Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 426
September 28, 2019
Sabine Hossenfelder explains the problem with the “many worlds” hypothesis

Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, topic
The many world interpretation, now, supposedly does away with the problem of the quantum measurement and it does this by just saying there isn’t such a thing as wavefunction collapse. Instead, many worlds people say, every time you make a measurement, the universe splits into several parallel worlds, one for each possible measurement outcome. This universe splitting is also sometimes called branching.
Some people have a problem with the branching because it’s not clear just exactly when or where it should take place, but I do not think this is a serious problem, it’s just a matter of definition. No, the real problem is that after throwing out the measurement postulate, the many worlds interpretation needs another assumption, that brings the measurement problem back.
The reason is this. In the many worlds interpretation, if you set up a detector for a measurement, then the detector will also split into several universes. Therefore, if you just ask “what will the detector measure”, then the answer is “The detector will measure anything that’s possible with probability 1.”
This, of course, is not what we observe. We observe only one measurement outcome.
Sabine Hossenfelder, “The Trouble with Many Worlds” at BackRe(Action)
They end up with all the same problems in this universe plus infinite universes as well. But some may want that.
See also: Sabine Hossenfelder Summarizes Multiverse Theories, Asks: Science Or Fiction?
and
Sabine Hossenfelder: The multiverse is a fringe idea
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Should we infect Mars with bacteria?

To kickstart colonization?
A paper published last month in the journal FEMS Microbiology Ecology argues that the “primary colonists” of the Red Planet should be “microorganisms” — the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that support many of life’s processes here on Earth.
Jose Lopez, a professor at Nova Southeastern University and one of the authors of the paper, proposes an approach to planetary colonization that begins with a plan on studying microbes that could support life in extraterrestrial environments.
“Life as we know it cannot exist without beneficial microorganisms,” he said in a press release. “To survive on a barren (and as far as all voyages to date tell us) sterile planets, we will have to take beneficial microbes with us.”
Natalie Coleman, “Contaminating Mars With Microbes Could Kickstart Colonization” at Futurism
Paper. (open access)
One way of seeing it: We can’t find alien life but maybe we can literally invent it.
Another way of seeing it: If the idea works, it could be like rabbits in Australia and cats in New Zealand. That is, it works but then most other things don’t.
and
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Eric Holloway: Friendly AI would kill us all

Is that a shocking idea? Let’s follow the logic:
Remember, the goal of friendly AI is to create a godbot that is guaranteed to be kind and good, to never do anything bad, and not be stupid. Now in order to guarantee that the bot will always be good, it must be completely predictable, so that we can predict with 100% accuracy that it will never be bad. This programming fits the “Alf Criterion A,” that the godbot be completely predictable.
But the second point is that, in order to not be stupid, the godbot must be able to make decisions and not just blindly do what it is told. This is “Alf Criterion B.”
Therefore, our friendly AI, the omnibenevolent godbot, must fulfill both Alf Criteria.Eric Holloway, “Friendly artificial intelligence would kill us” at Mind Matters News
If you are worried about things like this happening, check out Eric Holloway’s Could AI think like a human, given infinite resources? Given that the human mind is a halting oracle, the answer is no.
Whew.
Some do worry about an AI takeover though. Check out, for example, Tales of an invented god
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September 27, 2019
Science organizations continue to reel from Jeffrey Epstein “bombshells”
In late August, MIT admitted to accepting $800K from Jeffrey Epstein (then recently deceased), on behalf of physicist Seth Lloyd and MIT Media Lab:
But on Friday, The New Yorker published a bombshell report revealing that the amount of money the MIT Media Lab accepted from Epstein was actually substantially higher — and that the lab’s director Joi Ito went to great lengths to conceal the source of the money.
Drawing from newly obtained e-mails and other documents, as well as interviews with current and former MIT employees, The New Yorker reported that the Media Lab accepted donations from Epstein long after the university dubbed him a “disqualified” donor — by labeling the donations as coming from an anonymous source.
