Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 519

February 25, 2019

The “purely evolutionary perspective” is a waste of time

More to the point, is that Grandma or a wolf?

Brilliantly illustrated here:

Evolutionary biologists have long been struck by two unique features of humans. The first is that we enjoy some of the longest life spans in the animal kingdom. In just the past 200 years, there has been an unprecedented increase in how long we live, not just in the richest countries but also in the poorest. We have moved so far away from our hunter-gatherer ancestors that their life spans are more similar to those of apes and chimpanzees than to modern human beings.

This feature is coupled with another. To a biologist, an organism that cannot reproduce is of little value in evolutionary terms, an unmitigated oddity. So scientists have been puzzled by the long postmenopausal life of human females. From a purely evolutionary perspective, grandmothers can be considered a failure of reproductive fitness: What good is an organism that cannot reproduce and cannot help perpetuate the species?Haider Warreich, “‘Grandmother effect’ helps explain human longevity” at Stat News

First, what’s increased is not our lifespans but our likelihood of achieving a “normal” human lifespan, seventy to eighty years (as articulated at least three or four thousand years ago but surely known from much earlier). Some individuals live much longer simply because nothing kills them.

Second, only a “purely evolutionary perspective” would fail to see that the primary reasons for the survival of old women are intelligence and culture.

Some old women are useful; some are not. But intelligence causes most of them not to avoid stupid situations where they just get killed (the way an animal might). And cultural values, carefully nurtured by the old women themselves, cause their survival to be valued.

Treat this sort of evolutionary biology the way you would treat grievance studies. Be polite.

See also: Darwinian grandmother hypothesis takes another hit Sadly, it probably doesn’t matter whether the grandmother hypothesis explains anything about human history because it doesn’t need to. It needs only to be a Darwinian talking point, trotted out at the correct time.

Shock! Darwinism does not explain why old women exist

Evolutionary medicine: Insomnia in the elderly is due to evolution?

The Grandmother Hypothesis, yet again

Menopause caused by guys staying home

“Grandmother” Thesis In Human Evolution Takes A Hit: The “grandmother” thesis is that the reason our ancestors didn’t kill granny was that she helped out. (And then somehow religion got involved, and …) An actual study showed that “The hazard of death for Dogon children was twofold higher if the resident paternal grandmother was alive rather than dead. This finding may reflect the frailty of elderly grandmothers who become net consumers rather than net producers in this resource-poor society.”

and

Evolutionary psychology: The grandmother hypothesis yet again

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

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 25, 2019 15:19

Reader Pat Suwonpanich provides food for thought on hearing and consciousness

Pat Suwonpanich has made a comment on hearing and sound as a mental phenomenon leading to questions of conscious mind that I think is worth pondering by one and all, so let us headline (with slight edits):

>>For those who wanna read less-technical article on hearing, I have
tried to write my own article as shown below. Hope it will be useful for
many of us.

Whenever we hear beautiful music or any other interesting sounds, we should realize that the ability to hear is so special that no known set of nature’s laws can explain it !

Most of us tend to think that we hear sounds because there are various sounds around us. In reality, if there were no human/animals that can hear, there would be no sound, just air vibration. [1]

Without brains of human and animals to interpret the air vibration into sounds that we experience, there is no sound at all, only soundless air vibration. The entire universe is in fact ‘silent’. Sound only really exists in human’s and animals’ minds. [2]

Ability to hear is one of our senses. Most importantly, it is a part
of consciousness. But the big problem is, scientists know very little
about mechanisms of consciousness. Although many scientists are
materialists, no scientists know how matter generates consciousness. [3]
In the case of hearing, no scientists know how to make ‘sound’ from air
vibration.

The origin and mechanisms of consciousness are very “special” because no known set of nature’s laws suggest that matter can generate consciousness. It is so special that many scientists admitted that, “questions of consciousness may be beyond the bounds of science” [4], “We just don’t know how we should think about ‘being’ and how ‘mind’ fits into nature.” [5]

Consequently, even the world’s top scientists can’t make AI or robots that have consciousness. [6] No scientists can make AI or robots that can hear sounds like human or animals. [7]

set of Ultimately, the fact that ‘no known nature’s laws suggest that matter can generate consciousness’ has a very important implication. Without nature’s laws for consciousness to emerge from matter, consciousness certainly can’t arise by evolution !

From air vibration which has no sound, the Creator beautifully designed what each sound should sound like. Inside brains, the Creator put the special program that can interpret each frequency pattern of air vibration into each sound, thus giving us the sound experience.

This amazing creation results in hearing ability which is very useful for us to observe surrounding through sounds, enjoy music, communicate in language, etc.

