Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 437

If we can’t find aliens Out There, we can always declare local life forms to be aliens

With some justification, actually. The jellyfish-like ctenophore is a prime candidate:

The ctenophore was already known for having a relatively advanced nervous system; but these first experiments by Moroz showed that its nerves were constructed from a different set of molecular building blocks – different from any other animal – using ‘a different chemical language’, says Moroz: these animals are ‘aliens of the sea’.

If Moroz is right, then the ctenophore represents an evolutionary experiment of stunning proportions, one that has been running for more than half a billion years. This separate pathway of evolution – a sort of Evolution 2.0 – has invented neurons, muscles and other specialised tissues, independently from the rest of the animal kingdom, using different starting materials.

This animal, the ctenophore, provides clues to how evolution might have gone if not for the advent of vertebrates, mammals and humans, who came to dominate the ecosystems of Earth. It sheds light on a profound debate that has raged for decades: when it comes to the present-day face of life on Earth, how much of it happened by pure accident, and how much was inevitable from the start?

Douglas Fox, “Aliens in our midst” at Aeon

That’s a classic fake controversy. The obvious problem is that—to account for the ctenophore—complex systems had to arise twice, not once, by alleged Darwinian chance. If you doubted chance before, you just doubled your chances of doubting it.

Structuralism might explain it; Darwinism cannot.

As scientists speculate what kind of life might exist on other worlds, a provocative idea is taking hold: that alien life, unlike anything we know, might already exist here on Earth. The idea is that life might have arisen two or more times on our planet – not just once, as long assumed. Our form of life came to dominate, while other forms receded into the corners. This ‘shadow biosphere’ would be difficult to detect, since it might not contain DNA, proteins or the other molecules that we rely on to detect life.

The phylum of ctenophores isn’t quite that exotic. It is based on the same basic chemistry that we share, but it still represents a shadow biology for animals. Ctenophores are a long-lost cousin that we didn’t even know we had.

Douglas Fox, “Aliens in our midst” at Aeon

Well, if there are a lot more shadow biospheres out there, the conventional tale is that much less likely.

See also: If Evolution Were Repeated, Would Jellyfish Be Intelligent?

and

Comb Jellies: Evidence That If Evolution Began Again, Intelligence Would Re-Emerge?

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Lovelock (now 100 years old): Cyborgs will replace us and treat us like houseplants

Or something. Anyway, we are doomed, cyborg-style, says a centenarian James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis:

For tens of thousands of years, humans have reigned as our planet’s only intelligent, self-aware species. But the rise of intelligent machines means that could change soon, perhaps in our own lifetimes. Not long after that, Homo sapiens could vanish from Earth entirely. …

Rather, Lovelock views the rise of technology through an evolutionary lens, in keeping with his decades of research and thinking about ecological and biological systems. He also brings the unique perspective of a scientist who just marked his 100th birthday, with a deep awareness of changing scientific fashions and with nothing left to prove. It’s an outlook that pushes him to conclusions at once optimistic and deeply disturbing. …

Corey S. Powell, “Cyborgs will replace humans and remake the world, James Lovelock says” at NBC News

Like Darwin’s Ascent of Man, Lovelock’s Ascent of the Cyborgs has no ladder and he doesn’t sense the need for one.

What would cyborgs look like? Lovelock is intentionally vague because he expects that they’ll rethink the basic rules of design in ways that we puny humans cannot imagine. “Cyborgs would start again; like Alpha Zero they would start from a blank slate,” he writes in his book. He speculates that they might look like spheres, though when pressed he says, “It’s entirely possible they would have no form at all,” existing mostly as virtual forms inside computers. Corey S. Powell, “Cyborgs will replace humans and remake the world, James Lovelock says” at NBC New

Like the space aliens, the can be comprehensible or otherwise, as needed.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

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More on the cyborg and other dooms:

Our AI overlords will sayve Earth, says prominent scientist

Noted astronomer envisions cyborg on Mars

and

Will space aliens become a new majority religion?

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Sokal hoaxer punished: Science has left the building

The National Association of Scholars weighs in on the Peter Boghossian case:

Portland State University is punishing Peter Boghossian for demonstrating that grievance studies are nonsense. Dr. Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State, joined two other academics to hoax the purveyors of gender studies and kindred fields committed to turning personal gripes into taxpayer-funded “studies.”

Boghossian and his colleagues submitted articles including an analysis of “canine rape culture” and an extract from “Mein Kampf” translated into the language of feminist theory. These were accepted by what counts as “major” journals in these pseudo-disciplines. In 2018, Boghossian and his colleagues made public these hoaxes, which elegantly and hilariously made the point that these fields’ “scholarship” cannot be distinguished from applesauce and horsefeathers.

