Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 446

What is National Center for Science Education (the Darwin in the schools lobby) doing now?

Well, an awful lot on climate change, for one thing. Wherever else the climate is changing, it is certainly changing around Darwinism. Perhaps this is a graceful exit for them:

Want to defend science education from the forces of denial? Get involved! NCSE’s work reaches as far as our members take it.

Action Alerts and Ongoing Campaigns: Keep track of the latest attempts to enact anti-science legislation and other challenges to good science education.

How To and Training: Battling with science deniers? Need to learn how to handle creationist students? Need to get informated about climate change? NCSE offers a range of online hands-on workshops aimed at teachers facing these issues. …

“Take Action” at National Center for Science Education

See also: Listen to the “symphony of genes” in animal evolution… So if all this complexity got started in something like the twinkling of an eye, are we looking at an argument for creationism? Or what?

A Single Set Of Genes Drives Pufferfish Spines, Mouse Hair, And Chicken Feathers

and

Direct experimental falsification of Darwinism (The Selfish Gene was heard to sob uncontrollably in the background.)

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There is no Reason to Believe Any Computer Will Ever be Conscious

On this date in 1944 one of the first computers, the IBM Mark I, became operational.  See the Wiki article here.  From the article:

[The Mark I] could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second.  A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute.

Now, here is the question for the class.  What is the difference, in principle, between the Mark I and the IBM Summit, which, as of late 2018, became the fastest supercomputer in the world, capable of performing calculations at the rate of 148.6 petaflops (one petaflop is one thousand million million floating-point operations per second)?

The answer, of course, is “absolutely nothing.” 

Both machines do nothing but calculate.  The Mark I calculated slowly (by todays standards).  The Summit calculates very rapidly.  But there is no difference in principle between performing algorithms slowly as opposed to rapidly.

This should give pause to proponents of AI (at least proponents of AI in its “strong” conceptualization).  Unless one defines “consciousness” as “executing algorithms very quickly,” (which would be absurd), there is no reason to believe that any computer will ever be conscious.  Decades from now when people look back at the Summit the way we look back at the Mark I and marvel about how anyone could have thought that it was “fast,” computers will still be, in principle, doing the same thing the Mark I was doing.  The argument I am making is practically identical to Searle’s Chinese Room argument with the Mark I standing in for the room.

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Listen to the “symphony of genes” in animal evolution…

There are so many of these stories now: From ScienceDaily:

One of the most exciting discoveries in genome research was that the last common ancestor of all multicellular animals — which lived about 600 million years ago — already possessed an extremely complex genome.

Hold on. What does that mean, exactly?

Using comparative genomic analyses, the researchers reconstructed evolutionarily conserved gene arrangements in animals and investigated their activity in different cell types. They could show that genes that are always present together in the genome in several species, also tend to be active in the same cells. For example, three genes that have been adjacent in several species (e.g., in sponges or cnidarians) for 600 million years are primarily active in a digestive cell type. “Cell types in animals can thus be characterized not only by individual genes but also by specific gene arrangements, and different cell types are also capable of accessing different regions in the genome,” explains Oleg Simakov, evolutionary biologist at the University of Vienna. In addition, the team noted that certain cell types seem to utilize such conserved regions more than others, and thus may represent very ancestral functions. Paper. (paywall) – Bob Zimmermann, Nicolas S. M. Robert, Ulrich Technau, Oleg Simakov. Ancient animal genome architecture reflects cell type identities. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41559-019-0946-7 More.

So if all this complexity got started in something like the twinkling of an eye, are we looking at an argument for creationism? Or what? What exactly is the source of all this very complex, very early information?

See also: Will setting proteins to music help us understand them?

A Single Set Of Genes Drives Pufferfish Spines, Mouse Hair, And Chicken Feathers

and

Direct experimental falsification of Darwinism

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Why didn’t the saber-toothed tigers survive?

Saber-toothed tiger skull/Vitezslav Halamka, Adobe Stock

A researcher offers a suggestion from her analysis of teeth from the la Brea tarpits: From ScienceDaily:

“Isotopes from the bones previously suggested that the diets of saber-toothed cats and dire wolves overlapped completely, but the isotopes from their teeth give a very different picture,” said DeSantis, an associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt. “The cats, including saber-toothed cats, American lions and cougars, hunted prey that preferred forests, while it was the dire wolves that seemed to specialize on open-country feeders like bison and horses. While there may have been some overlap in what the dominant predators fed on, cats and dogs largely hunted differently from one another.”

To study these ancient predators, she employs dentistry — taking molds of the teeth and shaving off tiny bits of enamel for chemical analysis. Information about everything the animal ate lies within the isotopes, she said. Further, the microscopic wear patterns on teeth can clarify who was eating flesh or scavenging on bones.

It’s likely that those giant predators went extinct due to climate change, the arrival of humans to their environment or a combination of the two, she said, and her team is working to clarify the cause of the extinction with multiple colleagues across six institutions as part of a separate on-going study.

