Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 503

March 30, 2019

Researchers: Experiment turns up no evidence of theoretical particle, the axion

[image error]
MIT’s new axion detector, in cross-section, designed to simulate an astrophysical magnetar/Courtesy of the researchers

Cosmology today would certainly seem to be at a standstill. Yesterday we looked at the quadrillion dubious rescues for string theory, reasons for believing that they are “pure, unadulterated hype,” and the fact that insiders are now leaning hard on theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder for calling it out.

So, how is another frustrating topic, dark matter doing? From ScienceDaily:

Physicists from MIT and elsewhere have performed the first run of a new experiment to detect axions — hypothetical particles that are predicted to be among the lightest particles in the universe. If they exist, axions would be virtually invisible, yet inescapable; they could make up nearly 85 percent of the mass of the universe, in the form of dark matter.

Axions are particularly unusual in that they are expected to modify the rules of electricity and magnetism at a minute level. In a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, the MIT-led team reports that in the first month of observations the experiment detected no sign of axions within the mass range of 0.31 to 8.3 nanoelectronvolts. This means that axions within this mass range, which is equivalent to about one-quintillionth the mass of a proton, either don’t exist or they have an even smaller effect on electricity and magnetism than previously thought…

While they are thought to be everywhere, axions are predicted to be virtually ghost-like, having only tiny interactions with anything else in the universe. …

The researchers reasonably hoped to find axions around magnetars, “ a type of neutron star that churns up a hugely powerful magnetic field.” They designed and carried out an experiment:

In 2018, the team carried out ABRACADABRA’s first run, continuously sampling between July and August. After analyzing the data from this period, they found no evidence of axions within the mass range of 0.31 to 8.3 nanoelectronvolts that change electricity and magnetism by more than one part in 10 billion.

The experiment is designed to detect axions of even smaller masses, down to about 1 femtoelectronvolts, as well as axions as large as 1 microelectronvolts.

The team will continue running the current experiment, which is about the size of a basketball, to look for even smaller and weaker axions. Meanwhile, Winslow is in the process of figuring out how to scale the experiment up, to the size of a compact car — dimensions that could enable detection of even weaker axions. Paper. (open access) – Jonathan L. Ouellet, Chiara P. Salemi, Joshua W. Foster, Reyco Henning, Zachary Bogorad, Janet M. Conrad, Joseph A. Formaggio, Yonatan Kahn, Joe Minervini, Alexey Radovinsky, Nicholas L. Rodd, Benjamin R. Safdi, Jesse Thaler, Daniel Winklehner, Lindley Winslow. First Results from ABRACADABRA-10 cm: A Search for Sub-μeV Axion Dark Matter. Physical Review Letters, March 29, 2019; DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.121802 More.

A ghost indeed. “It is a challenging experiment because the expected signal is less than 20 atto-Tesla,” one quintillionth of a tesla or 10^-18 anyway.

Is it theoretically possible that the axion be so small that it is not individually measurable by any foreseeable technique but the mass of axions has an enormous effect?

See also: At Forbes: The “miracle” hope for finding the dark matter of the universe is dead

and

Astrophysicist: photons with mass wouldn’t solve the dark matter puzzle

Before you go: 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

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

and

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

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 30, 2019 06:22

It is possible to demonstrate that AI will never think as humans do

Based on what we know of how algorithms work, it can be demonstrated mathematically that algorithms cannot deal with non-computable concepts:

There is another way to prove a negative besides exhaustively enumerating the possibilities

With artificial general intelligence (AGI), if we can identify something algorithms cannot do, and show that humans can do it then we’ve falsified the AGI position without running an infinite number of experiments across all possible algorithms. Eric Holloway, “The Flawed Logic behind “Thinking” Computers, Part II” at Mind Matters

If Eric is correct, a great deal of the hype we hear in media is based not only on improbable concepts (the usual stuff) but impossible ones. See, for example, Top Ten AI hypes of 2018

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: “Thinking” computers? Some logical problems with the idea

Computer Engineer Eric Holloway: Artificial Intelligence Is Impossible

and

Eric Holloway: ID As A Bridge Between Francis Bacon And Thomas Aquinas

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 30, 2019 05:28

March 29, 2019

Peter Woit on the quadrillion possible rescues for string theory: “pure, unadulterated hype”

While commenting on the quadrillion new hopes for string theory, our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon noted that Columbia mathematician Peter Woit has also addressed the quadrillion:

As usual, this is just pure, unadulterated hype. It’s based on a PRL publication, also available as this preprint. I usually try to avoid this sort of editorializing, but I’m actually shocked to see that PRL is now publishing this sort of thing, which is infinitely far from having any connection to conventional science. Peter Woit, “This Week’s Hype” at Not Even Wrong

“infinitely far from having any connection to conventional science”? Wow.

