Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 516

Evolution: If mental illness helped us adapt, Michael Behe is right

An evolutionary psychiatrist claims that natural selection selects for mental illness:

Randolph Nesse, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University, attributes high rates of psychiatric disorders to natural selection operating on our genes without paying heed to our emotional well-being. What’s more, the selective processes took place thousands of years before the unique stresses of modern urban existence, leading to a mismatch between our current environment and the one for which we were adapted.

In his new book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, Nesse recruits the framework of evolutionary medicine to make a case for why psychiatric disorders persist despite their debilitating consequences. Some conditions, like depression and anxiety, may have developed from normal, advantageous emotions. Others, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, result from genetic mutations that may have been beneficial in less extreme manifestations of a trait. Scientific American spoke to Nesse about viewing psychiatry through an evolutionary lens to help both patients and clinicians. Dana G. Smith, “Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt over the Millennia” at Scientific American

But, of course, Michael Behe’s point in Darwin Devolves is that natural selection primarily breaks or blunts complex things, resulting in survival at a cost. Sounds like Dr. Nesse is saying the same thing, not that he would admit it.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: A review of Darwin Devolves that looks at what Behe actually says

and

Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented?

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

Michael Behe: How to tell if scientists are bluffing

Michael Behe, author of Darwin Devolves, offers some hints:

So here’s the simple test to tell if scientists are exaggerating wildly. Let’s call it: “The Principle of Comparative Difficulty” (PCD): if an easier task is too difficult to accomplish, then a harder one certainly is too. …

Yet, as physicist David Snoke and I have shown, Darwin’s mechanism of random mutation and natural selection strains to explain even the very simplest molecular example of cooperation (called a “disulfide bond”). Michael Behe, “Here’s How to Tell if Scientists are Exaggerating” at The Stream

Yet we are told that Darwinism explains all the complex machinery.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

Complex machinery? “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”

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

How Do Cells Interpret The “Dizzying” Communications Pathways In Multicellular Life Forms?

and

Cell atlases reveal extreme complexity at biology’s frontiers

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

2018 Creationist paper: Retraction notice isn’t enough for Jerry Coyne

2018 Creationist paper: Retraction notice isn’t enough for Jerry Coyne Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne sounded the alarm late last year about a creationist paper (in truth, rather poorly written) published by Springer:

…two days ago I checked the website, and found that the paper was still there, with the only indication that it was retracted being a note (“RETRACTED ARTICLE”) on the BROWSER TAB of the paper, as well as on the downloadable pdf of the paper. I saw no indication on the paper’s site itself that it had been retracted, and it still appeared on the Springer Page… 

I guess I can take some satisfaction that the paper has been “retracted”, but really, in what way has it been “retracted”? It’s still there, freely available on the paper’s website and even in the journal’s table of contents (where, I note, it is labeled as “retracted”. Jerry Coyne, “Springer “apparently” retracts a creationist paper, but it’s still on the website” at Why Evolution Is True

True. Jerry supplies screenshots. Here’s one showing that the paper was in fact retracted. See upper left:

If you download the paper, you will see RETRACTED shadow-printed diagonally on each page.

From Springer’s perspective, of course, their approach is best. Anyone can see what the paper says and that it was retracted. They are free to draw the conclusions they wish.

Making the paper disappear, to please people like Jerry, would be far less transparent.

Hmmm. To please Jerry, maybe the author will have to disappear too.

Theorizing information out of a black hole

black hole/Alain r

Cvan information really be destroyed? Some odd finds in physics give rise to a memory principle:

The memory principle might even solve the black-hole information paradox that Hawking discovered in the 1970s. In the usual analysis, black holes are pathologically forgetful. The only record they keep of the matter that falls in is its mass, spin, and electric charge. Over time, black holes gradually slough off particles—in the form of Hawking radiation—eventually shrinking away completely. The finer details of their swallowed contents are lost and presumed destroyed. The paradox arises because such thorough amnesia is not ever supposed to happen in physics. But in 2016, working with Hawking and Cambridge theorist Malcolm Perry, Strominger suggested that the vacuum of general relativity may provide a memory matrix that preserves this information in the universe, beyond the black hole’s demise. A black hole forms in an empty region of spacetime; after it evaporates, that region is empty once more. But it is a different empty.George Nusser, “How the Universe Remembers Information” at Nautilus

