Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 509

March 16, 2019

Why has a historic medical publication gone weird?

A science writer asks, citing several distinctly odd viewpoints aired in the journal that was founded in 1823, including

This year, the weirdness continued. A paper in The Lancet argued that certain food experts should be banned from food policy discussions. (Of course, the experts that should be banned are any that are associated with industry, because industry = bad.) And then, The Lancet slandered surgeons, using shady statistics to blame them for killing millions of people every year. The study was so bad that our typically calm, cool, and collected Dr. Charles Dinerstein worried that his head would explode.

Apparently, whoever is operating The Lancet’s Twitter feed said, “Hold my beer, and watch this.” Here is what the organization posted today… AlexBerezow, “The Lancet Has Gotten Really Weird” at American Council on Science and Health

Wethinks the most likely reason is the need to cater to the raging Woke. Science is roadkill when you are really scared.

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See also: Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.

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Published on March 16, 2019 16:42

Webinar: Jonathan McLatchie interviews Joshua Swamidass

S. Joshua Swamidass On Michael Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves.

Join here.

Just a friendly reminder about the webinar I am hosting later today with Joshua Swamidass to discuss Behe’s new book [which Swamidass attacked in Science]. You are welcome to participate anonymously if you want — questions can even be submitted anonymously. We kick off at 3pm Eastern / 2pm Central / 12noon Pacific. That’s 7pm here in the UK due to the U.S. being on daylight savings time now. – Jonathan McLatchie

Time zones.

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See also: Swamidass Et Al’s Hit Review At Science On Behe’s Forthcoming Darwin Devolves “Borders On Fraud”

Swamidass Distances Himself From Christian Evolution Group

Protein families are still improbably astonishing – retraction of Matlock and Swamidass paper in order?

and

Biologist Wayne Rossiter on Joshua Swamidass’s claim that entropy = information

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Published on March 16, 2019 08:48

Hossenfelder: Now they are marketing non-discoveries as discoveries

The author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, thinks that the new discovery touted by some fellow particle physicists really doesn’t amount to much:

eanwhile it must have dawned on particle physicists that the non-discovery of fundamentally new particles besides the Higgs is a problem for their field, and especially for the prospects of financing that bigger collider which they want. For two decades they told the public that the LHC would help answering some “big questions,” for example by finding dark matter or supersymmetric particles…

First, mass-produce empty predictions to raise the impression that a costly experiment will answer some big questions. Then, if the experiment fails to answer those questions, proclaim how exciting it is that your predictions were wrong. Finally, explain that you need money for a larger experiment to answer those big questions. The most remarkable thing about this is that they actually seem to think this will work. Sabine Hossenfelder, “Particle physicists excited over discovery of nothing in particular” at BackRe(Action)

If Hossenfelder means that it won’t work scientifically, she is correct. But “won’t work” can be construed in other ways. In the age of the multiverse and “ET’s gotta be out there,” it is quite possible for something that is entirely without evidence to retain a place as science. Thus, it should easily be possible for non-discoveries to be marketed as discoveries.

We didn’t order this dish. We’re just sitting here, thinking there must be a better way.

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Before you go: 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.

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Published on March 16, 2019 08:24

Reuters: Twitter wars hound scientists

A report from the Reuters Foundation details the war to destroy the careers of scientists who don’t see chronic fatigue syndrome quite the way activists do:

Tuller refers to researchers who explore and test treatments for CFS/ME that feature a psychological element as “insane” and a “cabal” suffering from “mass delusion.” They are bent on pursuing “bogus and really terrible research,” he told Reuters. Sharpe no longer conducts research into CFS/ME treatments, focusing instead on helping severely ill cancer patients. “It’s just too toxic,” he explained. Of more than 20 leading research groups who were publishing treatment studies in high-quality journals 10 years ago, Sharpe said, only one or two continue to do so.

