Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 478

Genes are more like a river than a string of beads…

That’s the impression one gets from a recent article suggesting caution about DNA mapping and “it’s in my genes” in general:

In 2002, a woman named Lydia Fairchild applied for enforcement of child support when she separated from the father of her two children. The state of Washington required genetic testing to confirm his paternity. The tests showed he was indeed the father. But they also showed that Fairchild was not the mother…

Fairchild is known as a chimera. She developed inside her mother alongside a fraternal twin. That twin embryo died in the womb, but not before exchanging cells with Fairchild. Now her body was made up of two populations of cells, each of which multiplied and developed into different tissues. In Fairchild’s case, her blood arose from one population, while her eggs arose from another.

Women can also become chimeras with their own children. During pregnancy, fetuses can shed cells that then circulate throughout a woman’s body. In some cases they linger on after birth. They can then develop into muscle, breast tissue, and even neurons.Carl Zimmer, “Seven Big Misconceptions About Heredity” at Skeptical Inquirer

So we may not even have only one genome. Apart from genome mapping, who would know? It doesn’t seem to affect the sense of singular and unique identity.

Readers, if you went through a Darwinian biology curriculum in school, do you think it would have sounded quite the same way if this kind of thing were generally known?

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See also: So it’s come to this… Turmoil over what genes really do

and

There’s a gene for that… or is there?

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The immune cells, it turns out, have secret police

structure of an animal cell/royroydeb (CC BY-SA 4.0)

“Natural killer cells” roam the body, demanding that other cells produce evidence of good faith—otherwise, they kill them:

In general, two things must happen before an NK cell attacks a target cell: (1) It must receive an activating signal from a body cell that says, “Kill me!” (2) It must not receive an inhibitory signal that says, “Wait, don’t kill me!” This inhibitory signal is essentially a proper “ID card” known as a major histocompatibility complex I (MHC I) protein. When a body cell shows the NK cell this identification, the NK cell is temporarily satisfied and moves on to the next cell. If the next cell is not able to provide an MHC I molecule (or provides one that is otherwise “incorrect,”), it is assumed to be cancerous or virus-infected and is killed.

Demonstrating just how important NK cells are, epidemiological studies have shown that people who lack them are more susceptible to certain types of cancer. Furthermore, when a cell becomes cancerous, it develops ways to avoid the immune system, and evasion of NK cells is one mechanism by which they accomplish this.Alex Berezow, “Natural Killer Cells: Fighting Cancer With The ‘Secret Police’” at American Council on Science and Health

Intelligence is everywhere in nature yet somehow it doesn’t exist, right?

Intelligence was here from the beginning but it somehow also evolved over billions of years by Darwinian means (natural selection acting on random mutations)

And we are to “trust science” despite what we see and hear! Maybe that’s the take-home point.

Would an ID perspective do better against cancer? Could the lack of it be slowing cancer research? Maybe cancer needs to be outsmarted rather than outgunned.

Before you go: DNA uses “climbers’ ropes method” to keep tangles at bay It all just swished into place among unthinking cells billions of yours ago. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Go tell it on the mountain.

DNA as a laster of resource recycling

The amazing energy efficiency of cells: A science writer compares the cell to human inventions and finds that it is indeed amazingly energy-efficient.

In addition to DNA, our cells have an instruction language written in sugar Of course it all just tumbled into existence and “natural selection” somehow organized everything. As if.

Cells find optimal solutions. Not just good ones.

Researchers build “public library” to help understand photosynthesis

Wait. “The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, … ” And machines just happen all by themselves, right? There is no information load to account for; it just evolved by natural selection acting on random mutation the way your Android did!

In Nature: Cells have “secret conversations” We say this a lot: That’s a lot of information to have simply come into being by natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism). It’s getting not only ridiculous but obviously ridiculous.

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Researchers: Helpful gut microbes send messages to their hosts If the strategy is clearly identified, they should look for non-helpful microbes that have found a way to copy it (horizontal gene transfer?)

Cells and proteins use sugars to talk to one another Cells are like Neanderthal man. They get smarter every time we run into them. And just think, it all just tumbled into existence by natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism) too…

Researchers: First animal cell was not simple; it could “transdifferentiate” From the paper: “… these analyses offer no support for the homology of sponge choanocytes and choanoflagellates, nor for the view that the first multicellular animals were simple balls of cells with limited capacity to differentiate.”