We’re waiting for Sabine Hossenfelder too. But while looking to see if she had said anything, we came across a blog post attacking her:

It seems to me that at least in the case of Sabine Hossenfelder, people see that I was right all along. This movement is just a generic anti-science movement and string theory or supersymmetry were the first targets because they are the scienciest sciences. But the rest of particle physics isn’t really substantially different from the most prominent theories in theoretical physics, and neither is dark energy, dark matter, inflationary cosmology, and other things, so they should “go down” with the theories in theoretical physics, Hossenfelder proposes. It makes sense. If you succeeded in abolishing or banning string theory, of course you could abolish or ban things that “captured less public attention”, too. It is just like in the story “First they came for the Jews…”. And it’s not just an analogy, of course. There’s quite some overlap because some one-half of string theorists are Jewish while the ideology of the string theory critics was mostly copied from the pamphlets that used to define the Aryan Physics.

Well, as far as I know, Peter Woit and Lee Smolin – the prominent crackpots who hated string theory and played Sabine Hossenfelder’s role around 2006 – have never gone far enough to demand the suspension of particle physics for 20 years, dismissal for 90% of particle physicists, and other things. So even people from this general “culture” were surprised by Hossenfelder’s pronouncements. Luboš Motl, “Hossenfelder’s plan to abolish particle physics is the most prominent achievement of diversity efforts in HEP yet” at the reference frame

In the real world, many people were not surprised by Hossenfelder’s assessment of the situation

and she is actually threatening legal action against Motl for defamation regarding her expertise. Readers of her Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, can judge for themselves. Generally, when they claim you’re anti-science for asking questions, examining the historical record, and doing the math, they don’t have a lot to go on, do they?

We don’t know much about Motl but he seems to think, oddly, that Hossenfelder is a diversity hire. Um, no. Mere diversity hires natter constantly about their identity. They write articles about how they were done wrong to by less diverse colleagues. They end up by guaranteeing that everyone is glad to see them go, whether they move on or up.

taking on the genuine scams and hypes in a field, AS SHE IS DOING? That’s a job for pros.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Quadrillion possible ways found to rescue string theory! Physicist Rob Sheldon comments Sheldon: It suggests that 30 years of string theorists have been searching in the wrong part of phase space. That promising solutions are not in the “weak interaction” swampland, but in the “strong interaction” wasteland. By limiting their search, they claim they have eliminated many previous solutions, and are closing in on “the solution” as one-in-a-quadrillion. Their track record would say otherwise.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 29, 2019 09:19

Quadrillion possible ways found to rescue string theory! Physicist Rob Sheldon comments

Calabi-Yao manifold

String theorists have been trying to wish a multiverse into existence at least since avocado green appliances were hot (1970s if you weren’t around then) and here’s the latest:

Physicists who have been roaming the “landscape” of string theory—the space of zillions and zillions of mathematical solutions of the theory, where each solution provides the kinds of equations physicists need to describe reality—have stumbled upon a subset of such equations that have the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe…

The new work shows that there are at least a quadrillion solutions in which particles have the same chiral spectrum as the standard model, which is 10 orders of magnitude more solutions than had been found within string theory until now. “This is by far the largest domain of standard model solutions,” Cvetic says. “It’s somehow surprising and actually also rewarding that it turns out to be in the strongly coupled string theory regime, where geometry helped us.” Anil Ananthaswamy , “Found: A Quadrillion Ways for String Theory to Make Our Universe” at Scientific American

Our physic color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts on this latest blip on the screen in relation to the field in general:

String Theory is much closer to pure path than it is to physics. The problem faced by theoretical physicists nearly 100 years ago, was that Epicurus’s and Newton’s metaphysics failed–the world was not made out of little particles of matter flying through the void.

