Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 473

Science journalist confronts evolutionary theorist with hard questions at his bookstore reading

Having already attended a lecture by David Sloan Wilson on evolution at the World Science Festival, Suzan Mazur, author of Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology, decided to attend a launch for his new book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution.

She asked him some awkward questions. So things didn’t go quite as he must have hoped:

Suzan Mazur: Excuse me, what do you mean by selection?

David Wilson: Selection? Natural selection.

Suzan Mazur: Natural selection has been debunked by the scientific community. David, you know that. You know that. Why are you lying to the public?

You know that. Look at Eugene Koonin. Look at Jerry Fodor. Look at Richard Lewontin.

Moderator: Let’s let him answer the question.

Suzan Mazur: He needs to seriously define what he means by natural selection.

Moderator: We’re not ready for the question yet.

Suzan Mazur: The whole thing [talk] doesn’t work if he doesn’t define it. More.

Suzan Mazur, “Part 3 — World Science Festival Feeds Public Bogus Science: The DS Wilson Sermon” at Oscillations

Yes, in one phrase, Mazur, author of Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology, captures the problem: “he doesn’t define it.” Much Darwinism today survives on the fumes of “evolution” in general.

She certainly thinks evolution happened; it’s a substantial part of her body of work, to judge from her books on the subject. But what are the drivers of what happened?

Everyone agrees that things change over time. The world is not now as it once was. But how do we explain that?

David Sloan Wilson is an exponent of a group or kin selection, an effort to mend the problems of fully Darwinian natural selection by providing a naturalistic explanation for altruism.

But there is a curious story there: Top Darwinian E. O. Wilson espoused and then abandoned group selection, in a remarkable turn of events:

But then [E. O.] Wilson dramatically abandoned kin selection in 2010 in a Nature paper, “The evolution of eusociality,” co-authored with mathematicians. He argued that strict Darwinism (natural selection) “provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations,” dispensing with the other theories he had promoted for decades. Over 140 leading biologists signed a letter to Nature, attacking the 2010 paper. Some called his new, strictly Darwin model “unscholarly,” “transparently wrong,” and “misguided.”

What? All this is said of a Darwin-only model?

New atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has also weighed in, saying that Wilson et al. are “wrong–dead wrong.” Curiously, he admitted, “The “textbook” explanation, based on a higher relatedness of workers to their sisters than to their own potential offspring, no longer seems feasible. … But we’ve known all this for years!”

If so, he and fellow evolutionary biologists have been very economical with their accounts of the failures.

How else to account for the — to most people, incomprehensible — uproar?

Evolutionary psychologist David Sloan Wilson, defending E. O. Wilson, scolded, “This degree of illiteracy about foundational issues is an embarrassment for the field of evolutionary biology.” Denyse O’Leary, “Could we all get together and evolve as a group?” at Evolution News and Science Today:

At the time (2012, but it was still brewing), neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga tried to mend matters by declaring everyone right, raising the question in the minds of many others, “But right about what?”

And that’s what made Mazur think she was wasting a “rare day in June.”

Hey, sometimes, in some place, somewhere, in imaginary time, it gets even better… (News’s all-time fave YouTube clip)

See also: Suzan Mazur: World Science Festival is purveying an out-of-date Darwinism She notes: “The problem with Wilson’s perspective is that Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been discredited. Biology is no longer the descriptive science it once was.” (Part I)

and

Suzan Mazur: World Science Foundation’s Evening on Mars “marred,” so to speak, by a second-rate panel She also reveals that a two-page survey was handed out, asking a number of none-o’-yer-business questions on behalf of “Audience Research & Analysis, an organization that helps government agencies and cultural agencies to “move forward with decision research.” (Part II)

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Researchers: Body parts experience time separately from brain

Researcher Paolo Sassone-Corsi /
Penny Lee, UCI School of Medicine

The study done in mice identified independent circadian clocks operating through the body, independent of the brain:

The studies, published today in the journal Cell, used specially bred mice to analyze the network of internal clocks that regulate metabolism. Although researchers had suspected that the body’s various circadian clocks could operate independently from the central clock in the hypothalamus of the brain, there was previously no way to test the theory, said Paolo Sassone-Corsi, director of UCI’s Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism and senior author of one of the studies.

