Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 458

Why do plant scientists need to tell the world that plants are NOT conscious?

You didn’t think plants were conscious, did you? Did you really think salad is murder?

Yet telling us that plants are not conscious is the gist of a recently published major paper in Trends in Plant Science. (open access)

Part of the background to the “plants think like people” movement in science, which they oppose, is that we have learned over the years that plants communicate a lot. The other part is refusal to acknowledge that humans are exceptional. Quite simply, the need to see humans as equivalent to animals has now spread to the need to see us as equivalent to plants.

We can expect many more such conundrums. They will result in further declarations in science journals that sound, on the surface, strange. For one thing, some philosophers of physics make the case that if you are conscious, in a material world, your coffee mug must be too. Never mind whether salad is murder, is breaking a coffee cup the irretrievable loss of a fragile consciousness in a wholly material world?

There is an intellectual price to be paid for insisting that humans, bats, and dandelions are all just life forms on a continuum. The intellect is, in fact, that price.

Denyse O’Leary, “Scientists: Plants are NOT conscious!” at Mind Matters News

Human consciousness is a Hard Problem. How do we know? Because every six months, we learn about another Big Paper that has explained it.

This will get crazier. Stay tuned.

See also: Yes, plants have nervous systems, too. Not only that but, like mammals, they use glutamate to speed transmission

Can plants be as smart as animals? Seeking to thrive and grow, plants communicate extensively, without a mind or a brain

Further reading in the hard problem of consciousness:

Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug

and

How can consciousness be a material thing?

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Alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein pledged $30 million for Harvard evolution program

According to the Daily Beast:

Over the years, Epstein billed himself as a renowned philanthropist and pledged $30 million for Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He’s palled around with a host of famous faces including Donald Trump and Bill Clinton; the latter traveled with Epstein to Africa to address issues like economic development and AIDS.

Pervaiz Shallwani, Kate Briquelet, Harry Siegel, “Jeffrey Epstein Arrested for Sex Trafficking of Minors” at The Daily Beast

Program for Evolutionary Dynamics

Our current research topics include: evolution of cooperation, cancer, viruses, evolutionary game/graph/set theory, prelife, protocells, eusociality, evolution of construction, population structure, evolution of language, experimental games, and evolutionary economics.

Our ambitious goals include curing the world of cancer, infectious disease, selfishness, and inclusive fitness theory. More.

Some of these areas would seem to be science issues and others only questionably so. It is much easier to get general, evidence-based agreement on what constitutes cancer and its remedies, for example, than on what constitutes selfishness and its remedies.

One niggle: There seems to be something wrong with the second paragraph of the description. Much as the Program’s participants might hate inclusive fitness theory, they can’t really intend “curing the world” of it. More likely, some grammatical signposts are missing. They may, in reality, be well disposed toward inclusive fitness theory.

The director of the program is Martin Novak, of whom we learn:

A corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Nowak is the recipient of the Weldon Memorial Prize of Oxford University, the David Starr Jordan Prize of Stanford University, and the Akira Okubo Prize of the Society for Mathematical Biology. Nowak is the author of over 450 papers and four books. Evolutionary Dynamics (2006) provides an overview of the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems. SuperCooperators (2011) argues that cooperation is the third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and selection.

Keeping the file open.

See also: “The evolutionary psychologist knows why you vote — and shop, and tip at restaurants”

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Why SETI is asking the public for help in dealing with ET

At the Royal Society summer exhibition. With 300 billion stars in the galaxy, they have only just begun to look and they place high hopes in a new project, Breakthrough Listen (“Last month, astronomers on the Breakthrough Listen project announced they had heard nothing after eavesdropping on more than 1,000 star systems within 160 light years of Earth.”) It turns out, we’re the problem:

Dr John Elliott, a reader in intelligence engineering at Leeds Beckett University, said the global Seti community would announce any bona fide alien signal immediately. But in an era of social media that would spark a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories that leave people utterly confused about the truth, he said…

“It makes sense to create a legally binding framework that is properly rooted in international law,” Dominik said. “I’m completely comfortable with taking the whole thing above the level of scientists. If there are public consequences of replying and sending out messages that is a political decision and not one to be taken by scientists.”

