” it.

See also: Here are neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s three earlier articles on Michael Graziano’s approach to consciousness:

Neuroscientist Michael Graziano should meet the p-zombie. A p-zombie (a philosopher’s thought experiment) behaves exactly like a human being but has no first-person (subjective) experience. The meat robot violates no physical principles. Yet we KNOW we are not p-zombies. Think what that means.

Did consciousness “evolve”? One neuroscientist doesn’t seem to understand the problems the idea raises. Darwinian evolution must select physical attributes. If consciousness evolved as a mere byproduct of physical brain processes, it is powerless in itself. Thus Graziano’s theories of consciousness are themselves mindless accidents.

and

Did consciousness evolve to find love? It’s an attractive idea but it comes with a hidden price tag

If consciousness is a mere tool of human sexual selection, it is mere plumage, a pretty enticement, of no meaning or import otherwise. But then what becomes of Dr. Graziano’s own intellectual labors?

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Multiverse is science based on zero evidence, science writer complains

It’s unusual for a science writer not to be head over heels in the multiverse hogwash but, well, anyway:

The ‘mirrorverse’ is just one more in a long line of so-called multiverse theories. These theories are based on the notion that our Universe is not unique, that there exists a large number of other universes that somehow sit alongside or parallel to our own. For example, in the so-called Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are universes containing our parallel selves, identical to us but for their different experiences of quantum physics. These theories are attractive to some few theoretical physicists and philosophers, but there is absolutely no empirical evidence for them. And, as it seems we can’t ever experience these other universes, there will never be any evidence for them. As Broussard explained, these theories are sufficiently slippery to duck any kind of challenge that experimentalists might try to throw at them, and there’s always someone happy to keep the idea alive.

Is this really science? The answer depends on what you think society needs from science.

Jim Baggott, “But is it science?” at Aeon

Perhaps an increasing number of people need a system that accommodates anything they choose to believe, as opposed to a narrow, imperialistic system that insists on observable facts.

Baggott, of course, also feels the need to take the ritual swipe at ID:

And, no matter how much we might want to believe that God designed all life on Earth, we must accept that intelligent design makes no testable predictions of its own. It is simply a conceptual alternative to evolution as the cause of life’s incredible complexity. Intelligent design cannot be falsified, just as nobody can prove the existence or non-existence of a philosopher’s metaphysical God, or a God of religion that ‘moves in mysterious ways’.

Jim Baggott, “But is it science?” at Aeon

In fairness, it’s not as if he could afford to investigate whether non-intelligent causes of specified complexity are even possible. If he did, and admitted how serious the problems are, his criticism of crackpot cosmology would be rejected and lose all force.

Because, you see, he is allowed to criticize crackpot cosmology provided that he holds to no thesis about the nature of nature that would impede its actual advance. He can regret it but he must not undermine it.

Note: Jim Baggot is the author of Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe (2018) and Quantum Reality: The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics – A Game of Theories (forthcoming, 2020)

See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

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The war on math continues

pi in mosaic, Berlin/Holger Motzkau

It was bound to happen, of course, and the Seattle school board offers a preview of the Woke curriculum:

Other questions demonstrate an equal intellectual deficit. “How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to exist?” and “How has math been used to resist and liberate people and communities of color from oppression?” Just one of the sub-questions that students will be invited to consider here is “How can we use math to measure the impact of activism?” Because, of course, what matters most in this world is engaging in impactful activism. Elsewhere students will be invited to consider the following question, “Can you suggest resolutions to oppressive mathematical practices?”

Douglas Murray, “Will maths succumb to the woke wave?” at Unherd

Murray points out, sensibly, that the smart students will probably learn the math themselves along with the correct blather to spout in response to the timewasters. But what about those who struggle?

A rather basic knowledge of maths would help such people and come in very handy in their lives: in ordering their finances, and working out their day-to-day interactions with others.

Douglas Murray, “Will maths succumb to the woke wave?” at Unherd

But then they maybe wouldn’t need so big an army of middle-class government employees people to run their lives… At least it’s clear who this kind of curriculum really benefits.

Some of us remember back to when only the arts disciplines were being ruined. But yes, math can be ruined too.

That will make it hard to talk to people about a lot of science stuff, including science controversies. But hey, they’ll still have astrology.

