Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 475

Michael Egnor: Can animals “reason”? My challenge to Jeffrey Shallit

Michael Egnor

Readers may remember anti-ID mathematician Jeffrey Shallit. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor takes on his claim that animals can reason:

Jeffrey Shallit is an atheist mathematician who holds to the odd belief that animals, like humans, are capable of reason. It would seem that a highly intelligent man who makes his living by doing mathematics would understand that animals don’t, and can’t, do mathematics. But Dr. Shallit remains confused on this point, as he makes clear in his response to my recent post on that inability of animals to think abstractly or to reason (“An atheist argues against reason”)…

The widely-held philosophical understanding of reason is straightforward. Reason, which is a subset of abstract thought, entails the ability to think without particular objects in mind. That is, abstract thought is the ability to contemplate universals, rather than particulars. Shallit seems unfamiliar with this issue, which entails 3000 years of philosophical discussion and literature.
Michael Egnor, “Can animals “reason”? My challenge to Jeffrey Shallit” at Mind Matters News

Could Shallit be replaced by even the most talented and methodical of counting ravens?

Jeffrey Shallit

Also by Michael Egnor University fires philosophy prof, hires chimpanzee to teach, research Michael Egnor: A light-hearted look at what would happen if we really thought that unreason is better than reason. University officials noted that, in light of Smith’s convincing argument that reason is a “mark of [human] inferiority” and that “animals and plants do not hesitate, the search committee interviewed several apes, three mules, and a tomato plant.

and

An Atheist Argues Against Reason. And thinks it is the reasonable thing to do (Michael Egnor)

Also: Philosopher argues, human reason is inferior to animal reactions Smith offers to resolve the problem of human exceptionality by dethroning reason He hopes that artificial intelligence and extraterrestrial life (a “statistical near-certainty”) will help us “give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception.”

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Jerry Coyne is already mad at Marcos Eberlin

Marcos Eberlin

As we’ve explained, ID-friendly Brazilian scientist Marcos Eberlin, author of Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, shouldn’t exist. He admits that. And wouldn;t you know, Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is not a fan either: The topic turns on the appendix:

The question remains, however, whether the appendix is a vestigial organ—whether it is the remnant of a caecal pouch for digestion found in some of our relatives (some herbivores have pouches rather than an appendix). The important thing here is that vestigial organs can assume a new function. Despite that function, organs like the appendix could still be reduced remnants of a feature that once had a different (and useful) function, and thus, despite their new function, still serve as evidence for evolution. (There are, of course, many vestigial features that have no known function at all, like the muscles in human ears that can move them about or the “snake limbs” pictured below.) Jerry Coyne, “Why Evolution Is True” at Why Evolution Is True

Jerry will never be short of an explanation, no matter what the circumstance.

Hat tip: Pos-darwinista

See also: 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?

and

Jerry Coyne blocked on WordPress in Pakistan. It’s somewhat like blaspheming against Darwin by airing doubts about his theories in the American school system. But in Pakistan, the death penalty is involved.

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Charles Darwin’s grandfather’s poetry prophesied evolutionary theory

Portrait of Erasmus Darwin by Joseph Wright of Derby (1792)

Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) wrote poetry about evolution:

Elsewhere I’ve argued that poets such as John Milton and Walt Whitman could be categorised as ‘scientific’. Yet Darwin’s is really a movement of one. Arguments could be made about scientific imagery from Pope to Emily Dickinson, but Darwin’s verse is singular, for nothing comes close to The Botanic Garden and especially The Temple of Nature in how committed the poet is to exploring empirical science. Darwin mined not nature for metaphor – nature was the thing itself.

There is an irony that the greatest poetic encapsulation of evolution was written before there was an actual theory of natural selection. Literature anticipates and prepares; it can consider unrealised possibilities. Poetic fantasy prefigures scientific prose. If ever there was an era that required the scientific poetic imagination, it is ours. In an age that needs such healing and wisdom about the natural world, we too need poets who shall rise to the challenge, who can sing a song of evolution, of climate change. In some small but hopeful sense, maybe they can cure the world.Ed Simon, “How Erasmus Darwin’s poetry prophesied evolutionary theory” at Aeon

Erasmus Darwin remains largely unread in an age when he could be read online for free. There must be something amiss with Ed Simon’s assumption that persons of his type can “cure the world.”