Ian Sample, “How should we respond to alien contact? Scientists ask the public” at The Guardian

Some of us think that most of the fake news has been coming from the ET search community itself and that getting international law involved is a way of creating bureaucratic survival even if they hear nothing from extraterrestrials ever.

They are trying to create a legal framework that assumes ET’s existence without evidence.

But look, at least they’re not designing weapons or high tech surveillance…

See also: Do we really need a “plan” for a response to aliens? If a tenth of the effort were put into cleaning up the corruption around peer review,” that would be a better use of time than figuring out what to say to the Klingons or Jabba the Hutt if and when they or theirs finally show up.

Tales of Oumuamua: Why are we still talking about the Oumuamua alien sighting panic?

and

University of Maryland: Oumuamua was not an alien spacecraft “Stick with analogs we know, you advise”? Yes, good idea. It used to be the usual approach among scientists. So why was it suddenly suspended? We are still wondering. Or maybe we know but no one wants to discuss it. See Tales of an invented god.

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Ideologies that devalue human life – with historian Richard Weikart

You can go away screaming I suck! at an uncaring universe if you like or else you can look at evidence-based alternative views.

What is the value of human life? So many atheist thinkers argue it is nothing. Life has no value.

Confronting this destructive ideology, these five videos feature talks by Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, given at the European Leadership Forum in 2018.

Is Human Life a Cosmic Accident?

Since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, atheist and agnostic thinkers (i.e., materialists and positivists) have considered everything, including humans, as merely the product of accidental processes. This means that human life no longer has any value or moral significance. This talk examines the way that many thinkers, such as the eminent British philosopher Bertrand Russell, espoused this view, but also contradicted themselves by implying that humans are important.

Does Darwinism Devalue Human Life?

Many aspects of Darwinian theory have implications for the value of human life, and Darwinists themselves have acknowledged this. Darwinian theory rejects teleology, and often reduces humans to just another animal. Many Darwinists consider morality itself the product of chance evolutionary processes. Human evolution also implies human diversity, which has led many to embrace human inequality. Finally, Darwinism implies that death is a positive force in the universal struggle for existence.

Did my genes make me do it?

The notion that human behavior is shaped primarily by our hereditary predispositions has become a powerful force in Western thought in the past century. Many sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists today claim that behaviors, such as kindness, marital bonding, and self-sacrifice, but also marital infidelity, incest, infanticide, abortion, and even rape are programmed into our psyche by our evolutionary heritage. This reduces human agency and relativizes morality.

Did my upbringing make me do it?

Secular thinkers who reject biological determinism often embrace the view that human behavior is primarily the product of our upbringing and education. This became a powerful current in the nineteenth century, influencing Marxism and other forms of socialism. The behaviorist psychologists John Watson and B. F. Skinner powerfully promoted this idea in the twentieth century, claiming that humans are little more than a machine responding to stimuli. This view still has many prominent adherents in the social sciences.

Did Nietzsche, Foucault, and Postmodernism open the door for the Death of Humanity?

Nietzsche, subsequent existentialists, Foucault, and other postmodernists have contributed to the secular assault on the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic. Nietzsche had utter contempt for the masses of humanity and argued that Superman figures should oppress and even eradicate those deemed inferior. Foucault admitted that the Nietzschean death of God also meant the death of humanity, and Foucault glamorized suicide as a result. Both existentialists and postmodernists reject any human rights or objective morality.

Note: A quintuple hat tip to Philip Cunningham, for sending in these five vids.

See also: Believing in purposeful universe is good mental health

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J.P. Moreland on the reality of the mind tested by psychiatric disorder

His own mind, as it happened:

As a prominent devout Christian, Moreland found himself contending with two extremes of popular culture: “Why can’t faith alone heal?” pitted against “Why can’t pills alone heal?” So he found himself starting to live the approach he had often explained in his writings:

J. P. Moreland: We are a unity of body, mind, spirit, emotions, and will and they all affect one another. And so, if my brain is damaged and it’s not producing the kinds of chemicals that it needs to help me have a good mood, then medication feels like oiling the engine or vitamins for your brain. And it restores your brain to a balance so that you have a fighting chance now to deal with anxiety and depression through your spiritual life and your counseling.

