Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 469

Epigenetic learning appears confirmed in nematodes; Weismann barrier broken

Caenorhabditis elegans (nematode)/Zeynep F. Altun(CC BY-SA 2.5)

Two research groups have demonstrated epigenetic learning in worms:

Some bacteria are lethal to the animals when ingested, and unfortunately, the worms can’t always distinguish them from the nutritious kind until it’s too late.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop them from teaching their young not to make the same mistake, researchers recently realized when watching the nematodes in the lab. Before the animals die from the pathogen, they often lay eggs. These offspring, researchers at Princeton University observed, consistently avoid that particular bacterial species. Evidently, pathogen avoidance—a behavioral habit the mothers learned towards the end of their lifetime—can be transmitted to the next generation, aiding their survival. But it’s not a hard-wired trait; instead, an epigenetic mechanism involving small RNAs appears to be responsible.

Katarina Zimmer, “Worm Parents Pass on Behaviors Epigenetically to Offspring” at The Scientist

Does anyone remember the Weismann barrier, a classic in Darwinism?

For him, the results offer evidence against a long-held theory postulated by August Weismann in the 19the century that changes to somatic cells within an individual’s lifetime, such as neuronal responses, cannot be inherited. “The nervous system can transmit responses across generations and breach the Weismann barrier,” Rechavi says.

Katarina Zimmer, “Worm Parents Pass on Behaviors Epigenetically to Offspring” at The Scientist

If this trait turns out to be widespread, it may help explain some puzzling aspects of animal behavior: specifically, how animals that are definitely not able to learn much individually appear to know things.

See also: Epigenetic change: Lamarck, wake up, you’re wanted in the conference room!

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Rob Sheldon: What that hot new quantum experiment really showed

The experiment is To catch and reverse a quantum jump mid-flight, which suggests that quantum leaps take place in time (they are not extraordinary physics or unpredictable). “ Researchers were able to predict a kind of atomic behavior called a quantum jump and even reverse the jump in a new experiment on an artificial atom. Such research could bring up bigger questions about the nature of physics and could have important implications for improving quantum computers that rely on the rules of quantum mechanics in order to function.” (Gizmodo, June 3, 2019)

Recently, we heard a theoretical physicist dismiss its significance.

Now, experimental physicist Rob Sheldon, our physics color commentator and author of Genesis: The Long Ascent, writes to say:

No, nothing dramatic happened to the universe.

The crystal radio, using a diode, enabled every teenager to assemble a radio in his room and tune in to one of the 3 radio stations in the United States. But he had to wear headphones because the volume was so quiet. The triode was capable of amplifying those signals, and very soon the Grateful Dead’s tube amps were destroying the eardrums of 3 generations of teenagers.

In the same way, qubits incorporate QM effects, and marvellous things have been done with 2 level systems. I mentioned QM computers before, which do things like decode the 128 or 256 digit encryption standards using in secure communications.

Another more common two-level QM encryption method uses 4 entangled photons in two pairs. One pair is up/down (st.andrew cross) the other is diagonal (st.george cross), and the receivers consist of two pairs of polarizing beam splitters directing photons into 4 detectors. Starting with 5 million entangled photons per second, they can transmit up to 1000 bits per second, which is about half the speed of the 2400 baud modem I purchased to work at home on my PhD thesis some 30 years ago.

So why do QM encryption?

Because the NSA can’t intercept the message. That’s why the Chinese “Micius” satellite using Univ of Austria technology was able to digitally connect two cities in China in 2017 using a snoop-proof satellite digital channel. It took about $100M of components to do this, and like I said, was slower than my 1988 USRobotics modem.

What this recent paper with a qutrit experiment shows, is that it is possible to do QM communication or QM computing at high volume and high speed. No need to wear headphones.

Readers can relax.

See also: Theoretical physicist: Recent claim about big quantum mechanics find is “silly” Maybe the main thing to see here is that lots of people would love to falsify or tame quantum mechanics, the way they would like to falsify the Big Bang or fine-tuning and it won’t be their fault for lack of trying.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Materialism’s secret of success, Hint: It’s not evidence

Materialism enables irrational ideas about ourselves to compete with rational ones on an equal basis. It won’t work:

[Neurosurgeon Michael] Egnor offers a much more dramatic demonstration from an operation he performs, the corpus callosotomy, where a human brain is cut in half, to minimize otherwise uncontrollable epileptic seizures:

“But they still seemed to be a unitary person, they still seemed to be fairly normal. And what that implies I that the human mind is not generated purely by the matter of the brain. Otherwise, cutting the brain in half would have profound effects. It might create two people. Certainly, it would create a rather profound effect on a person’s state of consciousness. And it doesn’t.”