To overcome that obstacle, scientists figured out how to disable the entire circadian system of the mice, then jump-start individual clocks. For the experiments reported in the Cell papers, they activated clocks inside the liver or skin.

“The results were quite surprising,” said Sassone-Corsi, Donald Bren Professor of Biological Chemistry. “No one realized that the liver or skin could be so directly affected by light.”

For example, despite the shutdown of all other body clocks, including the central brain clock, the liver knew what time it was, responded to light changes as day shifted to night and maintained critical functions, such as preparing to digest food at mealtime and converting glucose to energy.

University of California Irvine, “Body parts respond to day and night independently from brain, studies show” at Medical XPress

Knowing more about internal clocks may help with diagnostics.

Just think, all those little clocks just built themselves up from nothing, even though there is no pre-existing intelligence in nature – in a world where we take for granted that spontaneous generation never occurs …

New vid series takes aim at toxic materialism in science

A new series at YouTube, from the Discovery Institute, questions the easy equation of materialism and science:

The culture that propagates the myth works through the media, through popular science spokesmen like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins, through education that takes the form of indoctrination, and with the insistent endorsement of more than a few genuine scientists who, like so many in the public, have swallowed the materialist Kool-Aid. They’ve convinced millions of people that reality goes no further than what we can see and touch. If true, that would mean that the things we care about most, including love, passion, meaning, a sense of right and wrong, and so much else, are illusions. Unfortunately, a great many people believe that.

One of the ironies of this way of thinking is that if “science proves” that only brains not minds are real, then no minds do science. That would mean there are no scientists, and no science. Besides being spiritually toxic, a “scientific” idea like that is fake science. “First Episode of Science Uprising Is Out: Fake Science and Toxic Materialism” at Evolution News and Science Today:

Hiding behind masks

One thing that materialism isn’t doing in science today is working very well.

One hears so many arguments that our coffee mugs must be conscious if we are or that the universe is a space alien computer sim — if they weren’t claiming it was science, who would care? But they are.

There are at least six vids in the series,

See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down

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Astrophysicist: Nothingness” may be the answer to our cosmic questions; Rob Sheldon responds

The real story of the universe isn’t the matter, he says, it’s the void: “And when it comes to understanding the universe, “nothing” is very powerful.”

Of course, the voids are not entirely empty. There are some dim, scattered dwarf galaxies floating around inside these mostly empty areas. And dark matter and some hydrogen managed to cling to life inside those empty, parched stretches. But by and large, the voids really are void. And because of this voidiness, ironically, the voids are filled with one thing: dark energy.Paul Sutter, “Why ‘Cosmic Nothingness’ May Hold Secrets of the Universe” at LiveScience

Rob Sheldon, our physics color commentator and author of Genesis: The Long Ascent, responds:

This article illustrates the reason why the scientific method is going extinct, not just in Darwin’s circular logic, but also in physics and cosmology.

Years ago, when models of the Big Bang and subsequent evolution of the Universe were being built, they noticed a problem, or actually, a series of problems. If enough matter was put into the model to get the galaxies to form, it all clumped up in the middle and made a single, monstrous black hole. But if they increased the power of the explosion to avoid this fate, the universe became a tenuous gas of hydrogen expanding everlastingly into the void.



The solution was to add noise, pockets of higher density matter in the Big Bang explosion like fragments of a grenade. These pockets became the galaxies. This sorta kinda worked, creating a universe of superclusters, big collections of galaxies. However, galaxy surveys that used robotic telescopes to look deep into the heavens, did not find these pockets, instead they found a web, as described in the article.