The world’s largest trials registry, clinicaltrials.gov, indicates that over the past decade there has been a decline in the number of new CFS/ME treatment trials being launched. From 2010 to 2014, 33 such trials started. From 2015 until the present, the figure dropped to around 20. This decline comes at a time when research into ways to help patients should be growing, not falling, because the condition is more widely recognised, scientists interviewed by Reuters said. Kate Kelland, “SPECIAL REPORT-Online activists are silencing us, scientists say” at Reuters

The fact that people behave this way toward the researchers would seem to establish a psychological element beyond reasonable doubt. What’s mystifying is why sufferers would think that acknowledging a psychological element is a putdown. There is a psychological element to cancer too. But people don’t fly into a rage if one suggests that it plays a role in the patient’s lived experiences.

But, say what you want about the brand new world of the raging Woke, lots of scientists are going to find out what the Dissent from Darwinism crowd know: People will say mean and crazy things about you if you go where the evidence you have personally seen leads. That’s the price of being honest these days.

Here’s a harrumph via Reuters (established 1851) about social media as a “battleground.” For example,

A United Nations panel of climate scientists says it is at least 95 percent certain that human activity is the dominant cause of climate change since the mid-20th century. Climate sceptics challenge that consensus daily on social media, arguing that fluctuations in global temperatures have occurred in previous era and are natural events. Kate Kelland, “Social media as battleground” at Reuters

Good thing social media is at least a battleground. As the Norwegian playwright Ibsen said, “The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right” He meant that a majority can be padded by people who just want to stay out of trouble with the raging Woke or some less unhinged source of violence—and beyond that, their reasoning doesn’t count for much. And the minority may be the raging Woke. So the numbers are not a fair assessment of anything anyway. We really do have to think for ourselves.

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See also: Maybe dissent from Darwin can’t kill a career any more. Not if it doesn’t want to die.

and

The Dissent from Darwin list now tops 1000 scientists.

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Published on March 16, 2019 06:14

March 15, 2019

The Neanderthals are undergoing a renaissance

Neanderthal/Photaro

The artwork accompanying a recent essay makes them look positively human. Just where Ooga! Ooga! has got himself to now, we are not sure. Meanwhile,

Scientific discoveries never occur in a social vacuum. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus formalised the ladder of life in 1758, when he crowned white European males as the ‘type specimen’ of our species. At a stroke of his pen, everyone else on the planet was demoted to a nonstandard, inferior version of humanity – identified by supposedly less advanced physiques, character and culture. In such a world, it was logical that the skull and bones from the Neander Valley were immediately compared with ethnic groups branded the most ‘brutal’ by their colonisers.

In 1863, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley claimed a striking similarity between Neanderthal brow ridges and the ‘lowering, threatening expression’ he perceived in the skulls of Aboriginal peoples – ignoring the clear difference in anatomical shape. The European intellectual elite were mostly blind to the possibility that Neanderthals were evidence of a common heritage for living people. Instead, they saw ‘scientific’ proof of the racist hierarchies that positioned non-Europeans as less evolved – although remaining puzzled that ‘savages’ nevertheless appeared to possess brains as big as those filling their own top hats. Up until the 1960s, scientists were still publishing theories of human evolution proposing that different races had budded off the human family tree sooner than others, with Caucasians the most recent arrivals, and therefore the least ‘primitive. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, “[article title]” at Aeon

Some of us remember all the way back to the Neanderthal art bombshell. (2012) They weren’;t supposed to be able to do art.

But there is the cave at Bruniquel where Neanderthals were building large, circular structures in a cave 174,000 years ago. And the floor hasn’t even been excavated yet.

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See also: How Neanderthals Got The Role Of The Subhumans

Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents

and

A deep and abiding need for Neanderthals to be stupid. Why?

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Published on March 15, 2019 17:02

Symbiotic bacteria help frogs find mates (but the real story is all the wrong assumptions we make)

Adult female (left) and calling male of Boana prasina/Andrés Brunetti

All these stories in recent days about animals finding mates (or not); spring must be coming. And here’s one more: From ScienceDaily:

“Frogs emit a pungent odor. Sometimes a particular species can be recognized by its scent, but until now, the function of this odor was unknown. It was typically assumed to be an aposematic smell, meaning a chemical warning sign that served to repel predators, as in the case of skunks [Mephitis mephitis] among mammals, for example,” said Célio Haddad, a professor at São Paulo State University’s Rio Claro Bioscience Institute (IBRC-UNESP) in Brazil and a coauthor of the article.

According to Haddad, who is also affiliated with the university’s Aquaculture Center (CAUNESP) in Jaboticabal, this hypothesis was considered plausible because many amphibian species, especially when poisonous, are brightly colored, and this serves as a visual alert to frighten predators. “We thought odor might play a similar role among anurans [frogs and toads],” he said. …

“The importance and originality of Brunetti’s research is that for the first time it shows a pronounced difference in the odors emitted by frogs of opposite sexes,” Haddad said. “No other studies of anurans have ever described this type of behavior. The results suggest that the odor serves to permit mutual recognition between males and females of the same species for mating purposes.” …

“In anurans, you often see different species sharing a lake or marsh. In such places, there are 30 male frogs for every female of the same species on average. The question is how the females recognize males of their own species among a multitude of males belonging to several species while they’re all vocalizing at the same time,” Brunetti said.

“It’s well-known that the function of the call of anuran males is to attract females and that every species has a characteristic song. Our findings suggest that odor appears to play a similar role, serving as an olfactory signal that enables females to recognize males of their own species.”

Biologists were also unaware of a difference in the scents of male and female frogs. Brunetti discovered this difference during his research, whose primary goal was to understand the chemical composition of the volatile components emitted by the skin of various frog species.

His working hypothesis suggested that smell was a chemical warning sign that served to repel predators. To verify the hypothesis, Brunetti conducted field surveys at several sites in São Paulo state and Rio de Janeiro state, collecting specimens of the tree frog Boana prasina.

“It’s very hard to collect females in the wild. Initially, we managed to collect only males. When we noticed what appeared to be a sexual difference in their odors, I went into the field again with the specific aim of capturing females for comparison,” he said.

“During my doctoral research at the Argentinian Natural Science Museum in Buenos Aires, while investigating the volatile compounds in two other frog species, I discovered that the secretions were made up of a blend of 35 to 42 compounds in nine different chemical classes. We then realized that some of the compounds had the specific signature of compounds produced by bacteria.” …

Brunetti and colleagues used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyze the diversity of the volatile components secreted by the skin of B. prasina. They found that adult males and females secrete a blend of 60-80 compounds, including alcohols, aldehydes, alkenes, ethers, ketones, methoxypyrazines, terpenes and thioethers.

The compounds were exactly the same in both males and females, but the researchers were surprised to find a pronounced sexual difference in the levels of methoxypyrazines, terpenes, and thioethers.

“These three components were responsible for the difference between males and females. Thioethers and methoxypyrazines are typically produced by microorganisms,” Brunetti said.
Paper. (paywall) (access?) – Andrés E. Brunetti, Mariana L. Lyra, Weilan G. P. Melo, Laura E. Andrade, Pablo Palacios-Rodríguez, Bárbara M. Prado, Célio F. B. Haddad, Mônica T. Pupo, Norberto P. Lopes. Symbiotic skin bacteria as a source for sex-specific scents in frogs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019; 116 (6): 2124 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1806834116 More.

So, contrary to assumption, 1) smell was important in locating mates and 2) males and females had different smells 3) produced by symbiotic bacteria. One wonders how many other life forms would challenge simple evolution tales if they were closely studied.

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See also: Researchers: When mates are rare, birds help their parents raise more offspring Interestingly, the researchers avoided trying to shoehorn the story into a Darwinian mold. It’s true that the next batch of eggs will share some genes with the babysitter bird but what if neo-Darwinian gene competition isn’t really what is happening at all? The bird can’t find a mate so it starts to engage in nesting behaviour around the nest it grew up in, simply because that’s what it would have done anyway? Then, while we can reasonably guess that the bird who does so helps more chicks who share some genes survive, that’s not the cause of the behavior.

Birds are found to plan like humans for their offsprings’ future Yes, the Darwinbird of pop science can do that! No natural mechanism is remotely suggested, so we must assume that it is sheer mental power, of the sort that we species-ists once thought existed only in humans, that enables the hen bird to plan for her chicks’ future. Shame on us!

A First: Solitary Bees Serve As Stepdads One question comes to mind: For the males, competing for females who are present is cognitively easy. But how do they know about the females who are still larvae? Can they smell them? If not, the behavior seems to require a foresight that is beyond the known cognitive powers of the bee.

and

Can sex explain evolution?

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Published on March 15, 2019 16:32

Researchers: When mates are rare, birds help their parents raise more offspring

Why fly the coop? With shortage of mates, some birds choose to help others raise offspring

Researcher Jessica Cusick keeps tabs on the birds/Tara Tanaka

Male birds are more likely to do so:

After a five-year experiment, researchers from Florida State University and the Tallahassee-based Tall Timbers Research Station found that when fewer mates were available for brown-headed nuthatches, these small pine-forest birds opted to stay home and help their parents or other adults raise their offspring…

Associate Professor of Biological Science Emily DuVal and Jim Cox, a vertebrate ecologist from Tall Timbers and a courtesy faculty member at FSU, had long been interested in how these tiny birds showed cooperation—that is often having non-breeding young adults hang out and help raise chicks. After all, bypassing the chance to reproduce is not typically how nature works…

This was the first large-scale, experimental evidence that the sex ratio of males and females could affect cooperative breeding, the researchers said.

Not all birds breed cooperatively, but it is commonly found among crows and jays. Birds with such complex social behavior are often long-lived, and this work built on nearly a decade of careful population monitoring by Cox and his Tall Timbers Research Station team to identify nests and breeding pairs.

The researchers also found that many of the nests took on additional helpers. While there is usually only one bird acting as a helper each year, in this case, some nests had three.
Florida State University, “Why fly the coop? With shortage of mates, some birds choose to help others raise offspring” at Phys.org

Interestingly, the researchers avoided trying to shoehorn the story into a Darwinian mold. It’s true that the next batch of eggs will share some genes with the babysitter bird but what if neo-Darwinian gene competition isn’t really what is happening at all? The bird can’t find a mate so it starts to engage in nesting behaviour around the nest it grew up in, simply because that’s what it would have done anyway? Then, while we can reasonably guess that the bird who does so helps more chicks who share some genes survive, that’s not the cause of the behavior.

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See also: Birds are found to plan like humans for their offsprings’ future Yes, the Darwinbird of pop science can do that! No natural mechanism is remotely suggested, so we must assume that it is sheer mental power, of the sort that we species-ists once thought existed only in humans, that enables the hen bird to plan for her chicks’ future. Shame on us!

and

Can sex explain evolution?

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Published on March 15, 2019 15:55

Birds are found to plan like humans for their offsprings’ future

Yes, the Darwinbird can do that. Read on.

Birds’ sex chromosomes function somewhat differently from mammalian ones, featuring W and Z instead of X and Y, but the distribution is different. W is small, like Y and Z has lots of genes, like X. We are told that birds can “control the sex of their chicks”:

Most bird species produce more males than females on average. Some birds, such as kestrels, produce different sex ratios at different times of the year and others respond to environmental conditions or the female’s body condition. For example, when times are tough for zebra finches, more females are produced. Some birds, such as the kookaburra, contrive usually to hatch a male chick first, then a female one.
Jenny Graves, “How Birds Sometimes Become Male and Female” at RealClearScience

Okay, but what exactly is doing the controlling here? With alligators, sex depends on ambient temperature (details here.) Ma alligator is not making plans for her brood.

Not so the clever bird:

Why would a bird manipulate the sex of her chicks? We think she is optimising the likelihood of her offspring mating and rearing young (so ensuring the continuation of her genes into future generations).

It makes sense for females in poor condition to hatch more female chicks, because weak male chicks are unlikely to surmount the rigours of courtship and reproduction.

How does the female do it? There is some evidence she can bias the sex ratio by controlling hormones, particularly progesterone. Jenny Graves, “How Birds Sometimes Become Male and Female” at RealClearScience

You see, the hen bird takes stock of her surroundings and realizes the likely outcomes, based on various ratios. She also knows how to do something that no woman in history has ever discovered: Control, unassisted, the sex of her offspring, in accordance with their chances in life.

No natural mechanism is remotely suggested, so we must assume that it is sheer mental power, of the sort that we species-ists once thought existed only in humans, that enables the hen bird to plan for her chicks’ future. Shame on us!

Where would we be in our understanding of animal cognition without pop science mag Darwinism?

No wonder they hate Michael Behe so much, with his monotonous emphasis on “how exactly?” Oh, by the way, speaking of Behe and Darwin Devolves:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#1 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology #2 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Creationism #6 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Science & Religion

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See also: A First: Solitary Bees Serve As Stepdads One question comes to mind: For the males, competing for females who are present is cognitively easy. But how do they know about the females who are still larvae? Can they smell them? If not, the behavior seems to require a foresight that is beyond the known cognitive powers of the bee.

and

Can sex explain evolution?

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Published on March 15, 2019 07:28

Should research funding agencies move resources away from particle physics to fighting climate change?

The LHC protons come from the small red hydrogen tank. / Saintfevrier (CC BY-SA 4.0)

That is, if a much bigger, better collider than the Large Hadron Collider that found the Higgs boson were built, would it find anything new? Or are the problem physicists see with the Standard Model not resolvable by smashing particles together? Japan is delaying a new collider and its decision is thought to produce a domino effect in other countries. One worry is the “nightmare scenario” in which the collider with hitherto undreamed-of energies reveals a desert, “a barren region otherwise devoid of new discoveries”:

Sir David King, the U.K.’s former chief scientific advisor, even goes as far to suggest it might be time to wrap up particle physics as we know it, not only because of what might be diminishing returns in terms of new discoveries but also due to the opportunity cost next-generation machines would bear for dealing with more pressing concerns. “I’m happy to draw a line at the FCC, congratulate all the particle physicists on the amazing work they’ve done, but suggest they move on to other extraordinarily challenging aspects of fundamental science,” he says. “I’m saying this at a time when humanity is faced with the biggest potential crisis it has ever had to face up to, which is climate change. I believe our intellectual resources should be focused on that.” Jonathan O’Callaghan, “Would New Physics Colliders Make Big Discoveries or Wander a Particle Desert?” at Scientific American

You know particle physics is in serious trouble when the idea of just putting the money into climate change instead gets serious face time.

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See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Is science harmed by an illusion of progress? Tellingly, Hossenfelder adds, “So here is the puzzle: Why can you not find any expert, besides me, willing to publicly voice criticism on particle physics? Hint: It’s not because there is nothing to criticize.”

Note: She may not be as lonely as she thinks. Others just talk about it in a more roundabout way.

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Published on March 15, 2019 06:37

March 14, 2019

Will AI merge with evolution to shatter human exceptionalism?

Yes, says humanist (and transhumanist) Peter Clarke:

The fact that humans are different from other animals is a distinction of degree, not of kind. Once we properly orient ourselves on the evolutionary tree, it becomes clear that we can learn more about ourselves by focusing on our similarities with other animals than by perpetuating the myth that we’re categorically unique. “Will AI shatter human exceptionalism?” at Mind Matters

Hmmm. If humans are not “categorically unique,” why are we having this conversation?

The advantage of adding talk of evolution to transhumanism is that it turns a perennial tale of immortality just out of reach into a chronicle of inevitable ascent, like the fabled “Ascent of Man.” More: at Mind Matters

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See also: AI and the future of murder (Jonathan Bartlett)

Claim: Yes, you can upload your brain

Attend your own funeral! It’s easy if you upload your consciousness to the cloud, says futurist. Ummm…

and

Can we cheat death by uploading ourselves as virtual AI entities?

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Published on March 14, 2019 18:14