Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 47

At Live Science: ‘STEVE’ descends on North America after surprise solar storm

 Brandon Specktor writes:

STEVE (short for “strong thermal velocity enhancement”) is a long, thin line of hot gas that slices through the sky for hundreds of miles. The hot air inside STEVE can blaze at more than 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius) and move roughly 500 times faster than the air on each side of it, satellite observations have shown.

A fish-eye-lens photo of STEVE, the mysterious purple river of light, hanging in the sky over Canada. (Image credit: Copyright 2022 Alan Dyer/AmazingSky.com )

In the dark of Sunday night and Monday morning (Aug. 7 and 8), a surprise solar storm slammed into Earth, showering our planet in a rapid stream of charged particles from the sun. The resulting clash of solar and terrestrial particles in Earth‘s atmosphere caused stunning auroras to appear at much lower latitudes than usual — and, in southern Canada, triggered a surprise cameo from the mysterious sky phenomenon known as STEVE.

The glowing river of light may look like an aurora, but it’s actually a unique phenomenon that was considered “completely unknown” to science upon its discovery. Today, scientists have a slightly better idea of what’s going on. 

Whereas the northern lights occur when charged solar particles bash into molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere, STEVE appears much lower in the sky, in a region called the subauroral zone. That likely means solar particles aren’t directly responsible for STEVE, Live Science previously reported. However, STEVE almost always appears during solar storms like Sunday’s, showing up after the northern lights have already begun to fade.

One hypothesis suggests that STEVE is the result of a sudden burst of thermal and kinetic energy in the subauroral zone, somehow triggered by the clash of charged particles higher in the atmosphere during aurora-inducing solar storms. However, more research is needed to uncover the true secrets of STEVE. In the meantime, we can simply bask in its otherworldly glow and wave back at its twinkling green fingers.

Live Science

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At Phys.org: ‘Eternal engine’ inspires the next generation of ultraprecise atomic clocks

UK scientists have created an “eternal engine” to keep the next generation of atomic clock ticking.

Precision timing is essential for systems such as global navigation, satellite mapping, establishing the composition of exoplanets and the next generations of telecommunication. But atomic clocks are currently massive devices—weighing hundreds of kilograms—which need to be housed within precise, difficult-to-maintain conditions.

That is why scientists from around the world are racing to build portable versions that will work in real-world settings, and could replace existing satellite navigation systems, such as GPS and Galileo.

Now, research undertaken at the University of Sussex and continued at Loughborough University has solved a major stumbling block in the development of these portable atomic clocks, by working out how to reliably switch “on” their counting device—and keep them running.

Microcombs are a fundamental part of future optical atomic clocks—they allow one to count the oscillation of the “atomic pendulum” in the clock, converting the atomic oscillation at hundreds of trillions of times per second to a billion times a second—a gigahertz frequency, that modern electronic systems can easily measure.

Based on electronic compatible optical microchips, microcombs are the best candidates to miniaturize the next generation of ultraprecise timekeeping. They are cutting-edge laser technology sources, made up of ultraprecise laser lines, equally spaced in the spectrum, which resemble a comb.

This peculiar spectrum opens an array of applications blending ultraprecise time keeping and spectroscopy which could lead to the discovery of exoplanets, or ultra-sensitive medical instruments based simply on breath scans.

The microcomb is a core component for creating a portable and ultra-accurate time reference, which is critically needed for the current and next generation of telecommunication (5 and 6G+ and fiber communication), network synchronization (e.g. electrical network) and it will reduce our dependence on the GPS.

Phys.org

Keeping the big questions in focus, we should ponder whether it’s reasonable that unguided natural forces could create “a portable and ultra-accurate time reference” or the “next generation of telecommunication (5 and 6G+ and fiber communication)”. Of course, we know that human beings are responsible for these technological achievements. But consider an analogy: if a scientist builds a robot that is designed to construct an electronic circuit board, what is the “efficient cause” (borrowing from Aristotle) of the circuit board? If you say, “the robot”, that’s only the first step in the causal chain. One would have to take it back to the human scientist who built the robot. But the causal chain needs to continue back further: what is the efficient cause of the human? The materialist would have to answer that unguided natural forces caused the human scientist who built the robot who constructed the electronic circuit board. The theist would answer that God created the human with the ability to do these things.

