Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 495

April 16, 2019

Plants “evolve” during the course of an experiment?

Brassica and bee/Florian Schiestl, UZH

Brassica rapa plants pollinated by bumblebees evolve more attractive flowers. But this evolution is compromised if caterpillars attack the plant at the same time. With the bees pollinating them less effectively, the plants increasingly self-pollinate. In a greenhouse evolution experiment, scientists at the University of Zurich have shown just how much the effects of pollinators and pests influence each other…

After this experimental evolution study, the plants pollinated by bumblebees without herbivory were most attractive to the pollinators: they evolved more fragrant flowers, which tended to be larger. “These plants had adapted to the bees’ preferences during the experiment,” explains Sergio Ramos. By contrast, bee-pollinated plants with herbivory were less attractive, with higher concentrations of defensive toxic metabolites and less fragrant flowers that tended to be smaller. “The caterpillars compromise the evolution of attractive flowers, as plants assign more resources to defense,” says Ramos.

The powerful interplay between the effects of bees and caterpillars was also evident in the plants’ reproductive characteristics: In the course of their evolution, for example, the bee-pollinated plants developed a tendency to spontaneously self-pollinate when they were simultaneously damaged by caterpillars. Plants attacked by caterpillars developed less attractive flowers, which affected the behavior of the bees so that they pollinated these flowers less well.
Paper. – Sergio E. Ramos, Florian P. Schiestl. Rapid plant evolution driven by the interaction of pollination and herbivory. Science, April 11, 2019 DOI: 10.1126/science.aav6962 More.

Wait a minute. This isn’t evolution! If these traits developed during the experiment, the tendency to do this sort of thing must be coded into the plants. The question then becomes, what signal systems convey information throughout the plant about self-pollination or blossom size in response to environment changes? How these systems evolved, in terms of the how the mechanisms came to exist is not addressed here.

Funny what gets called “evolution” these days. No wonder there is increasing skepticism among secular scientists.

See also: Pest Insect Gets Plants To Transmit False Information To Other Plants

and

Researchers: Yes, plants have nervous systems too Not only that but, like mammals, they use glutamate to speed transmission

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Published on April 16, 2019 17:20

Simpson’s Paradox: Numbers are stranger than we think

Dishonest statisticians can produce misleading data but some misleading data are the result of curious flukes of statistics. Simpson’s Paradox is one of these flukes:

Here’s an example. Baseball player Mickey has a better batting average than Babe in both April and May. So, in terms of batting average, Mickey is a better baseball player than Babe. Right?

No.

It turns out that Babe’s combined batting average for April and May can be higher than Mickey’s. In fact, Mickey can have a better batting average than Babe every month of the baseball season and Babe may still be a better hitter. How? That’s Simpson’s Paradox… Robert J. Marks, “Simpson’s Paradox: Big Data Can Lie” at Mind Matters

One outcome of Simpson’s Paradox is that machines cannot replace statisticians in analysing results. A great deal depends on interpretation, as Marks shows. “Clustering remains largely an art.”

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Also by Robert J. Marks: Things Exist That Are Unknowable: A tutorial on Chaitin’s number

See also: Too Big to Fail Safe? (cautions on overuse of Big Data in medicine)

and

Machines cannot take over Fundamental constraints in nature make nonsense of the claim. Great sci-fi plots though.

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Published on April 16, 2019 04:58

Increasing Skepticism Among Secular Scientists?

Today at The Federalist:

The plain truth from the literature, conferences, expert perception, and a bit of anecdote for color, is that current Neo-Darwinism is far from the untouchable theory it is lauded to be. Not only this, but it has serious and increasing skeptics and challengers from within the secular scientific community.

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Published on April 16, 2019 04:56

April 15, 2019

A biophysicist looks at the limits of what science can tell us

As a scientist, he confesses dismay at the naive popular faith in science, for example,

D. Ignoring Falsification of Key Predictions

Because so many conclusions in modern science depend upon inductive inferences to conclusions that cannot be proved experimentally, falsification has an important role. It tells us if we are on the wrong track. It is very bad science that focuses only on the positive support for a theory while ignoring experimental and observational evidence that falsifies it.

An essential prediction of the Darwinian theory of common descent, for example, is that functional genetic information increases through a process of mutations, insertions, and deletions. Experimental science, however, consistently falsifies this prediction. In reality, the number of harmful mutations is greater than the number of beneficial mutations, with the net result that the genomes of life are slowly degrading. We see this, for example, in bacteria, in the fruit fly, and in human beings. In this case, scientism’s philosophical commitment to common descent sets aside actual experimental results that contradict that belief because, under scientism, the foregone conclusion is required to be true, even if experimental science appears to falsify a key prediction. Scientism’s belief in Darwinian common descent by blind and mindless processes is, as some might say, “too big to fail.” Kirk Durston, “Inferential Science — What Could Go Wrong?” at Evolution News and Science Today:

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See also: Kirk Durston: In Defence Of Experimental Science

and

Kirk Durston: Backing Up The Particle Physicist Who Says There Is “Baked In” Bias In Science

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Published on April 15, 2019 16:32

At Inference Review: Human language is much more than a system of signals

Two recent articles in Inference Review provide insight into some of its ongoing puzzles in the huge unmapped territory of the interaction between the mind and the brain:

In his review of a recent book, Language in Our Brain: The Origins of a Uniquely Human Capacity (2017) by Angela Friederici, of the Max Planck Institute, a University of Maryland linguist outlines the information void:

“Which part of our brain carries information forward in time? No one knows. For that matter, no one knows what a symbol is, or where symbolic interactions take place. The formal structures of linguistics and neurophysiology are disjoint, a point emphasized by Poeppel and David Embick in a widely cited study. There is an incommensurability between theories of the brain and theories of the mind…” Denyse O’Leary, “The Origin of Language Remains Obscure” at Mind Matters

Note: Some readers may remember Inference Review from “Inference Review did not set out to make a fool of cosmologist Adam Becker”

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See also: Do big brains matter to human intelligence?

and

The real reason why only human beings speak (Michael Egnor)

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Published on April 15, 2019 14:42

Notre Dame burns – updated

A horror:

Daily Mail bullet points:

Condolences to the people of France and to lovers of great art everywhere. END

Arson suspected. – News, 17:28 EST Arson ruled out pending investigation (updated EST 17:29 PM EDT)
Blaze linked to renovations.

Nothing will remain ““Everything is burning, nothing will remain from the frame,” Notre Dame spokesman Andre Finot told French media. The 12th-century cathedral is home to incalculable works of art and is one of the world’s most famous tourist attractions, immortalized by Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” 17:31 EDT

Background: The Spire of Notre Dame Tumbled Like a Spear Into the Heart of Something Timeless

Background: Why arson was suspected: Vandals and arsonists have targeted French churches in a wave of attacks that has lasted nearly two months.

More than 10 churches have been hit since the beginning of February, with some set on fire while others were severely desecrated or damaged.

St. Sulpice, the second-largest church in Paris, after Notre Dame Cathedral, had the large wooden door on its southern transept set ablaze March 17. (Crux)

CATHOLIC CHURCHES ARE BEING DESECRATED ACROSS FRANCE—AND OFFICIALS DON’T KNOW WHY (Newsweek)

Notre Dame (no surprise given its prominence) has been targeted in the recent past:

No surprise, the Cathedral has been targeted before: France jails ‘jihadist’ woman (22) accused over foiled terror attack in Paris
“ONE OF THREE women allegedly involved in a foiled plot in 2016 to blow up a car packed with gas canisters near the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was today sentenced to eight years in prison by a French court for earlier offences.”

Current reported state of damage: The French leader credited the “courage” and “great professionalism” of firefighters with sparing Notre Dame’s facade and two landmark towers from being destroyed.

From Popular Mechanics: “Notre Dame has been threatened with collapse before. A New York Times report in 2017 stated that “experts say Notre-Dame, although not at risk of sudden collapse, has reached a tipping point — and an expensive one at that” and reported a $180 million price for appropriate repairs. Much of that money has gone to renovations come from American donors in love with French culture and how the cathedral embodied the nation.”

Live:

A firefighter’s view of why these buildings are hard to save.

Works of art feared lost have been saved (scroll down)

Live stream:

A week ago, Notre Dame statues were airborne.

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Published on April 15, 2019 13:21

Researchers: Origin of life more likely in ponds, assisted by lightning, than oceans

shallow pond may have provided more nitrogen/Thais, Fotolia

From ScienceDaily:

“Our overall message is, if you think the origin of life required fixed nitrogen, as many people do, then it’s tough to have the origin of life happen in the ocean,” says lead author Sukrit Ranjan, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It’s much easier to have that happen in a pond.”

Ranjan and his colleagues have published their results today in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. The paper’s co-authors are Andrew Babbin, the Doherty Assistant Professor in Ocean Utilization in EAPS, along with Zoe Todd and Dimitar Sasselov of Harvard University, and Paul Rimmer at Cambridge University.

They think lightning played a role:

“Lightning is like a really intense bomb going off,” Ranjan says. “It produces enough energy that it breaks that triple bond in our atmospheric nitrogen gas, to produce nitrogenous oxides that can then rain down into water bodies.”

Scientists believe that there could have been enough lightning crackling through the early atmosphere to produce an abundance of nitrogenous oxides to fuel the origin of life in the ocean. Ranjan says scientists have assumed that this supply of lightning-generated nitrogenous oxides was relatively stable once the compounds entered the oceans…

Ranjan says the more shallow the pond, the greater the chance nitrogenous oxides would have had to interact with other molecules, and particularly RNA, to catalyze the first living organisms.

“These ponds could have been from 10 to 100 centimeters deep, with a surface area of tens of square meters or larger,” Ranjan says. “They would have been similar to Don Juan Pond in Antarctica today, which has a summer seasonal depth of about 10 centimetres.” …

The debate over whether life originated in ponds versus oceans is not quite resolved, but Ranjan says the new study provides one convincing piece of evidence for the former.