Simultaneously, measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (NASA/COBE) did not find the matter irregularities assumed, but instead found a butter-smooth Big Bang, with clumps no bigger than 1:100,000 more dense. Such a smooth explosion would never create galaxies, much less the web recently discovered.

Their solution was to add two invisible things to the models, two unobserved theoretical ideas, two dials. One was a “clumper” called “dark matter” that would get the galaxies started without contributing to the CMBR, and the other was an “expander” called “dark energy” that acted as anti-gravity yeast, to make the bubbles (or galactic voids). Now mind you, there is no theoretical necessity, no direct evidence for either one of these things (pax Perlmutter & Rubin), rather they are inferred through the application of a model. If the model is changed, so are these two items. They have only as much reality as the model itself, or perhaps even less, because variant models add or subtract these quantities. I have to stress this, because theorists think their models are “real”, and hence the strange article by Paul Sutter.

Why do I find it strange?

Because after positing the existence of two dials to improve the model fit to reality, they then turn around and say that the existence of these dials proves the model is correct. Here is the quote:

And dark matter and some hydrogen managed to cling to life inside those empty, parched stretches. But by and large, the voids really are void. And because of this voidiness, ironically, the voids are filled with one thing: dark energy.

This is the name we give to the accelerated expansion of the universe, as well as for whatever’s causing it. We don’t really know what dark energy is, but our best current guess is that it has something to do with the vacuum of space-time itself; where there’s vacuum, there’s dark energy.”

Paul Sutter, “Why ‘Cosmic Nothingness’ May Hold Secrets of the Universe” at LiveScience

Notice how the model is treated as data when he says “the name we give to the accelerated expansion of the universe” as if the astronomy of the past 10 years can determine the changes in 100’s of megaparsecs of the universe over timescales of billions of years. (It can’t.) All they have done is to add more dials to the model until it looks like the astronomy picture–which is the well-known practice throughout science called “curve-fitting” or “ad hoc explanations”. Eleven more epicycles may keep Ptolemy’s model working for another 30 years, but in the end, Ptolemy was toast, and Copernicus knew it.

Biologists are waking up to the fact that despite all the epicycles, Darwin is toast. Isn’t it about time cosmologists did likewise?

See also, re dark matter and dark energy: Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling

Researcher: The search for dark matter has become a “quagmire of confirmation bias” So many research areas in science today are hitting hard barriers that it is reasonable to think that we are missing something.

Physicists devise test to find out if dark matter really exists

Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter

What if dark matter just doesn’t stick to the rules?

A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion

Proposed dark matter solution: “Gravity is not a fundamental governance of our universe, but a reaction to the makeup of a given environment.”

Researchers: Either dark energy or string theory is wrong. Or both are. But dark energy is so glitzy! Isn’t it a line of cosmetics already?

Researchers: The symmetrons needed to explain dark energy were not found

Rob Sheldon: Has dark energy finally been found? In pop science mags?

Are recent dark energy findings a blow for multiverse theory?

and

Science at sunset: Dark energy might make a multiverse hospitable to life… if it exists

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Why must fine-tuning be classed as a problem, not just a fact?

Big Bang/NASA

What if the fundamental constants of nature had values other than the ones they do?

What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values?

There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Or, indeed, anything remotely resembling life. Or even the complexity upon which life relies to store information, gather nutrients, and reproduce. A universe that has just small tweaks in the fundamental constants might not have any of the chemical bonds that give us molecules, so say farewell to DNA, and also to rocks, water, and planets. Other tweaks could make the formation of stars or even atoms impossible. And with some values for the physical constants, the universe would have flickered out of existence in a fraction of a second. That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life.Luke A. Barnes, “The Fune-Tuning of Nature’s Laws” at The New Atlantis

Apparently, the number to bet on is 1/137. Why that number? Here’s Barnes on 1/137.