Launching the jibe, “Who created God?” doesn’t score a point. There has to be an always-existent first cause. God’s eternal self-existence is plausible by definition. If God exists, the concept of God giving humans the ability to create technological devices is plausible. The eternal existence of matter and energy not only defies scientific observation, but the ability of unguided forces to transform matter into a human that can create “a portable and ultra-accurate” atomic clock is a far stretch beyond what we know with certainty about the limitations of nature.

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At Science Daily: Super-Earth skimming habitable zone of red dwarf

A super-Earth planet has been found near the habitable zone of a red dwarf star only 37 light-years from the Earth. This is the first discovery by a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope and offers a chance to investigate the possibility of life on planets around nearby stars. With such a successful first result, we can expect that the Subaru Telescope will discover more, potentially even better, candidates for habitable planets around red dwarfs.

Super-Earth illustration (stock image). Credit: © ANDREI / stock.adobe.com

Red dwarfs, stars smaller than the Sun, account for three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and are abundant in the neighborhood around the Sun. As such, they are important targets in the search for nearby extra-solar planets and extraterrestrial life. But red dwarfs are cool and don’t emit much visible light compared to other types of stars, making it difficult to study them.

In the infrared wavelengths red dwarfs are brighter. So the Astrobiology Center in Japan developed an infrared observational instrument mounted on the Subaru Telescope to search for signs of planets around red dwarf stars. The instrument is called IRD for Infrared Doppler, the observational method used in this search.

The first fruits of this search are signs of a super-Earth four times the mass of the Earth circling the star Ross 508, located 37 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. This planet, Ross 508 b, has a year of only 11 Earth-days, and lies at the inner edge of the habitable zone around its host star. Interestingly, there are indications that the orbit is elliptical, which would mean that for part of the orbit the planet would be in the habitable zone, the region where conditions would be right for liquid water to exist on the surface of the planet. Whether or not there is actually water or life are questions of further study.

To have the very first planet discovered by this new method be so tantalizingly close to the habitable zone seems too good to be true and bodes well for future discoveries. Bun’ei Sato, a Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the principal investigator in this search comments, “It has been 14 years since the start of IRD’s development. We have continued our development and research with the hope of finding a planet exactly like Ross 508 b.

Science Daily

Stating that this super-Earth exoplanet orbits in the habitable zone of its host star is implying more than it should. With an orbital period of only 11 Earth-days, the planet is almost certainly tidally locked, keeping one face always towards the heat of the star and the other always facing the night. Liquid water in either zone is unlikely. Moreover, red dwarf stars are subject to heightened ultraviolet flaring. As astrophysicist Hugh Ross explains, the conditions for multiple habitable zones must be satisfied simultaneously for any planet to be considered truly “habitable”.

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At Reasons.org: Benefits of Viruses

Reasons to Believe founder, Hugh Ross writes:

Viruses get a bad rap. Typically, we only think about all the harm they bring. The COVID-19 pandemic is one recent example. It brought worldwide terror and great economic harm. COVID joins a long list of deadly viruses that makes many of us wish viruses never existed. Viruses also bring existential angst. Why would an all-powerful, all-loving God create a world with viruses?

Known Benefits of Viruses
Essential for complex life. Life-forms on Earth larger and more complex than microbes would be impossible without abundant diverse viruses. If not for these viruses, bacteria would multiply and quickly occupy every niche and cranny on Earth’s surface. Earth would become a giant bacterial slime ball. Those sextillions of bacteria would consume all the resources essential for life. All life, including all the bacteria, would die.

Bacterial population check. Viruses kill and break apart bacteria at just-right rates in just-right locations to maintain a population and diversity of bacteria that is optimal for both the bacteria and for all other life-forms. We wouldn’t be here without viruses!

Water cycle. All terrestrial life crucially depends on the water cycle. All the water cycle’s precipitation components (rain, mist, snow, hail, and sleet) require microscopic seeds (or nuclei) to form. The most important seeds for precipitation are viruses and bacterial fragments resulting from viral attacks. While dust and soot particles can also serve as seeds for the formation of raindrops and snowflakes, viruses and bacterial fragments allow the initial ice crystals to form at warmer temperatures. We would not have sufficient precipitation over a sufficiently broad area to sustain our agriculture and civilization if not for viruses.

Medical applications. Viruses are beginning to play major roles in medical therapies and in advancing medical technology. Humans now possess the technology to reengineer natural viruses to combat cancer and cure genetic diseases.

