Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 508

Study: Oddly, it’s not media but researchers who pile on hype

From an effort to apportion blame as if all the world were a bureaucracy:

For their part, researchers at Cardiff University found that press releases from scientists’ own academic institutions about their work were a significant source of exaggerated claims and spin, even though most scientists can approve their wording. Their study of press releases from 20 leading British universities on health-related science news found that when the press releases exaggerated, it was likely the news stories would too. An analysis of 41 news articles on randomized controlled trials based on 70 press releases showed only four articles that contained exaggerated claims not included in the press release or journal abstract. Interestingly, they also found the hype and spin intended to tempt the media did not result in more news coverage. Louise Lief, “Whose Job Is It to Help Build Public Trust in Science?” at Scientific American

One senses that most of the hype tweaks are done by the public relations departments at universities. They go to school for that.

Most of the article is just establishment hand wringing. The main reason so many people don’t “trust science” is the same one that causes people not to trust used car dealers.

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

and

Top Ten AI hypes of 2018

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Researchers build public “library” to help understand photosynthesis

strains of algae growing in plastic plates /courtesy the researchers

From ScienceDaily:

It isn’t easy being green. It takes thousands of genes to build the photosynthetic machinery that plants need to harness sunlight for growth. And yet, researchers don’t know exactly how these genes work.

Now a team led by Princeton University researchers has constructed a public “library” to help researchers to find out what each gene does. Using the library, the team identified 303 genes associated with photosynthesis including 21 newly discovered genes with high potential to provide new insights into this life-sustaining biological process. The study was published online this week in Nature Genetics.

“The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, and we want to understand what each part does,” said Martin Jonikas, assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton. “This library, we hope, will be one of the foundations that people will build on to make the next generation of discoveries.” Paper. paywall – Xiaobo Li, Weronika Patena, Friedrich Fauser, Robert E. Jinkerson, Shai Saroussi, Moritz T. Meyer, Nina Ivanova, Jacob M. Robertson, Rebecca Yue, Ru Zhang, Josep Vilarrasa-Blasi, Tyler M. Wittkopp, Silvia Ramundo, Sean R. Blum, Audrey Goh, Matthew Laudon, Tharan Srikumar, Paul A. Lefebvre, Arthur R. Grossman and Martin C. Jonikas,. A genome-wide algal mutant library and functional screen identifies genes required for eukaryotic photosynthesis. Nature Genetics, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41588-019-0370-6 More.

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!

Before you go: 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.

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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Rob Sheldon responds to demand to get rid of elderly scientists

We are informed that the oldsters are an expensive drag on the system. The writer’s main experience is with the troubled public health field, where he says:

For example, the amount of public money going to researchers aged 56-70 doubled from the 1990 to 2010. And the number of taxpayer funded researchers over the age of 70 increased over 700% from the 1980s to 2000s while the number of grantees under 45 decreased. So while young investigators are most likely to make significant discoveries, they are much less likely to be funded…

Not surprisingly, the lack of accountability in taxpayer funded science has led to an ever-increasing frequency of retractions, and sexual harassment and fraud and misconduct investigations of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Yet even when these researchers are found guilty of misconduct, they continue to receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer’s dollars; sometimes into their eighth decade of life… Edward Archer], “Elderly Researchers Are a Drain on Publicly Funded Science” at RealClearScience

Hey, wait a minute. A person in the eighth decade is only 71. Is that supposed to be “old” now?

Anyway, our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon responds,

This is a deeply ironic article. After claiming that brilliance belongs to the youth, they cite anecdotal evidence both for the brilliance of youth and the errors of age. They then top it off with an argument that old people are useless bread gobblers.

On the other hand, if they had actually done their homework, instead of rebelling against their parents, they would have learned what we knew by 2011:

—
“The investigators found that great scientific achievement before age 30 was indeed common in all disciplines before 1905. About two-thirds of winners in these fields did their prize-winning work before age 40, and about 20 percent did it before 30.

However, contrary to what Einstein once said, this phenomenon has become increasingly rare.

“The age at which scientists make important contributions is getting older over time,” Weinberg told LiveScience.