Almost instantly Boghossian’s university brought him up on charges of “research misconduct.” The theory was that he should have told the editors of the journals that he was hoaxing them. Allegations of this sort multiplied. He was cleared of most of them, but Portland State stuck with the idea that he had carried out “improper research on human subjects.”

Peter Wood and David Randall, “Portland State U Punishes Professor For Proving Gender Studies Is A Joke” at The Federalist

The “human subjects” are the incompetent rage bunnies who did not spot the hoaxes. Need more be said?

The historic moment here is their awesome lack of a sense of shame. At one time, people would ask hard questions of themselves if they looked as silly as this, rather than rushing to blame someone else.

See also: Portland U Prof Who Hoaxed Social Science Journals To Prove A Point Is Punished

Jerry Coyne discovers the lack of intellectual freedom on campus

Social Science Hoax Papers: Putting A Respectable Face On Persecuting The Hoaxers

Embattled “Social Sciences Hoax” Prof Is Not A Hero, He’s A Canary

Social Science Hoaxer’s Job At Risk For Revealing “Bias”

Sokal hoaxes strike social science again

Exposing gender studies as a Sokal hoax

Social Science Hoax Papers Is One Of RealClearScience’s Top Junk Science Stories Of 2018

and

Alan Sokal, Buy Yourself A Latte: “Star Wars” Biology Paper Accepted

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At New Scientist: We’ll soon find out for sure if aliens are out there

With a new generation of telescopes:

But for the first time in human history we are reaching the technological sophistication needed to provide a genuine answer. Powerful telescopes are letting us study planets in other solar systems, giving us a glimpse into their atmospheres and a flavour of what type of life might be living on their surfaces. At the same time, improved analysis of our own planet is allowing us to redefine what life might look like from afar, and is helping us to distinguish the signs of a flourishing alien civilisation from the mere geological rumblings of a lifeless world. With these tools at our disposal, answers are finally within our grasp.

Sarah Rugheimer, “Are there any aliens out there? We are close to knowing for sure ” at New Scientist

Of course, they’re out there and as long as there’s an Out There, they’ll always be out there.

See also: Tales of an invented god

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So the “gay gene” was imaginary?

It empowered a movement but existed only in their heads? A huge study involving nearly half a million people suggests so.

The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality has revealed five spots on the human genome that are linked to same-sex sexual behaviour — but none of the markers are reliable enough to predict someone’s sexuality.

The findings, which are published on 29 August in Science and based on the genomes of nearly 500,000 people, shore up the results of earlier, smaller studies and confirm the suspicions of many scientists: while sexual preferences have a genetic component, no single gene has a large effect on sexual behaviours

.Jonathan Lambert, “No ‘gay gene’: Massive study homes in on genetic basis of human sexuality” at Nature

This is probably not the result many were looking for or could even report straightforwardly:

The five genes each explained less than 1 percent of the variation in whether or not an individual reported participating in same-sex behaviors. When they included all sequences in the genome associated with same-sex sex, the researchers estimated that genes account for a maximum of 8–25 percent of the variation in the population’s behaviors, suggesting that much of what drives sexual activity is beyond genetics.

“Genetics is less than half of this story for sexual behavior but it’s still a very important contributing factor,” Ben Neale, a behavioral geneticist at the Broad Institute and a senior author on the study, said during the press conference. Still, the genetic associations he and his colleagues observed could not predict the likelihood that an individual would report having sex with partners of the same sex.

Emma Yasinski, “Giant Study Helps Clarify Role of Genes in Same-Sex Sex” at TheScientist

Some simply deny the obvious conclusion:

However, the finding that there’s no single gay gene does not mean that sexual orientation is not genetic or biological, and is therefore a lifestyle choice.

“This is wrong,” study co-author Brendan Zietsch, a geneticist at the University of Queensland in Australia, told Live Science. “We find that there are many, many genes that predispose one to same-sex sexual behavior. Each of them individually has a very small effect, but together they have a substantial effect.

“Another possible misinterpretation is to think that if same-sex preference is genetically influenced, it must therefore be totally genetically determined,” Zietsch added. “That is not true. Genetically identical individuals — twins — often have different sexual orientations. We know there are non-genetic influences as well, but we don’t understand these well, and our study does not say anything about them.”

Charles Q. Choi, “The ‘Gay Gene’ Is a Total Myth, Massive Study Concludes” at LiveScience

Identical twins having the same sexual orientation used to be the gold standard for claims about the gay gene so if the researchers are backing away from that, we can be sure that the case for genetic determinism about sexual orientation is in ruins, even if this researcher insists that that is the “wrong” interpretation.

