Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 447

Are extinctions evidence of a divine purpose in life?

Late Pleistocene landscape/By Mauricio Antón – from Caitlin Sedwick (1 April 2008). “What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?”. PLoS Biology 6 (4): e99. DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060099., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...

Hugh Ross asks us to consider the Pliocene extinction:

Two years ago, a team of seven ecologists and paleontologists from Switzerland, Panama, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States identified a previously unrecognized mass extinction event. They determined that 36% of the Pliocene marine megafauna (mammals, seabirds, turtles, and sharks) genera failed to survive into the Pleistocene. The Pliocene Epoch extended from 5.333 to 2.580 million years ago while the Pleistocene Epoch spanned from 2.580 million years ago to 11,700 years ago.

The seven ecologists ascertained that the Pliocene-Pleistocene mass extinction event especially impacted animal species with high energy requirements. Animal species that lived in coastal and continental shelf marine habitats were also especially impacted.

A month ago, three astrobiologists published a paper in which they presented evidence that a nearby supernova either caused or was a substantial contributor to the Pliocene-Pleistocene mass extinction event. They first pointed out that there is independent evidence from multiple sources for up to ten nearby supernova eruption events during the past 8 million years. Of these supernovae, the one that impacted Earth most strongly occurred about 2.6 million years ago.4 This ensemble of supernova eruption events also formed the Local Bubble in the nearby interstellar medium…

As with all mass extinction events that have occurred in the history of Earth’s life, the Pliocene-Pleistocene mass extinction event poses a serious challenge to models attempting to explain the history of Earth’s life by strictly natural means. The general trend in that history reflects a pattern of increasing numbers of species of life where the most complex life-forms become progressively complex and advanced. Thus, on average, the rate of speciation must exceed the rate of extinction. While natural processes and events can explain the extinctions, they are not able to explain the speciations. Naturalistic models are especially challenged to explain high rates of speciation for large-bodied, advanced animals. A creation model can readily explain the speciation rates as stemming from the mind of a supernatural Creator who replaces species when he pleases and for his purposes.

Hugh Ross, “Another Megafaunal Extinction Challenge to Naturalistic Evolution” at Reasons to Believe

See also: Is there a fixed time limit for recovery after mass extinctions?

and

Learning more about the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs

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Gems from headlines 2011-2012 predicting the demise of ID

2011: Does anyone remember the Clergy Letter Project?

In case you had any doubt, the last nail was just placed in the coffin of intelligent design (ID). And, in case you had any doubt, that last nail joins many others that have been in place for quite some time.

The latest attack appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) and provides conclusive evidence that the design of the human genome is incredibly imperfect, or, in other words, very far from being intelligently structured. As John Avise, a University of California-Irvine biologist, noted in the paper, his focus “is on a relatively neglected category of argument against ID and in favor of evolution: the argument from imperfection, as applied to the human genome.”

Michael Zimmerman, “Intelligent Design: Scientifically and Religiously Bankrupt” at HuffPost

All genomes are a river of languages of creative information flowing through time. Sometimes, where the information ends up, it is not useful. We know a lot more about the human genome (and others) now than we did then but none of it suggests that there is no underlying intelligence.

2011: From a novelist and screenwriter:

Thanks to Michele Bachmann, the tired concept of Intelligent Design has once again become a topic of conversation among Creationists, most of whom, ironically, often sound like Neanderthals. In case you don’t know, this boneheaded theory claims that the human body is simply too remarkable to have come into being through millions of years of haphazard evolution, and that some super-intelligent deity must have been the engineering wizard behind the miracle of our anatomies.

Miracle? Really? If you’re over 50 and your body is starting to fall apart, it’s pretty obvious that the design is anything but intelligent.

John Blumenthal, “Intelligent Design? Not If You’re Over 50” at HuffPost

Somehow, Blumenthal has built into his definition of design the idea that in a finite and temporal world, designs should be ageless and invulnerable. Sure. That’ll work.

2012: A “physics professor, minister, major fan of Johnny Cash and the planet Saturn” holds forth:

For a person of faith, ID is not just an unnecessary choice; it is a harmful one. It reduces God to a kind of holy tinkerer. It locates the divine in places of ignorance and obscurity. And this gives it a defensive and fearful spirit that is out of place in Christian faith and theology. …

ID denies its proponents that freedom. Having opted to close the door on science, they steal from themselves the opportunity to see nature more deeply. In so doing they dig in their heels, refusing to be drawn, Kepler-style, closer to the creator God they all believe in. This is the great irony of ID.

Because ID is established in scientific ignorance, it cannot last. It is passing even now. And its religiously-motivated rejection by Kepler 400 years ago suggests that the seeds of its demise were planted even then. In this long view, it may be that ID never even managed to arrive.

Paul Wallace, “Intelligent Design Is Dead: A Christian Perspective” at HuffPost

As it happens, Darwin is in way bigger trouble now. One regularly sees stuff walloping along in the current of science information that isn’t consistent with any plausible interpretation of biology’s Big Theory. Not only does no one do anything about it but the worry that they ever will is beginning to fade.

See also: Direct Experimental Falsification Of Darwinism? (The Selfish Gene was heard to sob uncontrollably in the background.)

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Researchers: Plants were “remodelled” 450 mya to grow leaves

Background: Moss remodelling itself in Hull, Quebec

A change in the timing and location of gene activity did the trick:

The team discovered that around 450-million years ago a switch enabled plants to delay reproduction and displace new cells downwards from the shoot tips, paving the way to plant diversification. Using cutting-edge developmental and genetic techniques, the team studied the swollen reproductive structures at the tips of the small stems of mosses. These plants, which represent a starting point for plant evolution, are raised upwards by new cells generated in the middle of the stem. Despite their different patterns of growth, similar genes are responsible for elongating the stems of mosses and plants with more elaborate shoots.

Contrary to prior work, the results demonstrate a nascent mechanism for shoot development as plants first emerged on land and suggest that a change in the timing and location of gene activity triggered the radiation of shooting forms.

Dr. Jill Harrison, the study’s lead author and Senior Lecturer from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, explains: “By comparing our new findings from a moss with previous findings, we can see that a pre-existing genetic network was remodelled to allow shoot systems to arise in plant evolution.”

University of Bristol, “Genes that first enabled plants to grow leaves identified by scientists” at Phys.org

It looks very much like a plan rather than an accident.

See also: Researchers: Photosynthesis May Be A Billion Years Older Than Thought … But WAIT!

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The genes that come to life after you die

It sounds ghoulish but it could just be part of decomposition:

The idea that genes would activate after an organism’s death was unheard of, so the researchers wrote it off as a mistake with their instrumentation. But repeated tests, in fish and then in mice, continued to bear out the impossible: genes activating hours, or even days, after an organism died.

The scientists’ findings were met with skepticism, until a group of researchers led by Roderic Guigó at Barcelona’s Centre for Genomic Regulation also found post-mortem gene activity, this time in humans. “We were saved when the group from the Barcelona genome institute covered the paper on humans, because they … proved the same thing,” says Noble.

Kate Golembiewski, “After You Die, These Genes Come to Life” at Discover Magazine

The most likely explanation is that death is a process of shutting down, rather than an instant when everything stops. The genes to grow a spinal column, for example, resurfaced but maybe they had been suppressed because the deceased already had one. Still much to learn but that’s a good hypothesis to test.

We might learn some things about development quite unexpectedly this way.

See also: Reproductive stem cells have system to fight off jumping genes

and

De we really live longer because of longevity genes? Researchers cast doubt.

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Michael Egnor: Why human-ape similarity argues for human exceptionality

Michael Egnor

If man is an animal biologically, but so unlike an animal cognitively, the obvious implication is that some aspect of the human mind is not biological:

Only man has the capacity for abstract thought, and this is what essentially distinguishes us from non-human animals. The fact that we share so much biologically with animals means that the enormous differences between the human mind and the animal mind do not have a material origin. That is, the profound differences between humans and animals is not in the substance of our bodies.

Ironically, if humans and animals were biologically more different, materialists could claim that the material biological differences rather than immaterial spiritual differences account for our powers of abstract thought. It is precisely the biological similarity between humans and animals that precludes such an argument.Michael Egnor, “Human-ape similarity shows humans are exceptional” at Mind Matters News

When everything is the same except the one thing that matters most, we can be sure we are onto a real difference.

Also by Michael Egnor on human exceptionalism

Can animals “reason”? My challenge to Jeffrey Shallit: He believes that animals can engage in abstract thinking. What abstractions do they reason about?

University fires philosophy prof, hires chimpanzee to teach, research A light-hearted look at what would happen if we really thought that unreason is better than reason

Why apes are not spiritual beings: Apes do not have language, which enables humans to think about abstract ideas

How is human language different from animal signals? What do we need from language that we cannot get from signals alone?

and

Apes can be generous. Are they just like humans then?

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Why does an AI pioneer think that Jeopardy winner Watson is a “fraud”?

This. Post. Is.Not. An. Approved. Direction. Of. CorrectThought. (Rule # 0013654)

This is relevant if you know people who think that someday soon computers will think like people:

The famous Jeopardy contest in 2011 worked around the fact that Watson could not grasp the meaning of anything.

There’s two kinds of games going on. One was, for the human contestants, they weren’t allowed to buzz in until the light went on and it took them a fraction of a second to see the light and respond. And Watson couldn’t see lights so it was sent an electronic signal when it was okay to buzz in and that signal got there faster and was processed faster. And so Watson was repeatedly able to buzz in faster than the humans were. And it wasn’t that the humans didn’t know the answer, it was that they just didn’t have the reflexes.

The other gaming was that computers don’t really understand words… So you ask, “Who was the sixteenth president of the United States.”? The computer doesn’t know what “sixteenth” and “president of the United States” mean. But it can go and rummage through Wikipedia-like sources and find those words and match them to a president, Abraham Lincoln and come back with “‘Who’ was Abraham Lincoln.”

But then you put anything in that’s like a pun or a joke or a riddle or sarcasm, that you can’t look up in Wikipedia, and computers are helpless.
< “Why an AI pioneer thinks Watson is a “fraud”” at Mind Matters News

It is not your new overlord. It is a very big adding machine that works very fast.

Podcast:

https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-041-Gary-Smith.mp3

Here are the show notes.

See also: Earlier discussions between Robert J. Marks and Gary Smith:

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.

Further reading on “lies, damned lies, and statistics”*:

Big data can lie: Simpson’s Paradox Simpson’s Paradox illustrates the importance of human interpretation of the results of data mining. (Robert J. Marks)

Study shows eating raisins causes plantar warts. Sure. Because, if you torture a Big Data enough, it will confess to anything. (Robert J. Marks)

A proverb among 19th century British politicians, popularized by Mark Twain. “It suggests that statisyics can be used to mislead even more than the worst form of untruth.” – The Phrase Finder

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New book from Harvard U Press: Childhood, not evolution makes us human

Michael Tomasello was director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology:

Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on development. Building on the seminal ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child’s life. Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities. But then, Tomasello argues, the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities—through the new forms of sociocultural interaction they enable—into uniquely human cognition and sociality. The first step occurs around nine months, with the emergence of joint intentionality, exercised mostly with caregiving adults. The second step occurs around three years, with the emergence of collective intentionality involving both authoritative adults, who convey cultural knowledge, and coequal peers, who elicit collaboration and communication. Finally, by age six or seven, children become responsible for self-regulating their beliefs and actions so that they comport with cultural norms.

Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work.” — from the publisher“

Two things: If the significant changes happen to humans between birth and seven years of age, it is not a theory of evolution at all, but of intellectual and cultural development.

Also, Tomasello seems not be following the party line that apes are just like us but we refuse to recognize the fact. That’s borderline heresy.

Maybe he doesn’t really mean it.

See also: Researchers: Apes are just like us! And we’re not doing the right things to make them start behaving that way… Back in 2011, we were told in Smithsonian Magazine, “‘Talking’ apes are not just the stuff of science fiction; scientists have taught many apes to use some semblance of language.” Have they? If so, why has it all subsided? What happened?

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Extreme black hole shows Einstein was right

The story concerns a “supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, a monster with the mass of four million suns called Sagittarius A, or SgrA”:

Put simply, when S0-2 is closest to SgrA*, the black hole acts like a speed bump, slowing down the star’s light as it escapes into the cosmos. The effect shows up as a stretching of S0-2’s light toward less energetic, redder wavelengths.

“Gravitational redshift is fundamentally encoded in the spectroscopy,” says Ghez, who noted that S0-2’s starlight slows down by about 125 miles a second—exactly what Einstein’s equations predict for an object with SgrA*’s gravitational heft. As a bonus, the work more precisely pins down the mass and distance of SgrA*.

Nadia Drake, “Extreme black hole vindicates Einstein (again)” at National Geographic

Of course, there is so much talk these days of a crisis in physics that one is tempted to wonder if vindicating Einstein is regarded as just as positive an event as it would have been decades ago. Good stuff anyway.

See also: At Scientific American: Understanding the cosmology crisis

At Forbes: Cosmology’s Crisis Is Merely “Manufactured Misunderstandings”

Rob Sheldon: The real reason there is a crisis in cosmology Nearly everything that has failed about the Big Bang model has been added because of bad metaphysics, a refusal to accept the consequences of a beginning. The remaining pieces of the Big Bang model that are failing and which can’t be attributed to bad metaphysics, were added from sheer laziness.

Here’s the supermassive black hole:

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Kirk Durston offers a scientific method for design detection

Can this definition be applied in practice?

– Design application: the application of intelligence to first principles in physics to produce a desired effect (e.g., a smartphone).

– Design derivation: the reverse engineering of a complex effect back to first principles of physics for the purpose of discovering the design process and application (e.g., one company or country reverse-engineering the technology of another company or country).

– Design detection: the analysis of effects to determine which required intelligence to produce and which could be produced by nature (e.g., searching for the acoustic signature of a submarine amidst the natural background noise of the ocean).

From the three categories noted above, a possible definition of intelligent design can be formulated as follows:

“Intelligent design: an effect that required an intelligent mind to produce.”

Kirk Durston, “A Scientific Method for Design Detection” at Evolution News and Science Today

See also: Kirk Durston: What do we do when Darwinism looks less like science all the time

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Panpsychism: Scientists who believe that the universe is conscious

They’re not mystics. But materialism is not giving good answers so they are looking around:

It’s easy to mock the idea. But consider what neuroscientists studying consciousness are up against:

“Traditionally, scientists have been stalwart materialists. But doing so has caused them to slam up against the limitations of materialism. Consider the chasm between relativity and quantum mechanics, or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and you quickly start to recognize these incongruities. – Philip Perry, “The Universe May Be Conscious, Say Prominent Scientists” at Bigthink, June 25, 2017″

Put another way, in a universe governed by uncertainty principles rather than hard facts, what is the “material” in materialism? There is no good materialist theory of consciousness; far from it, an article in Chronicles of Higher Education last year labeled the current research a “bizarre” field of science.

Consciousness depends on the brain, yes. But one may as well say that a student’s essay depends on her laptop. The laptop enables an essay that it does not create. Her ideas start elsewhere but where, exactly, do they start? What space do they inhabit?

Some prominent physicists and neuroscientists who cannot accept the idea of a separate immaterial reality (dualism) turn to the simplest alternative, that the whole universe participates in consciousness (panpsychism).

“Why some scientists believe the universe is conscious” at Mind Matters News

See also: Further reading on panpsychism:

No materialist theory of consciousness is plausible. All such theories either deny the very thing they are trying to explain, result in absurd scenarios, or end up requiring an immaterial intervention. (Eric Holloway)

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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