By 2000, great work before age 30 almost never happened in any of the three fields. In physics, great achievements by age 40 occurred in only 19 percent of cases by the year 2000, and in chemistry, it almost never occurred.” – Charles Q. Choi,, “The Stroke of Genius Strikes Later in Modern Life” at Live Science
—

And as for the disadvantages of youth, I’d like to point out that almost every federal funding agency has “early career” grants that I’m too old for, even though I’ve jumped from one career to another as I tried to outrun the blacklisting gatekeepers. So indeed, it isn’t the young that are getting shafted, but those whose careers grow horizontally.

And finally. When China began its “Cultural Revolution” in 1966, it was the young who were recruited to shut down the universities, to turn in their parents, to destroy the infrastructure. There is a reason why youth is at a disadvantage in grants and appointments. And it has nothing to do with genius.

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Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

See also, re longevity: Researcher: Ancient people were NOT all dead by 30 years of age This matter is worth clarifying because people arguing dubious claims about the mindset of ancient man sometimes assume that few people were around much beyond thirty years of age. But enough of them were around that the lifespan of 70 to 80 years was accepted as the norm for a human being, irrespective of the percentage of the population that reached it.

Is aging a “disease” or does it have an “evolutionary purpose”?

Study: Religiously affiliated people lived “9.45 and 5.64 years longer…”

and

Anomaly: Human mortality hits a plateau after 105 years of age From Discover Magazine: “ That is, you aren’t any more likely to die at 110 than at 105. It’s a contradictory finding, because mortality ticks steadily upward as we get older at all previous ages.”

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OOL researcher Paul Davies: They used to make fun of me for saying Earth, Mars swapped microbes…

Mars/NASA

But they’re not laughing now:

The bombardment of the planets by comets and asteroids was far more severe in the past, especially before about 3.8 billion years ago, after which it tailed off somewhat, although it has never ceased entirely. Evidence suggests that until about 3.5 billion years ago Mars was warm and wet and far more earthlike than it is today. As we know there was life on Earth at that time, it seems inevitable that the transfer of viable organisms from Earth to Mars would have occurred, thus seeding the red planet with Earth life. Of course, the same mechanism works in reverse; indeed, it is easier to knock rocks off Mars because of its lower gravity and thinner atmosphere.

All of which raises the intriguing question of whether life on Earth may have started on Mars and come here in impact ejecta, implying that we are all the descendants of Martians. Mars does have a few favourable aspects as an incubator of life; certainly early Mars was no less congenial than early Earth for biology to get started. But whichever way around it was, it seems that if we ever find traces of life on Mars, chances are it will just be good old terrestrial life. Paul Davies, “Did Mars and Earth swap microbes?” at Cosmos Magazine

Indeed. But that raises a question. If we discover life on Mars and it turns out to be a lot like life on Earth, will that be experienced as an achievement or a disappointment? It certainly won’t prove anything like what some have hoped. Heck, it won’t even prove that We Are NOT Alone…

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See also: Should we look for patterns of life, not chemical signatures, on Mars?

and

“Very Few” Exoplanets Have Strong Magnetic Fields Like Earth’s

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How bacteria use harpoons to speed horizontal gene transfer

A friend points out that researchers have observed bacteria using their surface appendages called competence pili to “harpoon” DNA in the environment, thus speeding up their evolution:

Abstract: Natural transformation is a broadly conserved mechanism of horizontal gene transfer in bacterial species that can shape evolution and foster the spread of antibiotic resistance determinants, promote antigenic variation and lead to the acquisition of novel virulence factors. Surface appendages called competence pili promote DNA uptake during the first step of natural transformation1; however, their mechanism of action has remained unclear owing to an absence of methods to visualize these structures in live cells. Here, using the model naturally transformable species Vibrio cholerae and a pilus-labelling method, we define the mechanism for type IV competence pilus-mediated DNA uptake during natural transformation. First, we show that type IV competence pili bind to extracellular double-stranded DNA via their tip and demonstrate that this binding is critical for DNA uptake. Next, we show that type IV competence pili are dynamic structures and that pilus retraction brings tip-bound DNA to the cell surface. Finally, we show that pilus retraction is spatiotemporally coupled to DNA internalization and that sterically obstructing pilus retraction prevents DNA uptake. Together, these results indicate that type IV competence pili directly bind to DNA via their tip and mediate DNA internalization through retraction during this conserved mechanism of horizontal gene transfer. – Courtney K. Ellison, Triana N. Dalia, Alfredo Vidal Ceballos, Joseph Che-Yen Wang, Nicolas Biais, Yves V. Brun & Ankur B. Dalia , “Retraction of DNA-bound type IV competence pili initiates DNA uptake during natural transformation in Vibrio cholerae” at Nature Microbiology, 3, pages773–780 (2018)

(paywall)

Well, if that’s a way bacteria evolve, what becomes of common descent and speciation? What do we mean by “bacterial species”?