“Interspecies communication” strategy between gut bacteria and mammalian hosts’ genes described

Researchers: Cells Have A Repair Crew That Fixes Local Leaks

Researchers: How The Immune System “Thinks”

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

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

Researchers A Kill Cancer Code Is Embedded in Every Cell

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Researchers: Recently found fungus pushes complex life back a half billion years

Five types of fungi/
BorgQueen ((CC BY-SA 2.5 )

Fungi were thought to have appeared about half a billion years ago but…

But recent fossil specimens unearthed in Canada and analysed using the latest dating technology appear to push back fungi’s arrival to the earliest reaches of life on land.

Corentin Loron, a PhD student from the University of Liege, Belgium, and colleagues examined the microfossils to determine the chemical composition of their cells.

They found the presence of chitin—a fibrous substance that forms on fungal cell walls—and examined the age of the rock the fossils were found in by its ratio of radioactive elements.

They concluded the microfossils were between 900 million and one billion years old.

Loron said the finding was significant because in the “tree of life”, fungi are part of the same umbrella group of organisms—known as Eukaryotes—as plants and animals.

“This means that if fungi are already present around 900-1000 million years ago, so should animals have been,” he told AFP. “One billion year old fungi found is Earth’s oldest” at Phys.org

If so, not nearly as much time from the Big Bang onward for all that complexity to just sort of slosh into existence…

Note: We are told that fungi make up about six times the biomass of all animals. It seems there are many fungus among us.

See also: Talk about stasis! Bedbugs are 100 million years old!

Amber—a moment in time 100 mya: Life forms trapped in amber—hardened resin from conifers—can show remarkable examples of stasis: No real change from one ten-million-year span to the next one.

and

Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

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Philosopher eliminates human exceptionality by ejecting reason

Justin E. H. Smith of Concordia University 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”:

He is unusually frank in explaining why he finds that an attractive (or even tenable) idea:

“In answering the where question of reason in this maximally broad way, we are able to preserve the naturalism that philosophy and cognitive science insist upon today, while dispensing with the human-exclusivity of reason. And all the better, since faith in the strange idea that reason appears exactly once in nature, in one particular species and nowhere else, seems, on reflection, to be itself a vestige of pre-scientific supernaturalism.”

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.”

But what if philosophy and cognitive science are so wrong in this matter that they are leading Smith and the rest of us into absurdities? Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor comments. Denyse O’Leary, “Philosopher argues, human reason is inferior to animal reactions” at Mind Matters News

See also: The real reason why only human beings speak. (Michael Egnor) Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly

Do big brains matter to human intelligence? We don’t know. Brain research readily dissolves into confusion at that point.

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

and

Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug Another approach to dethroning reason is to claim that everything is conscious, a surprisingly popular view among naturalists.

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Is science “broken” or has it just accumulated a lot of baggage?

What’s hot? What’s not?/Niklas Bildhauer, Wikimedia

The National Academies of Science is wading into the longstanding mess over the validity of research findings. It doesn’t, of course, agree that there is a “crisis.”

That said, the report also notes that the American public’s confidence in science hasn’t wavered at all in recent years, despite major news articles discussing the “crisis” in psychology and elsewhere. And it found that even scientists who have criticized the current state of things aren’t completely on-board with calling science broken.

“How extensive is the lack of reproducibility in research results in science and engineering in general? The easy answer is that we don’t know,” Brain Nosek, co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science, told the report committee during a panel last year. “I don’t like the term ‘crisis’ because it implies a lot of things that we don’t know are true.” Ed Cara, “Is Science Broken? Major New Report Outlines Problems in Research” at Gizmodo

Interesting approach, that: We don’t know how extensive the problem is but we are sure it can’t be a crisis?

That’s too bad. The term “crisis” means “turning point” or point at which decisions get made. Not to be confused with “apocalypse” (or, these days, mostly a-crock-a-lypse… )

The NAS report blames science journalists, which is a hoot:

The report also singles out journalists, citing a survey showing that 73 percent of Americans agree that the “biggest problem with news about scientific research findings is the way news reporters cover it.” Ed Cara, “Is Science Broken? Major New Report Outlines Problems in Research” at Gizmodo

Anyone familiar with the situation will know that most of the hype originates with media releases prepared by or for the researchers themselves.