Kristin Houser, “MIT Media Lab Hid Donations From Sex Offender Jeffrey Epstein” at Futurism
They kept his name off the records. Joi Ito has since resigned. It would be hard for them to claim they did not know.
But we don’t doubt that there will be lots of grantsmanship and bioethics patter around the question.
See also: Michael Egnor on Jeffrey Epstein: “Consensus science” meant not denouncing him. Listen to this: People’s lives may depend on other people not speaking out. For example about design in nature.
Seth Lloyd?
“Playing Physics Head Games” — NY Times Review Of Seth Lloyd’s New Book (William Dembski, 2006)
Does a time travel simulation resolve the grandfather paradox? (2014)
The Multiverse Cosmologists’ War On Falsifiability The Multiverse Cosmologists’ War On Falsifiability Rages On
Physicists hope to test whether we live in a computer sim
The multiverse did not start out as science
From other sources on the big issues:
On Epstein and the science elite. (New York Magazine) (Wow.)
A petition: No Money From Jeff Epstein at MIT, Seth Lloyd Should Resign
Seth Lloyd: I am writing to apologize to Jeffrey Epstein’s victims
Other fallout in general: Jeffrey Epstein infiltrated science because it was ready to accommodate him
fallout, fallout
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Michael Egnor gets mail from Jerry Coyne
Recently, Michael Egnor took issue with Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s question of who invented God. Now Coyne has replied:
In other words, ID itself refutes Egnor’s claim that God The Intelligent Designer cannot be sensed via an organ. The stupidity here (and I’m not pulling punches given that Egnor engages in name-calling) is to assume that a deity who is nonphysical cannot be apprehended through sense organs. If you’re a theist, that’s palpably ridiculous.
As for God giving us our “capacity for reason” specifically so we can know Him (do chimps know Him, too, since they have a capacity to reason?), that’s also ridiculous. If our capacity for reason gives us the “capacity to know immaterial reality and act on our knowledge”, then how come every religion has a different conception of immaterial reality? Egnor is a Christian; does he reject the Muslim belief that Jesus wasn’t the son of God but merely a prophet, and that Muhammad was given the true religion by Allah through Gabriel? Does he reject Hindu pantheism, or the animism of some tribes? Does he reject the thetans and Xenu-beliefs of Scientology?
Jerry Coyne, “Another breathtaking example of creationist Egnorance” at Why Evolution Is True
It’s too bad Jerry Coyne probably doesn’t want to discuss these matters seriously because they have been taken up that way elsewhere.
He refers to David Berlinski as a “biker.” At Berlinski’s age, that’s… admirable.
See also: If Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent him. We could end up with patent issues, never mind theological ones. So let’s be thankful we did not have to.
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Stromatolites from 3.5 bya really ARE microbial life, say researchers
Re the ancient Dresser Formation in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, from ScienceDaily:
The stromatolites have been thought to be of biogenic origin ever since they were discovered in the 1980s. However, despite strong textural evidence, that theory was unproven for nearly four decades, because scientists hadn’t been able to show the definitive presence of preserved organic matter remains — until today’s publication in journal Geology.
“This is an exciting discovery — for the first time, we’re able to show the world that these stromatolites are definitive evidence for the earliest life on Earth,” says lead researcher Dr Raphael Baumgartner, a research associate of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology in Professor Martin Van Kranendonk’s team at UNSW.
Professor Van Kranendonk says the discovery is the closest the team have come to a “smoking gun” to prove the existence of such ancient life.
“This represents a major advance in our knowledge of these rocks, in the science of early life investigations generally, and — more specifically — in the search for life on Mars. We now have a new target and new methodology to search for ancient life traces,” Professor Van Kranendonk says.Paper. (paywall) – Raphael J. Baumgartner, Martin J. Van Kranendonk, David Wacey, Marco L Fiorentini, Martin Saunders, Stefano Caruso, Anais Pages, Martin Homann, Paul Guagliardo. Nano−porous pyrite and organic matter in 3.5-billion-year-oldstromatolites record primordial life. Geology, 2019; DOI: 10.1130/G46365.1 More.
