Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 45

At Mind Matters News: What does it mean to say bees “feel and think”?

The New Scientist reviewer is unsure that we are ready for such a radical message. Unsure? At one time, it would have been “not science!”:

Behavioral ecologist Lars Chittka’s book, The Mind of a Bee (Princeton University Press, 2022), is a fascinating detailed description of bee behavior that will cure us of believing that the insect world is devoid of intelligence or sensation. Indeed, in a 2018 essay with Catherine Wilson, Chittka offers many research findings in a shorter format. It’s only in Chapter 11, toward the book’s end, that he makes a controversial claim:

“From the very start, early in evolution, nervous systems were inseparable from movable bodies with sensors, and developed in order to integrate perception and action. The challenges of survival and self-replication (reproduction) that a moving organism faces are most efficiently met when brain and body are intimately connected, enabling the organism to know itself as distinct from non-self and to predict at least the immediate future, in part from knowing its own intentions. In this view, an elementary form of consciousness may have come into being at the roots, not at the endpoint, of animal life. – Lars Chittka, The Mind of a Bee, Princeton University Press, 2022 pp. 208-209” …

What, exactly, does “consciousness” or “feel and think” mean when applied to a bee? This usage is no remote outpost. Renowned USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio tells us that viruses are “intelligent.” Similarly, University of Chicago biochemist James Shapiro tells us in a scholarly paper that all living cells are “cognitive.” But what do they mean? Intelligent or cognitive as in humans? Dogs? Bees? Are we talking about a universal standard or are these the intuitions of seminal thinkers?

The difference matters: Panpsychism (everything is conscious) and, for that matter, insect rights, can advance a great deal in public perception, unimpeded by the risks that attend clear and rigorous terminology. The very fact that formerly materialist New Scientist treats it sympathetically underlines the transformation.

Denyse O’Leary, “What does it mean to say bees “feel and think”?” at Mind Matters News (August 11, 2022)

Panpsychism is winning over materialism in science. What changes will that portend?

You may also wish to read:

Can insects be conscious? Let’s look at bees first. Consciousness does not seem to reside in the neocortex so complex behavior in bees has raised the question for biologists and philosophers alike. Bees can rival mammals in problem-solving intelligence. They can also want things, which gives them a rudimentary form of consciousness.

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Jerry Coyne tells us: Anticreationist book author Twittermobbed, may be de-Wikipedia’d

First, here’s the book.

Creationists had nothing to do with her plight. The Woke pounced. And don’t expect their accusations to necessarily make any sense. They wouldn’t have to. One of Coyne’s readers provides links:

”I’d like to bring your attention to what’s been happening over the past couple of days to the paleoartist and behavioral geneticist Emily Willoughby. Emily is the co-author and illustrator of the anti-creationism book that you covered here: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/0...

The main Twitter thread attacking her is this one: https://twitter.com/Prehistorica_CM/s...

And Emily posted this thread in response: https://twitter.com/eawilloughby/stat...

What is clear is that mob sentiment is now trying to get her page erased because a few yahoos falsely accused of her engaging in racist work on IQ. Nobody cares about the facts; an accusation is sufficient.”

The people trying to hurt her career are reprehensible; humans lacking a crumb of empathy and wallowing in their own ignorance about the person they’re trying to cancel. And if Wikipedia erases her article, it will be shameful.

Jerry Coyne, “The imminent cancellation of Emily Willoughby: a fight to remove her from Wikipedia” at Why Evolution Is True (August 21, 2022)

Willoughby might as well be Gunter Bechly.

Get this: “Nobody cares about the facts; an accusation is sufficient.” Oh, for heaven’s sakes, look on the bright side!: At least we know it’s the authentic Twitter mob and not some second-rate substitute like a starving wolf pack…

The thing is, Darwinians themselves (like Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne) perfected the art of deplatforming when they used it on Darwin skeptics. The Woke adopted it — but the Woke, as it happens, eat their benefactors. So, of course, now the Woke are coming after the Darwinians…

It’s hard to know how to help because none of these people believe in intellectual freedom. So where do we start?

Jerry Coyne is also trying to do something about Scientific American going Woke. It’s likely hard for him to accept that Woke is slowly becoming all that Scientific American has got now. Woke devours institutions the way cancer devours a body, as long as there is anything to sustain it.

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At Mind Matters News: Octopuses create an “origin of intelligence” conundrum

Outstandingly bright — with eyes that strikingly resemble ours — yet their ancestors split from mammals and birds 600 million years ago… Some say, oh well, it’s convergent evolution.

But such convergent evolution raises a conundrum for conventional assumptions about evolution in general, including the evolution of intelligence (in terms of problem-solving skills). The intelligence of octopuses was not recognized in the past because many researchers assumed that intelligence itself was something of an accident that evolved among, say, mammals and birds. We do not really know how it is created but, after all, if it only happened once, it could be put down to a fluke…

[James Bridle] might be right in thinking that many life forms will turn out to be much more intelligent than we have supposed. But we don’t have evidence for that. What we have evidence for is a single very intelligent invertebrate (and some moderately intelligent ones like squid, crabs, and lobsters) that confound what we expected of evolution.

Denyse O’Leary, “Octopuses create an “origin of intelligence” conundrum” at Mind Matters News (August 18, 2022)

Takehome: The evolution of intelligence in mammals and birds could be dismissed as a fluke. Finding far-distant intelligent life forms suggests a pattern instead. But what is it?

You may also wish to read:

Octopuses get emotional about pain, research suggests. The smartest of invertebrates, the octopus, once again prompts us to rethink what we believe to be the origin of intelligence. The brainy cephalopods behaved about the same as lab rats under similar conditions, raising both neuroscience and ethical issues. (Denyse O’Leary)

and

Can squirrels really be socially unjust? Check their privilege? A recent paper suggests that the animal world, untroubled for aeons by any notion of conscience, has a lot to answer for. Researchers long assumed that people think like animals. But the equation reads the same in reverse: Animals think like people. Folklore soon trumps reality. (Denyse O’Leary)

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At Mind Matters News: People with half their brains removed do well on psych tests

In a recent study, adults who had had hemispherectomies as children — to combat severe epilepsy — performed within 10% of other study subjects on face and word recognition:

In view of the claim we frequently hear that “the mind is just what the brain does,” it’s a remarkable fact that the forty study subjects who had half their brains removed are functional at all, never mind that they do less well than a control group with no similar background.

We are used to thinking of the brain as an organization with departments, some in the left brain and some in the right. But the brain may be more like an ocean so it is more complex than that. …

If neurosurgeon Michael Egnor is right, not only is the human mind not simply what the brain does but human consciousness, unlike a material thing, cannot be split. He should know because he must sometimes split brains, in order to improve the outlook for persons with epilepsy.

News, “People with half their brains removed do well on psych tests” at Mind Matters News (August 18, 2022)

Takehome: Findings like this are a challenge to those who insist that the mind is simply what the brain does. The mind may not be split or removed when the brain is.

You may also wish to read: Yes, split brains are weird, but not the way you think. Scientists who dismiss consciousness and free will ignore the fact that the higher faculties of the mind cannot be split even by splitting the brain in half. Patients after split-brain surgery are not split people. They feel the same, act the same, and think the same, for all intents and purposes. Materialists like Jerry Coyne focus on subtle differences and distort the big picture. (Michael Egnor)

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At Mind Matters News: Has a superintellect monkeyed with our universe’s physics?

Groundbreaking astronomer Fred Hoyle was a staunch atheist but then he tried showing that carbon, essential to life, could form easily…

Stephen C. Meyer: Now, some of the most important fine tuning parameters were first discovered by Sir Fred Hoyle, a British Australian astronomer and astrophysicist. Hoyle was in his early career a staunch atheist. And in fact he was quoted as saying that, “Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves.” [Harper’s Magazine, 1951] He went on to say that people didn’t like him because he took away hope by saying things like that.

In any case, Hoyle was working on theories of how carbon formed. And he was struck by a big mystery, which is, why is there so much carbon in the universe? He realized that carbon was super important, because carbon forms, long chain-like molecules that are necessary for any form of life to exist. Without carbon there is no possibility of life.

News, “Has a superintellect monkeyed with our universe’s physics?” at Mind Matters News (August 14, 2022)

Takehome: It got worse for Hoyle: To form carbon at all, gravitational forces must be balanced just right with the electromagnetic forces. That’s just the start…

Steve Meyer is the author of The Return of the God Hypothesis.

Here’s the first portion of the talk: If DNA is a language, who is the speaker? Philosopher Steve Meyer talks about the significance of Francis Crick’s sequence hypothesis that showed that DNA is a language of life. What sort of speaker can utter a language that produces living beings? Is it a fluctuation of a multiverse or an intelligence that underlies nature?

You may also wish to read: Life is so wonderfully finely tuned that it’s frightening. A mathematician who uses statistical methods to model the fine tuning of molecular machines and systems in cells reflects… Every single cell is like a city that cannot function without a complex network of services that must all work together to maintain life.

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At Phys.org: Mathematical model of animal growth shows life is defined by biology, not physics

Monash University scientists have challenged the conventional wisdom that biological patterns are explained by physical constraints.

In a study published today in Science, the researchers present their mathematical model of animal growth which describes how animals devote energy to growth and reproduction as they age and increase in size.

“Despite the fact that living organisms cannot break the laws of physics, evolution has shown itself to be extraordinarily adept at finding loopholes,” said lead study author Professor Craig White, from the Monash University School of Biological Sciences, and the Center for Geometric Biology.

An unexplained problem in biology concerns the non-proportional (allometric) relationship between energy metabolism and size.

“Finding that an animal’s metabolism can be explained without invoking physical constraints means that we’ve been looking in the wrong place when it comes to finding answers for why this widespread pattern occurs,” Professor White said.

“We believe that physical constraints don’t drive as much of the biology that we observe as previously supposed, and that evolution has a wider range of options than previously thought,” he said.

An increase in size, during development or evolution, is typically accompanied by a less-than-proportional increase in energy requirements such that, when compared gram-for-gram, large animals burn less energy and require less food than small ones.

For example, small mammals such as shrews might need to consume as much as three times their body weight in food each day, whereas the largest—baleen whales—eat just 5–30% of their body weight in krill each day.

Note: This comparison fails to take into account the difference in metabolism between a shrew and a whale. Also, another obvious difference affecting energy requirements is that the shrew moves on land and the whale moves through water. Finding an allometric relationship between body mass and energy requirements, but failing to take into account all the relevant physical and environmental factors, and then ascribing it to the cleverness of natural selection is a stretch. The laws of physics universally set limits on performance.

“Our study argues against the conventional wisdom that biological patterns such as allometric scaling occur because of physical constraints,” said Professor White.

“We devised a mathematical model of animal growth that describes how animals shift their energy allocation from growth to reproduction as they increase in age and size, and show that lifetime reproduction is maximized when metabolism scales out of proportion with size,” he said.

“Many models presented since the early nineteenth century have used physical or geometric constraints to explain this pattern, but ours does not. Simply put, classic theories argued that animals have the metabolism they have because they must, we find they have the metabolism they have because it’s the best.”

Professor White said the study showed that allometric scaling does not have to be a result of physical or geometric limits. Instead, natural selection, not physics, favors allometric scaling.

Phys.org

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At Evolution News: Michael Denton Explains the Miracle of Your Heart

David Klinghoffer writes:

The human heart was a wonder before humans knew much of anything scientifically or medically about it. It is the organ in our body most often turned into a metaphor: to “have a heart” (as distinguished from “having heart,” which means something different), “of pure heart,” “light of heart,” “a heart bursting with…,” and more. As we feel it working in our chest, it can tell us things before we register them consciously. Different kinds of palpitations may alert us to the presence of an enemy or predator, or before we realize it, that we are in love.

Now add to this the wonders revealed by science about this biological pump. A new video, “The Miracle of the Human Heart Explained by Biologist Michael Denton,” notes that if we live to be 80 years old, it will have beat 2 billion notes of life. Each beat, Dr. Denton points out, pumps a hundred billion red blood cells: “By the heart’s unceasing activity, it ensures a bountiful supply of oxygen to provide us with the vital energy of life.” No human invention can compare with it.

But there is still more that most people – probably most scientists – have never even considered, and that seals the case for the heart’s intelligent design. As Denton explains in his recent book, The Miracle of Man, nature was specially crafted — he calls it “prior fitness” — to make the work of the heart possible. Here, he mentions just three illustrations: the prior fitness of light, of water, and of transition metals. A proper accounting of nature’s prior fitness for human life would “fill many volumes.” This brief video gives only a hint of that. The Miracle of Man gives more than a hint. Learn about the miracle and share it with friends and family:

The Miracle of the Human Heart Explained by Biologist Michael Denton

The heart: a miracle of biological functionality, essential for our physical existence. As Denton explains, our circulatory system depends upon numerous factors of prior fitness in the properties of our atmosphere, sunlight, and transition metal atoms. Do we ascribe this exceptional confluence of wonders to nature or to the God who designed nature? Do we worship dirt and static electricity or a God who transcends it all?

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At Science Daily: Evidence that giant meteorite impacts created the continents

Dr. Tim Johnson, from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the idea that the continents originally formed at sites of giant meteorite impacts had been around for decades, but until now there was little evidence to support the theory.

“By examining tiny crystals of the mineral zircon in rocks from the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, which represents Earth’s best-preserved remnant of ancient crust, we found evidence of these giant meteorite impacts,” Dr. Johnson said.

Giant impact on Earth, illustration (stock image; elements furnished by NASA).
Credit: © muratart / stock.adobe.com

“Studying the composition of oxygen isotopes in these zircon crystals revealed a ‘top-down’ process starting with the melting of rocks near the surface and progressing deeper, consistent with the geological effect of giant meteorite impacts.

“Our research provides the first solid evidence that the processes that ultimately formed the continents began with giant meteorite impacts, similar to those responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, but which occurred billions of years earlier.”

Dr Johnson said understanding the formation and ongoing evolution of the Earth’s continents was crucial given that these landmasses host the majority of Earth’s biomass, all humans and almost all of the planet’s important mineral deposits.

“Not least, the continents host critical metals such as lithium, tin and nickel, commodities that are essential to the emerging green technologies needed to fulfil our obligation to mitigate climate change,” Dr. Johnson said.

“These mineral deposits are the end result of a process known as crustal differentiation, which began with the formation of the earliest landmasses, of which the Pilbara Craton is just one of many.

“Data related to other areas of ancient continental crust on Earth appears to show patterns similar to those recognised in Western Australia. We would like to test our findings on these ancient rocks to see if, as we suspect, our model is more widely applicable.”

Dr. Johnson is affiliated with The Institute for Geoscience Research (TIGeR), Curtin’s flagship earth sciences research institute.

The paper, ‘Giant impacts and the origin and evolution of continents‘, was published in Nature.

Science Daily

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At Big Think: Why the Multiverse is a “God-of-the-gaps” theory

Professor Marcelo Gleiser writes:

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The Multiverse has been proposed as an answer to the question, “Why does our Universe exist?” Its proponents believe the Multiverse can explain our origins without having to reference God. But the Multiverse is in no way falsifiable, and the arguments in its support are nearly identical to the arguments for God. Not all questions need to be answered in order to be meaningful.

In the late 17th century, the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz said, “The first question that should rightly be asked is, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’” Leibniz was turning to this question to prove the existence of God.

Credit: Andrew Brumagen / Adobe StockSliding into cosmic inflation

The very success of the science that emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries — Newtonian mechanics and gravity, optics, chemistry, and so on — created a distance between science and religion. The trend continued with force for 300 years, and now most people accept a clear separation between the two. Religion may inspire a number of scientists, but it is no longer part of the scientific discourse. 

That was true, at least, until the advent of the Multiverse hypothesis in recent cosmology.

The Multiverse is a strange idea. Its roots are very old, dating back to Ancient Greece. (The interested reader should consult Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s excellent book.) There are two main inspirations for the modern version of the Multiverse: Inflationary cosmology and superstring theory. In inflation, the Universe undergoes a super-fast, exponential expansion very early on in its infancy, fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The expansion is propelled at such speed by a hypothetical field called the inflaton — basically a fluid-like presence that permeates the whole of space and has the unique property of pushing space apart. A simple picture is that of a child going down a slide. Why does the child go down? Since she is not at the ground (the lowest point), there is potential gravitational energy that is converted into kinetic energy (motion) as the child slides. When the child hits the ground, all that potential energy has been converted to kinetic energy. At impact, that energy is converted into friction and heat. 

The inflaton is similar. It starts with its potential energy, and while it is sliding down, this is converted into kinetic energy. But since the inflaton fills the whole of space, this process makes space expand like a balloon. 

The Multiverse comes in when we add quantum physics to this picture. In quantum physics, everything is jittery. The inflaton is jittery, too. This means that while it is going downhill, quantum effects may kick it upward a bit in some regions of space, or down a bit in others. Since the amount of potential energy determines how fast the Universe expands, the inflaton will cause regions of space to expand faster or slower. The Universe splits into many Universes, each with its own expansion rate. This collection of Universes, or cosmoids, is the inflationary Multiverse. We live, supposedly, in one of these bubbles. 

Landscaping the Multiverse

In superstring theories, the Multiverse comes from the string landscape. Briefly, superstring theories require spaces with six extra dimensions. This means superstrings live in nine-dimensional spaces. But we do not. At some point very early in the history of the Universe (or maybe before, it is not clear), six of these nine dimensions balled up and remained very tiny, while the other three — the ones we live in — kept growing. My PhD thesis, in the mid-1980s, was about different scenarios that would keep these extra dimensions small so that we cannot see them. 

Now, this extra six-dimensional space has a shape, a topology. In fact, it can have many different topologies, and each one of them generates a different three-dimensional Universe. The theory predicts that the reason the Universe is the way it is — why the electron has the mass it does, why gravity or electromagnetism have the intensity they do — is due to the shape and topology of this extra six-dimensional space. We can picture the string landscape as the set of all possible shapes this extra space can have. Each generates a different three-dimensional Universe, with different physical properties. Ours, the theory states, would be the only one that has physical variables with the values we measure in the laboratory.

The superstring Multiverse, then, is the collection of all these Universes that pop up in the string landscape. And what does this have to do with God? Well, proponents of the theory argue that our Universe is fine-tuned for being the way it is and for having the properties it has. These properties include the existence of observers that can make theories about it. Some would argue this fine-tuning needs a fine-tuner, i.e., God. If you do not want a fine-tuning God, having a plethora of possible Universes reduces the problem to a kind of cosmic lottery game. Out of a huge number of Universes, ours is just one. We won the cosmic lottery, at least if you consider our existence to be a win — and we did not need a God to win it.

Familiar philosophical framing

How reasonable is this argument? First, from a physical perspective, we need to accept that superstring theory is a fundamental “theory of “everything,” including its predictions of supersymmetry — an extra symmetry of nature that predicts that each particle has a supersymmetric partner — and of six extra dimensions of space. So far, we have zero experimental evidence for either of these two properties. We have found no supersymmetry, and no extra dimensions. Proponents argue that maybe the supersymmetric particles are just too heavy to be seen by our current accelerators, while the extra dimensions are too tiny to be detected. Maybe, but then we cannot ever falsify this theory: Particles can always be too heavy and extra dimensions can always be too small for any machine that we ever build to detect. 

The same with the Multiverse. By construction, these extra Universes exist outside our own and thus are not directly detectable. They may cause indirect signals, possibly from past collisions, but no such signal has been detected. On physical grounds there is not much support for the string landscape and its Multiverse. 

And what about philosophically? The whole “if you don’t like God you’d better have the Multiverse” argument is very similar to Leibniz’s, just carried out backwards. This may be surprising for Multiverse enthusiasts to hear. But it should be clear that the Multiverse, in a curious inversion, is playing the exact same role as the God-of-the-Gaps. God’s existence is not provable by observations. The Multiverse is not provable by observations. God explains the Universe. The Multiverse explains the Universe. The Multiverse, then, is a lot like God. Weird, right?

The false assumption is that something that exists requires an explanation, whatever the cost of this explanation. In the case of the Universe, this is the problem of the First Cause, the uncaused cause that causes the Universe to become. This transition from being (God or an uncaused Multiverse) to becoming has been twisting our logical arguments into knots for at least 3,000 years, and probably longer. The question, then, is this: What is the price we must pay to have an “answer”? Is the price a supernatural cause, or an untestable scientific explanation? And in the end, does accepting either make a difference? Does it offer a way out? We should instead accept that not all questions need to be answered in order to be meaningful. 

Complete article at Big Think.

Gleiser concludes that the Multiverse theory falls into the category of a God-of-the-Gaps argument, but his conviction that it is also a God-of-the-Gaps cop-out to postulate God as the explanation for why there is something rather than nothing seems to suffer from a confusion of philosophy with science. As I argue in a previous UD post, “nothing” cannot give rise to “something,” which leads logically to the conclusion that an eternally existent something must be the cause of our physically observable universe. An eternally existent multiverse has zero evidence in its favor, whereas it can be argued that an eternally existent God has many types of evidence (not only from scientific observations, but also from history, philosophy, psychology, theology, and personal testimony) in its favor.

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At SciTech Daily: Harvard Researchers Have Linked Spirituality to Healthier Lives and Longer Lifespans

Spirituality is associated with improved health outcomes and patient care.

“This study represents the most rigorous and comprehensive systematic analysis of the modern-day literature regarding health and spirituality to date,” said Tracy Balboni, lead author and senior physician at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center and professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School. “Our findings indicate that attention to spirituality in serious illness and in health should be a vital part of future whole person-centered care, and the results should stimulate more national discussion and progress on how spirituality can be incorporated into this type of value-sensitive care.”

“Spirituality is important to many patients as they think about their health,” said Tyler VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Harvard Chan School. “Focusing on spirituality in health care means caring for the whole person, not just their disease.”

The study, which was co-authored by Balboni, VanderWeele, and senior author Howard Koh, the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership at Harvard Chan School, was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Balboni, VanderWeele, and Koh are also co-chairs of the Interfaculty Initiative on Health, Spirituality, and Religion at Harvard University.

Spirituality is defined as “the way individuals seek ultimate meaning, purpose, connection, value, or transcendence,” according to the International Consensus Conference on Spiritual Care in Health Care. This might involve organized religion, but it also includes means of discovering ultimate meaning through connections with family, community, or nature.

They noted that for healthy people, spiritual community participation–as exemplified by religious service attendance – is associated with healthier lives, including greater longevity, less depression and suicide, and less substance use. For many patients, spirituality is important and influences key outcomes in illness, such as quality of life and medical care decisions. Consensus implications included incorporating considerations of spirituality as part of patient-centered health care and increasing awareness among clinicians and health professionals about the protective benefits of spiritual community participation.

The 27-member panel was composed of experts in spirituality and health care, public health, or medicine, and represented a diversity of spiritual/religious views, including spiritual-not-religious, atheist, Muslim, Catholic, various Christian denominations, and Hindu.

According to the researchers, the simple act of asking about a patient’s spirituality can and should be part of patient-centered, value-sensitive care. The information gleaned from the conversation can guide further medical decision-making, including but not limited to notifying a spiritual care specialist. Spiritual care specialists, such as chaplains, are trained to provide clinical pastoral care to diverse patients–whether spiritual-not-religious or from various religious traditions. Chaplains themselves represent a variety of spiritual backgrounds, including secular and religious.

“Overlooking spirituality leaves patients feeling disconnected from the health care system and the clinicians trying to care for them,” said Koh. “Integrating spirituality into care can help each person have a better chance of reaching complete well-being and their highest attainable standard of health.”

Full article at SciTech Daily.

The connection between spirituality and improved human health outcomes is suggestive of a metaphysical aspect to reality that surpasses a purely naturalistic viewpoint.

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