He also discusses the remarkable discoveries of twentieth-century Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (1891–1976) who found that consciousness remained somehow intact, despite deep brain surgery, and that free will could be detected in the brain. And much more.

Denyse O’Leary, “Science Uprising: Stop ignoring evidence for the existence of the human mind! ” at Mind Matters News

Here’s the second episode: Mind: The Inescapable I:

See also: Robert J. Marks: A new short film series takes on materialism in science, including that of AI’s pop prophets At the Bradley Center, we are open to discussing and reporting any such discovery but are also open to evidence leading to alternative explanations.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Sex evolved as a strategy against cancer?

sperm fertilizing egg//© nobeastsofierce, Adobe Stock

From ScienceDaily:

One of the greatest enigmas of evolutionary biology is that while sex is the dominant mode of reproduction among multicellular organisms, asexual reproduction appears much more efficient and less costly. However, in a study publishing on June 6 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, researchers suggest that sexual reproduction is favored by selection because, unlike asexual reproduction, it not only provides important evolutionary advantages in constantly changing environments, but also prevents the invasion of transmissible cancer, or “cheater” cells. …

Not only did first multicellular organisms have to deal with their own cheater cells, they also had to evolve adaptations to prevent them being colonized by foreign malignant cells (i.e. infectious ones). Because asexual reproduction leads to identical (“clonal”) organisms, this mode of reproduction is risky due to the possibility of being invaded by clonal infectious cell lineages (i.e. transmissible cancers). Conversely, sexual reproduction decreases the compatibility of contagious cancer cells with their hosts, limiting individual infection risk, as well as the risks of transmission between parent and offspring. Sexual reproduction also generates genetic variation that facilitates the detection of foreign cells, the first and critical step of immune protection.

Although relatively rare, transmissible cancers do exist (e.g. Tasmanian devils, dogs, bivalves), and increasing evidence suggests that most, if not all, malignant cells are potentially transmissible provided a suitable transmission route is offered. Given the ubiquity of cancer in multicellular organisms, in combination with the plethora of potential transmission routes, sexual reproduction may have been favoured as a less risky, more profitable option to produce viable offspring despite its associated costs. Paper. (open access) – Frédéric Thomas, Thomas Madsen, Mathieu Giraudeau, Dorothée Misse, Rodrigo Hamede, Orsolya Vincze, François Renaud, Benjamin Roche, Beata Ujvari. Transmissible cancer and the evolution of sex. PLOS Biology, 2019; 17 (6): e3000275 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000275 More.

It’s an interesting theory but the obvious problem is that transmissible cancers are, as the authors admit, rare. They may always have been rare, relative, say, to predation or extinction—whether sex was part of a life form’s organization or not. And sex is a big development, with many consequences, including a heightened risk of extinction.

Cancer cells, on this view, are seen as a form of parasite:

… As early cells banded together to form single, eukaryotic organisms, these organisms would have needed to guard against member cells that refused to subordinate themselves to the whole—“internal cheater cells,” or cancer cells. Early multicellular organisms would also have needed to develop defenses against invading malignant cells from other organisms, or transmissible cancers…

Such early immune systems would have had an easier time differentiating between healthy cells and malignancies, the study argues, if sexual reproduction created offspring that were genetically distinct from surrounding organisms. Targeting cancerous cells could have created an evolutionary pressure to embrace sex, similar to the pressure from parasites and other pathogens.

Jon Kelvey, “The Evolution of Sex Could Have Provided a Defense Against Cancer Cells” at Smithsonian Magazine

Ah yes, that “evolutionary pressure” again. It says nothing about how exactly the machinery develops. The question isn’t what would benefit an organism but for what paths did resources actually exist?

When we get down to that, we are talking about science. The rest is all speculation.

See also: Can sex explain evolution?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Total Darwin Rewrite in progress: “Survival of the fittest” now means “sympathy”

The Darwinians must have considered the possibility that they aren’t popular for a reason:

Yet Darwin’s use of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was hardly meant to suggest that existence was a knockdown, drag-out fight – he was very clear that generosity, sympathy and all those other traits that give us warm feelings are central to human survival.

