Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 445

Dark matter is older than the Big Bang?

3-D impression of dark matter via Hubble

The latest theory for 80% of the universe’s mass:

“The study revealed a new connection between particle physics and astronomy. If dark matter consists of new particles that were born before the Big Bang, they affect the way galaxies are distributed in the sky in a unique way. This connection may be used to reveal their identity and make conclusions about the times before the Big Bang too,” says Tommi Tenkanen, a postdoctoral fellow in Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and the study’s author.

While not much is known about its origins, astronomers have shown that dark matter plays a crucial role in the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters. Though not directly observable, scientists know dark matter exists by its gravitation effects on how visible matter moves and is distributed in space.

For a long time, researchers believed that dark matter must be a leftover substance from the Big Bang. Researchers have long sought this kind of dark matter, but so far all experimental searches have been unsuccessful.Johns Hopkins University, “Dark Matter May Be Older Than The Big Bang, Study Suggests” at Newswise

So dark matter isn’t part of the universe as we know it but one of the stage hands that helped set it up? Well, that speculation raises some interesting possibilities…

The media release refers to “time before the Big Bang.” The idea that time did not begin, for our purposes, with the Big Bang would be contested by some. That raises arrow-of-time issues.

See also: Has a recent find brought us closer to understanding why time goes only one way?

and

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

Consider how little we know: Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling

Researcher: The search for dark matter has become a “quagmire of confirmation bias” So many research areas in science today are hitting hard barriers that it is reasonable to think that we are missing something.

Physicists devise test to find out if dark matter really exists

Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter

What if dark matter just doesn’t stick to the rules?

A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion

and

Proposed dark matter solution: “Gravity is not a fundamental governance of our universe, but a reaction to the makeup of a given environment.”

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Who knew bacteria could trap light without chlorophyll?

It’s not just that we learn new things every day but some of the new things would change our view of things in ways no one predicted:

For years, scientists have thought that microorganisms that use chlorophyll capture the majority of solar energy in the ocean. In study published this week (August 7) in Science Advances, researchers show that bacteria with proteorhodopsins—proteins that capture light with a pigment called retinal—play a major role in converting light to energy, especially in parts of the ocean where nutrients are scarce.

“Chlorophyll is a big deal in the ocean, and now we’re showing that this other pigment is just as important,” says University of Southern California biologist Laura Gómez-Consarnau, a coauthor of the new study.

Abby Olena, “Oceanic Bacteria Trap Vast Amounts of Light Without Chlorophyll” at The Scientist

We are “trained,” if you like, to expect certain discoveries (dark matter, for example). Then we learn something significant that really surprises us and allows for new thinking about, for example, ecology.

Before you go: DNA uses “climbers’ ropes method” to keep tangles at bay It all just swished into place among unthinking cells billions of yours ago. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Go tell it on the mountain.

DNA as a master of resource recycling

The amazing energy efficiency of cells: A science writer compares the cell to human inventions and finds that it is indeed amazingly energy-efficient.

In addition to DNA, our cells have an instruction language written in sugar Of course it all just tumbled into existence and “natural selection” somehow organized everything. As if.

Cells find optimal solutions. Not just good ones.

Researchers build “public library” to help understand photosynthesis

Wait. “The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, … ” And machines just happen all by themselves, right? There is no information load to account for; it just evolved by natural selection acting on random mutation the way your Android did!

In Nature: Cells have “secret conversations” We say this a lot: That’s a lot of information to have simply come into being by natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism). It’s getting not only ridiculous but obviously ridiculous.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Researchers: Helpful gut microbes send messages to their hosts If the strategy is clearly identified, they should look for non-helpful microbes that have found a way to copy it (horizontal gene transfer?)

Cells and proteins use sugars to talk to one another Cells are like Neanderthal man. They get smarter every time we run into them. And just think, it all just tumbled into existence by natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism) too…

Researchers: First animal cell was not simple; it could “transdifferentiate” From the paper: “… these analyses offer no support for the homology of sponge choanocytes and choanoflagellates, nor for the view that the first multicellular animals were simple balls of cells with limited capacity to differentiate.”