Why are people so uncomfortable with the idea that they are not ruled by their genes?

Bet we haven’t heard the last of this.

See also: There’s a gene for that… or is there?

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But WHY are they abandoning Darwinism?

Yesterday, we looked at senior Canadian journalist Barbara Kay’s defection. Other discussions sharpen the question:

Kay mentions Gelernter’s recent apostasy and that it was fueled in large part by Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt. While she hasn’t read Meyer’s bestseller yet, she does point to another book by the incomparable journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe, who repudiated Darwinism in his last book The Kingdom of Speech

Andrew McDiarmid , “The Dam Begins to Break: Gelernter’s Apostasy Attracts Mainstream Media Coverage” at Evolution News and Science Today

Okay sure. But there have been shelves of such books. Many are clear and well-written. Massive thought base. So why this, why now?

Something is changing, almost like a tectonic plate moving. People who knew they had to salute Darwin before are now thinking, “Aw, Darwin, what rot!” And note, these are not the raging Woke who would pull down Darwin’s statue because he is dead, white, and male. These are thoughtful people. They can see that he might be reasonable but wrong.

Now, some changes are hardly noticeable because they are so big. Is this one? And what else might we expect?

See also: Eh? Senior Canadian journalist knows Darwinism is bunk? It’s as if she thinks we can be free to think again, to examine the evidence. We must hope the Darwin mob loses its way when setting out to attack her. Maybe help them to lose it?

Meanwhile, other engaged brains have been getting restless too:

At First Things, They Are Also Getting Over Darwinism

Another Think Tank Now Openly Questions Darwinism So Power Line is interviewing J. Scott Turner, author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. He’s not an “ID guy” but that doesn’t matter. His book’s title tells you what you need to know. He understands that something is wrong. And his insights into insects’ hive mind are a piece in the puzzle.

Hoover Institution interview with David Berlinski

Mathematicians challenge Darwinian Evolution

The College Fix LISTENS TO David Gelernter on Darwin! It’s almost as though people are “getting it” that Darwinism now functions as an intolerant secular religion. Evolution rolls on oblivious but here and there heads are getting cracked, so to speak, over the differences between what really happens and what Darwinians insist must happen.

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Rare hominin skull upsets tidy human origins theory

Below are some media clippings on the recent hominin skull find in Ethiopia. Meanwhile, a reader writes to say that the significance of the story—not always made clear—is this: The idea that an early hominin A. anamensis evolved tidily into a newer hominin A. afarensis (Lucy) was one of the few examples of such a clear Darwinian transition available. But now it turns out, the 3.8 mya skull anamensis in the news is from 100,000 years after fossils of A. afarensis, which means that this hominin was a contemporary as well as an ancestor. Another “textbook example” of Darwinism scrubbed.

The early hominin evolutionary tree is “messier than thought”:

This species was thought to precede Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis. But features of the latest find now suggest that A. anamensis shared the prehistoric Ethiopian landscape with Lucy’s species for at least 100,000 years, the researchers say. This hints that the early hominin evolutionary tree was more complicated than scientists had thought — but other researchers say the evidence isn’t yet conclusive.

Colin Barras, “Rare 3.8-million-year-old skull recasts origins of iconic ‘Lucy’ fossil” at Nature

Some, of course, the idea that the two hominins were contemporaries:

Not everyone is convinced by the team’s argument. Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, tells The Post that the data could be interpreted differently and might only reveal that the Australopithecus genus was evolving at the time, 3 million to 4 million years ago, and not that the current human family tree is incorrect, though it’s been revised before.

Ashley Yeager, “” at The Scientist

It was a time, the story goes, when we were just learning to walk upright:

“Most of A. anamensis’ own traits are quite primitive,” Haile-Selassie says, noting the individual’s small brain, protruding face and large canine teeth. “There are a few features exclusively shared with A. afarensis, like the orbital region in the frontal area. But everything else is really primitive. If you look at it from the back, it looks like an ape. This is something that I never expected to see in a species that is hypothesized to be the ancestor of A. afarensis. So it changed the whole gamut of ideas in terms of the relationship between those two.”

Brian Handwerk, “A 3.8-Million-Year-Old Skull Puts a New Face on a Little-Known Human Ancestor” at Smithsonian Magazine

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Eh? Senior Canadian journalist knows Darwinism is bunk?

Barbara Kay

Readers, WHY are so many people suddenly waking up – seemingly all of a sudden – to what nonsense Darwinism is? We just want to know, that’s all.