See also: Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented?

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Marcos Eberlin shouldn’t exist

The upstart Brazilian scientist takes issue with those who think there is no design in nature:

My latest book takes the opposite position, arguing that nature strongly suggests foresight at many levels, the working of a designing mind. And three Nobel laureates endorsed the book. Such distinguished scientists, encouraging an open exploration of the evidence for design, aren’t supposed to exist.

I’m not supposed to exist either. I have almost 1,000 peer-reviewed science papers to my name and am the former president of the International Mass Spectrometry Society. And yet I am convinced that nature points to a mind, to one who foresaw and solved a myriad of stunningly difficult engineering challenges to make life in the universe possible.

Indeed, contemporary science has revealed that Earth and the cosmos display layer upon layer of features essential to life. I can mention, for instance, the numerous physical constants whose precise values must be just so to allow for life. Things such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and the Planck constant.

If the Universe Were a Radio… Marcos Eberlin, “The Radio at the Edge of the Universe” at Evolution News and Science Today

You’d never guess from Eberlin’s career that thinking the universe shows evidence of design would ruin science. How did he escape Darwin’s thugs?

See also: The day Marcos Berlin was chased out of Portugal

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Should we call the Pauli Exclusion Principle quantum fine-tuning?

An astrophysicist explains:

If we didn’t have the Pauli Exclusion Principle to prevent multiple fermions from having the same quantum state, our Universe would be extremely different. Every atom would have almost identical properties to hydrogen, making the possible structures we could form extremely simplistic. White dwarf stars and neutron stars, held up in our Universe by the degeneracy pressure provided by the Pauli Exclusion Principle, would collapse into black holes. And, most horrifically, carbon-based organic compounds — the building blocks of all life as we know it — would be an impossibility for us.Ethan Siegel, “This Little-Known Quantum Rule Makes Our Existence Possible” at Forbes

Paging Hugh Ross…

Pre-existing genes a more likely cause of herbicide resistance than new mutations

From ScienceDaily:

Summary: New evidence suggests that herbicide resistance in weeds is more likely to occur from pre-existing genetic variation than from new mutations.

After exposing more than 70 million grain amaranth seeds to a soil-based herbicide, researchers were not able to find a single herbicide-resistant mutant. Though preliminary, the findings suggest that the mutation rate in amaranth is very low, and that low-level herbicide application contributes little — if anything — to the onset of new mutations conferring resistance, researchers say…

Any major stress that does not kill a plant can contribute to genetic mutations in its seeds and pollen, said University of Illinois crop sciences professor Patrick Tranel, who led the new research. Even the ultraviolet light in sunlight can stress a plant and increase the likelihood of mutations in its offspring, he said. Such mutations increase genetic diversity, which can be useful to a species’ survival.

“Resistance to herbicides comes from genetic variation in a population,” Tranel said. “If an individual weed has the right mutation that allows it to survive a particular herbicide, that individual will survive and pass the trait to its progeny.”

The relative contribution of new mutations to the problem of herbicide resistance is poorly understood, Tranel said. He and his colleagues hoped to determine the baseline mutation rate for a plant of the genus Amaranthus, a group that includes waterhemp, Palmer amaranth and other problematic agricultural weeds. They also wanted to test whether herbicide applications that failed to kill the plant increased that baseline rate…

Very few of the test plants overcame the herbicide treatment. Rigorous testing revealed that those rare plants that did survive were the offspring of seeds of weedy amaranth species that already carried the resistance genes…

“Herbicide resistance is an evolutionary process, and evolutionary processes are mathematical,” Tranel said. “If you know more precisely how plants will behave under different environmental conditions, you can develop equations that will predict how fast resistance will evolve.” Paper. (paywall) – Federico A. Casale, Darci A. Giacomini, Patrick J. Tranel. Empirical investigation of mutation rate for herbicide resistance. Weed Science, 2019; 1 DOI: 10.1017/wsc.2019.19 More.

Note: “New evidence suggests that herbicide resistance in weeds is more likely to occur from pre-existing genetic variation than from new mutations” vs. “Herbicide resistance is an evolutionary process, and evolutionary processes are mathematical”

It sounds as though the necessary evolution occurred a long time ago and that a Darwinian process just isn’t happening. But they are not likely allowed to discuss it that way.