“Interspecies communication” strategy between gut bacteria and mammalian hosts’ genes described

Researchers: Cells Have A Repair Crew That Fixes Local Leaks

Researchers: How The Immune System “Thinks”

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Researcher: Mathematics Sheds Light On “Unfathomably Complex” Cellular Thinking

How do cells in the body know where they are supposed to be?

Researchers A Kill Cancer Code Is Embedded in Every Cell

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Do you remember when IBM Watson (Jeopardy winner) was going to revolutionize medicine?

Economist Gary N. Smith and Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks continued their discussion of many things AI, including John Searle’s Chinese Room, but talk turned to why Watson couldn’t turn its famous 2011 Jeopardy win into usefulness in medicine:

Robert J. Marks: Do you know the current status of IBM Watson? I’ve heard some bad things.

Gary N. Smith: They’ve been trying to go into all sorts of things with mixed success and one of the most hopeful things was that they would be able to revolutionize medical care, health care. And it’s not worked because they could look up symptoms of various diseases and they could look up cures for various diseases and they could look up medical articles. But they don’t understand which are more meaningful than others, which medical articles are reasonable and which are bull and so a lot of doctors have become disillusioned with Watson. And a lot of hospitals have literally pulled the plug. More here.

https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-042-Gary-N-Smith.mp3

See also: Why did Watson think Toronto was in the USA? How that happened tells us a lot about what AI can and can’t do, to this day

Why an AI pioneer thinks Watson is a “fraud.” The famous Jeopardy contest in 2011 worked around the fact that Watson could not grasp the meaning of anything.

and

IBM Watson is not our new computer overlord. AI help, not hype: It won at Jeopardy (with specially chosen “softball” questions) but is not the hoped-for aid to cancer specialists. (Robert J. Marks)

Earlier discussions between Robert J. Marks and Gary Smith:

Why an AI pioneer thinks Watson is a “fraud.” The famous Jeopardy contest in 2011 worked around the fact that Watson could not grasp the meaning of anything.

Can AI combat misleading medical research? No, because AI doesn’t address the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacies” that produce the bad data.

AI delusions: A statistics expert sets us straight. We learn why Watson’s programmers did not want certain Jeopardy questions asked.

and

The US 2016 election: Why Big Data failed. Economics professor Gary Smith sheds light on the surprise result.

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Muons, alas, vindicate Einstein’s special relativity

This video about muons (an “elementary subatomic particle similar to the electron but 207 times heavier”) explains:

One byproduct of these collisions is the creation of extraordinarily short-lived particles known as muons that, rather curiously, seem to exist for much longer when moving towards the planet than when created by scientists working in the lab.

“Extremely small and incredibly fast, muons offer amazing proof of special relativity” at Aeon

Apparently, time dilation that we can observe is to blame. The only reason for the “alas” is that the conflict between major theories that are all well-supported must leave some wishing that at least some of the contenders could be less well-supported.

Nice to see Gunter Bechly’s name on a paper again

Yes, okay, a paper on prehistoric cockroaches”

Abstract: (paywall) Unequivocal palaeontological evidence for viruses is usually absent. A specimen of the extinct predatory cockroach Stavba babkaeva gen. et sp. n. from Cretaceous Myanmar amber (98 Ma) shows symptoms of Deformed Wing Virus infection caused by pathogenic DWV-Iflavirus. The hindwing is undeveloped and both curled forewings are symmetrically deformed, differing from environmentally caused asymmetries known from Pripyat and Fukushima. While some unknown cockroach mutation might have the same symptoms, ontogenetic defects (such as incomplete moulting) differ in complete lack of sclerotization, modified forewing bases and presence on both wings. Post-depositional, taphonomic influence can be excluded due to local character of the deformation (forewings on both sides) while other areas are undeformed. Drying shrinking can be excluded due to brittle character of the wing, which would crack instead – and it could not, be local either. Pathogenic RNA-viruses probably circulated among vertebrates and invertebrate decomposers/predators in the dinosaur-age ecosystems. Our discovery complements an indirect putative evidence of Retrovirus infection that modified dinosaur bones. – Pathogenic DWV infection symptoms in a Cretaceous cockroach
Vršanský, Peter; Vršanská, Lucia; Beňo, Milan; Bao, Tong; Lei, Xiaojie; Ren, Xiaojie; Wu, Hao; Šmídová, Lucia; Bechly, Günter; Jun, Lv; Yeo, Melvyn; Jarzembowski, Edmund More.