Not really being able to integrate information with matter and energy surely means it is hard to say whether information could really be destroyed.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: What does “nothing” mean in physics? (Hugh Ross)

and

Paul Davies: Incorporating information into science as a physical quantity

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

Why people don’t “trust science”: The “Cancer Personality”

Considered by some to be one of the worst scientific scandals of all time (a crowded field of contenders, that!),

The scandal in question is one I had never heard of before, but the facts are jaw-dropping. Beginning in 1980, a Dr Ronald Grossarth-Maticek reported that he had discovered a cancer-prone ’emotionally repressed’ personality. Someone with this personality type was, he claimed, at very high risk of later developing cancer. A second personality type predicted ‘internal diseases’, such as stroke and hypertension. Even more remarkably, Grossarth-Maticek said, a brief course of psychotherapy was enough to virtually eliminate the excess risks. Neuroskeptic, “The Cancer Personality Scandal (Part 1)” at Discover

Some of us remember the spate of sciencey articles that appeared in women’s mags on the cancer-prone personality. It sounded wrong at the time. Many of us knew so many people who had died of cancer who didn’t fit the type at all. Science problems emerged; statistically, the results were just too good to be true:

It might be said that this is all ancient history now, and there is no need for an investigation after so long, but I think this is entirely the wrong attitude. If anything, the fact that these frankly bizarre results are still in the literature (and, as Pelosi points out, still being cited) 30 years later makes the scandal even worse. Neuroskeptic, “The Cancer Personality Scandal (Part 1)” at Discover

Yes, it’s almost on a level with schoolbook Darwinism. Haeckel’s embryos, the most famous fakes in biology, may still be in textbooks somewhere.

Although that instance was debunked, the idea lives. Consider, for example, “Is There a Cancer-Prone Personality?

How you think and act may put you at risk” (Psychology Today, 2014) In 2017, the idea was discredited by a number of studies. Of course, behavior doesaffect cancer. Personality issues may lead a person to smoke but it’s the smoke that matters.

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

and

That Didn’t Take Long: Darwin’s Man Jerry Coyne Defends Zombie Science

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Michael Egnor: The Real Reason Why Only Human Beings Speak

Dr. Egnor explains, “Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly”:

In his discussion of why only humans have language, science writer Tom Siegfried gets a lot right, but he misses the crucial reason. …

Siegfried is right that many non-human animals have the physiological apparatus needed to form words. Yet they have no language. They can make and respond to signs—gestures, grunts and the like. A dog, for example, can respond appropriately to simple words directed at him (“Sit!” “Fetch!”). But all animal communication is symbols, that is, signals that point directly to an object. In this case, the object is a simple expected action the animal is to perform immediately.

What animals cannot do is communicate using abstractions. They cannot use designators,—words employed abstractly as language. For example, a dog can be trained, by reward and punishment, to stay when told, “Stay!” He associates the sound “s-t-a-y” with a behavior and performs the behavior. But he doesn’t know what you mean when you say “Let’s stay a bit longer on the beach,” “He extended his stay in Peru,” or “The judge issued a stay of the eviction order.”

Animals can only think concretely. More.

Michael Egnor is a neurosurgeon, professor of Neurological Surgery and Pediatrics and Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery, Neurological Surgery, Stonybrook School of Medicine

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Why speech is unique to humans

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

Paul Davies: Incorporating information into science as a physical quantity

In this interview with prominent origin-of-life physicist Paul Davies, author of The Demon in the Machine:How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life, we learn,

In some ways, Demon in the Machine is a follow up to your 1998 book The Fifth Miracle, where you also tackle the origins of life. What has changed since you wrote that book?

The science has changed. I was motivated to write this book, in part because I am now surrounded by some very clever young people who are coming up with all sorts of wonderful ideas, but also because of advances, not only in biology, but in fundamental physics. The demon in the title of the book is something that’s beloved of all physicists: Maxwell’s demon. It’s the sort of thing you learn, you think, “Hmm, well okay. I understand,” then you move on because it’s been an inconvenient truth at the heart of physics for over 150 years. It’s only just in the last few years that people have actually built devices based on the concept. This is now part of nanotechnology – you can build devices that, in a thermal background, can actually discern individual degrees of freedom and operate mechanisms to convert heat into work or use information as a fuel or a source of energy.

I have to say, it’s on a very small scale. My favourite is the information-powered refrigerator, which is being built in Finland. Don’t expect anything from your kitchen appliances soon, but it establishes the principle that to fully understand the nature of thermodynamics, we have to take into account information as a physical quantity, and not just as some sort of airy-fairy concepts that we use in daily life. That really is, I like to say, the chink in the armour of mystery that surrounds the question “what is life?”. I think we begin to see that if information can have causal leverage over matter, then that opens the way to understanding how we might adapt the laws of physics to incorporate this information thing, which is at the heart of what makes life tick. Tushna Commissariat, “Life, the universe and everything: an interview with Paul Davies” at PhysicsWorld

In a world where some believe that consciousness must be a material thing, perhaps it’s not surprising that others seek to see information as a physical quantity. Computer scientist Robert J. Marks would ask, what is the weight difference between a full CD and an empty one? Could we start there?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Paul Davies: The Really Tough Question Is How Life’s Hardware Can Write Its Own Software

Physicist Rob Sheldon On Paul Davies’ “Life Writes Its Own Software” Claim

Paul Davies And The “Struggle To Define Life”

Paul Davies: Life’s Defining Characteristics “Better Understood As Information”

and

How can consciousness be a material thing?

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

Conventional non-ET explanations for Oumuamua

Artist’s impression of interstellar asteroid/comet, Oumuamua /ESO, M. Kornmesser

Now that the buzz that Oumuamua might be an extraterrestrial light sail has died down, here are some more down-to-earth thoughts, if anyone is interested:

1. Fluffy ice fractal To get a push from starlight, an object needs to have a large surface area — to provide more surfaces for particles of light called photons to nudge — and a small mass, so that even tiny amounts of photon pressure can make a difference. A flat sheet, such as a solar sail, isn’t the only way to harness this radiation pressure, Moro-Martín says. A fluffy, porous structure that resembles a fractal, a geometric pattern that repeats itself on smaller and larger scales, could also be propelled by light, she argues. “Physically it would be the same idea, just the geometry would be different.” … Lisa Grossman, “3 explanations for ‘Oumuamua that aren’t alien spaceships” at Science News

And two more suggestions are offered as well.

But hey, like we always say, They Will Always Be Out There if you need them to be. Also, be kind to ET. He is somebody’s deity.

See also: Astronomers: Solar System Object In Transit, Oumuamua, Might Be A “Light Sail Of Extra-Terrestrial Origin”

Why Some Scientists Saw Asteroid Oumuamua As ET

Why can top scientists get away with extraordinary claims?

and

“Tales of an Invented God. Why They must be Out There.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

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

Surprise superhighway: Cambrian worms lived in “unsustainable” ocean 500 mya

labeled worm tunnels from 500 mya/Brian Pitt, USask

The sea bed was thought to lack enough oxygen to sustain them. From ScienceDaily:

The rocks came from an area in the remote Mackenzie Mountains of the Northwest Territories in Canada which Pratt found 35 years ago.

Pratt then digitally enhanced images of the rock surfaces so he could examine them more closely. Only then did the hidden ‘superhighway’ of burrows made by several different sizes and types of prehistoric worm emerge in the rock.

Some were barely a millimetre in size and others as large as a finger. The smaller ones were probably made by simple polychaetes — or bristle worms — but one of the large forms was a predator that attacked unsuspecting arthropods and surface-dwelling worms.

Pratt said he was “surprised” by the unexpected discovery.

“For the first time, we saw evidence of large populations of worms living in the sediment — which was thought to be barren,” he said. “There were cryptic worm tunnels — burrows — in the mud on the continental shelf 500 million years ago, and more animals reworking, or bioturbating, the sea bed than anyone ever thought.”

Now here’s the kicker:

It has always been assumed that the creatures in the Burgess Shale — known for the richness of its fossils — had been preserved so immaculately because the lack of oxygen at the bottom of the sea stopped decay, and because no animals lived in the mud to eat the carcasses.

Pratt’s discovery, with co-author Julien Kimmig, now of the University of Kansas, shows there was enough oxygen to sustain various kinds of worms in the sea bed. Paper. (open access) (paywall) – Brian R. Pratt, Julien Kimmig. Extensive bioturbation in a middle Cambrian Burgess Shale–type fossil Lagerstätte in northwestern Canada. Geology, 2019; 47 (3): 231 DOI: 10.1130/G45551.1 More.

Well, either something else was stopping the decay or oxygen is not as necessary as supposed. See, for example, “Life form’s environment is so extreme it has never been cultivated in a laboratory” and Why did bigger, more complex organisms get started earlier in deep oceans?

