Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 460

July 3, 2019

Do we really need a “plan” for a response to aliens?

True, we’ve been writing a lot lately about responses to alien sightings but that’s because there’s a lot of response to write about. Response, that is, not invasions. And now this:

… the group of UK academics active in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence launched a survey at the Royal Society’s summer science exhibition on Monday …
“There is absolutely no procedure enshrined in international law on how to respond to a signal from an alien civilization,” astronomer Martin Dominik told The Guardian. “We want to hear people’s views. The consequences affect more people than just scientists.”
Kristin Houser, “Scientists want your input on our alien response plan” at Futurism

Here.

Readers? What’s your view?

From News: If a tenth of the effort were put into cleaning up the corruption around peer review, as for example in: The astonishing rise of junk science,” that would be a better use of time than figuring out what to say to the Klingons or Jabba the Hutt when they or theirs finally show up.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Why are we still talking about the Oumuamua alien sighting panic?

Look, these people needed a miracle from outer space and it was great while it lasted. But why is the embarrassing story being kept alive? Won’t another, similar one come along soon?

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.

Also: Tales of an invented god.

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

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 03, 2019 07:12

July 2, 2019

Can the history of medicine help social sciences out of their dark ages?

Well, when we read about the “issue” of misgendering dogs, well, everyone had to know that social science has gone barking mad. As if you can’t trust a dog to know that kind of thing without human intervention…

Okay, more seriously, a historian of science thinks that social science could take a leaf from how medicine got out of the dark ages:

In its subject matter, medicine is in many ways like social science. We have irreducible values that will inevitably guide our inquiry: we value life over death, health over disease. We cannot even begin to embrace the “disinterested” pose of the scientist who does not care about his or her inquiry beyond finding the right answer. Medical scientists desperately hope that some theories will work because lives hang in the balance. But how do they deal with this? Not by throwing up their hands and admitting defeat, but rather by relying on good scientific practices like randomized double-blind clinical trials, peer review, and disclosure of conflicts of interest. The placebo effect is real, for both patients and their doctors. If we want a medicine to work, we might subtly influence the patient to think that it does. But whom would this serve? When dealing with factual matters, medical researchers realize that influencing their results through their own expectations is nearly as bad as fudging them. So they guard against the hubris of thinking that they already know the answer by instituting methodological safeguards. They protect what they care about by recognizing the danger of bias.
Like medicine, social science is subjective. And it is also normative. We have a stake not just in knowing how things are but also in using this knowledge to make things the way we think they should be. We study voting behavior in the interest of preserving democratic values. We study the relationship between inflation and unemployment in order to mitigate the next recession. Yet unlike medicine, so far social scientists have not proven to be very effective in finding a way to wall off positive inquiry from normative expectations, which leads to the problem that instead of acquiring objective knowledge we may only be indulging in confirmation bias and wishful thinking. This is the real barrier to a better social science. …
Lee McIntyre, “To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine” at The MIT Press Reader

To the extent that so many social scientists seem comfortable with Correctness (that’s at the root of many scandals), one fears that Dr. McIntyre’s approach can’t be adopted.

Many doctors are prepared to slay beautiful theories for the sake of the lives of their patients. Have social scientists any similar motivation?

See also: “Motivated reasoning” defacing the social sciences?

At the New York Times: Defending the failures of social science to be science Okay. So if we think that — in principle — such a field is always too infested by politics to be seriously considered a science, we’re “anti-science”? There’s something wrong with preferring to support sciences that aren’t such a laughingstock? Fine. The rest of us will own that and be proud.

What’s wrong with social psychology , in a nutshell

How political bias affects social science research

Stanford Prison Experiment findings a “sham” – but how much of social psychology is legitimate anyway?

A BS detector for the social sciences

All sides agree: progressive politics is strangling social sciences

and

Back to school briefing: Seven myths of social psychology: Many lecture room icons from decades past are looking tarnished now. (That was 2014 and it has gotten worse since.)