The revolution of quantum mechanics showed that it was made out of waves – but only when travelling. When they hit a detector, they looked like particles again. And the higher the energy hitting a detector, the more particle-like they looked. As particle physicists kept raising the energy of their accelerators, they detected “sub-atomic” particles that make up Newton’s atoms—quarks, mesons, gluons, etc.

But they had no theory of where these sub-atomic particles got their mass from. Today, the “Standard Model” has 18 free parameters, corresponding to the mass of 18 sub-atomic particles.

Just as Niels Bohr had done for the hydrogen atom when he explained the hydrogen spectrum as a series of trapped electron-waves, particle physicists tried to explain proton masses as a series of trapped quark-waves. But it wasn’t working.

Combined with this problem was the fact that Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (GR) argued that matter “bent” space-time, but otherwise had nothing to do with particle accelerators, electricity, and sub-atomic particles. There just didn’t seem to be a way to combine electricity and magnetism (EM/Maxwell’s equations) or quantum mechanics (QM) with GR.

In 1919 Theodor Kaluza added a fifth dimension to Einstein’s 4D spacetime, with some caveats that it didn’t interact with the other 4, and was able to get a combined EM+GR. In this superset, electric charge corresponded to motion in the 5th dimension.

In 1926 Oskar Klein explained how “non-interaction” was as if the 5th dimension was “rolled-up” into a cylinder. This is known as “compactification”. The idea is that we live in 3+1 dimensions, but there may be other dimensions that are rolled-up and not visible to our naked eyes. But they are needed to support the existence of electrons and other particles. Then the particles would be “waves” on the compactified dimensions, like waves on a 1D-string, or ripples on a 2D-surface, … etc.

It all seemed so promising–a unification of Einstein and Maxwell, a specification of particle physics, a hidden-dimension of reality that explained everything. The Kaluza-Klein theory was popular with theorists until the last details were worked out in 1950s. Alas, 5-dimensional Kaluza-Klein theory failed to describe reality.

Working the other direction, it seemed possible to explain reality if we started with 20 dimensions. All those compactified dimensions were like “strings”, and hence the idea of trying to explain reality with extra dimensions became known as string theory. Over the years, the goal of string theorists was to reduce the number of extra dimensions (supersymmetry led to fewer dimensions or “super strings”) But it has been at 10 dimensions for going on 40 years now. That says 6 dimensions must be compactified, and that’s a lot of ways to wiggle a string.

There have been thousands of graduate-student lifetimes spent on string theory. But after the initial success in the 90’s, there just hasn’t been much progress in the past two decades. The problem has led to new math techniques, new areas of mathematical research, but precious little on the physics side. Many physicists see it as a pure math field sucking resources from genuine theoretical physics. True believers see it as the unification of Maxwell and Einstein.

At least one group of skeptics has called it a “swampland” of string theory, because they think it will never work. Peter Woit has a blog dedicated to disproving string theory. Here’s his entry on “swampland”.

One of the few predictions made by string theory was that “super symmetry” (SUSY) would create particles that were “heavier” than usual, which would be seen by the CERN LHC collider at slightly higher energy. This expectation fueled a $20 billion upgrade of LHC, yet nothing was seen. A majority of particle physicists now believe that SUSY is dead:

Here’s Peter Woit and here’s Sabine Hossenfelder suggesting redirecting funding to more promising fields.

Now we come at last to your question. What is the meaning of this press release about a quadrillion ways to make a string theory?

Well, it suggests that 30 years of string theorists have been searching in the wrong part of phase space. That promising solutions are not in the “weak interaction” swampland, but in the “strong interaction” wasteland. By limiting their search, they claim they have eliminated many previous solutions, and are closing in on “the solution” as one-in-a-quadrillion. Their track record would say otherwise.

The Long Ascent: Genesis 1â 11 in Science & Myth, Volume 1 by [Sheldon, Robert]

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Belief In String Theory Is Becoming, At This Point, A Sort Of Social Virtue

and

Post-modern physics: String theory gets over the need for evidence

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 29, 2019 08:33

Culture of Darwinism: He is their “homeboy” now?