Barbara Kay is a very intelligent senior journalist, a rarity in these times, and she understands this:

Darwinism’s puzzling Achilles’ heel is its utter failure to account for, alone amongst the species, humans’ large brains and capacity for both abstract thought and speech. Back when the world was young, I was taught that four visionaries’ theories shaped modernity: Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Of them, only Einstein’s could be subjected to scientific scrutiny. The rest remained hypotheses, resistant to such standard scientific tests as falsifiability, replicability and predictability, but so beautiful in their comprehensiveness that the intelligentsia accepted them for what they were not: settled science.

Time has proven unkind to Freud’s and Marx’s theories, but very kind to Darwinism. Why? Shhh. If you dare to ask, you invite ridicule. Because the minute one expresses doubt about Darwin’s basic premise that all life-forms, including humans, descend from a common ancestor through the simple processes of random, heritable variation and natural selection, one admits the possibility of a counter-theory — Intelligent Design — that is considered anathema to the intelligentsia, since it implies, you know, the G-word.

David Gelernter, a conservative Yale professor of computer science, is suffering extreme ridicule and worse from colleagues for having just published an article in the Claremont Review, “Giving up Darwin.” The title is misleading, because Gelernter does not reject Darwin completely. He says there is no doubt that Darwin “successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances” through fur density or beak shape or wing style changes. It’s the big thing Gelernter now believes Darwin got wrong: humans.

Barbara Kay, “Barbara Kay: 160 years into Darwinism, there’s one mystery we still can’t explain” at National Post

But the Darwinians never set their sights so low as beak shape for long. They sought to explain morality, religion, heroism, art, and literature, etc. by the behavior of ants, wolves, and horses. Darwin himself knew that, if he couldn’t do that, his work was trivial. Well, could he?

Kay goes on to talk about the Cambrian explosion, anomalocaris, and Thomas Wolf’s The Kingdom of Speech and its fallout – without the least tendency to reassure us that Darwin’s flacks are on their way with patches and paste.

Maybe they are. But so what?

It’s as if she thinks we can be free to think again, to examine the evidence.

We must hope the Darwin mob loses its way when setting out to attack her. Maybe help them to lose it?

O’Leary for News: She is a fellow Canadian but I don’t really know her personally. I hope she will consider reading some of Suzan Mazur’s books because they are a good place to begin, especially The Altenberg 16: An exposé of the evolution industry (2010) and Royal Society: Public Evolution Summit and, of course, Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology — a completely non-religious approach to the problems is a good place to begin.

Meanwhile, other engaged brains have been getting restless too. Why all of a sudden?:

At First Things, They Are Also Getting Over Darwinism

Another Think Tank Now Openly Questions Darwinism So Power Line is interviewing J. Scott Turner, author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. He’s not an “ID guy” but that doesn’t matter. His book’s title tells you what you need to know. He understands that something is wrong. And his insights into insects’ hive mind are a piece in the puzzle.

Hoover Institution interview with David Berlinski

Mathematicians challenge Darwinian Evolution

The College Fix LISTENS TO David Gelernter on Darwin! It’s almost as though people are “getting it” that Darwinism now functions as an intolerant secular religion. Evolution rolls on oblivious but here and there heads are getting cracked, so to speak, over the differences between what really happens and what Darwinians insist must happen.

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Have researchers found a way to harness time?

Quantum time as an abstract concept/Stillfx, Adobe Stock

So they say. From ScienceDaily:

A University of Queensland-led international team of researchers say they have discovered “a new kind of quantum time order.”

UQ physicist Dr Magdalena Zych said the discovery arose from an experiment the team designed to bring together elements of the two big — but contradictory — physics theories developed in the past century.

“Our proposal sought to discover: what happens when an object massive enough to influence the flow of time is placed in a quantum state?” Dr Zych said.

She said Einstein’s theory described how the presence of a massive object slowed time.

“Imagine two space ships, asked to fire at each other at a specified time while dodging the other’s attack,” she said.

“If either fires too early, it will destroy the other.”

“In Einstein’s theory, a powerful enemy could use the principles of general relativity by placing a massive object — like a planet — closer to one ship to slow the passing of time.”

“Because of the time lag, the ship furthest away from the massive object will fire earlier, destroying the other.”

Dr Zych said the second theory, of quantum mechanics, says any object can be in a state of “superposition”

“This means it can be found in different states — think Schrodinger’s cat,” she said.

Dr Zych said using the theory of quantum mechanics, if the enemy put the planet into a state of “quantum superposition,” then time also should be disrupted.