I was in such bad shape that I needed medication and I highly recommend that people try this because there is nothing wrong with doing this. It is not unspiritual to do so because we are not just souls, we have bodies too. – (From the podcast “Our Anxious Souls Have Bodies” [5:30-7:15])

“J. P. Moreland’s model of the human self survived the ultimate field test” at Mind Matters News

Podcast

https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/mind-matters-037-jp-moreland.mp3

See also: Notes: Moreland also discussed these issues in an earlier podcast with Sean McDowell and Scott B. Rae. See: Moreland Theologian, battling depression, reaffirms the existence of the soul. J. P. Moreland reasons his way to the evidence and captures his discoveries in a book

His most recent professional work is Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology (2018); an outline is available here.

See also: AI as an emergent religion Science philosopher Mike Keas’s new book Unbelievablediscusses how AI and ET are merging, to create a religion of futurist magic

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Was Orwell a better techno-prophet in 1984 than Huxley was in Brave New World?

George Orwell

Some curious turns in the debate, now that 1984 is 70 years old:

But now whose dystopia is the more accurate? Orwell’s or Huxley’s? In January, a British journalist and novelist posed the question directly, offering some background:

“One particular area of Huxley’s prescience concerned the importance of data. He saw the information revolution coming — in the form of gigantic card-indexes, true, but he got the gist. It is amusing to see how many features of Facebook, in particular, are anticipated by Brave New World. Facebook’s mission statement “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” sounds a lot like the new world’s motto “Community, Identity, Stability”. The world in which “we haven’t any use for old things” dovetails with Mark Zuckerberg’s view that “young people are just smarter”. The meeting room whose name is Only Good News — can you guess whether that belongs to Huxley’s World Controller, or [Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer] Sheryl Sandberg? …

“A globally dominant society ruled by a party and a strong leader, a society which uses every possible method of surveillance and data collection to monitor and control its citizens, a society which is also enjoying a record rise in prosperity and abundance, and using unprecedented new techniques in science and genetics — that society would look a lot like a blend of Orwell’s and Huxley’s visions. It would also look a lot like modern-day China. The developing Chinese “citizen score”, a blend of reputational and financial and socio-political metrics, used to determine access to everything from travel and education and healthcare, is such a perfect blend of dystopias that we can only credit it to a new writer, Huxwell.” – John Lanchester, “Orwell V Huxley: Whose Dystopia Are We Living in Today?” at Financial Times

While Lanchester doesn’t make it quite clear, he seems to prefer Orwell by a hair. In 1985, a well-known culture critic, Neil Postman (1931–2003), came down for Huxley

Denyse O’Leary, “1984 is 70 years old yet still feels current” at Mind Matters News

Others weigh in as well.

Generally, the materialist constructors of brave new worlds entirely believe in design in nature, as long as they design it themselves. Anything else is pure randomness or else it sucks, right?

See also: British novelist predicted the internet over a century ago

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Well, if Neanderthal history is as complex as other human histories…

That’s another blow for Darwinism

DNA preserved in ancient bones and teeth has recently helped scientists reconstruct how groups of ancient humans migrated and mingled, and a new study now does the same thing for Neanderthals. Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for around 400,000 years, and it would be a huge stretch to assume they spent all that time as one big homogeneous population or that different groups of Neanderthals never migrated and mixed.

Thanks to ancient DNA, we can now begin to see how Neanderthal groups moved around Eurasia long before Homo sapiens entered the mix.

Kiona N. Smith, “Neanderthals’ history is as complicated as ours” at Ars Technica

That’s bad for “evolutionary theory.” Darwinism thrives on the application of theory to the past: Neanderthals “would have” done this or that because such and so enabled them to raise more offspring… etc.