See also: How Maize Corn’s Wild Ancestor Teosinte Prevents Maize From Breeding With It

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Researchers: Supernova prompted humans to walk upright

supernova/NASA

You have to admit, supernovas are cool. And humans are the only primate that always walks on two legs if possible. That is, we don’t drop down onto our hands and feet when we “really” need to run. All serious races are bipedal because we are fully committed to bipedalism.

In this version, bipedalism started with an avalanche of electrons:

A paper published today in the Journal of Geology makes the case: Supernovae bombarded Earth with cosmic energy starting as many as 8 million years ago, with a peak some 2.6 million years ago, initiating an avalanche of electrons in the lower atmosphere and setting off a chain of events that feasibly ended with bipedal hominins such as homo habilis, dubbed “handy man.”

The authors believe atmospheric ionization probably triggered an enormous upsurge in cloud-to-ground lightning strikes that ignited forest fires around the globe. These infernos could be one reason ancestors of homo sapiens developed bipedalism — to adapt in savannas that replaced torched forests in northeast Africa…

“The observation is that there’s a lot more charcoal and soot in the world starting a few million years ago,” Melott said. “It’s all over the place, and nobody has any explanation for why it would have happened all over the world in different climate zones. This could be an explanation. That increase in fires is thought to have stimulated the transition from woodland to savanna in a lot of places — where you had forests, now you had mostly open grassland with shrubby things here and there. That’s thought to be related to human evolution in northeast Africa. Specifically, in the Great Rift Valley where you get all these hominin fossils.” University of Kansas, “Researchers wonder if ancient supernovae prompted human ancestors to walk upright” at Eurekalert

Funny, if bipedalism originated in a global catastrophe, that it never occurred to any other primate to resolve the problem by becoming fully bipedal. But keep thinking. Resist groupthink.

See also: Bipedalsm: Regulatory area cent.com/intelligent-design/bipedalis...” target=”another”>missing in humans

Researcher: To Understand Human Bipedalism, Stop Assuming “A Chimpanzee Starting Point”

Rough terrain caused humans to start walking upright

Early bipedalism walked no straight line

We’ve also heard that bipedalism developed so we could hit each other. Or carry infants. Or scarce resources. Or save energy. Or cool down. But mainly so we could have our hands free for whatever. (Saving eneregy and cooling down don’t really count here because lots of other methods would have worked; they just wouldn’t have freed the hands at the same time.)

See also “I’m Walkin’, Yes Indeed I’m Walkin’” But Not Because It’s Necessarily a Better Way to Get Around

Also, Design perspectives and the physiology of walking

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Another snippet from “Why People Don’t Trust Science Any More”

NASA edition:

Late last month, NASA announced the results of a years-long investigation by its Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and its Launch Services Program (LSP). Back in 2009 and 2011, two climate-change-observing satellites failed to reach orbit and were lost at a total cost of US$700 million…

To allow the fairing to separate into its clamshell halves at the right moment during the launch phase of a flight, explosive charges are set off to sever the aluminum extrusions that hold the halves of the fairing together. But the aluminum has to have the right properties to break cleanly, it appears, and so NASA required supplier SPI to do certain materials tests on their extrusions, probably things like tensile strength and so on.

Given the right equipment, these are straightforward tests, and even low-level engineers and engineering students such as I teach know that faking test results is one of the worst, but at the same time one of the more common, engineering-ethics lapses.

According to the NASA report, such fakery became routine at SPI, so much so that a lab supervisor got in the habit of training newcomers how to fake test results. NASA found handwritten documents showing how the faking was done.

And this was no now-and-then thing. For whatever reason, the extrusions failed tests a lot, and so lots of faking went on, not only for NASA’s extrusions but for products bound for hundreds of other customers. But not all of them had the investigative resources and motivation of $700-million launch failures to check out what was happening. Karl D. Stephan, “Faked test result cost $700 million, says NASA” at MercatorNet

Today, if we are surrounded by dangerous flimflam, we may also be surrounded by blowhards puffing for “science” on its behalf. How about this from Chemistry World: Forensic science is “in crisis.” What a great way to convince people that the justice system is fair.

It’s rather amusing to hear clueless adminbots and their enablers explain to the world what’s wrong with people who don’t “trust science” in contexts where the non-trusters may show more awareness of what’s probably going on than the easy marks are. And many of them may be scarfing tax money to do this.