A good deal of effort goes into explaining away the fine-tuning of our universe and our Earth for life. But note the intellectually disastrous theses that are casually accepted as alternatives. For example, one alternative, the multiverse, is science’s assisted suicide; if we must consider an infinity of universes whose very existence cannot beverified, we have simply come to an end of thinking. Another dodge is that we merely evolved to see the universe as fine-tuned but it really isn’t. The very existence of the person making such a case is evidence that his case isn’t true.

What if we just accepted the fact that the universe is fine-tuned for life and for exploration? The way we accept the significance of 1/137. For what project would that be a problem? If we had that out in the open, we might have a clearer picture of the purpose of cosmological research.

See also: Should We Call The Pauli Exclusion Principle Quantum Fine-Tuning?

Rob Sheldon: Researchers Showed That The Carbon State Of The Universe IS Fine-Tuned

Shedding light on water’s weird, life-friendly qualities

and

What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

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Most chemistry papers retracted for serious, not trivial problems

Chuttersnap at Unsplash

From the Trust Science! Files: While most of the papers were retracted for plagiarism and data manipulation, according to a recent study,

Dr. Coudert learned that 229 of the 331 papers (69%) were retracted for plagiarism and “data manipulation,” which, more often than not, is a nice way of saying “fraud.” (See chart.) Only 54 of the papers (16%) were retracted due to “honest errors.”Alex Berezow, “Chemistry Papers Are Retracted Mostly Due To Plagiarism, Data Manipulation” at American Council on Science and Health

… that’s not the whole story. Plagiarism is now easy to catch (which is why we hear about it so much). Treating data as the basis for stunning fiction can often be detected too, Berezow says. But honest error? That’s surprisingly hard to catch, for reasons he sets out.

Paper. (open access)

Trust science? No. Rather, trust but verify.

See also: Another Snippet From “Why People Don’t Trust Science Any More”

At Forbes: Four Reasons People “Fear Science”

Educating Oneself Away From Science Denial: Two True Stories

and

A study of the causes of science skepticism sails right by the most obvious cause of skepticism: Repeated untrustworthiness

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Darwinian philosopher on finding meaning in life without God.

Wintery Knight summarizes the most recent episode of Unbelievable, with host Justin Brierley, discussing how atheists find meaning in life with apologist Andy Bannister, author of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: Or the Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments, and Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse:

Bannister: (to Ruse) what do you think would follow next if you got new information that caused you to believe in God?

Ruse: I’d feel scared, I’d think of all the reasons that God would dislike me, rather than any reasons why God would save me

Bannister: according to the Bible, God is not so much interested in mere belief, but in active trust in him

Ruse: without being smug, I just completed 50 years as a college professor of philosophy, and I have a sense of worth from that

Ruse: if God turns up, and says that 50 years of being a professor is not good enough, well, I don’t know God, I’m sorry, I did my best…

Ruse: “obviously, someone like myself cannot have meaning with a capital M in that sense”

Ruse: the real question is and atheist can find a sense of self-worth, “I find that I’m happier within myself, I can find meaning”

Bannister: what would you say to someone who drinks away the family inheritance and gets the same sense of happiness you have?

Bannister: what would you say to all the people who are unable to get “a sense of self-worth” from their career, because of where they are born, sickness, etc.

Ruse: I have nothing to offer them, some people are born into such awful situations that they are bound to be bad people

Ruse: these unfair accidents of birth, etc., fits with atheism better

Ruse: what we should do is change society so that more people can build a sense of self-worth through achievements

Ruse: that way, they can say to God “I used my talents” so they can create feelings of self-worth and happiness (apart from God) “ Andy Bannister and Michael Ruse Discuss How Atheists Find Meaning in Life ” at Wintery Knight

We are learning something about Darwinian atheism here but it doesn’t sound very inspiring

Hat tip: Wintery Knight

See also: At Unbelievable: Fun with Scooby Doo and the Silly Sceptics

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The scramble for Darwin’s successor

When the current Darwinians retire, who will replace them?