Readers may remember Gunter Bechly from his getting disappeared from Wikipedia on account of his doubts about Darwin. Nice if concerted efforts to destroy him did not work.

It’s not even just heroes we want to see vindicated but ordinary joes and jills who can go about their business while saying, “I see plenty wrong with the dominant theory today.”

Physicists are allowed that but biologists aren’t. That’s because Darwinism functions very much as a religion for Darwinians, as philosopher Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse: has often pointed out. Doubt about their theory is an attack on their faith.

See also: Gunter Bechly: Ediacaran Fossil Paper Is “Junk Science”

Paleontologist Gunter Bechly Live Tonight On What The Fossil Record Really Tells Us About Common Ancestry

Gunter Bechly: Decline of science? Imaged in a single paragraph

Gunter Bechly: Living fossils under massive attack

Gunter Bechly: New Human Find In The Philippines = New Headache For Darwinism

Fossil dragonfly named has implications for ID

Logic vs. the multiverse: Gunter Bechly offers some insights

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Rob Sheldon on the chances of the tardigrades (water bears) surviving the recent moon crash

We are informed that there were 30,000 tardigrades in the crashed Israeli moon probe:

The dehydrated tardigrades are probably still alive, Philippe Reekie, an astrobiologist and PhD student at the University of Edinburgh not involved with the mission, tells The Guardian. “I would imagine they would survive for some time,” he says. “The main problem with the moon is the vacuum and the high radiation, but tardigrades are proven to survive those conditions.”

Because the tardigrades are dehydrated, they are in a dormant state. That means if they made it, they are in a tiny ball, with their heads and legs retracted inward and their metabolism at 0.01 percent of their normal rate, BBC reports. It’s not likely they’ll colonize the moon like that; they’d need water to reanimate. But “what it means is the so-called ‘pristine environment’ of the moon has been broken,” Monica Grady, a professor of planetary and space sciences at Open University in the UK, tells BBC.

Ashley Yeager, “Tardigrades May Have Made it to the Moon” at The Scientist

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon says,

Well, I do think that dormant tardigrades, which could survive for hundreds if not thousands of years in a “freeze-dried” state, can be revived when placed in water. If the spacecraft, Beresheet, had crashed with dormant tardigrades, then most definitely they are scattered about the surface of the Moon, waiting for their resurrection day in water. The Moon is not expected to deliver any water to them for perhaps a billion years when our Sun runs out of hydrogen, goes into red-giant phase and melts the pockets of ice in the Moon’s south pole. And I won’t take bets on their survival for that long.

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

See also: Rob Sheldon: What if the “building blocks from space” are really degraded life?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Researchers puzzle over a dolphin who adopted a baby melon-headed whale

We are told that the whale even acts like a dolphin:

Now, new research has revealed the first known case of a wild bottlenose mom adopting a calf of another species.

In 2014, researchers spotted a bottlenose mother caring for an unusual-looking male calf, along with what was presumed to be her biological calf, in coastal waters off French Polynesia.

While bottlenose dolphins have slender beaks, the mysterious one-month-old’s beak was short and blunt. Eventually, the scientists identified the orphan as a melon-headed whale—an entirely different species and genus of dolphin.

Erica Tennenhouse, “Dolphin mom adopts whale calf—a first” at National Geographic

Various speculations are offered as to why the dolphin cared for a baby that wasn’t a relative.