Viruses as Drivers of Biogeochemical Cycles
Another benefit of viruses is the crucial role they play in Earth’s deep carbon, oxygen, and water cycles. As I have explained in my new book, Designed to the Core, each of these three cycles must be amazingly fine-tuned for global human civilization to be possible.1 Viruses play a major role in this fine-tuning.

Viruses and the bacterial fragments they create are carbonaceous substances. Through their role in precipitation, they form vast carbonaceous sheets on ocean surfaces. These carbonaceous sheets sink slowly and eventually land on the ocean floors. As they sink, they provide important nutrients for deep-sea and benthic (bottom-dwelling) life. Plate tectonics drives much of the viral and bacterial fragments into Earth’s crust and mantle where some of that carbonaceous material is returned to the atmosphere through volcanic eruptions.

Viruses ensure that carbon, oxygen, and water are cycled from the atmosphere and oceans into Earth’s crust and mantle with just-right amounts returned to Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Previous studies revealed that the population level of DNA viruses in the world’s oceans is far greater than the populations of all species of marine life combined.2 There are an estimated 1030 DNA viruses in the oceans. If stretched end to end these viruses would extend all the way to the supergiant galaxy NGC 5128, 10 million light-years away. Every second, about a hundred billion trillion DNA viral infections occur in the oceans, killing about 20% of marine microbes daily.

Thanks to the Tara Oceans Expeditions (TOEs), ecologists are now gaining an accurate picture of the population, diversity, and ecological and geochemical roles of marine RNA viruses.

Optimal Fine-Tuning Shows Design
The team that performed the analysis of the TOEs data concluded that the abundance and diversity levels of both DNA and RNA viruses must be fine-tuned in all six marine ecological zones (Arctic, Antarctic, Temperate Epipelagic, Tropical Epipelagic, Temperate Mesopelagic, and Tropical Mesopelagic) to maintain optimal marine ecosystems. Similarly, the abundances and diversities of both DNA and RNA viruses must be fine-tuned to maintain the deep carbon, oxygen, and water cycles at levels optimal for advanced life.

This research shows that the more we learn about viruses the more evidence we uncover for God’s supernatural design and care of all Earth’s resources. That care extends to all Earth’s species of life and especially to the human race.

Reasons.org.

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At Mind Matters News: Epitaph for transhumanism: But it’s far from dead!, advocate says

Canadian bioethicist and transhumanist George Dvorsky embraced it as a religion but he sees public interest waning amid growing criticism of Big Tech’s side effects:

Dvorsky offers some suggestions as to why the transhumanist movement has stalled: One is that, what with wearables and virtual reality, we are living in a partly transhuman environment now. Possibly, but the public isn’t clamoring for any more of it. In fact, as he admits, the public is having second thoughts. A growing chorus suggests, for example, that social media be off limits to teens for the same reasons as alcohol and firearms are. There are also increasingly pointed questions around social media suicides. Mark Zuckerberg’s executives are deserting his virtual universe. And the AI Church has collapsed in a scandal. Even enthusiast PJ Manney thinks transhumanism “could use an upgrade.”

Here’s a possibility Dvorsky doesn’t consider. This morning, Eric Holloway wrote about the fundamental deficit in artificial neural networks (ANNs), compared to human thinking: Neural networks get stymied by complex decisions due to the very processes that enable them to make any decisions at all. Bigger networks won’t fix that.

News, “Epitaph for transhumanism: But it’s far from dead!, advocate says ” at Mind Matters News (August 8, 2022)

Takehome: The waning of interest in transhumanism may be related to a growing awareness of the fundamental limits of artificial intelligence.

You may also wish to read: John Lennox: Transhumanism is not a new idea. In his just-published book, 2084, Oxford mathematician John Lennox points out that, in the 20th century, both the Communists and the Nazis had attempted transhumanist projects. The likely outcome of all transhumanist attempts to re-engineer humanity will be the extinction of humanity.

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At Phys.org: Ancient source of oxygen for life hidden deep in the Earth’s crust

Scientists at Newcastle University have uncovered a source of oxygen that may have influenced the evolution of life before the advent of photosynthesis.

The pioneering research project, led by Newcastle University’s School of Natural and Environmental Sciences and published today in Nature Communications, uncovered a mechanism that can generate hydrogen peroxide from rocks during the movement of geological faults.

While in high concentrations hydrogen peroxide can be harmful to life, it can also provide a useful source of oxygen to microbes. This additional source of oxygen may have influenced the early evolution, and feasibly even origin, of life in hot environments on the early Earth prior to the evolution of photosynthesis.