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 02, 2019 13:29

University of Maryland: Oumuamua was not an alien spacecraft

Could 'Oumuamua be an extra-terrestrial solar sail?

Artist’s impression of interstellar asteroid/comet, Oumuamua /ESO, M. Kornmesser

No, but why was there a general willingness to believe that it was an alien spacecraft anyway?

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – On October 19, 2017, astronomers discovered the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. Early reports of the odd characteristics of “‘Oumuamua” led to speculation that the object might be an alien spacecraft. Now a new analysis by an international team of astronomers co-led by, University of Maryland Associate Research Scientist Matthew Knight, strongly indicates that its origin is purely natural.

When first spotted by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 telescope located at the University of Hawaii’s Haleakala Observatory, the object defied easy description, simultaneously displaying characteristics of both a comet and an asteroid. Astronomers formally named the object 1I/2017 U1 and with a common name of ‘Oumuamua, which roughly translates to “scout” in Hawaiian.

Researchers from UMD and around the world immediately raced to collect as much data as possible in the few weeks they had to observe the strange visitor before ‘Oumuamua traveled beyond the reach of Earth’s telescopes. The new findings by Knight and colleagues from some 13 institutions and five countries are reported in the July 1, 2019, issue of the journal Nature Astronomy.

“We have never seen anything like ‘Oumuamua in our solar system. It’s really a mystery still,” Knight said. “But our preference is to stick with analogs we know, unless or until we find something unique. The alien spacecraft hypothesis is a fun idea, but our analysis suggests there is a whole host of natural phenomena that could explain it.”
Matthew Wright, “‘Oumuamua Interstellar Object Was Not an Alien Spacecraft” at UMD Right Now

“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

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: 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”

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 02, 2019 12:42

Why are we still talking about the Oumuamua space alien sighting panic?

Artist’s impression of interstellar asteroid/comet, Oumuamua /ESO, M. Kornmesser

Oumuamua cycles through the pop science news once again:

All this hubbub took place in the aftermath of news reports that the Pentagon had been collecting data on UFO sightings for years. Clearly, the hunt for alien intelligence is alive and well in our solar system, and it’s hot news. Indeed, Loeb’s article was approved for publication in mere days.

But while scientists tossing around the idea of alien life may find a rapt public audience, they can also draw cynical, even hostile reactions from their fellow scientists, a response summed up by acclaimed physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who once quipped to CNN: “Call me when you have a dinner invite from an alien.”

This paradox has ripple effects. The threat of being written off as a kook can loom large for researchers, especially young ones. A lot of academics “won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole,” said Don Donderi, a retired associate professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal who now teaches a non-credit course called “UFOs: History and Reality” in the school’s continuing education department.

Loeb says many discoveries have their roots in theories that were initially dismissed. He thinks open-mindedness keeps scientific inquiry moving forward, while shutting down new theories “reduces the efficiency of science.”
Diane Peters, “The Pitfalls of Searching for Alien Life” at Undark

Look, these people needed a miracle from outer space and it was great while it lasted. But why is the embarrassing story being kept alive? Won’t another, similar one come along soon?

Oumuamua forms part of a religion for many supposedly secular people today. But it’s almost as though they want to make those of us who don’t stand in this kind of special relationship to science believe in it.

That’s a lot to ask when they could just start up another buzz and keep the fun going.

See also: Tales of an invented god (to understand the weirdness)

Tales of Oumuamua:

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

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”

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 02, 2019 11:54

Fun! Political correctness forces creationism on Australian university

It’s hard to know what to make of scientists who think they owe it to the world to dismiss the scientific revolution but still want the rest of us to think of them as scientists:

Instructors at a prominent university in Australia have been warned not to lecture on the natural historical record of that country; instead, they should teach a creation narrative regarding the origin of indigenous Australian people.
Lecturers at the University of New South Wales “have been warned off making the familiar statement in class that ‘Aboriginal people have been in Australia for 40,000 years’,” The Australian reports…
The document states that relying on the scientifically researched historical record to determine a date of Aboriginal arrival “tends to lend support to migration theories and anthropological assumptions.”
Daniel Payne, “Instructors at Australian university told to teach creation myth instead of science” at The College Fix

What we are expected to accept without question:

The Dreamtime is a commonly used term for describing important features of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and existence. It is not generally well understood by non-indigenous people.