Some speculate that either the dolphin is forced to behave that way by hormones or there must be something in it for her. More plausibly, “Personality could have been another driving factor, as this particular dolphin was already well known for her tolerance of scuba divers in the area. Her easygoing attitude may be what kept her from displaying typical bottlenose aggression toward non-offspring.”

In which case, she was simply doing what was normal for herself. People anxious to cram all animal behavior into a Darwinian mold neglect the fact that temperaments among animals differ greatly. If we observe animal behavior long enough, we will surely see many departures from what is supposed to happen according to the theory. The animal does not actually know the theory; she does what occurs to her at the time and her temperament is bound to play a role.

We are also informed that adoption is more common in domestic animals (though the article to which we are directed doesn’t really say why).

Some thoughts: Adoption of all kinds of offspring is comparatively common among cats. Ducklings, for example:

Curiously, tomcats may look after kittens too, so it can’t all be hormones:

Possibly, when the tomcat sees the kittens, he behaves the way he was treated when he was a kitten. He really doesn’t have any other ideas about how to treat kittens nicely.

Cats adopt puppies. One interesting feature is that, when cats adopt puppies, the puppies can be difficult to raise with kittens. Kittens are territorial about nipples and thus are not very combative at feeding time. But, we are told, puppies fight for dominance:

Domestic animals maybe more inclined to adopt at random if they don’t experience food shortages or danger. But then, as Australian philosopher David Stove pointed out in Darwinian Fairytales many life forms don’t usually experience food shortages. Many don’t experience dangers they can do much about. In that case, we should not be surprised if individual temperament accounts for the behavior rather than some calculus around self-interest or natural selection.

See also: Animal minds: In search of the minimal self

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Physicists need courage to confront the Collider dilemma, says boson pioneer

Many talk of a crisis in particle physics. Boson pioneer Carlo Rubbia’s advice is to smash atoms in new and crative ways:

More than three decades later, particle physics once again finds itself at a crossroads. A decision looms about which big particle-collider experiment to build next — if indeed one is built at all. While CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has performed flawlessly, its collisions have yielded no signs of new particles beyond the expected 17, whose properties and interactions are described by the Standard Model of particle physics. This model makes incredibly accurate predictions about those particles’ behavior, yet it’s also understood to be an incomplete description of our world. It fails to include the gravitational force or dark matter — the mysterious substance that astronomers consider to be about five times more abundant than normal matter — or account for the universe’s matter-antimatter imbalance. Moreover, many theorists feel uneasy about the Standard Model’s inability to explain its own basic truths, such as why there are three families of quarks and leptons, and what determines the particles’ masses.

Rubbia, who at 85 remains at the forefront of the field, isn’t fazed by the absence of “new physics” in the LHC data. He urges his peers to press on in search of more and better data and to trust that answers will come. The Higgs boson — the 17th piece in the Standard Model puzzle — materialized at the LHC in 2012, and now Rubbia wants to explore its characteristics in depth with a state-of-the-art “Higgs factory.”

Thomas Lewton, “A Call for Courage as Physicists Confront Collider Dilemma” at Quanta

In the interview with Lewton that follows the article, Rubia says, “I’m a bit concerned that the future of particle physics at CERN does not involve, so far, any new alternative after the termination of the LHC program. When I was responsible for the activities at CERN, whenever we had one machine, we had the next one coming. We need to have more courage, and collectively agree on alternatives.”

Just a thought: Could the great age of particle physics be coming to an end? That is, not so much a crisis as the beginning of a long, slow decline? That happened to science in many former civilizations. There were high points and then somehow things slowed down. How would we know?

That might be the explanation for the way speculation on, say, the multiverse substitutes in many people’s minds for science.

See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Has The Large Hadron Collider “Broken Physics”?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Has a recent find brought us closer to understanding why time goes only one way?

passage of time, imaged/S. Sepp

Rob Sheldon comments. But first, in the interests of explaining time’s arrow, researchers go back to the Big Bang:

The researchers have discovered simple, so-called “universal” laws governing the initial stages of change in a variety of systems consisting of many particles that are far from thermal equilibrium. Their calculations indicate that these systems — examples include the hottest plasma ever produced on Earth and the coldest gas, and perhaps also the field of energy that theoretically filled the universe in its first split second — begin to evolve in time in a way described by the same handful of universal numbers, no matter what the systems consist of.