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See also: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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Neuroskeptic: Atheists are NOT genetically damaged

He marshalls reasons why not, in response to a recent claim:

According to the authors, Edward Dutton et al., humans evolved to be religious and atheism is caused (in part) by mutational damage to our normal, religious DNA. Atheists, in other words, are genetic degenerates…

These arguments are unconvincing, to say the least. To take autism as an example, Dutton et al. cite a handful of small studies as suggesting that people with autism are more likely to be atheists. Even if this is true, it doesn’t mean that ‘mutational load’ is involved. It could just be that having autism makes you more likely to become an atheist – I don’t think this has ever been tested, but it seems plausible. Dutton et al. don’t consider this or any other non-genetic explanation for the correlation between atheism and autism. Neuroskeptic, “Are Atheists Genetically Damaged?” at Discover Magazine

Of course, the claim is nonsense but then those of us who have listened to rubbish about the God gene and such can’t help hiding a giggle. Hey, given that it’s Hate Your Local Atheist Week anyway, how about “Atheists have mutant genes, don’t live as long ” 

Why we don’t find space alien trash

Alien tripod by Alvim Corréa, 1906 French edition of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds”

A researcher suggests that the “techno signature” of the trash might be a discarded reflective surface, rotating:

If only a few hundred mirrors were present, a much smaller telescope could spot one. But the fact that we haven’t seen such flashes yet suggests any alien visitors—if they are out there—are doing a good job of cleaning up after themselves. Daniel Clery, “If an alien ship left its trash near Earth, here’s what it might look like” at Science

Paper. (open access)

We invent explanations for not seeing the trash, quite apart from the fact that we have never seen the aliens. There, you stupid peasant, that’s real science thinking for you.

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See also: Our superiors explain why “people” believe in pseudoscience Elite reasoning is interesting. People who see no evidence for design in nature are quite prepared to believe that interstellar object Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft and that an evidence-free multiverse must really exist. And no evidence for fine-tuning of our universe for life is really evidence.

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Our superiors explain why “people” believe in pseudoscience

In a compendium of sage explanations of where we go wrong but they don’t:

From Corinne Zimmerman, Professor, Psychology, Illinois State University
and Emilio Lobato, Doctoral Student, Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced

Likewise, understanding the myriad processes and mechanisms of biological evolution is far more complicated than a belief that life was purposefully created by some powerful being, so the collection of pseudoscience beliefs under the umbrella terms “creationism” and “intelligent design” are common despite all scientific evidence to the contrary.Daniel Kolitz, “Why Do People Believe in Pseudoscience?” at Gizmodo

There isn’t “scientific evidence to the contrary.” The evidence points to fine-tuning but the evidence is unacceptable. But when you are an expert, you are allowed to make statements about a discussion that ell whatever story you need.

Elite reasoning is interesting. People who see no evidence for design in nature are quite prepared to believe that interstellar object Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft and that an evidence-free multiverse must really exist. And no evidence for fine-tuning of our universe for life is really evidence.

Well, all that’s okay as long as they don’t have power. Oh, wait…

See also: Astronomer: We’re too dumb to think space object Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial lightsail

An astrophysicist makes it clear why a multiverse MUST exist

and

Hugh Ross: The fine-tuning that enabled our life-friendly moon creates discomfort Was it yesterday that we noted particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s view that fine-tuning is “a waste of time”? Not so fast. If the evidence points to fine-tuning and the only alternative is the crackpot cosmology she deplores, it’s not so much a waste of time as a philosophically unacceptable conclusion. Put another way, it comes down to fine-tuning, nonsense, or nothing.

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An astrophysicist makes clear why a multiverse MUST exist

The multiverse comes down to an argumentagainst fine-tuning of our universe.