“This discipline is less like knocking over a row of dominos, and more like building a cathedral,” Ranjan says. “There’s no real ‘aha’ moment. It’s more like building up patiently one observation after another, and the picture that’s emerging is that overall, many prebiotic synthesis pathways seem to be chemically easier in ponds than oceans.” Paper. (paywall) – Sukrit Ranjan, Zoe R. Todd, Paul B. Rimmer, Dimitar D. Sasselov, Andrew R. Babbin. Nitrogen Oxide Concentrations in Natural Waters on Early Earth. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 2019; DOI: 10.1029/2018GC008082
More.

The researcher’s analogy is interesting (more like building a cathedral than knocking over a row of dominos). If the origin of life were like knocking over a row of dominos, life would be coming into existence ex nihilo, easily and often. That is assuredly not what we find.

On the other hand, no master architect ever built cathedral without a prior plan and a meaning to express — in this case a theology. What meaning does Ranjan think life is trying to express?

See also: NASA Recreates The Origin Of Life And It’s Totally Shocking What’s shocking in this case is the hype.

Ancient Cataclysms And Modern Conflicts In Origin Of Life Studies

The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.

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Published on April 15, 2019 11:21

Sabine Hossenfelder: Has the Large Hadron Collider “broken physics”?

Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, responds to philosopher David Wallace’s claim to the effect “ any such naturalness failure threatens to undermine the entire structure.” At bottom, the Collider produced useful data but did not, it seems, support the cosmologies that various theoretical physicists’ careers depend on.

We are living in the world of the Big Bang and fine-tuning where the Standard Model of particle physics just won’t give current theorists the universe they want. Will building a much bigger Collider help?

It has remained a mystery to me why anyone buys naturalness arguments. You may say, well, that’s just Dr Hossenfelder’s opinion and other people have other opinions. But it is no longer just an opinion: The LHC predictions based on naturalness arguments did, as a matter of fact, not work. So you might think that particle physicists would finally stop using them.

But particle physicists have been mostly quiet about the evident failure of their predictions. Except for a 2017 essay by Gian-Francesco Guidice, head of the CERN theory group and one of the strongest advocates of naturalness-arguments, no one wants to admit something went badly wrong. Maybe they just hope no one will notice their blunder, never mind that it’s all over the published literature. Some are busy inventing new types of naturalness that would predict new particles would show up only at the next larger collider.[name], “The LHC has broken physics, according to this philosopher” at BackRe(Action)

Question: Who decided that physics had to be “natural”? What does that mean? And what if “naturalness” is not an attribute of the physics of our universe? What does that mean?

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See also: Hossenfelder: Now They Are Marketing Non-Discoveries as Discoveries

and

Experimental Physicist: Particle Theory Is “In A Crisis” And A Bigger Collider IS the ans!

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Published on April 15, 2019 05:22

April 14, 2019

Richard Weikart: Is life a cosmic accident?

Richard Weikart (Ucal Stanislaus) studies how naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” affects our thinking:

Since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, atheist and agnostic thinkers (i.e., materialists and positivists) have considered everything, including humans, as merely the product of accidental processes. This means that human life no longer has any value or moral significance. This talk examines the way that many thinkers, such as the eminent British philosopher Bertrand Russell, espoused this view, but also contradicted themselves by implying that humans are important.Richard Weikart, “Is Human Life a Cosmic Accident?: Atheists’ Contradictory Position” at Forum of Christian Leaders Post-Forum Seminar

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See also: Historian Richard Weikart Is On C-Span Tonight, On The Death Of Humanity And Hitler’s Religion

and

Richard Weikart On The Anti-Semitic Burst In Evolutionary Psychology

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Published on April 14, 2019 15:24

Hugh Ross: How recent measurements support the Big Bang theory

Hugh Ross

Many cosmologists would prefer to reorganize the universe so that it did not have a beginning but the project doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, says astronomer Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe:

Astronomers have now produced four independent measurements of the mass of the hot intergalactic medium based on completely distinct methods using different telescopes and different databases of galaxies and quasars. The fact that all four measurements agree gives astronomers confidence that they really have found the missing baryons of the universe.

Thus, the missing baryons challenge to big bang cosmology has been resolved, and the scientific case for the validity of the biblically predicted big bang creation model is even more firmly established than before.9 We have one more reason to be confident that the God of the Bible exists and personally crafted the universe for our existence.Hugh Ross, “Four Astronomical Discoveries of “Missing Matter” Support Cosmic Creation” at Salvo 48

Maybe the cosmologists can overthrow the universe and appoint another one?

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See also: The fine-tuning that enambled our life-friendly moons creates discomfort

Hugh Ross’s five best arguments from nature for the existence of God

and

The Big Bang: Put simply,the facts are wrong.

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Published on April 14, 2019 12:44