The findings suggest that the initial stages of thermalization play out in a way that’s very different from what comes later. In particular, far-from-equilibrium systems exhibit fractal-like behavior, which means they look very much the same at different spatial and temporal scales. Their properties are shifted only by a so-called “scaling exponent” — and scientists are discovering that these exponents are often simple numbers like 12 and −13. For example, particles’ speeds at one instant can be rescaled, according to the scaling exponent, to give the distribution of speeds at any time later or earlier. All kinds of quantum systems in various extreme starting conditions seem to fall into this fractal-like pattern, exhibiting universal scaling for a period of time before transitioning to standard thermalization.

Natalie Wolchover, “The Universal Law That Aims Time’s Arrow” at Quanta

The idea is that time’s arrow’s direction got set during a prescaling period.

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers:

—

People sometimes wonder why physicists think so much about the arrow of time. but I’ll try to guess at their motivations:

a) The usual suspects.

Physicists are an arrogant lot, and part of the schtick is sounding erudite, edgy, and incomprehensible. Time travel, wormholes, multiverses, mirror matter, and time going backward are all good candidates for impressive cocktail conversations. And strangely enough, the public eats it up. Having dispensed with religion and its priests, they are starved for something that sounds quasi-mathematical (to exclude the crystals and incense crowd), and cloak physicists with the vestments of authority. Physicists, for their part, rarely turn down the role.

b) The unusual suspects.

The myth and worldview that we and the universe are an accident (the marriage between the Big Bang and Darwin), has been hard to sustain recently. Too many events in the history of the universe seem designed or caused. If causation can be eliminated, then design can be sidestepped. One way to eliminate causation is to have time go backward. Hence there is a perverse attempt to do away with time, because it supports causation and a Designer. As an added bonus, doing away with causation also does away with morality, sin and guilt.

—

Hey, it might even lead to time travel, someone is sure to say.

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

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”?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Researchers: 50 million years needed to recover extinct NZ birds! No, alas,, it’s impossible

Kakapo bird/© rghenry, Adobe Stock

Apart from cloning. From ScienceDaily:

In the new study, Valente and colleagues developed a method to estimate how long it would take for islands to regain the number of species lost due to humans. They realized that New Zealand birds would be an ideal system to apply and demonstrate this new method.

“The anthropogenic wave of extinction in New Zealand is very well documented, due to decades of paleontological and archaeological research,” Valente says. “Also, previous studies have produced dozens of DNA sequences for extinct New Zealand birds, which were essential to build datasets needed to apply our method.”

Using computers to simulate a range of human-induced extinction scenarios, the researchers found that it would take approximately 50 million years to recover the number of species lost since human’s first arrived in New Zealand. If all species currently under threat are allowed to go extinct, they report, it would require about 10 million years of evolutionary time to return to the species numbers of today. Paper. (open access) – Luis Valente, Rampal S. Etienne, Juan C. Garcia-R. Deep Macroevolutionary Impact of Humans on New Zealand’s Unique Avifauna. Current Biology, 2019; 29 (15): 2563 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.058 More.

There would doubtless be species but they might not be at all like the lost ones. They might not be birds.

An extinct life form could probably never be brought back, unless it can be cloned. A given fifty million years in the future will be quite different from fifty million years in the past. There is no reason to think the same species would arise during that period at all.

Apart from cloning, to get the exact same birds, we’d have to rent the multiverse (if it existed). And then we would have an infinite number of planets with islands like New Zealand, including these birds. Never mind one…

But if games with numbers do help to raise awareness so one enters an objection mainly as a matter of form.

See also: Why didn’t saber-tooth tigers survive? Why coyotes instead?

and

Humans off the hook for ancient African mammal extinction?

and

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana