Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 51

At Mind Matters News: Researchers: Distrust of science is due to tribal loyalty

In Part 2 of 4, we look at a claim arising from a recent study: We blindly believe those we identify with, ignoring the wisdom of science:

Recently, a paper lamenting the decline of trust in science was discussed at ScienceAlert, a science news site. In representing the paper—doubtless accurately — for a lay audience, the write-up embodies the causes of legitimate public distrust…

We press on. The second point of four raised at ScienceAlert is that tribal loyalty is thought to create distrust in science: “‘Work on cultural cognition has highlighted how people contort scientific findings to fit with values that matter to their cultural identities,’ write Philipp-Muller and colleagues.” …

There seems to be no recognition here that researchers also have a tribal loyalty. The fact that they are fiercely competitive among themselves doesn’t change that. Just as businesses can be fiercely competitive among themselves but band together against unwelcome government regulations, researchers can unite against skepticism of their claims in general.

If the researchers’ response is, “We represent science,” one might ask, “Why, then, was the Wuhan lab origin of COVID-19 treated as a ‘conspiracy theory’ when it was in fact a reasonable hypothesis?” Anyone who has taken the trouble to study the situation will be aware that political considerations made the theory unpopular because — well, for one thing — the United States had been helping to fund the research.

News, “Researchers: Distrust of science is due to tribal loyalty” at Mind Matters News (July 18, 2022)

Sometimes — just sometimes — researchers’ attitudes are themselves the best argument against science one could think of.

Takehome: There seems to be no recognition that researchers, however fiercely competitive among themselves, also have a tribal loyalty that skews their judgment.

The paper, which requires a subscription, is “Why are people antiscience, and what can we do about it?” by Aviva Philipp-Muller, Spike W. S. Lee, and Richard E. Petty, July 12, 2022, PNAS 119 (30) e2120755119
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120755119

Here are all four parts of the series:

Why many now reject science… do you really want to know? COVID demonstrated — as nothing else could — that the “science” was all over the map and didn’t help people avoid panic. As the panic receded, the U.S. government started setting up a disinformation board to target NON-government sources of panic, thus deepening loss of trust.Researchers: Distrust of science is due to tribal loyalty. In Part 2 of 4, we look at a claim arising from a recent study: We blindly believe those we identify with, ignoring the wisdom of science. There seems to be no recognition that researchers, however fiercely competitive among themselves, also have a tribal loyalty that skews their judgment.Researchers: If we tell folks more about science, they trust less. Part 3: The researchers argue that doubts about science arise from conflict with beliefs. The many COVID-19 debacles suggest other causes… Generally, the remedy for loss of trust after widespread failures is reform of the system, not reform of its doubters. Post-COVID, scientists should take heed.

and

Claim: If science were properly presented, trust would grow! The ideas examined in these four short essays all assume that scientists are exempt from the bias and self-interest that governs everyone else. We’re asked to believe that scientists are somehow exempt from the bias problem that they say is ingrained in our biology — yet they have the same biology as everyone else…Copyright © 2022 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.
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At Phys.org: Astronomer suggests it is time to look for near-Earth asteroids in the direction of the sun

Bob Yirka writes:

Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, has published a Perspective piece in the journal Science suggesting that it is time for the space science community to take a closer look at near-Earth objects (NEOs) that lie in the direction of the sun. In his paper, he notes that the technology now exists to look for and find such NEOs, at least during the twilight hours.

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

As Sheppard notes, most space gazing is fixed at the dark night sky, when the sky is not overwhelmed with light from the sun. But as a result, space scientists have ignored the NEOs that orbit between Earth and the sun. And that could lead to trouble, since one or more of them could be on a path that leads to them crashing into Earth.

Scientists are not completely ignoring NEOs that exist in the sun’s glare, of course. Sheppard notes that many of them have been discovered recently. But he says that more such studies are required to learn more about them. He points out that one team recently discovered an asteroid with an orbit inside of Venus’s orbit and another that has the shortest trip around the sun. He also notes that new facilities have the capabilities needed to study such NEOs, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility in the U.S. and the NSF Blanco-4-meter facility in Chile. The latter even has a Dark Energy Camera that can be pointed closer to the sun.

NEOs that orbit the sun inside of Earth’s orbit have been categorized based on their orbital positioning—if they travel inside of Venus’s orbit, for example, they are called Vatiras. Additionally, Sheppard notes that their numbers remain relatively constant, which is somewhat of a surprise. Based on computer models and the number of such objects that strike the Earth, the moon, or other celestial bodies, their numbers should be dropping. That they are not suggests that they are being replenished somehow. He thinks efforts should be made to find out where those other NEOs are coming from, and why.

Phys.org

That no asteroid impacts have devastated human civilization in historical memory doesn’t mean that it won’t happen in the future. We can be thankful that we live in a window of time that has been free from such disasters.

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L&FP, 57: What is naturalism? Is it a viable — or even the only viable — worldview and approach to knowledge?

What is naturalism? (And why do some speak in terms of evolutionary materialistic scientism?)

While everything touched on by philosophy is of course open to disagreements and seemingly endless debate, we can find a good enough point of reference through AmHD:

3. Philosophy The system of thought holding that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws.
4. Theology The doctrine that all religious truths are derived from nature and natural causes and not from revelation.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests:

The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit” (Krikorian 1944, Kim 2003) . . . . Those philosophers with relatively weak naturalist commitments are inclined to understand “naturalism” in a unrestrictive way, in order not to disqualify themselves as “naturalists”, while those who uphold stronger naturalist doctrines are happy to set the bar for “naturalism” higher.[2]

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy comments:

Naturalism is an approach to philosophical problems that interprets them as tractable through the methods of the empirical sciences or at least, without a distinctively a priori project of theorizing. For much of the history of philosophy it has been widely held that philosophy involved a distinctive method, and could achieve knowledge distinct from that attained by the special sciences. Thus, metaphysics and epistemology have often jointly occupied a position of “first philosophy,” laying the necessary grounds for the understanding of reality and the justification of knowledge claims. Naturalism rejects philosophy’s claim to that special status. Whether in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, or other areas, naturalism seeks to show that philosophical problems as traditionally conceived are ill-formulated and can be solved or displaced by appropriately naturalistic methods. Naturalism often assigns a key role to the methods and results of the empirical sciences, and sometimes aspires to reductionism and physicalism.

Then, there is Wikipedia, speaking of its own core tendencies:

In philosophy, naturalism is the idea or belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe.[1]

<>

According to philosopher Steven Lockwood, naturalism can be separated into an ontological sense and a methodological sense.[2] “Ontological” refers to ontology, the philosophical study of what exists. On an ontological level, philosophers often treat naturalism as equivalent to materialism. For example, philosopher Paul Kurtz argues that nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles. These principles include mass, energy, and other physical and chemical properties accepted by the scientific community. Further, this sense of naturalism holds that spirits, deities, and ghosts are not real and that there is no “purpose” in nature. This stronger formulation of naturalism is commonly referred to as metaphysical naturalism.[3] On the other hand, the more moderate view that naturalism should be assumed in one’s working methods as the current paradigm, without any further consideration of whether naturalism is true in the robust metaphysical sense, is called methodological naturalism.[4] With the exception of pantheists—who believe that Nature is identical with divinity while not recognizing a distinct personal anthropomorphic god—theists challenge the idea that nature contains all of reality.

So, already, we can see why it is quite reasonable to speak of “evolutionary materialistic scientism,” as that explicitly summarises a relevant, even dominant, form of naturalism commonly seen on the ground, especially in scientific and policy contexts.

Namely, following AmHD, the scheme of thought or view that “all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws.” That is, evolutionary materialism from hydrogen to humans, and scientism that reduces knowledge and know-ability to scientific approaches shaped by this a priori such that science as conceived monopolises or even dominates what can be called knowledge. Much as Lewontin, the US National Science Teachers, Martin Mahner, Monod and others have variously said.

Lewontin’s well-known phrase is that Science is “the only begetter of truth.”

Manifestly, such a claim fails.

First, the scientism is self refuting, self referentially incoherent (and depends on its institutionalised power to get us to lock out other perfectly valid approaches to warrant that substantiates knowledge . . . with, of course, the first duties of reasoning lurking out of the fog).

Of course, some here may appeal to an older sense of “Science,” meaning, systematic study on reasonable and responsible principles leading to an agreed body of discussion and knowledge with best practices, i.e. a discipline. In this older sense, Theology had reason to claim to be Queen of the Sciences, especially as she embraced a good slice of philosophy. If you are unwilling to acknowledge Theology and Philosophy or Ethics as sciences, then you cannot appeal to that older sense of science. And if one insists on science as pivoting on empirical observation and linked explanatory theorising (especially when mathematical analysis can be applied), then a core part of doing science is not science, Mathematics, the study of the logic of structure and quantity . . . applied and extended logic of being.

That’s before one recognises that the claim Science monopolises or so dominates knowledge that once it steps in, all else is silenced, is not a scientific claim. It is a proposed thesis of epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge, warrant and related matters. That is, scientism is self referentially incoherent and absurd.

Once these points are realised, the idea that we may freely impose so-called methodological naturalism without having smuggled in metaphysical naturalism, collapses. Instead, we must open ourselves instead to any valid approach to learning and warranting what we may learn; and in that context, the legitimacy of philosophy, logic of being [i.e. ontology], wider metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics and even aesthetics is obvious. So is the credibility of historical and forensic or common sense knowledge, and so are many other approaches to knowledge that can meet the duties to truth, right reason, warrant and wider prudence.

Indeed, we may make a minimal algebraic analysis, regarding any distinctly identifiable field of study amenable to careful reasoned discussion:

The truth claim, “there are no [generally knowable] objective truths regarding any matter,” roughly equivalent to, “knowledge is inescapably only subjective,” is an error. Which, happily, can be recognised and corrected.

Often, such error is presented and made to seem plausible through the diversity of opinions assertion, with implication that none have or are in a position to have a generally warranted, objective conclusion. This, in extreme form, is a key thesis of the nihilism that haunts our civilisation, which we must detect, expose to the light of day, correct and dispel, in defence of civilisation and human dignity. (NB: Sometimes the blind men and the elephant fable is used to make it seem plausible, overlooking the narrator’s implicit claim to objectivity.)

Now, to set things aright, let’s symbolise: ~[O*G] with * as AND. It intends to describe not mere opinion but warranted, credible truth about knowledge in general.

So,

~[O*G] = 1 . . .

is self referential as it is clearly about subject matter G, and is intended to be a well warranted objectively true claim.

But it is itself therefore a truth claim about knowledge in general intended to be taken as objectively true, which is what it tries to deny as a possibility.

So, it is self contradictory and necessarily false:

PHASE I: Let a proposition be represented by x G = x is a proposition asserting that some state of affairs regarding some matter in general including history, science, the secrets of our hearts, morality etc, is the case O = x is objective and knowable, being adequately warranted as credibly true}

PHASE II: It is claimed, S= ~[O*G] = 1, 1 meaning true

However, the subject of S is G, it therefore claims to be objectively true, O and is about G
where it forbids O-status to any claim of type G
so, ~[O*G] cannot be true per self referential incoherence

PHASE III: The Algebra, translating from S: ~[O*G] = 0 [as self referential and incoherent cf above] ~[~[O*G]] = 1 [the negation is therefore true]
_______________________________________________________
CONCLUSION I: O*G = 1 [condensing not of not] where, G [general truth claim including moral ones of course]

So too, O [if an AND is true, each sub proposition is separately true]

CONCLUSION II: That is, there are objective truths for any distinctly identifiable topic of study; and a first, self evident one is that ~[O*G] is false, ~[O*G] = 0. The set of knowable objective truths in general — and embracing those that happen to be about states of affairs in regard to right conduct etc — is non empty, it is not vacuous and we cannot play empty set square of opposition games with it.

That’s important.

Also, there are many particular objective general and moral truths that are adequately warranted to be regarded as reliable. Try, Napoleon was once a European monarch and would be conqueror. Try, Jesus of Nazareth is a figure of history. Try, it is wrong to torture babies for fun, and more.

Ours is a needlessly confused age

The scientism part has failed.

So does the evolutionary materialism part (once we realise that to do science we must be rationally, responsibly free and this cannot be reduced to computation on a blindly mechanical substrate), as for example J B S Haldane long since pointed out. Let us — yes again — cite him, reframing in terms of laid out propositions:

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For

if

[p:] my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain

[–> taking in DNA, epigenetics and matters of computer organisation, programming and dynamic-stochastic processes; notice, “my brain,” i.e. self referential]
______________________________

[THEN]

[q:] I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.

[–> indeed, blindly mechanical computation is not in itself a rational process, the only rationality is the canned rationality of the programmer, where survival-filtered lucky noise is not a credible programmer, note the functionally specific, highly complex organised information rich code and algorithms in D/RNA, i.e. language and goal directed stepwise process . . . an observationally validated adequate source for such is _____ ?]

[Corollary 1:] They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.

And hence

[Corollary 2:] I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. [–> grand, self-referential delusion, utterly absurd self-falsifying incoherence]

[Implied, Corollary 3: Reason and rationality collapse in a grand delusion, including of course general, philosophical, logical, ontological and moral knowledge; reductio ad absurdum, a FAILED, and FALSE, intellectually futile and bankrupt, ruinously absurd system of thought.]

In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. Cf. here on (and esp here) on the self-refutation by self-falsifying self referential incoherence and on linked amorality.]

Re-conceive us as oracle machines, where the in the cybernetic loop neural network processors are also interacting with a supervisory oracle, and we arrive at Eng Derek Smith’s sort of vision:

The Eng Derek Smith Cybernetic Model

Notice, this is not a low level analysis of say an insect, the point is that we can see a supervisor, interacting through say quantum influences, with not instinct but rational, responsible wisdom. True freedom of the rational soul is back on the table, whatever the likes of a Provine may imagine, by suggesting that “human free will is nonexistent . . . . humans are locally determined systems that make choices. They have, however, no free will.”

So, are you sufficiently responsibly and rationally free to make a rational objection, pivoting on first principles and duties of reason? If so, evolutionary materialistic scientism is dead; if not, then what may be chemically sound as a matter of cause effect chains in your brain, has no framework to claim more than being a product of GIGO limited computation. So, it has no power to properly claim warrant on ground-consequent relations or inference to best explanation etc.

Naturalism, as commonly proposed, fails. END

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At Evolution News: Chatbots Might Chat, But They’re Not People

Amanda Witt writes:

Recently a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made news by claiming that a chatbot he developed was sentient and spiritual, and that it should have all the rights people have. Lemoine claimed the chatbot (named LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications) meditates, believes itself to have a soul, has emotions like fear, and enjoys reading. According to Lemoine, Google should treat it as an employee rather than as property and should ask its consent before using it in future research.

“I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine said, and he provided a transcript of conversations he’d had with LaMDA on a wide range of topics.

Not for Being Delusional

Many experts, from psychologists to tech gurus, disagreed with Lemoine’s assessment. A Google spokesperson said that ethicists and tech experts investigated LaMDA and concluded that “the evidence does not support [Lemoine’s] claims.” Lemoine was placed on leave — not for being delusional and thinking his own creation had come to life, but for violating confidentiality agreements.

Yes, Lemoine’s chatbot can chat — that’s what chatbots are programmed to do. Nitasha Tiku of the Washington Post explains, “Today’s large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition — not wit, candor or intent.”

In other words, artificial intelligence such as chatbots can spit out human-like conversation, but only because humans program it to do so. Users may engage with chatbots and feel like there’s a mind, a personality, a living being behind the words, but that’s only an illusion created by other people.

Nothing but AlgorithmsRobert J. Marks spoke at the recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith on the question, “Will Thinking Machines Replace Humans?”

As Robert J. Marks explains in his new book Non-Computable You, all AI is made up of math — algorithms. So, while AI might mimic human conversation, it doesn’t really converse. Getting a satisfactory answer depends on how the questions are asked; if a question isn’t phrased in a way the AI can process, the answer it gives will be evasive or otherwise rely on cheap trickery. In short, if you’re lonely, AI simply will not be a satisfactory substitute for human companionship.

This raises the interesting question of what it means to be human. Philosophers have approached this topic from various angles. Among other things, humans are sentient, which means we experience emotions; AI does not. Humans have consciousness, which is surprisingly difficult to define, but which AI clearly doesn’t have. Humans have understanding and not just factual knowledge; humans have common sense and the ability to deal with ambiguities; humans are creative. AI meets none of these criteria.

Not Human, Not Now or Ever

Ethicist Wesley J. Smith gives five reasons why artificial intelligence isn’t human:

It isn’t alive; “inanimate objects are different in kind from living organisms.”It doesn’t think; “human thinking is fundamentally different from computer processing.”It doesn’t feel; feelings are “emotional states we experience as apprehended through bodily sensations” such as fear caused by an adrenaline rush.It’s amoral; humans have free will and thus are moral agents, whereas AI can only follow rules it’s programmed to follow.It’s soulless; AI is purely mechanistic, without a mysterious, immaterial, spiritual dimension.

It boils down to this: AI can process lots of data. AI can be programmed to mimic human interactions. But AI is not human — nor will it ever be.

Evolution News

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At Aeon: You’re astonishing! Life can be better appreciated when you remember how wonderfully and frighteningly unlikely it is that you exist at all

Philosophy professor Timm Triplett writes:

Family lore has it that my grandfather, having spent some time doing business in England and about to return to the United States, received an invitation to seek additional sales opportunities in Scotland. At the last minute, he cancelled the passage he had booked on the Titanic. If the story is true, then, but for a chance communication from a Scottish businessman, I would never have come into existence. And what led to that businessman learning about my grandfather? Perhaps it was a mere afterthought as someone was leaving a meeting in the purchasing office of a Glasgow manufacturer. Surely somewhere along the line there was something – many things – equally happenstance, without which the invitation to my grandfather would never have been made – without which, that is to say, I would never have been born.

In his book The View from Nowhere (1986), the American philosopher Thomas Nagel captures well the reaction that these sorts of reflections can generate:

We are here by luck, not by right or by necessity. Rudimentary biology reveals how extreme the situation is. My existence depends on the birth of a particular organism that could have developed only from a particular sperm and egg, which in turn could have been produced only by the particular organisms that produced them, and so forth. In view of the typical sperm count, there was very little chance of my being born given the situation that obtained an hour before I was conceived, let alone a million years before …

If you concentrate hard on the thought that you might never have been born – the distinct possibility of your eternal and complete absence from this world – I believe you too will find that this perfectly clear and straightforward truth produces a positively uncanny sensation.

If an uncanny sensation indeed results from such reflections, it’s something that just happens, like a shiver or a shudder. It can’t be evaluated as reasonable or unreasonable. But emotions can be assessed in that way: hope may be misplaced, anger may be an overreaction, fear may be unwarranted. I want to focus, not on any sensation such as Nagel speaks of, but on the emotion of astonishment. I believe that, when one reflects on all the things that had to have happened exactly as they did in fact happen in order for one to be born, astonishment is a reasonable and appropriate emotion.

Let me be clear that the emotion I am focusing on here is astonishment, and that the object of astonishment under discussion is the fact that one came to exist when one so easily might not have. Call this the contingency of one’s existence. This is quite different from the emotions of joy and happiness that many people feel about being alive and living their lives fully. Joy and happiness are emotions readily distinguishable from astonishment. A person can take delight in her life yet, if she never reflects on the contingency of her existence, or rejects the idea of such contingency, or accepts and understands it but is indifferent toward it, she will not experience the sort of astonishment of which I speak.

But suppose that determinism is true, and that each event that occurs in the world, including my birth, was the inevitable result of prior causal forces. Even if this is so, it’s still true that, from my subjective point of view, the exact course the world must take is outside my ken. I can’t penetrate into this determinacy and understand why things happened as they did in every particular. And so, as I reflect on the events that had to happen in order for me to be born, it is easy to imagine how this extraordinarily complex cause-and-effect sequence might have gone differently. Even if everything was determined, it’s still astonishing from my subjective perspective that the set course of the world went this way, so as to include me, and not that way – a way in which I’m forever absent, and no one even notices.

Consider the theist’s position. God created you for a purpose. If he needed you for a purpose that some other possible person could have fulfilled, then it is extraordinary that he picked you as opposed to one of those others. Suppose though that only you would do. Then it is extraordinary that, out of all the possible beings God could have created, the circumstances called for your creation, not that of any of those others. Had those circumstances been even slightly different, God would have chosen someone with a different profile. It’s wonderful for you that the circumstances were just right for God to need you, but you were also extraordinarily lucky, given that different circumstances would have entailed God’s need for a different person.

Why then do so many people seem to treat the fact of their existence as unremarkable? Perhaps, quietly and occasionally, many people do feel the astonishment that is appropriate to the contingency of their existence. But many others seem to go through life, however happy they may be to have it, taking utterly for granted what is in fact the most important thing in their lives – that, against all odds, they came into existence in the first place. Of course, the contingency of one’s existence may never occur to many people. 

Cultivating astonishment – recognising it in regard to oneself, encouraging it in children – can be seen as a call to see the world in a new way. It deepens one’s appreciation of the world by way of a philosophical argument to the effect that astonishment at one’s existence is a legitimate and realistic emotion. Since this conclusion is life-affirming in the most literal sense, and since it points to an important and too easily taken-for-granted truth, it is valuable to recognise that there is reasoned support for the astonishment that emerges from fully appreciating how wonderfully strange and extraordinary it is that the course of the world went in such a way as to include you as part of it.

The quotes above are excerpted from the complete article at Aeon.

Contingency of an outcome, coupled with the recognition of the specific purpose of that outcome, is more consistent with teleological design than with random outcomes or law-like, restricted determinism.

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At Mind Matters News: Jumping genes … a new clue to octopus intelligence?

Despite being very different, the human brain and the octopus brain share the same sort of jumping genes:

How did octopuses and some of their close kin among the cephalopods get so smart? Theories about how mammals and birds got to be smart may not work here.

A recent paper adds a little more information to the controversy. Studying the common octopus and the California octopus, researchers found that the same “jumping genes” are active in the octopus brain as in the human one — even though the two types of brain are very different. Jumping genes, of which there are many types, can move from one place in the genome to another…

News, “Jumping genes … a new clue to octopus intelligence? ” at Mind Matters News (July 20, 2022)

The octopus brain is very different.

Takehome: Formerly thought of as “junk DNA,” their mobility may help explain unique problem-solving abilities. “I literally jumped on the chair…” one researcher said.

You may also wish to read: If octopuses are really smart, should we eat them? Proposals to farm octopuses are meeting with opposition on grounds of animal cruelty. Underlying the ethical issues is the admitted fact that the evolution of animal intelligence, however it happened, is nowhere near as tidy as we once believed.

and

Is the octopus a “second genesis” of intelligence?

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New distinctions help accommodate researchers to the usefulness of “junk DNA”

Abstract: It is often thought that non-junk or coding DNA is more significant than other cellular elements, including so-called junk DNA. This is for two main reasons: (1) because coding DNA is often targeted by historical or current selection, it is considered functionally special and (2) because its mode of action is uniquely specific amongst the other actual difference makers in the cell, it is considered causally special. Here, we challenge both these presumptions. With respect to function, we argue that there is previously unappreciated reason to think that junk DNA is significant, since it can alter the cellular environment, and those alterations can influence how organism-level selection operates. With respect to causality, we argue that there is again reason to think that junk DNA is significant, since it too (like coding DNA) is remarkably causally specific (in Waters’, in J Philos 104:551–579, 2007 sense). As a result, something is missing from the received view of significance in molecular biology—a view which emphasizes specificity and neglects something we term ‘reach’. With the special case of junk DNA in mind, we explore how to model and understand the causal specificity, reach, and corresponding efficacy of difference makers in biology. The account contains implications for how evolution shapes the genome, as well as advances our understanding of multi-level selection.

Havstad, J.C., Palazzo, A.F. Not functional yet a difference maker: junk DNA as a case study. Biol Philos 37, 29 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-022-09... The paper requires a fee or subscription.

At least this group, unlike evolutionary biologist Dan Graur, is willing to “do politeness” on the topic.

You may also wish to read: Jumping genes … a new clue to octopus intelligence? Despite being very different, the human brain and the octopus brain share the same sort of jumping genes. Formerly thought of as “junk DNA,” their mobility may help explain unique problem-solving abilities. “I literally jumped on the chair…” one researcher said.

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How does a human being thrive normally with “quite a bit” of brain missing?

Yes, Game of Thrones (2011–2019) star is lucky her aneurysms weren’t worse but, given our brains’ complexity, how do our mental abilities survive?:

Clarke is unusually lucky, to be sure. But a question naturally arises: Shouldn’t her good fortune be impossible? The human brain is staggeringly complex. Suppose a man said, “I am one of a really small minority of people who fell twenty thousand feet from a plane and survived, despite my injuries…” We’d want to know more.

And yet, as we’ve noted earlier, people get by with split brains, a brain missing key components, or only half a brain, (or maybe less).

Florey Institute neuroscientist Anthony Hannan, author of over 150 papers and cited 7000 times, tackles the question…

News, “Minus “quite a bit” of brain, Game of Thrones star speaks. How?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: A veteran neuroscientist offers some answers, including neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, that might help treat brain injuries down the road. Beyond that…

You may also wish to read: Yes, the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe. But that’s not even the most remarkable thing about our brains. Our complex brains mirror the universe — 27 orders of magnitude bigger — yet some humans function with only half a brain or split brains.

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New paper: Different vertebrate classes arise in “radically diverse ways”

That’s inconvenient if one is arguing for common ancestry of vertebrates.

Abstract: It is well known that the embryonic development of vertebrates from different classes (e.g., fish, reptiles, mammals) pass through a “phylotypic stage” when they look similar, and this apparent homology is widely seen as evidence of their common ancestry. However, despite their morphological similarities, and contrary to evolutionary expectations, the phylotypic stages of different vertebrate classes arise in radically diverse ways. This diversity clearly counters the superficial appearance of homology of the phylotypic stage, and the plain inference is that vertebrates have not evolved from a common vertebrate ancestor. The diversity extends through all stages of early development—including cleavage and formation of the blastula, gastrulation, neurulation, and formation of the gut and extraembryonic membranes. This paper focuses on gastrulation, during which the germ layers originate and the vertebrate body-plan begins to form. Despite its key role in embryonic development, gastrulation occurs in fundamentally different ways in different classes of vertebrates. The inference against common ancestry becomes progressively stronger as more is discovered about the genetic and molecular mechanisms that implement development. It is increasingly evident that these are of such complexity that it is unrealistic to think that undirected variations (random mutations) could produce constructive changes to development, such as those required to account for a diversification of development from that of a common ancestor, especially while retaining a similar phylotypic stage.

Swift D (2022) The diverse early embryonic development of vertebrates and implications regarding their ancestry. BIO-Complexity 2022(1):1–10. doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2022.1

Are we talking Haeckel’s [famous fake] embryos here?

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At Science News: How James Webb Space Telescope data have already revealed surprises

The first image contains a galaxy cluster’s past and recent star birth in more remote galaxies.

Lisa Grossman writes:

Massimo Pascale wasn’t planning to study the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. But as soon as he saw the cluster glittering in the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, he and his colleagues couldn’t help themselves.

“We were like, we have to do something,” says Pascale, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. “We can’t stop ourselves from analyzing this data. It was so exciting.”

It took astronomers mere days to dig insights out of the first public image from JWST, which shows a massive galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723 and many more distant galaxies behind it.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCICluster collision

When the image of SMACS 0723 was released in a White House briefing on July 11, most of the focus went to extremely distant galaxies in the background (SN: 7/11/22). But smack in the middle of the image is SMACS 0723 itself, a much closer cluster of galaxies about 4.6 billion light-years from Earth. Its mass bends light from even farther away, making more distant objects appear magnified, as if their light had traveled through the lens of another cosmic-sized telescope.

The light from the most distant galaxy in this image started its journey to JWST about 13.3 billion years ago — “almost at the dawn of the universe,” says astrophysicist Guillaume Mahler of Durham University in England…

Pascale’s and Mahler’s teams each started by taking inventory of the distant galaxies that appear stretched and distorted in the image. The light from some of those galaxies is warped such that multiple images of the same galaxy appear in different places. Mapping those multiply imaged galaxies is a sensitive probe of the way mass is spread around the cluster. That, in turn, can reveal where the cluster contains dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that makes up the majority of the mass in the universe (SN: 9/10/20).

“The main thing that limits the study of star formation in galaxies is the quality of the data,” says astrophysicist Adam Carnall of the University of Edinburgh. But with the vastly improved data from JWST, he says, he and his team were able to measure the ages of stars in those remote galaxies.

“The ability to look at these small, faint galaxies … gives you a sense of how all galaxies must look when they start forming stars,” Carnall says.

Scientists hope to use JWST to find the first instances of star formation ever. Other early results suggest they’re already getting close.

Full article at Science News.

The “vastly improved data from JWST” is making this an exciting time to be an astronomer. We can look forward to a rich harvest of new observational discoveries about our unfolding universe as more data is analyzed.

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