Nasa.gov

In tectonically active regions, the movement of the Earth’s crust not only generates earthquakes but riddles the subsurface with cracks and fractures lined with highly reactive rock surfaces containing many imperfections, or defects. Water can then filter down and react with these defects on the newly fractured rock.

Principal Investigator Dr. Jon Telling, Senior Lecturer, added: “This research shows that defects on crushed rock and minerals can behave very differently to how you would expect more ‘perfect’ mineral surfaces to react. All these mechanochemical reactions need to generate hydrogen peroxide, and therefore oxygen, is water, crushed rocks, and high temperatures, which were all present on the early Earth before the evolution of photosynthesis and which could have influenced the chemistry and microbiology in hot, seismically active regions where life may have first evolved.”

Full article at Phys.org.

With hyperbolic extrapolation, research that merely generates hydrogen peroxide is made to sound like it’s solved the naturalistic origin of life conundrum and paved the way for early evolution. Wow!

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Eric Holloway: How AI neural networks show that the mind is not the brain

A series of simple diagrams shows that, while AI learns faster than the human brain, the human mind tackles problems that stump AI:

This example shows that the human mind is doing something the neural network cannot do. When you look at the checkerboard you can almost immediately see the pattern. If one or two squares are removed, it is trivial for a human to figure out what fills in the blank. However, the neural network is unable to discover the underlying pattern.

Now here’s the clincher: The reason why the neural network cannot discover the pattern is precisely the same reason it is able to learn in the first place. As we discussed at the beginning, the neural network is able to learn because of the incremental updates. However, it is these same incremental updates that prevent the network from making the large leaps necessary to get it unstuck from its chaotic partial solutions.

And that is why neural networks cannot learn as well as the human mind. Neural networks do not really learn patterns, they incrementally move lines around to fit data. And these lines can end up fitting the data in a way that has nothing to do with the real pattern in the data. Humans, on the other hand, learn the pattern itself.

Eric Holloway, “How AI neural networks show that the mind is not the brain” at Mind Matters News (August 8, 2022)

Takehome: Neural networks get stymied by complex decisions due to the very processes that enable them to make any decisions at all. That’s a fundamental limitation.

He makes a great case; easy to understand. Check it out!

Here are the first two parts of Holloway’s discussion of the question:

Artificial neural networks can show that the mind isn’t the brain Because artificial neural networks are a better version of the brain, whatever neural networks cannot do, the brain cannot do. The human mind can do tasks that an artificial neural network (ANN) cannot. Because the brain works like an ANN, the mind cannot just be what the brain does.

and

Can computer neural networks learn better than human neurons? They can and do; when artificial intelligence programmers stopped trying to copy the human neuron, they made much better progress. Humans can do things that AI cannot do, as we saw earlier, but those abilities are not due to the superior learning ability of a human neuron.

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At Mind Matters News: If DNA is a language, who is the speaker?

In a talk at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith (2021), philosopher Steve Meyer looked at the question of whether a multiverse, as in Multiverse of Madness (2022), or God, as in many traditions is the origin of our universe. That is, is our universe designed — as considerable evidence suggests — or is ours just one of a few lucky universes whose extra-lucky conditions allow for advanced life?

3D illustration of a method of DNA sequencing. Image Credit: ktsdesign / Shutterstock

Dr. Meyer is the author of The Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper One, 2021) which argues that the evidence from science favors God over a multiverse. (Sample here.)

In this first of four transcripts of the talk, he talks about how and why it matters to ordinary people which of these claims is more likely. Tom Gilson is the moderator of the podcast.

Stephen C. Meyer: At a previous Science and Faith conference I had the opportunity to do an interview with Eric Metaxas about my new book. About halfway through, he and others noticed that one of the young women who was manning the camera for the interview was weeping visibly.

Later we got a letter from the producer who had hired this young camera woman. The young woman — we’ll call her Alice — had shared her story with him.

She was listening to us discuss scientific evidence for the existence of God. She found herself overcome with emotion and she told us a bit of the backstory in her letter. This is what she said.

Throughout my college career professors would constantly lecture that, based on the evidence they had provided there should be no way that anyone in class could believe in God. They’d argue that science was proven, and hence God was a myth. I was not equipped to present a valid opposition in debate. I was desperate to find commonality between my beliefs and my scientific education, but could find none.