See also: At Forbes: Four reasons people “fear science” Of course, the price of cereal matters more to people on a limited budget than claims about polar bears, which they themselves never see outside a zoo. Most people in the world would not know that polar bears exist if no one told them so. But they would know if food was getting scarce and cannot easily be fooled on the point. Good for our expert witness for understanding that.

and

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

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Fungus found that can oxidize gold

Setting aside the wealth-related implications, it shows how life forms strive to stay alive using every possible niche. Fungi, as well as bacteria, can oxidize “inactive metals”:

Fungi present in soil of the so-called Golden Triangle Gold Prospect zone of Australia can oxidize the metal, researchers reported May 23 in Nature Communications. The reaction dissolves gold, after which the fungi precipitate the metal on their surfaces, a process that may help move the metal from deeper deposits in the Earth’s crust closer to the surface.Kerry Grens, “Fungus Found in Australian Soil Can Oxidize Gold” at The Scientist

The paper is open access.

F. oxysporum seems to do better in the presence of gold and might well indicate gold deposits in sewage and electronics:

“Fungi are well-known for playing an essential role in the degradation and recycling of organic material, such as leaves and bark, as well as for the cycling of other metals, including aluminium, iron, manganese and calcium,” Bohu explains in a CSIRO press release. “But gold is so chemically inactive that this interaction is both unusual and surprising—it had to be seen to be believed.” Meilan Solly, “Scientists Discover Fungus That Collects Gold From Its Environment” at Smithsonian Magazine

Some fungi are thought to be a billion years old:

Many types of fungi degrade and recycle organic matter, and some are known for their interactions with certain metals, “including aluminium, iron, manganese and calcium,” lead study author Tsing Bohu, a researcher with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), said in a statement. Mindy Weisberger, “This Fungus Mines For Gold, Then Wears It” at LiveScience

From the original CSIRO release:

The thread-like fungi attach gold to their strands by dissolving and precipitating particles from their surroundings, in a process that could offer clues for finding new gold deposits…

“Fungi can oxidise tiny particles of gold and precipitate it on their strands – this cycling process may contribute to how gold and other elements are distributed around the Earth’s surface,” CSIRO lead author, Tsing Bohu, said.

“Fungi are well-known for playing an essential role in the degradation and recycling of organic material, such as leaves and bark, as well as for the cycling of other metals, including aluminium, iron, manganese and calcium.

“But gold is so chemically inactive that this interaction is both unusual and surprising – it had to be seen to be believed.”

There may be a biological advantage in doing so too, as the gold-coated fungi were found to grow larger and spread faster than those that don’t interact with gold and play a central role in a biodiverse soil community. “Gold-coated fungi are the new gold diggers” at SciMex

Imagine. Non-reactive gold does all that for fungus. Is there anything is nature that is absolutely useless?

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

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Woke U fires prof, hires chimp ;)

Michael Egnor

He’ll teach, research. And campaign against speciesism …

A light-hearted look by neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at what would happen if we really thought that unreason is better than reason:

Dissociated Press – According to sources from the Funny Papers News Collective, officials at the Université Paris Diderot announced today that philosophy professor Justin Smith has been dismissed from his teaching and research duties at the university, following publication of his new book, Irrationality. In the widely acclaimed book, Smith argues forcefully that reason is highly overrated, and generally of less survival value than brute animal instinct…

University officials enthusiastically endorsed Smith’s thesis. Dean Nemo Nope told Dissociated Press:

“We believe Smith is completely right to argue that brute animal instinct is superior to human reason.” Citing university recruitment goals of hiring the best faculty available, the university provost announced that Smith would be let go and replaced with a bonobo chimpanzee named Nietzsche. “While Smith is certainly capable of being wrong, Nietzsche is not, and is thus clearly better qualified to hold the position of professor of philosophy. It’s not every day that you find a philosopher who is incapable of being wrong.” Michael Egnor, “University fires philosophy prof, hires chimpanzee to teach, research” at Mind Matters News

See also: An Atheist Argues Against Reason. And thinks it is the reasonable thing to do (Michael Egnor)

and

Philosopher offers to resolve the problem of human exceptionality by dethroning reason He hopes that artificial intelligence and extraterrestrial life (a “statistical near-certainty”) will help us “give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception.” (Denyse O’Leary)

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