As said at the beginning of the article, whenever we hear beautiful
music or any other interesting sounds, we should realize that the
ability to hear sounds is so special that no known nature’s laws can
explain it. Without the nature’s laws for consciousness to emerge from
matter, consciousness certainly cannot arise by evolution !

References
[1] Scientific American (1884), page 218, question no. 18.
Retrieved from https://archive.org/stream/scientific-american-1884-04-05/scientific-american-v50-n14-1884-04-05_djvu.txt
[2] Berry, S. (2015), ‘How Do Vibrations Make Sound’, original thread in Quora.
Retrieved from http://shaneberry.com/how-do-v…..ake-sound/
[3] Horgan, J. (2016),‘How Would AI Cover an AI Conference’, Scientific American, Cross-Check blog.
Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-would-ai-cover-an-ai-conference/
[4] Alexanian, M. (2014), ‘For some questions, science may not have answers’, Physics Today, page 12.
Retrieved from https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.2260
[5] Vernon, M. (2011), ‘Human consciousness is much more than mere brain activity’, The Guardian.
Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/17/human-consciousness-brain-activity
[6] Horgan, J. (2008), ‘The Consciousness Conundrum’, IEEE Spectrum.
Retrieved from https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/the-consciousness-conundrum
[7] Agarwal, T., ‘Understanding Voice Recognition’, elprocus.com.
Retrieved from https://www.elprocus.com/understanding-voice-recognition/>>

Food for thought. END

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 25, 2019 02:48

February 24, 2019

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

3-D impression of dark matter via Hubble

The WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive particles) model has just not worked out:

We understand how the Standard Model particles behave. We have solid predictions for how they should interact through all of the fundamental forces, and experimental confirmation of those theories. We also have extraordinary constraints on how they’re permitted to interact in a beyond-the-Standard-Model fashion. Because of our constraints from accelerators, cosmic rays, decay experiments, nuclear reactors and more, we’ve been able to rule out many possible ideas that have been theorized.

When it comes to what might make up the dark matter, however, all we have are the astrophysical observations and our theoretical work, in tandem, to guide us. The possible theories that we’ve come up with include a huge number of dark matter candidates, but none that have garnered any experimental support. Ethan Siegel, “The ‘WIMP Miracle’ Hope For Dark Matter Is Dead” at Forbes

The greatthingxs is that the physicists acknowledge it. They’re not trying to pretend it’s there when it isn’t.

See also: Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling

Researcher: The search for dark matter has become a “quagmire of confirmation bias” So many research areas in science today are hitting hard barriers that it is reasonable to think that we are missing something.

Physicists devise test to find out if dark matter really exists

Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter

What if dark matter just doesn’t stick to the rules?

A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion

and

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

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 24, 2019 19:00

Physicist: It’s not the answers we lack, it’s the question

Calabi-Yao manifold

A number of different models can explain the universe, says Armani-Hamed, but how to choose:

It seems inconceivable that this intricate web of perfect mathematical descriptions is random or happenstance. This mystery must have an explanation. But what might such an explanation look like? One common conception of physics is that its laws are like a machine that humans are building in order to predict what will happen in the future. The “theory of everything” is like the ultimate prediction machine—a single equation from which everything follows. But this outlook ignores the existence of the many different machines, built in all manner of ingenious ways, that give us equivalent predictions. …

To Arkani-Hamed, the multifariousness of the laws suggests a different conception of what physics is all about. We’re not building a machine that calculates answers, he says; instead, we’re discovering questions. Nature’s shape-shifting laws seem to be the answer to an unknown mathematical question. This is why Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues find their studies of the amplituhedron so promising. Calculating the volume of the amplituhedron is a question in geometry—one that mathematicians might have pondered, had they discovered the object first. Somehow, the answer to the question of the amplituhedron’s volume describes the behavior of particles—and that answer, in turn, can be rewritten in terms of space and time. Natalie Wolchover, “A different kind of theory of everything” at The New Yorker

The amplituhedron? “a jewel-shaped geometric object that challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental constituents of nature.” More from the American Mathematical Society. Peter Woit’s take at Not Even Wrong is worth noting. He sees it as more hopeful than much string theory stuff. But Arkani-Hamed, it seems, says all kinds of things.

Rightly or otherwise, this all reminds some of us of Eugene Wigner’s The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

See also: The ongoing failure of supersymmetry

and

String theory defeated but never wrong

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 24, 2019 14:54

How is the hologram universe coming?

Calabi-Yao manifold

This principle of string theory is a long way from testability but…

Ever since 1997, when Maldacena discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence — a duality between AdS space and a “conformal field theory” describing quantum interactions on that space’s boundary — physicists have sought an analogous description of space-time regions like ours that aren’t bottled up. The only “boundary” of our universe is the infinite future. But the conceptual difficulty of projecting a hologram from quantum particles living in the infinite future has long stymied efforts to describe real space-time holographically.

In the last year, though, three physicists have made progress toward a hologram of de Sitter space. Like the AdS/CFT correspondence, theirs is also a toy model, but some of the principles of its construction may extend to more realistic space-time holograms. There is “tantalizing evidence,” said Xi Dong of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led the research, that the new model is a piece of “a unified framework for quantum gravity in de Sitter [space].”Natalie Wolchover, “How Our Universe Could Emerge as a Hologram” at Quanta

Still closer to sci-fi than the classroom, it would seem.

See also: Suzan Mazur Talks With Fermilab Associate Craig Hogan At Oscillations About The Current State Of The Hologram Universe

Astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi Explains The Holograph Universe To Suzan Mazur At Oscillations

and

“Substantial evidence” claimed for universe as a hologram

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 24, 2019 13:55

Richard Dawkins’s Darwin Day lecture, 2019

What, him again? And no new, ground-breaking book?

Richard Dawkins is one of the best known scientists in the world. He is author of ‘The Selfish Gene’, which upturned our understanding of natural selection, and in 2017 was named the most influential science book of all time. He is also author of ‘The God Delusion’, which caused a global sensation upon publication in 2006. He has chaired almost every event in the Darwin Day Lecture series since its launch in 2003.

Humanists UK president Professor Alice Roberts takes over the chair of the lecture at this event, and introduces Richard Dawkins as he delivers the Darwin Day Lecture for the first time. More.

Somehow this stuff hasn’t aged well. Dissent from Darwinism is becoming commonplace and scrutiny is starting to go mainstream.

Beyond a certain point, just telling everyone else to get with the program doesn’t work.

All together now, Dissenters, Happy Birthday, Darwin!

See also: Maybe dissent from Darwin can’t kill a career any more? Too soon to tell but in an age when “trust in science” is demanded in the teeth of evidence, not on account of it, maybe Darwinism can’t kill opponents the way it used to. Or does it?

The Dissent from Darwinism list now tops 1000 scientists.

and

Human Zoos documentary aired on Chicago TV Discussing Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism is noteworthy in itself. For various reasons. legacy media have never been willing to take the legacy of explicitly Darwinian racism seriously, much as they feature disconnected and useless rants about racism.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 24, 2019 06:23

Jerry Coyne on how mathematician John Lennox embarrasses himself

John Lennox

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne topic

Reader Alexander called my attention to this item in the Science Focus section of the BBC. (Note that it’s in the science section, not the “religion” section!) It’s a 33-minute podcast interview with John Lennox, whose Wikipedia page says this (my emphasis, and yes, that’s THE Templeton Foundation, which now has a damn Oxford College named after it): …

Skipping the digression on Templet on Foundation, we hear,

The podcast interview with Lennox is below (click on the link), though you may not get through much of it before your digestive system goes awry … Listen to as much of this podcast as you can stand, and then, perhaps, to the much shorter video below. Jerry Coyne, “Mathematician John Lennox embarrasses himself by trying to reconcile Christianity and science” at Why Evolution Is True

[image error]Jerry Coyne

We recommend you listen to the podcast, watch the video, and ignore Jerry. In fairness, he has got at least as far as realizing that anti-Semitism is a problem among the raging Woke. We can’t ask for more than that just now.

It’s hard for a Darwinian to understand a mathematician anyway. We’ve seen it a few times before. Something about things adding up.

See also: Jerry Coyne Discovers The Lack Of Intellectual Freedom On Campus

and

John Lennox Vs Peter Atkins: Can Science Explain Everything?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 24, 2019 05:59

February 23, 2019

Detroit: Become Human – Adam Nieri on the twin pillars of the AI religion

Nieri looks at them as the narrative of the sci-fi game Detroit: Become Human develops them:

A Closer Look at Detroit: Become Human, Part I Gaming culture provides a window into our culture’s assumptions about artificial intelligence (Adam Nieri) In the game, Detroit has transcended its current economic despair, emerging as the epicenter of the android revolution. Cyberlife, headquartered there, has become the first company to engineer and produce fully autonomous, general purpose AI androids for consumers.

A Closer Look at Detroit: Become Human, Part II Adam Nieri: One pillar, if you like, of the worldview of the “Church of AI” is the belief that our embrace of artificial intelligence is a step on the road to a higher form of life. Looking more closely, we can see that the stupidity and insignificance of human beings is a central dogma in the AI religion.

A Closer Look at Detroit: Become Human, Part III Adam Nieri: The second pillar of the AI religion is reductionism, the reduction of humanity to matter and energy If the qualities that define being human (so that there is an obvious distinction between what is human and what is not) are not material by nature; then the premise of a compelling story about androids that become and surpass human beings as intelligent life falls flat.

