Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 471

June 8, 2019

Why do humans have greater endurance than monkeys?

On the quest for the limit to human endurance, we learn,

The conclusions are pretty technical but the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances highlights one feature in particular that makes people unique among primates: their physical endurance is indeed extraordinary.
It is probably something we inherited from hunter-gatherers over the course of two million years, the researchers say. In a nutshell, when it comes to pushing one’s body to the limit, humans run circles around monkeys.
The limit to human endurance is measured in multiples of something called basal metabolism, which is the minimum energy, counted in calories, that is expended by the body to keep itself going for one minute.
Ivan Couronne , “Scientists seek out limit to human endurance” at Agence Presse France

It’s not just metabolism. Clearly, the reason humans can endure longer than monkeys is in large part the effect of human intelligence. The real nature of human endurance, captured:

Terry Fox could marshall the resources he did because, as a human being with a mind, he knew why he was doing what he did.

Note: What they don’t tell you is that all the Canadian cancer boffins opposed Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope. But Canadians, who heard of it by chance, lined the roadsides, offering cash to fight cancer. Remember that when you are told to “trust” the boffins. They are sometimes right. But often not when it matters most.

See also: Researcher: Ancient people were NOT all dead by 30 years of age This matter is worth clarifying because people arguing dubious claims about the mindset of ancient man sometimes assume that few people were around much beyond thirty years of age. But enough of them were around that the lifespan of 70 to 80 years was accepted as the norm for a human being, irrespective of the percentage of the population that reached it.

Is aging a “disease” or does it have an “evolutionary purpose”?

Study: Religiously affiliated people lived “9.45 and 5.64 years longer…”

and

Anomaly: Human mortality hits a plateau after 105 years of age From Discover Magazine: “ That is, you aren’t any more likely to die at 110 than at 105. It’s a contradictory finding, because mortality ticks steadily upward as we get older at all previous ages.”

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Published on June 08, 2019 06:20

If there IS a ninth planet out there…

Not Pluto (it was downgraded in 2006). What do you want to bet that the Big Ninth will turn out to be an instance of fine-tuning?

Thus far, no one has been able to turn up direct evidence the so-called “Planet Nine” exists, but the new studies add weight to the hypothesis. Fred Adams from the University of Michigan believes that Planet Nine will be spotted within the next 10 to 15 years. In his latest study, Adams used computer models of the solar system’s evolution to simulate how Planet Nine might fit into our little corner of the universe.
According to Adams, the analysis suggests that Planet Nine is smaller and closer to the sun than previously thought.
Ryan Whitwam, “New Studies Support Existence of Massive 9th Planet” at ExtremeTech

Paper (open access) and paper (paywall). Note: A special issue of Physics Reports features The planet nine hypothesis. (paywall)

Fine-tuning is a massively true but very unpopular concept.

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Published on June 08, 2019 05:45

Yet another thing that made us human: Dancing

Chimps eating shellfish helps explain human evolution? Hey, here’s another one, from a philosopher, dancer, and scholar of religion:

What if humans are the primates whose capacity to dance (shared by some birds and mammals) was the signature strategy enabling the evolution of a distinctively large and interconnected brain, empathic heart and ecological adaptability? And what if dancing plays this role for humans not just in prehistoric times, but continuing into the present? What if humans are creatures who evolved to dance as the enabling condition of their own bodily becoming? Kimerer LaMothe, “ The dancing species: how moving together in time helps make us human” at Aeon

Birds generally dance in courtship. Only humans dance in order to express personal ideas. Lamothe’s observations are on target but we are left with the question: “Who told you you had ideas?”

Strange, how much scholarship needs to deny the obvious difference between humans and animals.

Some other human evolution claims: Eating fat, not meat, led to bigger human type brains, say researchers.

Earlier discussion of the fat theory.

Starchy food may have aided human brain development

Do big brains matter to human intelligence?