What they know is predators alive today in the Americas were better able to adapt their diets. Instead of only feeding on large prey, they could effectively hunt small mammals, scavenge what they could from carcasses or do both. Paper. (open access) – Larisa R.G. DeSantis, Jonathan M. Crites, Robert S. Feranec, Kena Fox-Dobbs, Aisling B. Farrell, John M. Harris, Gary T. Takeuchi, Thure E. Cerling. Causes and Consequences of Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinctions as Revealed from Rancho La Brea Mammals. Current Biology, 2019; 29 (15): 2488 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.059 More.

If climate change, humans, or any other effect tended to mean smaller prey animals, it’s clear what happened: Saber teeth are not needed for dealing with sheep and calves. A mountain lion lugs less equipment around but gets the same value.

See also: Humans off the hook for ancient African mammal extinction?

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Our brains did not evolve to know facts about science?

How is science supposed to survive in the midst of all these “evolutionary” user illusions?

The great triumph of the theory of evolution was to show that humans are just animals in nature — clever, yes, but clever animals. Or so we are told. No more mysticism about the “mind”! — it’s just the human brain. The brain is a mechanism that evolved over time by natural selection, to enable our survival. And we can eventually figure out exactly how it works.

Not so fast. That door leads to a blind alley, as a recent essay by an enthusiastic neuroscientist illustrates.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says that evolution by natural selection selects for the fittest human. Is the fittest human the one most likely to pursue the truth at any cost? His team’s computer simulations showed otherwise “Why some scientists think science is an illusion ” at Mind Matters News

For those who take Darwinism seriously, that’s not good news for science. Of course, believing it requires that you buy into Hoffman’s computer sim as well.

See also: Further reading on dilemmas around consciousness:

Why some scientists believe the universe is conscious They’re not mystics. But materialism is not giving good answers so they are looking around

Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug. Materialists have a solution to the problem of consciousness, and it may startle you.

and

How can consciousness be a material thing? Maybe it can’t. But materialist philosophers face starkly limited choices in how to view consciousness.

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David Gelernter warns against Darwin mob

And he’s a Unabomber survivor. Here:

At The College Fix, editor Jennifer Kabbany takes note of Yale polymath David Gelernter’s interview with Peter Robinson, in which Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski also participated. The conversation followed Gelernter’s public admission of having rejected Darwinian theory. Kabbany highlights what Gelernter had to say about academic freedom. Good. College students need to understand this.

From “Famed Yale computer science professor quits believing Darwin’s theories”:

Gelernter said an ideological bent has taken over the field of science. There are good scientists doing good work, “but we have a cautionary tale in what happened to our English departments and our history departments could happen to us, God forbid,” he said.

Gelernter said he likes many of his colleagues at Yale, that they are his friends, but when he looks at “their intellectual behavior, what they have published — and much more importantly what they tell their students — Darwinism has indeed passed beyond a scientific argument as far as they are concerned. You take your life in your hands to challenge it intellectually. They will destroy you if you challenge it.”

David Klinghoffer, “Yale’s Gelernter: To Challenge Darwinism Is to “Take Your Life in Your Hands”” at Evolution News and Science Today

” You take your life in your hands”? Okay, then they leave us with few options but getting tougher with nonsense.  We’ll take the Darwinbird of pop science hostage!

See also: 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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Astronomer Martin Rees on why science is approaching its limits

And how it can transcend them via “intelligent design:”

We can expect huge advances on three frontiers: the very small, the very large, and the very complex. Nonetheless – and I’m sticking my neck out here – my hunch is there’s a limit to what we can understand. Efforts to understand very complex systems, such as our own brains, might well be the first to hit such limits. Perhaps complex aggregates of atoms, whether brains or electronic machines, can never know all there is to know about themselves. And we might encounter another barrier if we try to follow Weinberg’s arrows further down: if this leads to the kind of multi-dimensional geometry that string theorists envisage. Physicists might never understand the bedrock nature of space and time because the mathematics is just too hard.

Martin Rees, “Black holes are simpler than forests and science has its limits” at Aeon

And now, about transcending those limits?

Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity, spanning tens of millennia at most, will probably be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the post-human era – evolved not by Darwinian selection but via ‘intelligent design’. Whether the long-range future lies with organic post-humans or with electronic super-intelligent machines is a matter for debate. But we would be unduly anthropocentric to believe that a full understanding of physical reality is within humanity’s grasp, and that no enigmas will remain to challenge our remote descendants.