Some of us think it’s the baggage caused by the built-in assumptions of naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism.”

Note: The report is free if you register online, paywalled if you need paper.

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See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Science publishing is too much like Facebook She introduces SciMeter.org where you can “Create your own custom metric and apply it to a list of authors.” And it is none of Mark Zuckerberg’s business or any science boffin’s either.

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David Klinghoffer: Racism is integral to Darwinian thinking, “like an irremediable birth defect”

There’s been a bit of back and forth between Uncommon Descent and Evolution News and Science Today on an American thinkmag once again stepping on Darwin’s rake (racism). Something I (O’Leary for News) often say is that in any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman, got picked up there and their editor comments,

The word “creationism” is used unfairly as a cudgel against proponents of intelligent design. But fine, let’s entertain it for a moment, if only to designate a minimal concept like the philosophical one that says humans, while sharing biological common descent with other creatures, are uniquely endowed with souls bearing some sort of exceptional quality, however you characterize that. It could be a divine image, but need not be. The consistent materialist must deny all this.

The idea of racial equality, perfectly natural to a design perspective, can be achieved by the Darwinist only by continually and ruthlessly suppressing a built-in tendency. It requires bad faith: fooling himself about his own way of thinking. Like an irremediable birth defect, it’s never going to go away. David Klinghoffer, “Why Darwinism Can Never Separate Itself from Racism” at Evolution News and Science Today:

For the record, I’m not—of course—saying that all Darwinians are racist or that no non-Darwinians are racist. Rather, a belief in natural selection acting on random mutation as the main explanation for the human race makes racism intellectually reasonable, even if morally wrong.

If one believes, however, that God ordained that all human beings possess an immortal soul and are equal in his sight, racism is intellectually unreasonable as well as morally wrong.

But those aren’t even the only two choices. If one believes merely that evolution has proceeded by many different paths over billions of years—and not predominantly by the long, slow, methodical ascent of natural selection—looking for the subhuman loses its force. It is like looking for the space alien or the Abominable Snowman. He may exist or have existed. On the terms stated, who can rule it out? But he isn’t necessary for an explanation of how human life today comes to be as it is. So taking him seriously becomes the domain of cranks.

Under the circumstances, it is a testament to human decency that more Darwinians aren’t racists.

See also: “Race realism” (Darwinian racism) pops up again: the John Derbyshire commemorative edition. An American conservative thinkmag published geneticist Razib Khan, glorifying Darwinism, and he turned out to have apparent racist links. Then someone with even more pronounced racist links rose to defend him.

Darwinian conservative has a troubling history re racist links Every so often, for whatever reason, a US conservative thinkmag steps on Darwin’s rake.

In any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman. Otherwise, there is no beginning to human history.

and

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

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“Race realism” (Darwinian racism) pops up again: the John Derbyshire commemorative edition

Recently, we noted a PhD candidate in genetics, Razib Khan, holding forth for Darwin at a conservative thinkmag (National Review steps on Darwin’s rake every few years, it seems). Well then it turned out the guy has apparent racist links. Enough anyway to be a warning flag.

And, wouldn’t you know, a staunch Darwinist who left National Review under just such a cloud is now speaking up for him, as we learn:

Derbyshire was our antagonist at National Review, blazing away at “Creationists,” some years ago. That was before he rode off, leaving mainstream conservatism behind, on a horse called “Race Realism.” His writing now appears at racialist publications including VDare, Taki’s Magazine, and The Unz Review. The last is particularly vile, but Derbyshire runs his pieces at all three…

If you are going to argue for turning the mute button on against those who say biology gives evidence of design, excluding them as discussion partners, you do need to examine your own associations pretty carefully. Khan, it seems, has failed to do that. He wrote regularly for the Unz website, a home to sickeningly racist and anti-Semitic material, and his name still appears on their homepage…

Khan’s association with the alt-right, and Derbyshire’s, is not by chance. The thread of what the racist Right calls “Race Realism” has never been completely absent from Darwinian theorizing from Darwin himself down to today. See our colleague Richard Weikart’s book From Darwin to Hitler for more about this persistent taint. Derbyshire calls the opposite view “Race Denial,” which is another way of saying that the “denier” rejects racism. If you want to call it that, I’m glad to be a “denier.” David Klinghoffer, “The Return of John Derbyshire” at Evolution News and Science Today

Klinghoffer, tell Derbyshire he needs a louder mike. He should go tell it on the mountain. Worldwide.