Actual histories of the Neanderthals are like actual histories of the Navaho or the Welsh. What they “would have” done doesn’t matter; only what they apparently did. Enter historical interpretation from a variety of schools of thought.

See also: At Nature: Researcher smashes conventional evolution doctrine about insect egg shapes Some readers missed the point of this story. Nature indulged in Darwin-bashing, having found a Correct person to enable it. Can the collapse really be far off now? We’ll see.

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Design inference: What do these Stone Age markings on beads mean?

From Ice Age Europe, about 20,000-13,500 years ago:

During this period, around 19,000 years ago in southwestern France at a site called Saint-Germain-La-Rivière, an adult woman dies and is prepared for burial by members of her society. She is adorned with 70 red-deer teeth that were perforated by a flint tool to be used as beads; many of which have a unique engraved design and were smeared with red ochre. These beads provide a window into the period, giving an insight into the way our Magdalenian ancestors negotiated relationships, and the importance of this meshwork of relations to their survival. The burial context of these beads demonstrates how these relations took centre stage in the social lives of Magdalenian people. Untangling the object biographies of these beads – the way they were made, used and deposited – can reveal the creative ways our ancestors used objects to negotiate and embody intricate human-animal-object-landscape relationships. Insight into the ‘lives’ of these beads can be achieved by contextualising the successive stages of their biographies within the environmental and social conditions of the Magdalenian.

Nigel Warburton, “What a deer-tooth necklace says about our Ice Age ancestors” at Aeon

The bone deer teeth with the symbols are here, along with a proposed guide to Stone Age signs.

When “evolution” becomes history, it knocks a lot of nonsense off its pedestal. Remember when people couldn’t think that way back then?

See also: Oldest jewelry found so far at 46 kya

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Revealing things scientists told media about our “simulated” universe

As in “we are living in an advanced space aliens’ simulation.” But why were media even asking for this kind of thing?

Who, or what, is the godlike entity that may have created a simulated universe? One possibility, supporters of the simulation hypothesis say, is that it’s a race of advanced beings — space aliens. Even more mind-bending is the possibility is that it’s our own descendants — “our future selves,” as Terrile puts it. That is, humans living hundreds or thousands of years in the future might develop the ability to simulate not only a world like ours but the bodies and minds of the beings within it.

“Just as you can simulate anything else, you can simulate brains,” Bostrom says. True, we don’t yet have the technology to pull it off, but he says there’s no conceptual barrier to it. And once we create brain simulations “sufficiently detailed and accurate,” he says, “it is possible that those simulations would generate conscious experiences.”

Dan Falk, “Are we living in a simulated universe? Here’s what scientists say.” at NBC News

Wait a minute? Doesn’t this remind us all of the “mirror universe” that walloped through recently, with no real evidence? It’s as if the media do not want to cover real science events.

Falk is careful to say, above, that experiments to test the idea have been proposed. Maybe we should say nothing about the matter until they have been done and the results announced.

A reader draws attention to this item in the article:

Harvard astronomer Abraham Loeb says the knowledge could even trigger social unrest. Knowing that our thoughts and deeds aren’t our own could “relieve us from being accountable for our actions,” he says. “There is nothing more damaging to our social order than this notion.”

Dan Falk, “Are we living in a simulated universe? Here’s what scientists say.” at NBC News

But, holy cow, wasn’t he the fellow who led everyone on a wild goose chase about the space cigarillo Oumuamua being an “extraterrestrial light sail”?

It’s clear that these people are running out of naturalist options if we are down this deep into the nuts.

See also: Mirror universe: Now they market science fiction as news This appears in a tech and science section of a major network: Could 2019 be the year humans open the first portal to a shadowy dimension which mirrors our own world?

Tales of Oumuamua: Why are we still talking about the Oumuamua alien sighting panic? Oumuamua alien sighting panic?

What? Oumuamua Was Just A Comet? After All The ET Hype?

Astronomer: We’re too dumb to think space object Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial lightsail.Hmmm. In the real world, when you are an only child so far as you know, it is hard to compare yourself to your siblings. Few readily accept criticism for failure to measure up to the standards of imaginary beings.