The various new proposals include punctuated equilibrium, neutral evolution, evolutionary developmental biology, self-organization, epigenetic inheritance, and natural genetic engineering. Big claims are made for each of these variants and other versions of blind evolution. But in the end those claims — while undoubtedly believed sincerely by their proponents — have little more substance than a bluff. Each has serious shortcomings as a substitute for foresight and planning with a purpose…

We must applaud the search for a replacement to neo-Darwinism. Despite all the grand claims, it has failed to explain the origin of new form. But if origins biology’s quest for answers is to be guided by evidence rather than by a dogmatic rule, we would do well to have both material and intelligent causes in our investigative toolkit. Marcos Eberlin, “Game of Thrones: As Darwinism Dissolves, Top Evolutionists Scramble for a Successor” at Evolution News and Science Today:

Many of the new ideas are quite interesting but, to the extent that they are all committed to the view that there is no design in nature, none of them will prove very satisfactory in the long run.

Also, it remains to be seen whether the quest to find the new Darwin will attract the brightest lights in the world today. Honestly… why should it?

Marcos Eberlin is the author of Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose.

See also: Jerry Coyne is already mad at Marcos Eberlin

and

Marcos Eberlin shouldn’t exist You’d never guess from his career that thinking the universe shows evidence of design would ruin science. How did he escape Darwin’s thugs?

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Are most “unbelievers” just superstitious and otherwise uncommitted?

The trouble with philosophically demanding religions is that they make ethical demands. Superstition doesn’t. Recently, a major conference was held at the Vatican on ”unbelief”:

The multidisciplinary research programme… mapped the nature and diversity of ‘unbelief’ across six countries including Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, UK and the USA.

Researchers asked unbelievers across the six countries about attitudes to issues such as supernatural phenomena, whether the “universe is ultimately meaningless” and what values matter most to them.

Their interim findings, published in a report “Understanding Unbelief Atheists and agnostics around the world”, showed that in all six countries, the majority of unbelievers identified as having ‘no religion’. Unbelievers, the report found, exhibited significant diversity both within, and between, different countries. It also found that a lack of belief in God didn’t necessarily entail unbelief in other supernatural phenomena – the majority of unbelievers in all countries surveyed expressed belief in one or more supernatural phenomena.

The report also found that, contrary to popular belief, only around a third of unbelievers in each country regard the universe to be ultimately meaningless.

The report also tackles the implication of unbelief on morality and values, finding that most unbelievers endorse objective moral values, human dignity and attendant rights and the “deep value” of nature, at similar rates to the general populations in their countries. Rose Gamble, “Major ‘unbelief’ conference held at Vatican” at The Tablet

PDF: “Unbelief in God doesn’t necessarily entail unbelief in

other supernatural phenomena. Atheists and (less so)

agnostics exhibit lower levels of supernatural belief than

do the wider populations. However, only minorities of

atheists or agnostics in each of our countries appear to

be thoroughgoing naturalists.”

One way of looking at it: If you believe vaguely that “there is something out there,” you needn’t do anything about it. You needn’t even avoid superstition. You can even be part of a war on science in good faith. (For example, you can convince yourself that right answers in math discriminate against somebody or other and voila! a war on math!)

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: Sceptic asks, why do people who abandon religion embrace superstition? Belief in God is declining and belief in ghosts and witches is rising

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Key Silicon Valley figures hope to beat death the transhumanist way

You, by the way, are doomed:

Everything has a history, including Silicon Valley. According to a new media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff, an influential Valley philosophy might underlie the current attitudes, values, and beliefs:

“There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, among others.” Denyse O’Leary, “Silicon Valley’s strange, apocalyptic cult” at Mind Matters News

It would explain a lot of crazy.

See also: The idol with feet of silicon: Religions based on artificial intelligence (AI) cannot transcend the limits of computers (Robert J. Marks)

Tales of an invented god The most important characteristic of an AI cult is that its gods (Godbots?) will be created by the AI developers and not the other way around

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

and

Can we cheat death by uploading ourselves as virtual AI entities?

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