Aboriginals believe that the Dreamtime was way back, at the very beginning. The land and the people were created by the Spirits. They made the rivers, streams, water holes the land, hills, rocks, plants and animals. It is believed that the Spirits gave them their hunting tools and each tribe its land, their totems and their Dreaming.

The Aboriginals believed that the entire world was made by their Ancestors way back in the very beginning of time, the Dreamtime. The Ancestors made everything. Aboriginal Dreamtime

Something similar is happening in Canada.

It’s a perfect storm—or if you believe in divine judgment
— a perfect judgment. To the extent that science boffins have vastly preferred sanctimonious catering to the raging Woke to critical thinking about what they represent, it’s hard to know how to even talk to them.

Make no mistake; the people who want their beliefs taught as science also want to take over the positions of the teachers. Let’s just say, a whole new world awaits. And it will not be Darwin’s world.

How odd an outcome of the Darwin wars.

See also: Native American Creationism Viewed Favorably In A Recent Court Ruling In Canada

Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.

and

Bret Weinstein, The Evergreen Prof Who Got SJW-D? It’s Partly The Fault Of Creationists! (learn more about Native American creationists)

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 02, 2019 11:07

July 1, 2019

At Peaceful Science: An anti-creationist psychiatrist misunderstands evidence for an immaterial mind, says Michael Egnor

In neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s view, “Here is one way of seeing it” If someone took a sledgehammer to your computer and pulverized it, yet it still worked fairly well, you would conclude that there was something rather strange about the computer that you had not previously considered:

I am not arguing that fMRI imaging of patients in PVS measures abstract thought. I am saying that the presence of fMRI activity that correlates with complex thought is a serious problem with the materialist theory of the mind.
After all, these PVS patients have massive permanent brain damage and have been medically diagnosed as having no mind at all. Yet many of them do have minds and are capable of thinking quite complex thoughts (understanding language, imagining complex activities such as walking across a room or playing tennis).
Michael Egnor, “Atheist psychiatrist misunderstands evidence for immaterial mind” at Mind Matters News

See also: Do epileptic seizures cause abstract thoughts? Michael Egnor: A psychiatrist argues that “intellectual seizures” can occur. But Egnor says, Seizures never evoke abstract thought. That is, if a seizure causes you to think about a triangle, it always causes you to imagine a particular triangle, not to define triangles abstractly.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 01, 2019 14:09

Is much modern psychology a “scientized version of original sin”?

Sometimes sounds that way. But, as Steven Poole, author of Rethink shows in his survey of the sociology literature, at any rate, the underlying psychology assumptions about human behavior are often wrong or questionable:

He calls it a “scientised version of original sin” but one accompanied not by sermons but by bureaucratic attempts to mold behavior. As he goes on to show, the underlying assumptions about human behavior are often wrong or questionable.

Just recently, it came out that researchers were baffled by the tendency around the globe to return lost wallets rather than pocket the money. When the behavior contradicts the theory, the behavior seems at least doubtful, if not clearly wrong.
“Who started the war on reason anyway?” at Mind Matters News

It had to be a religion for sociologists. Otherwise, it would have been abandoned.

See also: The lost wallet returns—and experts are baffled Social scientists struggle for explanations as to why people turned out to be more honest than theory led them to expect

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 01, 2019 13:50

A physicist is testing for a parallel universe – the mirrorverse

“an “oscillation” that would lead her to ‘“mirror matter.”’ Then the qualifications begin:

“It’s pretty wacky,” Broussard says of her mind-bending exploration.
The mirror world, assuming it exists, would have its own laws of mirror-physics and its own mirror-history. You wouldn’t find a mirror version of yourself there (and no evil Mister Spock with a goatee — sorry “Star Trek” fans). But current theory allows that you might find mirror atoms and mirror rocks, maybe even mirror planets and stars. Collectively, they could form an entire shadow world, just as real as our own but almost completely cut off from us.