Stephen C. Meyer: There are many powerful voices in our culture today that have declared that science properly understood undermines belief in God. 

Stephen C. Meyer: Now, Dawkins has done a nice job of framing the issue. He says, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect at bottom. There is no design, no purpose, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” In other words, the universe we observe is consistent with what philosophers call a materialistic worldview. There’s only matter and energy are the things from which everything else comes. And there’s no purpose of intelligence behind the universe whatsoever. “And the properties of the universe,” Dawkins says, “are exactly what we’d expect if that kind of a materialistic universe was in fact the case.”

And I want to argue that no, it’s not. I’ve focused on just one discovery: In the foundation of life, every living cell, every living organism, there is a molecule that contains digital code. Code for producing the really important protein molecules that keep cells alive. And that molecule of course is DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. 

Stephen C. Meyer: In 1957, 1958, Francis Crick proposed what he called the sequence hypothesis. And this hypothesis was, if anything, more significant than the original discovery of the double helix structure.

The sequence hypothesis proposed that the four chemical bases called nucleotides function like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in a machine code, like the zeros and ones that we’d use in software today. And in fact, our local hero here in the Seattle area, Bill Gates has said that, “DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than any we’ve ever devised.” Now… to build life you need code. Just as you need new information to build a new program or operating system on your computer.

Digital information has to be present in the DNA in order to build the proteins that service the types of cells that are present. Where did it come from? In my book Signature in the Cell, I argued that the origin of the information that’s necessary to new forms of life is best explained by designing intelligence.

Full article available at Mind Matters.

So, the pivotal question that the information content of DNA and other biomolecules raises is, can the relevant forces of nature, namely gravity and the electromagnetic forces, produce the complex, information-rich, functional biomolecules found within even unicellular organisms? Do we have here evidence of intelligent design (as in Dr. Meyer’s book, The Return of the God Hypothesis), or has our study of the interaction of these forces with the precursor, constituent atoms of biomolecules shown us that there is a reasonable expectation of the atoms forming into a living organism naturally?

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At Mind Matters News: Human brain shape hardly changed in 160,000 years

Faces changed, yes, and researchers think diet may have played a role:

The changes in human heads over the past 160,000 years were not driven by a changing brain, researchers say. It was the human face that changed, according to a recent article at New Scientist

News, “Human brain shape hardly changed in 160,000 years” at Mind Matters News (August 5, 2022)

Takehome: The human brain reaches 95% of adult size at six years of age. Interestingly seven years of age is commonly held to be the “age of reason.”

You may also wish to read: You may also wish to read: Researchers still puzzled: Why did human brains shrink? Human brain volumes decreased by 10% in the last 40,000 years, coinciding with spectacular intellectual achievements. Examples of brain shrinkage among animals are fascinating but have not provided much insight. But perhaps we should ask, how much does brain size even matter?

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At Mind Matters News: Could we really increase human IQ via genetic engineering?

One suggested approach is to only implant “intelligent” human embryos and discard the rest, to
avoid editing individual genes:

First, there are obvious problems like, how much is genetics and how much is environment? From MedLine: “Studies have not conclusively identified any genes that have major roles in differences in intelligence. It is likely that a large number of genes are involved, each of which makes only a small contribution to a person’s intelligence… A person’s environment and genes influence each other, and it can be challenging to tease apart the effects of the environment from those of genetics.” Recent genetic studies point to some genes but provide no clear guidance.

It gets more complex. The interaction between genetics and environment plays a big role in intelligence: “… the right question is not a question of Genes v. Environment, the right question is how do genes and environment interact to shape behavior?” (Psychology Today)

And then there’s the Flynn effect: “… people living in the United States were gaining a little more than 3 points per decade on tests of human intelligence.” James Flynn (1934–2020) attributed this effect to the greater opportunity that modern societies offer for abstract, problem-solving approaches to life…

From available knowledge, intelligence boost proposals have all the makings of either nothing or the next ethical train wreck.

News, “Could we really increase human IQ via genetic engineering?” at Mind Matters News (August 4, 2022)

Takehome: It’s not clear what, explicitly, human intelligence is or even how it originates. Ethics aside, there’s no way to decide who to save and who to throw away.

You may also wish to read: Can science really engineer a bigger human brain? Computational neuroscientist Daniel Graham wonders why we would bother. There is no strict relationship between brain size and intellectual achievement. The human brain has actually been shrinking in the last 30,000 years, the same period that has also shown great intellectual achievements.

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