This doesn’t leave a lot of time for Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation). Not nearly enough, in fact.
A bit of history (life to non-life, then back to life):
Researchers Suggest Life Began On Land Not Sea. And Nearly 600 Mya Earlier Than Thought (2017)
World’s “Oldest Microfossils” Are Not Life Forms After All (2015)
Microbial Mats Show Fossil Structures From 3.5 Billion Years Ago (2014)
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Nature has retracted a major oceans warming paper, after ten months of mass freakouts
Here’s the notice re “Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition,” which appeared at last October and quickly attracted attention for flawed analysis.
Retraction Watch asks:
Now, nearly more than 10 months later, Nature is pulling the plug on the article. As the retraction notice states, the journal came to feel that the uncertainties in the analysis were too significant to let the paper stand: …
What about the 10-month lag? Lisa Boucher, the press manager for Nature Research, told us: “In general, when concerns are raised about papers we have published, whether by the original authors or by other researchers and readers, we look into them carefully, following an established process, consulting the authors and, where appropriate, seeking advice from peer reviewers and other external experts. These issues are often complex and as a result, it can take time for editors and authors to fully unravel them.”
“Nature paper on ocean warming retracted” at RetractionWatch
Well, how about this: After the public has endured months of screaming, crying teenage truants demanding panicked assent to questionable policies, we can now clean the place up and get back to science?
Do you think that is not a fair assessment? Well, one thing for sure is true. The more sobbing, screaming teens are paraded in front of the public, the more reasonable climate skepticism begins to sound.
A question: If climate issues are so serious, why is Greta Thunberg the spokesperson? Whatever the reality, that whole circus revolving around an unhappy teen seems tailor-made for fashionable freakouts—with no serious commitments beyond bringing one’s own plastic bags to the grocery store and denouncing whoever thou thinkest to be less environmentally friendly than thou art… And starting a witch hunt against such persons, of course. That’s the real fun.
If responsible people truly believed that climate change is both drastic and preventable, the Children’s Crusade would get sent back to school in favor of real leadership. And when they get there, let’s hope they learn real science instead of the currently fashionable war on science. Maybe that last one is too much to ask though.
Here’s a list of fifty years of failed environment doom predictions.
Keep up to date with Retraction Watch. You learn a lot there that you wouldn’t learn from failing local media.
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September 26, 2019
If Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent him
Now, understand, for many of us, inventing Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne might be a theological problem. So we are happy to discover him along the path:
A shimmering example of atheist idiocy (there is no other word for it) is Jerry Coyne’s recent argument, at Why Evolution Is True, against God’s existence in his post on David Attenborough’s agnosticism. Attenborough, who is a Darwinist producer of nature films (quite good films I must say, despite the Darwinist taint), was interviewed about his views on God.
To Coyne’s chagrin, Attenborough declares that he is agnostic about God’s existence. Attenborough raises common objections to theism (e.g., the problem of evil), but he invokes a rather nice metaphor about a termite mound. He points out that termites, blind and busily working away in a mound, are unaware of human observers. Their unawareness is not evidence that an observer doesn’t exist — they lack the sense organs to perceive the observer. Attenborough says that is why he is agnostic — he doesn’t sense that God exists, but perhaps that is because he lacks the capacity to know God …
Coyne hops on this:
[O]f course, if a god wanted to make himself known to humans, he would have given them the sense organs to detect divinity.
Michael Egnor, “Jerry Coyne on Our “Divinity Sense Organs”” at Evolution News and Science Today
Wow.