See also: The progressive war on science takes dead aim at math

and

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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SETI aims to become more “respectable”

Alien tripod by Alvim Corréa, 1906 French edition of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds”

And get government grants:

[Jason] Wright, a cheerful, apple-cheeked, forty-two-year-old professor with wispy brown hair, is at the vanguard of a new movement in SETI. Its goal is the rationalization of a speculative endeavor. “We’re trying to formalize it,” he told me. “We’re trying to get a canon of papers that my peers have read and understood.” In a number of articles published over the past five years, Wright and his collaborators have tried to build frameworks and standards that could provide a more objective basis for SETI. In one paper, a table enumerates “Ten Anomalies of Transiting Megastructures That Could Distinguish Them from Planets or Stars.” In another, Wright and his co-authors show, by making a series of calculations, that “galaxy-spanning civilizations” may be easier to detect than those that remain clustered around a single star—a finding that has implications for how astronomers might search for aliens in the future. By approaching SETI in a more rigorous way, Wright hopes to make it more respectable. His aim is partially earthbound: he wants to win the search for aliens the government funding that it’s long been denied.

Adam Mann, “Intelligent Ways to Search for Extraterrestrials” at The New Yorker

The thing is, we do not actually have any evidence-based reason to believe that ET is out there. Why should government fund a search for ET as an alternative to, say, health care and affordable housing, for which we needn’t search very hard to see the need?

Episodes like the “extraterrestrial light sail.” uproar don’t really help either.

See also: Why Are Scientists “Terrified” To Do SETI Research?

and

Tales of an invented god

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Once upon a time, Venus (might have) had life, say researchers

Venus today

According to this thesis, Venus is not beyond the edge of the habitable zone but was affected by a massive resurfacing event:

It all started about 700 million years ago when a massive resurfacing event triggered a runaway Greenhouse Effect that caused Venus’s atmosphere to become incredibly dense and hot. This means that for 2 to 3 billion years after Venus formed, the planet could have maintained a habitable environment. According to a recent study, that would have been long enough for life to have emerged on “Earth’s Sister”…

This flies in the face of conventional notions of habitability, which state that Venus’ orbit places it beyond the inner edge of our Sun’s habitable zone (HZ). Within this “Venus Zone”, according to conventional wisdom, a planet absorbs too much solar radiation to ever be able to maintain liquid water on its surface. But as Way indicated, their simulations all indicated otherwise:

“Venus currently has almost twice the solar radiation that we have at Earth. However, in all the scenarios we have modelled, we have found that Venus could still support surface temperatures amenable for liquid water.”

These findings are in line with a similar study that Way and Del Genio conducted in 2016 with colleagues from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Uppsala University and Columbia University. For this study, their team created a suite of 3D climate simulations using data from the Magellan mission that examined how the presence of an ocean on ancient Venus would affect its habitability.

Matt Williams, “Venus Could Have Supported Life for Billions of Years” at Universe Today

Here’s the thesis:

It could be the basis for a “long ago and not so far away” space trilogy.

See also: Could there be life adrift in Venus’s clouds?

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In debating Jerry Coyne, Michael Egnor tries philosophy…

Michael Egnor

That’s novel. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor is a Thomas Aquinas. fan and Jerry Coyne is a Darwinian evolutionary biologist:

In my ongoing debate about God’s existence with biologist Jerry Coyne, who writes at Why Evolution Is True, frequent reference is made to Aquinas’ Five Ways, particularly to his Prime Mover argument. It is the most popular formal argument for the existence of God, and it is often misunderstood and, when understood, often misrepresented. Atheists, in my experience, never get it right. If they did, they wouldn’t be atheists.

The first three of Aquinas’ Five Ways share a similar logical structure, and are called the cosmological arguments. More precisely, these arguments probably ought to be called the cosmogonical arguments, because they are proofs based on origins of things. I’ll stick with habit and call them cosmological, but keep in mind that what ties them together is that they are proofs of God’s existence based on the beginnings in nature.

In this post I’ll lay out the logical structure, and in coming posts I hope to apply the structure to three kinds of beginnings in nature: the beginning of change, the beginning of causes, and the beginning of existence itself.

The cosmological arguments have two cornerstones: the law of non-contradiction, and the metaphysics of potency and act. Both principles are Aristotelian, developed in fullest form by St. Thomas Aquinas.:

Michael Egnor, “ Introducing Aquinas’ Five Ways” at Evolution News and Science Today

[image error]
Jerry Coyne

Most people today may not have learned in school that the Scholastics, including Aquinas, restored the importance of classical Greek and Roman learning in Europe, incorporating the thinking processes into philosophy, including natural philosophy (later, science) and theology. So, although Aquinas was a theologian and, in the Catholic tradition, a saint, much that he talks about is not especially “religious.”