“There would be a new way for the order of events to unfold, with neither of the events being first or second — but in a genuine quantum state of being both first and second,” she said.

UQ researcher Dr Fabio Costa said although “a superposition of planets” as described in the paper — may never be possible, technology allowed a simulation of how time works in the quantum world — without using gravity.

“Even if the experiment can never be done, the study is relevant for future technologies,” Dr Costa said. Paper. (open access) – Magdalena Zych, Fabio Costa, Igor Pikovski, Časlav Brukner. Bell’s theorem for temporal order. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11579-x More.

The theory is, it will help quantum computers work faster. Let’s see it closer to home first.

See also: Would backwards time travel unravel spacetime?

Economist: Can time go backwards?

Astrobiologist: Why time travel can’t really work

Carlo Rovelli: Future time travel only a technological problem, not a scientific one. Rovelli: A starship could wait [near a black hole ] for half an hour and then move away from the black hole, and find itself millennia in the future.

Rob Sheldon’s thoughts on physicists’ “warped” view of time An attempt to force complete symmetry on a universe that does ot want to be completely symmetrical

At the BBC: Still working on that ol’ time machine… BBC: “But using wormholes for time travel won’t be straightforward.” Indeed not. Unless everything is absolutely determined, some wise person from the future has already gone back through a wormhole and altered the present so that we can’t go anywhere.

Is time travel a science-based idea? (2017)

Apparently, a wormhole is our best bet for a time machine (2013)

and

Does a Time Travel Simulation Resolve the “Grandfather Paradox”?

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Science pros reckon with the fallout from Jeffrey Epstein – and it’s grim

To hear them tell it, it’s big. Some scientists continued their association with Epstein after his sex assault rap in 2008 (under social duress, maybe?):

But others continued to accept funding from Epstein, BuzzFeed reports. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, who retired from Rutgers Universty in 2017, told Reuters in 2015 that he had accepted $40,000, and defended Epstein by saying that girls mature earlier now than they used to—comments he walked back in a tweet published this July.

Still others continued to facilitate meetings between Epstein and members of the research community. Martin Nowak, a mathematician and evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, arranged a get-together in 2012 between Epstein and scientists at MIT and Harvard. Nowak tells BuzzFeed he’d received no funding from Epstein since the latter’s conviction, although he continued to thank him in scientific papers published up until at least 2012.

Catherine Offord, “More Scientists, Institutions with Links to Jeffrey Epstein” at The Scientist

Several science research foundations that received Epstein money have said that they will donate an equivalent amount to an appropriate cause (for example, causes fighting sexual exploitation).

An interesting take on the story is the study of the networks Epstein moved around in:

Harvard, thus far, doesn’t get it. In July, school representatives said the university had no plans to return $6.5 million that helped set up its Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

Giving away the money would begin to clean up the gross, topologically complex web of influence trading that Epstein helped weave. Before and after his year in prison, in 2008, Epstein lavished money and attention on scientists—biologist Stephen Jay Gould, biochemist George Church, evolutionary scientist Martin Nowak, linguist Steven Pinker, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, physicist Stephen Hawking, and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, among many others.

Epstein was, in the parlance of the sciences, a marker. Like the radioactive tracer you get injected with before an fMRI, his villainy illuminates how the connections among a relatively small clique of American intellectuals allowed them, privately, to define the last three decades of science, technology, and culture. It was a Big-Ideas Industrial Complex of conferences, research institutions, virtual salons, and even magazines, and Jeffrey Epstein bought his way in.

Adam Rogers , “Jeffrey Epstein and the Power of Networks” at Wired

Rogers asks, “How did these geniuses find themselves cozying up to a child rapist?” and provides us with some of the many answers that will filter in.

See also: More Pop Science Fallout Re Jeffrey Epstein: Stu Pivar And PZ Myers

Meanwhile, from the Uncommon Descent News Wayback machine: Stu Pivar’s Book Lifecode: So What’s In It? Why The Fuss? Okay, here at last is Jerry Bergman’s review of Stuart Pivar’s Lifecode. Yes, Stu Pivar was the friend of Steve Gould who was suing and then unsuing PZ Myers.

See also: Darwinists May Be Paying A Price For Pop Science Celebrity: Jeffrey Epstein

UD Newswatch: Epstein suicide

Now Steve Pinker Is Getting #MeToo’d, At Inside Higher Ed Over Jeffrey Epstein

Alleged Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein Pledged $30 Million For Harvard Evolution Program

and

Jeff Epstein’s cultural dumpster fire spreads to ID vs. evo controversies.
Just because people are in the news doesn’t mean they did anything. It rather shows how a bad actor can change the news picture.

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