See also: Complex Worm Find From Cambrian (541-485 Mya) “Helps Rewrite” Our Understanding Of Annelid Head Evolution

Symbiosis found in Cambrian fossil worms

and

Cambrian explosion ended surprisingly quickly

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Also:

Researchers: Earth’s oxygen rose and fell several times before the Great Oxidation Event 2.2 bya

Photosynthesis pushed back even further. Time to revisit the “Boring Billion” claim

Researchers: Extreme fluctuations in oxygen levels, not gradual rise, sparked Cambrian explosion Explanations of the dramatic Cambrian explosion of life forms (540 million years ago) are a cottage industry, with arguments about oxygen a staple of the discussion. At times, it feels like trying to understand World War II without allowing for the possibility that any intention underlay any of the events. Maybe that’s why the issues can’t be resolved.

Maverick theory: Cambrian animals remade the environment by generating oxygen

Did a low oxygen level delay complex life on Earth?

There was only a small oxygen jump

Animals didn’t “arise” from oxygenation, they created it, researchers say

Theory on how animals evolved challenged: Some need almost no oxygen

New study: Oxygenic photosynthesis goes back three billion years

Enough O2 long before animals?

Life exploded after slow O2 rise?

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

Spiders mimic two different ant types while growing (but secretly signal spidery mates)

The growing spider S. formica (bottom) mimics Crematogaster, then Camponotus (top, ants) /Alexis Dodson

Yeah, the story does sound like as plotline from Saturday night with popcorn at the old Downtown Grand but… From ScienceDaily:

Viewed from above, the mimics look like skinny, three-segmented ants to fool predators. But in profile, the adult mimics retain their more voluptuous and alluring spider figure to woo nearby mates.

UC researchers presented their findings in January at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference in Tampa, Fla.

Most birds avoid ants and their painful stingers, sharp mandibles and habit of showing up with lots of friends. Try to eat one and you’re likely to get chewed on by 10 more. That’s why nearly every insect family from beetles to mantises has species that mimic ants.

By comparison, spiders are delicious and nutritious, said Alexis Dodson, a UC doctoral student and lead author.

“That’s what a lot of natural selection is all about — to convince other species not to eat you and convince members of your species to mate with you and to do so at the least cost possible,” Dodson said. …

But it’s not enough to look like an ant, Morehouse said. To fool clever predators, you have to act like one, too. The spiders have enormous back legs like ants. Spiders have an extra pair of legs compared to ants and no antennae. But ant mimics will wave their small forelegs in the air like ant antennae.

“The level of mimicry we encounter in jumping spiders is incredibly detailed,” he said. “When ants follow a trail, they weave their heads back and forth. The ant is trying to cast back and forth over a chemical trail that’s hard to find.

“Remarkably, jumping spiders also perform this weaving behavior even though it has no functional significance for them,” Morehouse said. “They’re trying to be convincing actors. They’re trying to look like an ant.” …

S. formica is unusual for another reason: It mimics two different species of ants during its lifetime. To make the illusion more convincing, adult spiders will mimic Camponotus, a bigger kind of ant than the tinier black ants called Crematogaster the young spiderlings copy.

“I think that’s the most surprising finding,” UC postdoctoral researcher and study co-author David Outomuro said. “It makes a lot of sense to mimic something that matches your size.”

Now UC researchers are studying how ant mimics communicate with each other without blowing their cover. Jumping spiders are renowned for their larger-than-life courtship rituals. Many such as the peacock jumping spider have flashy colors — iridescent blues, greens and reds — and perform showstopper courtship dances like some kind of arachnid vaudevillian.

“This is my passion project,” Dodson said. “Do they have mating rituals like other jumping spiders?”

So far Dodson has only observed what she calls “handshake” behaviors, or spiders seeming to acknowledge each other from a distance.

“It’s as if one says, ‘Hi, I’m not an ant.’ And the other says, ‘I am also not an ant,'” Dodson said. “It’s definitely there. It’s distinct from just walking around. And it’s not something I’ve seen an ant do.” – University of Cincinnati More.

Astonishing. What is astonishing about the commentary provided is that the writer in no way addresses the question of how exactly “evolution” can access and activate all the information required to perform all this deception. We will not understand evolutionary biology today if we fail to see that avoiding that question has become the unspoken goal of the discipline.

We are told about design in detail and then commanded not to think about it or else. Somehow the selfish gene does it all?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: A first: Spider masquerades as leaf

and

Bioscience 2010: Problems With Evolution Of Mimicry “Huge”

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