But here’s Aquinas in “religious” mode, in case you wondered:

More by neurosurgeon Michael Egnor on how the mind differs from the brain:

Science points to an immaterial mind. If one did not start with a materialist bias, materialism would not be invoked as an explanation for a whole range of experiments in neuroscience.

and

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.

Further reading on the abstract nature of thought:

A simple triangle can disprove materialism. Conventional descriptions of material processes do not help much when we are trying to account for abstract thought.

and

Four researchers whose work sheds light on the reality of the mind: the significance of Wilder Penfield, Roger Sperry Benjamin Libet, and Adrian Owen. 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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Two contradictory figures for the age of the Earth can be true at the same time?

News at Linked In:

Two Jewish scholars offered some thoughts on the age of the Earth as they approached Jewish New Year:

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?

But how can one believe two contradictory things at once? If the world is really 5,780 years old, then evolution must be false. And if the universe is governed by laws that make humanity a mere accident of physics and chemistry, what can biblical stories of Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs possibly teach us?

F. Scott Fitzgerald put it beautifully: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And John Keats praised what he called “negative capability,” the capacity to entertain mysteries and contradictions without any “irritable reaching” for some system to impose on the world’s complexity. We take these messages to heart in an undergraduate class we co-teach, where we try to impress on our students that the greatest questions tend to have the most elusive and incongruous answers.

Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, “Religion and science don’t contradict — they just answer different questions” at Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Not sure this works. Is there no risk of a split worldview?

That said, suppose one goes back behind the question and asks, why must I believe something anyway? Age of Earth is a useful question for that purpose because the question cannot be answered by the evidence of one’s senses or by what somehow seems reasonable.

And that can go both ways. You might think that the landscape around you dates back millions of years but maybe it is actually post-glacial from the last Ice Age, maybe 20,000 years ago, according to geologists. It would “look old” to you and me either way! Specialized knowledge is needed to construct a fact-based history of the region.

Most people who believe that the Bible is divinely inspired don’t feel that they must, therefore, accept a four-figure age of Earth, as a result of interpretations of the wording of the text. If a person does believe that religious scriptures require them to accept a certain four-figure sum for the age of Earth, then they must hold that belief in tension with what geologists say.

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.

Most beliefs about the nature of the physical world are best held provisionally.

The people who end up worst off are not those who struggle with some precepts of their faith but those who attribute some sort of divine/absolute truth-telling to science. Scientism is a tricky religion. – (O’Leary for News)

See also: Why I am not a young-Earth creationist.

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Rob Sheldon: Why process philosophy won’t rescue naturalism

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts on a new book offering process approaches to naturalism, Theses on Critical Theory and Contemporary Naturalism by Wayne Hudson and Arran Gare (eds.)., and picks up on claims about “non-linear thermodynamics” made in the publisher’s blurb:

—

To begin with, there is no field called “non-linear thermodynamics”. I think they meant to say “non-equilibrium thermodynamics”. But more to the point, they are looking at feedback, at how a system can be affecting its environment as well as responding to it.

This is not a mysterious procedure, and as every amateur radio geek can tell you, is essential in building electronic circuits, such as oscillators. It is true that an oscillator doesn’t ever come to a stationary state, but if we regard these as “poles in frequency space” then we can build circuits that have deterministic outcomes, even non-linear outcomes that we desire—such as 5th order notch filters that eliminate static from our favorite radio station.

Let me repeat. Physics doesn’t change. And even when discussing the changes (like an oscillation), the physics of change doesn’t change. Somebody is making a serious category error when the physics of change becomes the change of physics.

But “the physics of change” isn’t what this fellow is advocating. He’s advocating some sort of Whiteheadian “progress” where the end state is improved over the initial state. He wants laws of physics to be malleable, just like post-modern truth. In this new world, there are not to be “reductionist” rules of physics, nor “positivist” views of truth, rather a science of sociology that determines where we should all end up.

Why do I have this feeling of deja vu all over again?

How about, where there are no new ideas, people dust off and recycle old ones?

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent, Volumes 1 and 2.

See also:

Can process philosophy rescue naturalism? As process theology empties churches, process philosophy will empty classrooms. Whatever the students do, absent learning, won’t be governed by philosophy. And they won’t care.

and

How naturalism rots science from the head down

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