[image error]

A tee shirt for Dad proclaims Darwin is my homeboy:

Homeboy:

1 slang : a boy or man from one’s neighborhood, hometown, or region broadly : a male friend

2 slang

a : a boy or man who is a member of one’s peer group

b : a member of one’s gang

3 slang : an inner-city youth “homeboy” Merriam-Webster

A close friend.

Originally used among transplanted African-Americans with Southern roots to refer to and aid in the assimilation of someone who might have directly migrated from a common Southern home town or is otherwise well known to the person using the term.

Used to establish a mutual relationship between the invidividual using the term, the person described by it, and a third person.“homeboy” at Urban Dictionary

Reality check: Darwin was homeboy to the rich and famous, not to the inner city, and his early followers imported their prejudices into biology, not the inner city’s prejudices. See, for example, Do racial assumptions prevent recognizing Homo erectus as fully human?

and

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

Okay, wear the shirt if you want. We have to hope the world knows what it really means though.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 29, 2019 07:30

More “junk DNA” that actually does something

The technical term is functional pseudogene and what it does in this case (creating sensitivity to pain) could be a mixed blessing, depending on your circumstances:

Jo, from Whitebridge, near Inverness, told the BBC Scotland news website that doctors didn’t believe her when she said she wouldn’t need pain relief after surgery.

She said: “We had banter before theatre when I guaranteed I wouldn’t need painkillers.

“When he found I hadn’t had any, he checked my medical history and found I had never asked for painkillers.”

That’s when she was referred to specialists in England.Claire Diamond, “The woman who doesn’t feel pain” at BBC Scotland News

Is she just a stoic?

Abstract: The study of rare families with inherited pain insensitivity can identify new human-validated analgesic drug targets. Here, a 66-yr-old female presented with nil requirement for postoperative analgesia after a normally painful orthopaedic hand surgery (trapeziectomy). Further investigations revealed a lifelong history of painless injuries, such as frequent cuts and burns, which were observed to heal quickly. We report the causative mutations for this new pain insensitivity disorder: the co-inheritance of (i) a microdeletion in dorsal root ganglia and brain-expressed pseudogene, FAAH-OUT, which we cloned from the fatty-acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) chromosomal region; and (ii) a common functional single-nucleotide polymorphism in FAAH conferring reduced expression and activity. Circulating concentrations of anandamide and related fatty-acid amides (palmitoylethanolamide and oleoylethanolamine) that are all normally degraded by FAAH were significantly elevated in peripheral blood compared with normal control carriers of the hypomorphic single-nucleotide polymorphism. The genetic findings and elevated circulating fatty-acid amides are consistent with a phenotype resulting from enhanced endocannabinoid signalling and a loss of function of FAAH. Our results highlight previously unknown complexity at the FAAH genomic locus involving the expression of FAAH-OUT, a novel pseudogene and long non-coding RNA. These data suggest new routes to develop FAAH-based analgesia by targeting of FAAH-OUT, which could significantly improve the treatment of postoperative pain and potentially chronic pain and anxiety disorders. –
Abdella M. Habib1,2, Andrei L. Okorokov1, Matthew N. Hill3, Jose T. Bras4,5, Man-Cheung Lee1,6,7, Shengnan Li1, Samuel J. Gossage1, Marie van Drimmelen8, Maria Morena3, Henry Houlden5, Juan D. Ramirez9, David L.H. Bennett9, Devjit Srivastava10, ,’Correspondence information about the author Devjit SrivastavaEmail the author Devjit Srivastava, James J. Cox1, ,’Correspondence information about the author James J. CoxEmail the author James J. Cox
Handling editor: H.C. Hemmings Jr, Microdeletion in a FAAH pseudogene identified in a patient with high anandamide concentrations and pain insensitivity, British Journal of Anaesthesia, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bja.2019.02... More.

Needless to say, this finding could have implications for the control of chronic pain. The paper is open access.

Note: It’s been a couple of years since some of us have heard Darwinians defending junk DNA as evidence for their theory. Don’t let them get away with claiming they never did. One reason their theory is never wrong is that failed support drops down the memory hole.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Researchers: Male Y Chromosome Not A Genetic Wasteland After All

Before you go: Humans may have only 19,000 coding genes

“Junk DNA” regulates regeneration of tissues and organs

Note: One junk DNA defender just isn’t doing politeness anymore. Hmmm. In a less Darwinian science workplace, that could become more a problem for him than for his colleagues.