See also: Alita: Battle Angel (2019): A Mind Matters Review Adam Nieri: If you love anime and felt betrayed by the flop of Ghost, I would highly recommend Alita (Adam Nieri)

The idol with feet of silicon (Robert Marks) Religions based on artificial intelligence (AI) cannot transcend the limits of computers

and

Tales of an Invented God The most important characteristic of an AI cult is that its gods (Godbots?) will be created by the AI developers and not the other way around. They will mesh with ET, an eternal cyborg who is always Out There.

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 23, 2019 17:00

Journalist: ET can be common ground between atheists and ID theorists

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

He suggests making clear that life was not necessarily created by the “the God of the Christians and the Jews”:

Instead, it points to the design of some higher, alien species. Say, a race of brilliant beings who live in Alpha Centauri, who have learned how to travel by wormholes. No, there’s no evidence for that, but there’s equally little evidence for the “Multiverse.” That’s a favorite fiction of atheists eager to escape the religious implications of the Big Bang. But that didn’t stop Stephen Hawking from touting it. Okay? It’s not the “Divine Foot” of Yahweh we’re letting in the door. It’s a mysterious alien green foot of a purely natural being. One who doesn’t impose morality on us. Or care if we sleep with our much younger lab assistants… Perhaps if intelligent design advocates stipulated such alien designers, they’d hit much less resistance. Biologists wouldn’t work so desperately hard to avoid the evidence of their eyes. John Zmirak, “At Last, Common Ground for Atheists and Intelligent Design Advocates” at The Stream

Guy’s doubtless kidding. Anyway, people familiar with the scene are unsure how it would help:

It’s an interesting suggestion. But as Michael Behe noted the other day, Darwinists “are famously slow to recognize problems for their theory.” Why so slow? You have to understand how many careers, and how much of personal image and other factors, are wrapped up with the theory that nature on Earth created itself, only giving the illusory appearance of design. Stipulating actual design by Little Green Men would still be an affront, requiring Darwinists to admit they were wrong, and not about a small matter. This may not be the way forward after all, John. David Klinghoffer, “Peace Through ETs? John Zmirak’s Puckish Proposal” at Evolution News and Science Today:

Klinghoffer’s onto something. Knowledge of the sheer massive intricacy of design in nature grows by the day and the only possible hostile response would now have to be attacking anyone who wants to discuss it seriously. True, the space aliens won’t run afoul of the No Divine Foot rule but if that’s the only problem they solve, they’re not going to shed much light on the nature of nature.

See also: Tales of an Invented God: The most important characteristic of an AI cult is that its gods (Godbots?) will be created by the AI developers and not the other way around

and

They’ll always be Out There

Follow UD News at Twitter!

View more on Michael J. Behe's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 23, 2019 14:10

Biology’s language is poorly adapted to Darwinism

structure of an animal cell/royroydeb (CC BY-SA 4.0)

So says Stephen L. Talbott in The Organism’s Story (January 2019) at Nature Institute:

Organisms are purposive (“teleological”) beings. Nothing could be more obvious. The fact of the matter is so indisputable that even those who don’t believe it really do believe it. Philosopher of biology Robert Arp speaks for biology as a whole when he writes,

“Thinkers cannot seem to get around [evolutionary biologist Robert] Trivers’ claim that “even the humblest creature, say, a virus, appears organized to do something; it acts as if it is trying to achieve some purpose”, or [political philosopher Larry] Arnhart’s observation that . . . “Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for the young — these and many other activities of organisms are goal-directed”.1”

And yet, despite his acknowledgment that we “cannot get around” this truth, Arp again speaks for almost the entire discipline of biology when he tries, with some delicacy, to take it all back: “with respect to organisms, it is useful to think as if these entities have traits and processes that function in goal-directed ways” (his emphasis). This as if is a long-running cliché, designed to warn us that the organism’s purposive behavior is somehow deceptive — not quite what it seems. The goal-directedness is, in the conventional terminology, merely apparent or illusory. Certainly it must not be seen as having any relation at all to human purposive activity — an odd insistence given how eager so many biologists are to make sure we never forget that the human being is “just another animal”.

Others have commented on this strange reluctance to acknowledge fully the purposiveness that is there for all to see. The philosopher of science, Karl Popper, said that “The fear of using teleological terms reminds me of the Victorian fear of speaking about sex”.2 Popper may have had in mind a famous remark by his friend and twentieth-century British evolutionary theorist, J. B. S. Haldane, who once quipped that “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist; he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public”. More.

Funny that normal language should be poorly adapted after all this time.

When people are at great pains to try to alter their language so as to pretend that something isn’t true that really is, what should we call that? Should we cater to it?

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: Before you go: “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”