Corey S. Powell, “Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you.” at NBC News

Why not? No really, why not an evil Mr. Spock?

Is there some reason why the mirror verse must exist but not the evil Mr. Spock?

See also: Physicists: A mirror universe might explain dark matter

New Scientist has seen signs of a mirror universe touching our own Broussard is about to do tests to find out if it is true. That’s fun, of course, but in reality, no one can prove it false and it will therefore always be real when cosmologists need it. It would be still more fun to see Sabine Hossenfelder tackle this one.

Did Stephen Hawking Discover A Means Of Detecting Parallel Universes Just Before He Died?

That sounds a lot like grief talking but we’ll see.

Claim: Evidence, maybe, for parallel universes

Cosmologist: Parallel Universes Are Pushing Physics Too Far?

Alternate parallel universe found. Maybe (2015)

Test parallel universes for real?

Parallel universes TESTED?

Brit mid-market tabloid says Large Hadron Collider within days of discovering parallel universe

Scientific American tells us we may live in the past of a parallel universe

and why this is supposed to be science.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 01, 2019 13:28

Life never originates where they say. But grants do.

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor muses on the strangeness:

Life isn’t characterized by cyanide, or even nucleotides or lipids or proteins or the host of substrates in living things. The essence of life is information — the gigabytes of information in the genetic code in DNA, the astonishingly complex molecular machinery of cellular metabolism, the intricate orchestration of the physiology of higher organisms, and the immaterial power of rational thought and free will in man. The material components of living things are merely the substrate in which this elegant information is stored and expressed. And information always originates in a mind.
“Astrobiologists” who search for life’s origin in cyanide in meteorites or in any material substrate are fools blinded by materialist ideology.:
Michael Egnor, “Astrobiology: Searching for the Origin of Life, In All the Wrong Places” at Evolution News and Science Today

Actually, the researchers are not so dumb when you consider that looking for chance events attracts the grants. Little else would.

See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – What we do and don’t know about the origin of life

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 01, 2019 05:56

Is finding extraterrestrial life inevitable and does it prove the existence of God?

Hugh Ross

So says Hugh Ross,at Salvo:

I’ve been on record since the 1980s predicting that the remains of living things will be found on the Moon, Mars, and some other solar system bodies. What makes this discovery inevitable is that millions of tons of Earth’s soil have been exported throughout the solar system due to large meteorites striking Earth. A large meteorite impacting Earth generates enough energy to cause rocks, soil, dust, and water on Earth to be ejected into interplanetary space. Much of that material eventually lands on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.

The quantity of exported Earth life is far from trivial. On average, one ton (about 1,000 kilograms) of Earth’s soil contains 100 quadrillion microbes. When rocks, soil, dust, and water are ejected from Earth after a meteorite hits, embedded microbes and small multicellular life-forms are ejected along with them. On average, about 200 kilograms of material from Earth have been deposited on every square kilometer of the Moon.2 For Mars, the figure is about two kilograms per square kilometer. …

But what if extraterrestrial life does exist? Well, it is already well established that life on Earth could not have begun through any conceivable naturalistic pathway,7 but rather must have been initiated through a divine miraculous intervention. Therefore, the discovery of life in another planetary system would indicate another instance of such divine intervention, meaning our universe would contain not just one origin-of-life miracle, but two. The more exoplanetary systems on which life was discovered to exist, the more origin-of-life miracles would be established. Thus, the possible discovery of extraterrestrial life would yield even more evidence for the supernatural handiwork of God.
Hugh Ross, “On Discovering Extraterrestial Life & Extraterrestrial Intelligence” at Salvo Spring 2017

Also featuring Hugh Ross: How recent measurements support the Big Bang theory

and

The fine-tuning that enabled our life-friendly moons creates discomfort

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on July 01, 2019 04:56