Junk DNA can actually change genitalia. Junk DNA played the same role in defending Darwinian evolution as claims that Neanderthal man was a subhuman. did:

Been a while since we’ve heard much about humans as the 98% or 99% chimpanzee. If the human genome is this fuzzy how would we know? And doubtless, things have gotten more complex.

At Quanta: Cells need almost all of their genes, even the “junk DNA”

“Junk” RNA helps regulate metabolism

Junk DNA defender just isn’t doing politeness any more.

Anyone remember ENCODE? Not much junk DNA? Still not much. (Paper is open access.)

Yes, Darwin’s followers did use junk DNA as an argument for their position.

Another response to Darwin’s followers’ attack on the “not-much-junk-DNA” ENCODE findings

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 29, 2019 06:00

“Thinking” computers? Some logical problems with the idea

If an algorithm that reproduces human behavior requires more storage space than exists in the universe, it is a practical impossibility that also demonstrates the logical impossibility of artificial intelligence, Eric Holloway argues. He engaged in a three-part debate on the subject. Here’s the first part:

The most basic sort of algorithm that can mimic human action is one that reproduces a recording of human behavior. So, one example of algorithmic intelligence the following print statement:

print: “So, one example of algorithmic intelligence the following print statement.”

And the program prints the sentence.

So there you have it, an intelligent computer program!

Admittedly, this is a silly example but it makes the point that intelligence is more than just functionalism. … A program that is intelligent must do more than reproduce human behavior.Eric Holloway, “The Flawed Logic behind “Thinking” Computers, Part I” at Mind Matters

Note: A really accurate reproducer of human behaviour is a full-length mirror. How many people have claimed that the mirror is intelligent?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Computer Engineer Eric Holloway: Artificial Intelligence Is Impossible

and

Eric Holloway: ID As A Bridge Between Francis Bacon And Thomas Aquinas

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 29, 2019 05:33

AI is not the artist’s new “robot overlord”

Spencer Imbrock/Unsplash

Software engineer and musician Brendan Dixon thinks AI is the perfect tool for creating social noise:

If you believe all you read, AI is once again nipping at the heels of our humanity, this time by “creating” music all on its own (lyrics included). Soon we must submit to our “robot overlords.”

Or not.

The achievement celebrated at Digital Music News is, as so often, less than heralded and does not portend AI overtaking humanity. It mainly shows that few engineers understand art and even fewer artists understand engineering. Both look at (or listen to) the “work” and see more than is present. And both are wrong…

Creating art begins by fully absorbing what makes art good and then extrapolating outward. AI selectively absorbs and “creates” by remixing what’s left. Thus AI is the perfect kitsch creator. Brendan Dixon, “AI creates kitsch, not art” at Mind Matters

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Also at Mind Matters:

Adam Nieri: Love, Death, & Robots is a rather ambiguous title. Perhaps a more descriptive title would be Blood, Butts, and Some Sci-Fi Thrown In.

Despite the trash and ruined expectations, several shorts were enjoyable and downright fun to watch.

and

AI and the Seductive Optics of the Frankenstein Complex Robert J. Marks writes: The fact that some AI makes you feel creepy is a part of its success. Anything not human that looks like a human or is otherwise close to displaying human characteristics is scary.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 29, 2019 05:05

March 28, 2019

Report: That so many studies cannot be reproduced is a “crisis” in science

Image result for THE IRREPRODUCIBILITY CRISIS OF MODERN SCIENCE Causes, Consequences, and the Road to Reform

From the National Association of Scholars (2018) (open access):

This report deals with an epistemic problem, which is most visible in the large numbers of articles in reputable peer-reviewed journals in the sciences that have turned out to be invalid or highly questionable. Findings from experimental work or observational studies turn out, time and again, to be irreproducible. The high rates of irreproducibility are an ongoing scandal that rightly has upset a large portion of the scientific community. Estimates of what percentage of published articles present irreproducible results vary by discipline. Randall and Welser cite various studies, some of them truly alarming. A 2012 study, for example, aimed at reproducing the results of 53 landmark studies in hematology and oncology, but succeeded in replicating only six (11 percent) of those studies.