“Don’t misread Darwin: for humans, ‘survival of the fittest’ means being sympathetic” at Aeon

Funny how so many people, whether they agreed with Darwin or not, got it so wrong all these years … How did it get to be called “social Darwinism” anyway, as opposed to, say, “social Florence Nightingale-ism”?

You know, it’s almost like Darwin didn’t really think what some now need to portray him as thinking …

Florence Nightingale/Henry Hering

Note: Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was an important figure in the development of hospital nursing.

See also: Do racial assumptions prevent recognizing Homo erectus as fully human?

Was Neanderthal man fully human? The role racism played in assessing the evidence

and

Teilhard De Chardin: The “Evolution” Priest’s Legacy Included Racism and Social Darwinism, Says Theologian

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Fun: Animatrons of extinct giant predators

At the Chester Zoo in the UK, animations of extinct giant predators.

Jurassic Park as if you were part of the cast.

One of them is a giant extinct snake, Titanoboa cerrejonensis, from 60 million years ago. Weighed well over 1000 kg.

Smithsonian weighs in on Titanoboa vs. T. Rex (were it possible):

Okay, back to work.

Hat tip: Nature

See also: Fastest known bite in the animal kingdom? Researchers report: The speed of a hairy frogfish’s bite is the result of a vacuum in its mouth that can suck in its prey in just 1/6000th of a second. It’s so fast that even slow-motion video struggles to capture it.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Mind vs Matter: the Result of an Error of Thought

(I think we’ve corrupted KF’s thread long enough.)

The entire problem of mind/matter dualism is rooted in a single error of thought: the reification of an abstract descriptive model of experience into an causal agency independent of the mind that conceives it and the mental experience it is extrapolated from. It is similar to the same error of thought that mistakes “forces” and “physical laws” and “energy” as independently existing causal agencies, when in fact they are abstract models of various mental experiences.

All experience and all thought about experience takes place in mind, regardless of whether or not it is caused by something external to mind. Therefore, “an external, physical world” is a mental abstraction about mental experiences. Insisting that the content of the abstraction is “real” is entirely irrelevant.

Since all we have to work from and with is mental experience and mental thoughts about mental experiences, mind is not only primary ontologically and epistemologically; it is ontologically and epistemologically exhaustive. Even if some non-mental, independent “secondary” aspect of our existential framework exists, we have no access to it nor any ability to use it. If some sort of independent physicality exists, it is therefore 100% ontologically and epistemologically irrelevent. The “external physical world” abstraction still lies within the ontological and epistemological framework of mind and it is all we can ever have access to or use.

In fact, once one understand this error of thought, the self-evidently true irrelevant nature of any supposed external world comes clearly into focus.

This error of thought has entrenched the idea of an external world as “real” so deeply into general psychology that it has contaminated thousands of years of thought. It has generated “the hard problem of consciousness” out of nothing but error. It has led to adoption of 3rd-layer abstractions about mental experience as having primacy over mental experience itself from which they are generated (much like insisting that one’s grandchild is one’s own father). It has generated an entirely false dependency on the “reality” of that abstract world in many philosophical lines of thought.

One such bizarre perspective it has generated is this: that if the external physical world doesn’t in fact exist (even though it is 100% irrelevant because it is 100% outside of our access), then mental experience – the ONLY kind of experience we actually have – is deemed “delusional,” when in fact “delusion” can factually only ever be a comparison between kinds of mental experiences and can never include any comparison to any supposed “external physical reality.”  The idea that unless an actual external world exists we are doomed to delusion is entirely due to an error of thought. The delusion or reality value of anything can only ever be a comparison of kinds of mental experiences.

It gets worse. Non-materialists (people that are not materialists) insist that epistemological validity requires that some sort of external world exists independent of mind that can cause universal or near universal mental states in observers .  It seems no one has figured out that if one insists that non-mental, independent external commodities can cause mental states, thoughts and experiences, they have just given up free will and have become an “in principle” materialist, consigning themselves to existence as caused automatons.

How would we determine what is an externally-caused mental state, thought or experience concerning free will and what is an independent free choice?  Answer: as long as something external can cause mental states, there’s no way to know. As with materialism, even rationality is lost.