But you know, every so often, Jerry gets it:
Darwinian Jerry Coyne Makes A Good Point About The Social Science Hoaxes
and
Are Our Political Views Coded In DNA? Jerry Coyne Is Not Really Convinced
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An ID guy writes to ask us why this new paper ISN’T ID…
“Herein, we present the foundations of a new theoretical approach to agnostically quantify the amount of potential pathway assembly information contained within an object. This is achieved by considering how the object can be deconstructed into its irreducible parts, and then evaluating the minimum number of steps necessary to reconstruct the object along any pathway. The analysis of pathway assembly is done by the recursive deconstruction of a given object using shortest paths, and this can be used to evaluate the effective pathway assembly index for that object (13). In developing pathway assembly, we have been motivated to create an intrinsic measure of an object forming through random processes, where the only knowledge required of the system is the basic building blocks and the permitted ways of joining structures together. This allows determining when an extrinsic agent or evolutionary system is necessary to construct the object, permitting the search for complexity in the abstract, without any specific notions of what we are looking for, thus removing the requirement for an external imposition of meaning, see Figure 1.”
Quantifying the pathways to life using assembly spaces
Stuart M. Marshall, Douglas Moore, Alastair R. G. Murray, Sara I. Walker, Leroy Cronin
(Submitted on 6 Jul 2019 (v1), last revised 9 Aug 2019 (this version, v2)) (ArXiv)
We’re told that author Sara Walker is a long-time collaborator with Paul Davies at Arizona State and that she put this material forward at “Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World” in July 2019 in Italy. Other talks’ pdfs here.
Another reader writes to ask, about that and some of the other conference papers’ themes: “Mind Matters? Natural and Artificial Intelligence? Irreducible parts? Minimum number of steps? Extrinsic agent? Biological or technological processes?” Where have we seen this stuff before?
Oh yes, we’ve seen it hanging from the racks in our own toolshed.
Okay, they lifted our tools. But did they remember to take the troll spray too?
We might have lent them the tools. But without No! Troll, begone!TM, oh dear…
Another reader points out that their stuff is probably not called ID simply because no known ID sympathizer is associated with the paper. Cute.
Okay, fine. No one owns a general idea. No dispute here.
But to proceed without a means of neutralizing trolls risks careers. One must hope that they have developed a troll spray themselves. One that survived beta testing.
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Even bird droppings can confute science expectations
From ScienceDaily:
Why are bird droppings so hard to remove from buildings? Uric acid.
Why are they white and pasty? Uric acid.
Why are they corrosive to car paint and metal structures? Uric acid.
These answers are based on the prevailing wisdom that ranks uric acid as the primary ingredient in bird “poop,” which is comprised mostly of urine. (Birds release both solid and liquid waste at the same time. The white substance is the urine).
But according to Nick Crouch, a scientist at The University of Texas at Austin, uric acid can’t be the answer. That’s because there is no uric acid in excreted bird urine.
And after analyzing the excretions from six different bird species — from the Great Horned Owl to the humble chicken — he’s pretty positive of that statement…
Crouch said that this research opens the door to new research questions, from the power of the bird microbiome to identifying the two unknown substances. He said that most of all, it shows the value of taking the time to question conventional wisdom.
Paper. (paywall) (paywall) Nicholas M. A. Crouch, Vincent M. Lynch, Julia A. Clarke. A re-evaluation of the chemical composition of avian urinary excreta. Journal of Ornithology, 2019; DOI: 10.1007/s10336-019-01692-5More.
The main thing to see here is that we just assumed that there was a lot of uric acid in bird droppings. No one tested it.
Here’s a truism (but that doesn’t make it any less true): Incurious certainty is the most serious enemy of new discoveries.
See also: Intelligent Design And Ecology: Environmental Change Via Biosphere Feedback Mechanisms: Sarah Mims, daughter of Forrest (one of 50 best brains in science) Mims discovered a couple of years ago, that fungus spores travel on smoke from forest fires, establishing themselves in non-burnt-out zones. Here’s more. Sarah Mims has the unusual distinction of being the lead author of a science paper* while still in high school. (Sarah A. Mims and Forrest M. Mims III, Fungal spores are transported long distances in smoke from biomass fires, Atmospheric Environment 38, 651-655 (2004).)
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