Irreproducibility can stem from several causes, chief among them fraud and incompetence. The
two are not always easily distinguished, but The Irreproducibility Crisis deals mainly with the
kinds of incompetence that mar the analysis of data and that lead to insupportable conclusions.
Fraud, however, is also a factor to be weighed.David Randall and Christopher Welser, “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science: Causes, Consequences, and the Road to Reform” at National Association of Scholars

They talk a bit about the politicization of the academy as well, though that’s not their main focus:

Many scientists think of themselves as philosopher kings, far superior to those in the “basket of deplorables.” The deplorables have a hard time understanding why scientists are so special, and why they should vote as instructed by them. More than two thousand years ago, Plato, who promoted the ideal of philosopher kings, also promoted the concept of the “noble lie,” a myth designed to persuade a skeptical population that they should be grateful to be ruled by philosopher kings. Our current scientific community has occasionally resorted to the noble lie, a problem that can’t be fixed by better training in statistics. Noble lies are also irreproducible and damage the credibility of science William Happer, “Afterword: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science: Causes, Consequences, and the Road to Reform” at National Association of Scholars

Um, yes, sires, as it happens, the masses are revolting…

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Pushback against abandoning “statistical significance” in science

and

Abandon statistical significance, learn to live with uncertainty, scientists demand

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 28, 2019 14:54

Study challenges theory that sexual conflict is a driver of speciation

From ScienceDaily:

In nature, males eager attempts to mate with females can be so extreme that they will harm females. Such negative impact of mating interactions has been suggested to promote the emergence of new species under some circumstances. Surprisingly, one type of diving beetle species now show that this conflict between the sexes can instead lead to an evolutionary standstill in which mating enhancing traits in males and counter-adaptations in females prevent the formation of new species…

In many diving beetles, males are equipped with crafted suction cups on their front legs used to attach on the back of females during mating. This grasping ability has become so effective that females can be harmed under high mating pressure, lasting up to many hours for each mating attempt. As a consequence, some females have developed a more rough back that becomes more difficult for the male to attach to.

“Sometimes nature creates designs that goes beyond our imagination” says Kaj Sand-Jensen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Freshwater Biology Section. “It is truly fascinating how the constant quest for mating success has shaped the front legs of these beetles into flawless suction cups.” …

The outcome is a situation with no consistent long-term advantage for any single female type. Instead, populations move towards a state where both smooth and granulated females are equally abundant and thereby minimizing the mating pressure on a specific female type. Hence, the diving beetles are kept in an evolutionary limbo and the two type of females are maintained by the ongoing and intense mating harassment from the males.

Well, nature is a clever old bird then. But how do we know that the beetles haven’t had this distribution of female types for a long time?

“This study will be an important baseline for developing a better understanding of the evolutionary outcome of sexual conflict in natural populations” says Erik Svensson, a professor at Lund University, who has studied the evolutionary consequences of such female variation for more than 20 years.” Paper.(open access) – Lars Lønsmann Iversen, Erik I. Svensson, Søren Thromsholdt Christensen, Johannes Bergsten, Kaj Sand-Jensen. Sexual conflict and intrasexual polymorphism promote assortative mating and halt population differentiation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2019; 286 (1899): 20190251 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.0251 More.

It has been thought that females’ efforts to escape males “could initiate the evolution of new species”:

“Here, we document an alternative outcome: that sexual conflict instead prevents populations from diverging from each other and becoming new species.” …

“The story is more complicated than we previously thought. We now know that sexual conflict can prevent population divergence and halt speciation.”Nick Carne, “Water beetles mate themselves to an evolutionary standstill” at Cosmos Magazine

Sexual conflict, and sexual selection in general could conceivably turn out to be so “complicated” that, while it usually makes a difference when it occurs, it does not point in any particular direction for evolution.

That just adds to the problems with the concept of speciation.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Microbes can make evolution work faster for their hosts Okay, but then aren’t the microorganisms the unit of selection rather than the host’s genes? This might work for some adaptations to habitats (they describe one), but it won’t be Darwinism.

Can sex explain evolution?

and

A physicist looks at biology’s problem of “speciation” in humans

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 28, 2019 14:12