Conventional Non-ET Explanations For Oumuamua

Astronomers: Solar System Object In Transit, Oumuamua, Might Be A “Light Sail Of Extra-Terrestrial Origin”

Why Some Scientists Saw Asteroid Oumuamua As ET

Why can top scientists get away with extraordinary claims?

Did Interstellar Object Oumuamua Normalize Space Aliens As Science In 2018?

and

Astronomers: Solar system object in transit, Oumuamua, might be a “light sail of extra-terrestrial origin”

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What Do Climate Scientists Really Know?

Scientistsdiscover the biggest seaweed bloom in the world:

From Phys.Org:(https://phys.org/news/2019-07-scienti...) [N.B. I find the newest version of WordPress almost impossible to work with. There is no correlation between the commands they tell you to use and what actually happens. This might be the last post I post here. There’s no way I can set up a link. Impossible. ]

Scientists led by the USF College of Marine Science used NASA satellite observations to discover the largest bloom of macroalgae in the world called the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB), as reported in Science.

They confirmed that the belt of brown macroalgae called Sargassum forms its shape in response to ocean currents, based on numerical simulations. It can grow so large that it blankets the surface of the tropical Atlantic Ocean from the west coast of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. This happened last year when more than 20 million tons of it—heavier than 200 fully loaded aircraft carriers—floated in surface waters and some of which wreaked havoc on shorelines lining the tropical Atlantic, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and east coast of Florida.

Well, where did this come from? Was it the heat? No.

The team identified key factors that are critical to bloom formation: a large seed population in the winter left over from a previous bloom, nutrient input from West Africa upwelling in winter, and nutrient input in the spring or summer from the Amazon River. In addition, Sargassum only grows well when salinity is normal and surface temperatures are normal or cooler.

Did you say ‘cooler’ Oh, my! Those darn satellites. Not only do they point out algal blooms that no one’s noticed before, they also show that temperatures are staying steady, or are even declining, over the last twenty years so.

Well now that we’ve spotted them, what about these newly discovered algal blooms? How do they affect ‘global warming”?

This, from Ecology.com:

It is estimated that marine plants produce between 70 and 80 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Nearly all marine plants are single celled, photosynthetic algae. Yup, that’s right, good ol’ scum on the pond…green gak…..slip slimein’ away. Even marine seaweed is many times colonial algae. They are a bunch of single cells trying to look like a big plant, but they are really individuals.

We need marine algae a whole lot more than they need us. Think about it, 70 percent to 80 percent of all the oxygen we breathe comes from algae! Without them we would really be sucking wind, but not for long! At this point, you may be saying, “Yo! What about the trees and other land plants?” Trees and other land plants are very important, no doubt about it. But for pure survival, we couldn’t make it without algae.

Why does so much of our oxygen come from algae? First of all, remember that the oceans cover about 71 percent of this planet and land is only about 29 percent. If we assume that every square mile of the ocean produces as much oxygen as every square mile of land, then this makes sense. The oceans would produce about 71 percent and the land 29 percent of the oxygen we breathe. Looks like we are in the ballpark, don’t you think?

So, we’re told that humans add 4% to the total carbon cycle taking place. We’re also told that algal blooms amont to 70 to 80% of oxygen produced. This means that algal blooms might perhaps ‘absorb’ 70 to 80% of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But, actually, there are various kinds of ‘sinks’ other than these blooms when it comes to carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, algal blooms must represent a very high percentage of the planet’s overal uptake of carbon dioxide. This means that this discovery, by itself, has the potential of easily offsetting the 4% humans add to the normal carbon cycle.

If so, then there’s nothing to be alarmed about. Nor, is there reason to spend perhaps a 100 trillion dollars to ‘combat’ supposed ‘warming’—except, of course, to make rich people even richer as they sell the ‘world’ their newly constructed ‘lifesavers.’ “Buy our lifesavers or you will perish.”

The claims of climate alarmists now seem to border on buffoonery. There are so many unknowns that undercut the models they’ve set up. As they say, “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous things.”

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