Maybe the explanation is simpler than we suppose: People who are looking for the subhuman but can’t seem to definitely locate him in the past are compelled to look for him in the present.

Anyway, the good news is, you needn’t believe us if they are telling you themselves.

See also: Darwinian conservative has a troubling history re racist links Every so often, for whatever reason, a US conservative thinkmag steps on Darwin’s rake.

In any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman. Otherwise, there is no beginning to human history.

and

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

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Jerry Coyne blocked on WordPress in Pakistan

[image error]Jerry Coyne

The Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, was blocked due to “blasphemous” posts:

I think this must be the third time that WordPress has cooperated with the Pakistani government in blocking “blasphemous” content on my site. The blasphemy, as you’ll see from the three links singled out, involves reproducing Jesus and Mo cartoons, which have apparently hurt the feelings of Muslims. Indeed, I seem to have committed a crime.

Here’s the letter from WordPress, with the Pakistani complaint belowJerry Coyne, “WordPress once again helps the Pakistani government block my “blasphemous” Jesus and Mo posts” at [publication]

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.*

The comments are informative.

*Note: Asia Bibi, who had real problems with the Pakistani government, has landed refugee in Canada.

See also: Darwinian Jerry Coyne vents his spleen at Darwin-doubting Yale computer scientist Gelernter is HOW likely to read Coyne’s diatribe and conclude he must be all wrong? But then Darwinians tend not to notice what others do. Presumably, it’s an adaptation.

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Epigenetics: Worm memories passed down 14 generations

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

Nematode worms were genetically engineered with a transgene that causes fluorescence, more so when they were moved to higher temperatures. But then, when the worms were moved back to lower temperatures, the fluorescence continued as, researchers think, a genetic memory:

Last year, researchers discovered that these kinds of environmental genetic changes can be passed down for a whopping 14 generations in an animal – the largest span ever observed in a creature, in this case being a dynasty of C. elegans nematodes (roundworms). Signe Dean, “Scientists Have Observed Epigenetic Memories Being Passed Down For 14 Generations” at ScienceAlert

This was the longest span of generations to retain an environment change. One researcher suggested ,

“Worms are very short-lived, so perhaps they are transmitting memories of past conditions to help their descendants predict what their environment might be like in the future,” added co-researcher Tanya Vavouri from the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Spain. Signe Dean, “Scientists Have Observed Epigenetic Memories Being Passed Down For 14 Generations” at ScienceAlert

If we accumulate precise information as to the method of epigenetic transmission, we will have the material for a serious theory of epigenetics in evolution.

That is how Darwinism fades. Not by knowing less about evolution but by knowing more.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

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See also: Researchers: Nicotine Effects Persist Through Several Generations Of Mice,Via Sperm

and

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

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Evolutionary biologist declares, Martian colonists will mutate really quickly

Mars/NASA

Riffing off Elon Musk’s goal of sending humans to Mars by 2024, and NASA’s plans to send astronauts there after they visit the Moon again, Rice University evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon envisions “mutations cascading through the gene pool”:

After about two generations, he thinks their bones will strengthen, they’ll need glasses for nearsightedness, their immune systems will be null, pregnancy and childbirth will be significantly more perilous, and the exposure to radiation—more than 5,000 times the amount we’re exposed to on Earth during a normal lifetime, Solomon says—could lead to an influx of cancer.Natalie Coleman, “Evolutionary Biologist: Mars Colonists Will Mutate Really Fast” at Futurism

As a result, he thinks Martians should stop having kids with Earthlings.

Hey, what do you know? A human evolution theory we maybe able to test in real time.

By the way, the 1950s phoned. They want their little green men back. We haven’t, it seems, given them enough respect.

See also: Tales of an invented god

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