The Multiverse is an extremely controversial idea, but at its core it’s a very simple concept. Just as the Earth doesn’t occupy a special position in the Universe, nor does the Sun, the Milky Way, or any other location, the Multiverse goes a step farther and claims that there’s nothing special about the entire visible Universe.

The Multiverse is the idea that our Universe, and all that’s contained within it, is just one small part of a larger structure. This larger entity encapsulates our observable Universe as a small part of a larger Universe that extends beyond the limits of our observations. That entire structure — the unobservable Universe — may itself be part of a larger spacetime that includes many other, disconnected Universes, which may or may not be similar to the Universe we inhabit…

If you have an inflationary Universe that’s governed by quantum physics, a Multiverse is unavoidable. As always, we are collecting as much new, compelling evidence as we can on a continuous basis to better understand the entire cosmos. It may turn out that inflation is wrong, that quantum physics is wrong, or that applying these rules the way we do has some fundamental flaw. But so far, everything adds up. Unless we’ve got something wrong, the Multiverse is inevitable, and the Universe we inhabit is just a minuscule part of it. Ethan Siegel, “This Is Why The Multiverse Must Exist” at Forbes

Yes, Siegel has talked himself into a simple concept, all right. Anyone could think it up. His supporting theses? Cosmic inflation seems a troubled theory at best and quantum mechanics offers support for a multiverse only if you interpret it in a specific way (not the usual way).

And if the multiverse “must exist,” then science must die because the multiverse is science’s assisted suicide. It eliminates the concept of evidence. But when we look at the actual patterns of evidence, maybe that’s what this generation of cosmologists needs to do, to save their positions if not their discipline.

You should be suspicious of any science claim that could have been thought up as a sheer work of the imagination. The multiverse is just such a concept: Somewhere, everything and its opposite happens or doesn’t, in an infinity of infinities. No math needed.

But in the world of the war on math, that might not be such a disadvantage. If they can hitch the multiverse to something the raging Woke can get behind, it’s sure to batter down traditional science’s petty demands for evidence.

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See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Cosmic inflation is overblown. The author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, makes clear that cosmic inflation was intended to deal with evidence for fine-tuning, which she considers a “waste of time.” But, as she shows, the cosmology has gone nowhere.

Hugh Ross: The fine-tuning that enabled our life-friendly moon creates discomfort Was it yesterday that we noted particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s view that fine-tuning is “a waste of time”? Not so fast. If the evidence points to fine-tuning and the only alternative is the crackpot cosmology she deplores, it’s not so much a waste of time as a philosophically unacceptable conclusion. Put another way, it comes down to fine-tuning, nonsense, or nothing.

What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

and

Cosmic inflation theory loses hangups about the scientific method

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What is it with the Japanese and robots?

Declining population is only one factor. Ancient cultural beliefs are another. I (O’Leary for News) wrote about this at Mind Matters:

Ito sees our problems as originating in the idea that humans are special and urges that we “develop a respect for, and emotional and spiritual dialogue with, all things.”

Illustrating this approach to life, in 2018, a 450-year-old Buddhist temple in Isumi held a funeral ceremony for 114 first-generation Aibo robotic dogs (“with priests in traditional robes chanting sutras and offering prayers for the departed plastic puppies.”), prior to recycling them. Production of the model had stopped in 2006 and the repair service was discontinued in 2014.

“The little robots often arrive at the temple with notes or letters from their owners that state the name they gave to their mechanical companion and how they spent their time together. “Please help other Aibos. Tears rose in my eyes when I decided to say goodbye,” reads one such note, while another states: “I feel relieved to know there will be a prayer for my Aibo.” (The Japan Times) Craig Lewis, “Japanese Buddhist Temple Holds Funerals for Defunct Robot Dogs” at Buddhist Door.net

Lewis explains, “Recognizing the impermanence of all compounded phenomena is one of the fundamental tenets of Buddhism, and that of course includes cybernetic canines,” or, as head priest Bungen Oi puts it, “All things have a bit of soul.” More.

In short, we assume that all cultures recognize a distinction between life and non-life but apparently not.

See also: Will AI merge with evolution to shatter human exceptionalism? Yes, says humanist (and transhumanist) Peter Clarke

Why you can be sure electrons are not conscious

and

Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug Materialists have a solution to the problem of consciousness, and it may startle you

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