Martin Rees, “Black holes are simpler than forests and science has its limits” at Aeon

Be warned. In the middle of the bridge to the post-human artificial intelligence future sits a fat troll called the Halting Problem, waiting for an unsuspecting computer idealist to wander by…

See also: Astronomer Martin Rees Reacts To Suzan Mazur’s Darwin Overthrown

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If you can reproduce how life got started, $10 million is yours

Be your own intelligent designer! Specifically, create life from simple chemicals, information from nothing! You have to create a genetic code from simple chemicals:

Wealthy investors are offering a $10m prize to the first scientific team that can create a genetic code from simple chemicals — reproducing the unknown process that led billions of years ago to DNA as the vehicle for transmitting information in life on Earth. The Evolution 2.0 prize is an initiative by Perry Marshall, an online marketing entrepreneur based in Chicago. It will be judged by prominent scientists, including George Church, genetics professor at Harvard university, and Denis Noble, the Oxford university biologist who was the first to model the human heart on a computer…

Clive Cookson, “Entrepreneurs offer $10m prize for cracking mystery of DNA” at Financial Times

The entire $10 million will go only to a “patentable” coding system, with the sponsors of the prize as partners with the winner in commercialization.

Here’s the official Natural Code Prize vid:

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: Even viruses have complex origins now

and

Yes! Oparin’s coacervates again!

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Poll: American Public still not Galluping to embrace Darwinism

Only one in five (22%) Americans believes in Darwinism, according to a recent Gallup poll, higher than before but still nowhere near a winner.

What the poll doesn’t and can’t address is way more interesting:

Forty years ago, the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Physiology held a symposium of mathematicians and biologists. The conclusion of the mathematicians, after calculating all of the many wildly improbable layers of assumptions necessary for Darwinism to work, was that the origin and development of life according to Darwin’s old, worn out theory was simply impossible. What was the response of the Darwinist biologists? Simply this: The calculations of the mathematicians must be wrong since evolution happened. No evidence or analysis could disprove Darwinism.

What that means is that Darwinists are too lazy and too dumb and too corrupt to look for a more workable scientific theory for the origin and development of life. They view as “science” what props up their creaky ideology, just as Marxists consider their prophets’ failed musings as “science” and Freudians ignore all the utterly unproven assumptions in Freud’s theories as “science” and global warming disciples rewrite old temperature data to conform to their phony theory and consciously suppress data that disproves it.

Scientism is the enemy of science.

Bruce Walker, “Gallup, Darwinism, and Scientism” at American Thinker

It’s nice to know that at least one commentator on the poll remembers the Wistar meet of 1966 (over fifty years ago, actually).

Scientism is what happens when you shake most of the facts out of science but leave the dogmatism intact.

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

See also: My Wistar Retrospective Talk (Paul Nelson, 2008)

and

Ann Gauger Sets Record Straight On Wistar II (2012)

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Will setting proteins to music help us understand them?

Abstract musical notes/© flashmovie, Adobe Stock

From ScienceDaily:

In a surprising marriage of science and art, researchers at MIT have developed a system for converting the molecular structures of proteins, the basic building blocks of all living beings, into audible sound that resembles musical passages. Then, reversing the process, they can introduce some variations into the music and convert it back into new proteins never before seen in nature.

Although it’s not quite as simple as humming a new protein into existence, the new system comes close. It provides a systematic way of translating a protein’s sequence of amino acids into a musical sequence, using the physical properties of the molecules to determine the sounds. Although the sounds are transposed in order to bring them within the audible range for humans, the tones and their relationships are based on the actual vibrational frequencies of each amino acid molecule itself, computed using theories from quantum chemistry…

The whole concept, Buehler explains, is to get a better handle on understanding proteins and their vast array of variations. Proteins make up the structural material of skin, bone, and muscle, but are also enzymes, signaling chemicals, molecular switches, and a host of other functional materials that make up the machinery of all living things. But their structures, including the way they fold themselves into the shapes that often determine their functions, are exceedingly complicated. “They have their own language, and we don’t know how it works,” he says. “We don’t know what makes a silk protein a silk protein or what patterns reflect the functions found in an enzyme. We don’t know the code.”

By translating that language into a different form that humans are particularly well-attuned to, and that allows different aspects of the information to be encoded in different dimensions — pitch, volume, and duration — Buehler and his team hope to glean new insights into the relationships and differences between different families of proteins and their variations, and use this as a way of exploring the many possible tweaks and modifications of their structure and function. As with music, the structure of proteins is hierarchical, with different levels of structure at different scales of length or time. Paper. (paywall) – Chi-Hua Yu, Zhao Qin, Francisco J. Martin-Martinez, Markus J. Buehler. A Self-Consistent Sonification Method to Translate Amino Acid Sequences into Musical Compositions and Application in Protein Design Using Artificial Intelligence. ACS Nano, 2019; DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b02180 More.

So they have a language, even though they supposedly sludged together just by chance?

Hey, if this music turns into something like Palestrina, we will know for sure it’s design. (It could be design without turning into Palestrina but the reverse does not follow.)

See also: Evidence for irreducible complexity in proteins

and

Cells and proteins use sugars to talk to one another

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