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

A “gender non-binary dino” is not a useful teaching moment

It started out as a dino fossil that was difficult to sex but morphed into an illustration at the Field Museum in the Woke war on science:

In recent years, through her social media persona, SUE has asserted her gender identity. It all started on Twitter in March 2017. Reacting to a comment, SUE tweeted that her sex was unknown and that, like human gender non-binary people, she uses “they/them” pronouns. While it is true that her sex is indeterminate, this move conflates the exclusively human concept of gender and the incontrovertible reality of binary sex. SUE was either male or female. We just don’t know which. This purposeful misunderstanding has now made its way into her new exhibit, opened on the museum’s upper level in December 2018. In a world where even some scientists claim — erroneously — that there is no such thing as biological sex, this sets a dangerous precedent. …

With apologies to SUE and her reptilian cousins, they simply don’t have enough going on in their minds to express gender non-binary identity. l

Richard T. Pallardy, “The Case of SUE, the Woke Dinosaur” at Arc Digital

No need to apologize to them, Pallardy. They were never going to understand anyway. Never did and never would have done. But the Woke war on science, that IS real.

See also: 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.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Theoretical physicist: Recent claim about big quantum mechanics find is “silly”

Recently, dramatic claims about overturning quantum mechanics walloped through the science media:

When quantum mechanics was first developed a century ago as a theory for understanding the atomic-scale world, one of its key concepts was so radical, bold and counter-intuitive that it passed into popular language: the “quantum leap.” Purists might object that the common habit of applying this term to a big change misses the point that jumps between two quantum states are typically tiny, which is precisely why they weren’t noticed sooner. But the real point is that they’re sudden. So sudden, in fact, that many of the pioneers of quantum mechanics assumed they were instantaneous.

A new experiment shows that they aren’t. By making a kind of high-speed movie of a quantum leap, the work reveals that the process is as gradual as the melting of a snowman in the sun.

Philip Ball, “Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to Be Instantaneous, Take Time” at Quanta

Theoretical physicist Vystavil Luboš Motl responds,

Needless to say, they haven’t found anything that would disagree with the predictions of quantum mechanics, as defined by the Copenhagen folks and derivable from the Copenhagen rules, which is why their statements that they have refuted some Copenhagen ideas is just completely wrong. But a general problem with the culture of science writing as of 2019 is that it doesn’t seem to matter to many people in the “system” that the experimenters haven’t found anything that violates the predictions by the Copenhagen QM. Instead, they just do some experimental masturbation that isn’t new in any way and use this masturbation as an excuse to write completely silly personal opinions of the experimenters about theory. –

vystavil luboš motl, “Experimenters and especially journalists can’t write good far-reaching interpretations of QM experiments” at The Reference Frame

He expresses himself a little, shall we say, roughly, around the edges. Maybe the main thing to see here is that lots of people would love to falsify or tame quantum mechanics, the way they would like to falsify the Big Bang or fine-tuning and it won’t be their fault for lack of trying.

See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Black Holes Vs. Quantum Mechanics = Something Has To Give

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Jonathan Bartlett: The key to machine learning is not machines but mathematics

                  Jonathan Bartlett

People forget that finger counting is machine learning too. (as far as your mind is concerned, your fingers are machines.)

The key to machine learning is not machines but mathematics. There is nothing special about silicon and electricity. In fact, the first computers were mechanical, not electrical.

The devices designed by Charles Babbage (1791-1871) are best-known. Babbage’s Difference Engine was built in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. and his Analytical Engine was designed (though never completed) in 1837. But well before Babbage, others had invented mechanical computational devices. Wilhelm Schickard built a mechanical adding machine in 1623, and Blaise Pascal built a more complete and workable version in 1642.

Computers are just machines that do math using electricity. Whether we are doing math with computers, mechanical calculators, pens and pencils, or our fingers to help, we are doing machine learning.

So, to get at the heart of the beginning of machine learning, we must ask ourselves, what does the machine do and how?…

Jonathan Bartlett, “Machine learning dates back to at least 300 BC” at Mind Matters News

Demystifying some of these topics might help a bit. It’s not The Machine. It’s you.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Eighteenth-century windup robots, featuring intricate robots that do not use electric power.

and

UD Author’s Suggested Correction To Calculus Instruction Goes Viral (Yes, that’s our johnnyb!)

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