Human evolution: The war of trivial explanations

and

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Published on June 08, 2019 04:39

Eric Holloway: With infinite data, AI would not outperform a human with finite data

He writes, “Earlier this year, I published a three-part exchange with Querius (linked below), who is looking for answers as to whether computers can someday think like people. He contacted me again recently and once again kindly gave me permission to publish our discussion”:

… because the halting problem, is undecidable, even with unbounded resources, then the AI still cannot perform like a human mind. That seems counterintuitive at first because all the halting programs will eventually halt, given enough time and resources. However, because the AI does not know ahead of time how many halting programs there are, it will never know when they’ve all stopped. Instead, we’ll end up with a permanently frozen world when the AI goes head to head with a human.
Eric Holloway, “COULD AI THINK LIKE A HUMAN, GIVEN INFINITE RESOURCES?” at Mind Matters News

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Published on June 08, 2019 04:14

Brendan Dixon: You are the ghost in the machine that powers AI

The machine can’t be smarter than you because you program it: You power AI whenever you prove your humanity to the CAPTCHA challenges overrunning the web. AI systems are not some alien brain evolving in our midst. They are machines we build and train by embedding our humanity into their programming. It can be smarter than you only if you can be smarter than yourself.

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Published on June 08, 2019 04:06

Anti-extinction? Former pet tropical parrots now wild in the United States

How do they survive the cold?

“We think they’re basically pre-adapted to survive in cold climates because they build their own nests and they can vary their diets so dramatically across the year,” says Stephen Pruett-Jones, an ecologist at the University of Chicago, who has been studying birds for decades. “They roost in their nest every single night of the year, so the nest is really more like a home to the monk parakeet. And their diet changes completely during the winter to seed in backyard bird feeders.”

JILL LANGLOIS, “Former pet parrots breeding and thriving in 23 U.S. states” at National Geographic

Okay, not completely wild. But they have prior adaptations to serious sub-zero temperatures.

Paper. (paywall)

“The primates of the bird world… ”

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Published on June 08, 2019 04:01

June 7, 2019

Researchers: Something like human beings had to eventually come along

Because, on a large scale our universe is “perfectly predictable”:

If Newton’s view was to remain perfectly true, the evolution of humans was inevitable. However, this comforting predictability was shattered by the discovery of the contradictory but fantastical world of quantum mechanics in the 20th century. At the smallest scales of atoms and particles, true randomness is at play – meaning our world is unpredictable at the most fundamental level.
This means that the broad “rules” for evolution would remain the same no matter how many times we replayed the tape. There would always be an evolutionary advantage for organisms that harvest solar power. There would always be opportunity for those that make use of the abundant gases in the atmosphere. And from these adaptations, we may predictably see the emergence of familiar ecosystems. But ultimately, randomness, which is built into many evolutionary processes, will remove our ability to “see into the future” with complete certainty.

James S. Horton and Tiffany Taylor, “Why humans (or something very similar) may have been destined to walk the Earth” at The Conversation

The authors would seem to be Darwinians because they believe that claim that ““natural selection”” would select more or less what actually happened, leaving out the question of how vast quantities of complex information could possibly arise via random mutations in inadequate numbers of trials and amounts of time. Which is the main question.

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See also: Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?

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Published on June 07, 2019 13:51

Clusters of human body cells have different genomes

From a study of samples collected from 500 people:

The human body is a complex mosaic made up of clusters of cells with different genomes — and many of these clusters bear mutations that could contribute to cancer, according to a sweeping survey of 29 different types of tissue…

Overall, the study found fewer examples of mosaicism in some types of tissue than would be expected on the basis of previous research. But the key, says Martincorena, is that the latest analysis demonstrated that mosaicism is present across a wide array of tissues.

Tissues with a high rate of cell division, such as those that make up the skin and oesophagus, tended to have more mosaicism than tissues with lower rates of cell division. Mosaicism also increased with age, and was particularly prevalent in the lungs and skin — tissues that are exposed to environmental factors that can damage DNA.
Heidi Ledford, “The human body is a mosaic of different genomes” at Nature

Remember the Selfish Gene? Aw, he was just playin’ you guys. You didn’t fall for that, did you?

See also: Researchers’ new find: Liver, pancreas cells are generally as old as the brain If the vast majority of liver cells are as old as the animal, being kind to the liver may be a key to longevity. It will be interesting to see whether epigenetic changes affect new cells or old cells more.

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Published on June 07, 2019 12:45

Hawking’s idea that the universe had no beginning is still alive, on life support

This image represents the evolution of the Universe, starting with the Big Bang. The red arrow marks the flow of time.

Big Bang/NASA

A recent challenge divides cosmologists:

In their 2017 paper, published in Physical Review Letters, Turok and his co-authors approached Hartle and Hawking’s no-boundary proposal with new mathematical techniques that, in their view, make its predictions much more concrete than before. “We discovered that it just failed miserably,” Turok said. “It was just not possible quantum mechanically for a universe to start in the way they imagined.” The trio checked their math and queried their underlying assumptions before going public, but “unfortunately,” Turok said, “it just seemed to be inescapable that the Hartle-Hawking proposal was a disaster.”

The paper ignited a controversy. Other experts mounted a vigorous defense of the no-boundary idea and a rebuttal of Turok and colleagues’ reasoning. “We disagree with his technical arguments,” said Thomas Hertog, a physicist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium who closely collaborated with Hawking for the last 20 years of the latter’s life. “But more fundamentally, we disagree also with his definition, his framework, his choice of principles. And that’s the more interesting discussion.”

After two years of sparring, the groups have traced their technical disagreement to differing beliefs about how nature works.
Natalie Wolchover, “Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning” at Quanta

They all hate the Big Bang. No one’s found a way to kill it.

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See also: The Big Bang: Put simply. the facts are wrong.

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Published on June 07, 2019 10:42

Researchers’ new find: Liver, pancreas cells are generally as old as the brain

Isotope imaging of different cells inside an islet of Langerhans within the pancreas. Older cells have a yellow-to-pink color scheme, while younger cells exhibit a blue-to-green color pattern.

They used to think that all cells other than brain cells would simply be replaced:

“We were quite surprised to find cellular structures that are essentially as old as the organism they reside in,” says Salk Vice President, Chief Science Officer Martin Hetzer, senior author and professor. “This suggests even greater cellular complexity than we previously imagined and has intriguing implications for how we think about the aging of organs, such as the brain, heart and pancreas.”

Most neurons in the brain do not divide during adulthood and thus experience a long lifespan and age-related decline. Yet, largely due to technical limitations, the lifespan of cells outside of the brain was difficult to determine.

Isotope imaging of different cells inside an islet of Langerhans within the pancreas. Older cells have a yellow-to-pink color scheme, while younger cells exhibit a blue-to-green color pattern.
Isotope imaging of different cells inside an islet of Langerhans within the pancreas. Older cells have a yellow-to-pink color scheme, while younger cells exhibit a blue-to-green color pattern.
Click here for a high-resolution image.

“Biologists have asked—how old are cells in an organism? There is this general idea that neurons are old, while other cells in the body are relatively young and regenerate throughout the organism’s lifetime,” says Rafael Arrojo e Drigo, first author and Salk staff scientist. “We set out to see if it was possible that certain organs also have cells that were as long-lived as neurons in the brain.”

Since the researchers knew that most neurons are not replaced during the lifespan, they used them as an “age baseline” to compare other non-dividing cells. The team combined electron isotope labeling with a hybrid imaging method (MIMS-EM) to visualize and quantify cell and protein age and turnover in the brain, pancreas and liver in young and old rodent models.

To validate their method, the scientists first determined the age of the neurons, and found that—as suspected—they were as old as the organism. Yet, surprisingly, the cells that line blood vessels, called endothelial cells, were also as old as neurons. This means that some non-neuronal cells do not replicate or replace themselves throughout the lifespan …

Prior studies have suggested that the liver has the capacity to regenerate during adulthood, so the researchers selected this organ expecting to observe relatively young liver cells. To their surprise, the vast majority of liver cells in healthy adult mice were found to be as old as the animal, while cells that line blood vessels, and stellate-like cells, another liver cell type, were much shorter lived. Thus, unexpectedly, the liver also demonstrated age mosaicism, which points to potential new paths of regenerative research for this organ. “How old are your organs? To scientists’ surprise, organs are a mix of young and old cells” at Salk News

If the vast majority of liver cells are as old as the animal, being kind to the liver may be a key to longevity. It will be interesting to see whether epigenetic changes affect new cells or old cells more.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: Researchers: How The Immune System “Thinks”

Researcher: Mathematics Sheds Light On “Unfathomably Complex” Cellular Thinking

How do cells in the body know where they are supposed to be?

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Published on June 07, 2019 05:20