Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 525

Polar bears overrun small northern Russia town

Yeah, another cute critter story, but your news desk is digging out from a snow wallop and thought you’d find this walk on the wild side fun:

On Saturday, dozens of large adult animals, as well as many cubs, moved into the town of Belushya Guba, or Sturgeon Bay, a military community of 2,500 people on the far northern archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. While polar bear sightings are common in Russia’s High Arctic, the brazenness of the animals has taken many people by surprise. Video taken near the town’s garbage dump showed as many as 20 or 30 animals grunting and gorging themselves on discarded food. “They’re not afraid of anything,” said a voice on the video. Security cameras showed silent images of adult bears entering buildings, and peering into the windows of people’s homes.CBC News, Tuesday, February 12, 2019, “50 polar bears invade Russian town, emergency declared” at The Weather Network

One senses that bear-proof garbage disposal will become more of a local priority there. And there’s always the Canadian solution, the polar bear jail.

See also: Grizzly-polar bear hybrids in the Arctic

See also:

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All together now, Dissenters: Happy Birthday, Darwin!

Folks, it’s Darwin Day, when we are told by Darwinians to celebrate “intellectual bravery.” Very well, here is some: Dissent from Darwinism, the vid:

What do you give a great scientist for his birthday when he’s already got everything? He’s got absolutely all the scientists behind his theory. All the media. All the Officially Smart People, as Jay Richards calls them. Well, today is Darwin’s Day, the birthday of the venerated Charles Darwin, whose theory is a fact beyond question. Right? The journal Nature assures its readers, “Scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact.” Or as philosopher Michael Ruse wonderfully put it, “Evolution is a fact, fact, FACT!”

The insistence on this point encourages a certain skepticism, though. As others have pointed out, evolution is supposed to be as certain gravity, yet nobody goes around saying, “Gravity is a fact, fact, FACT!” and nobody says gravity is as certain as evolution …

What if evidence actually mattered again?

See also: The Dissent from Darwinism list now tops 1000 scientists A mathematician, quoted: “What we have learned since the days of Darwin throws doubt on natural selection’s ability to create complex biological systems – and we still have little more than handwaving as an argument in its favor.”

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Our spinal cords are smarter than previously thought

From ScienceDaily:

It is well known that the circuits in this part of our nervous system, which travel down the length of our spine, control seemingly simple things like the pain reflex in humans, and some motor control functions in animals.

Now, new research from Western University has shown that the spinal cord is also able to process and control more complex functions, like the positioning of your hand in external space.

“This research has shown that a least one important function is being done at the level of the spinal cord and it opens up a whole new area of investigation to say, ‘what else is done at the spinal level and what else have we potentially missed in this domain?'” said the study’s senior and supervising researcher Andrew Pruszynski, PhD, assistant professor at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and Canada Research Chair in Sensorimotor Neuroscience. …

“We found that these responses happen so quickly that the only place that they could be generated from is the spinal circuits themselves,” said the study’s lead researcher Jeff Weiler, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry. “What we see is that these spinal circuits don’t really care about what’s happening at the individual joints, they care about where the hand is in the external world and generate a response that tries to put the hand back to where it came from.”

This response generated by the spinal cord is called a ‘stretch reflex,’ and has previously been thought to be very limited in terms of how it helps movement. “Historically it was believed that these spinal reflexes just act to restore the length of the muscle to whatever happened before the stretch occurred,” said Pruszynski. “We are showing they can actually do something much more complicated — control the hand in space.”

This finding adds immensely to our understanding of neuroscience and neurocircuitry, and provides new information and targets for rehabilitation science.

“A fundamental understanding of the neurocircuits is critical for making any kind of progress on rehabilitation front,” said Pruszynski who is also a scientist at Western’s Robarts Research Institute and the Brain and Mind Institute. “Here we can see how this knowledge could lead to different kinds of training regimens that focus on the spinal circuitry.”

Paper. (paywall) – Jeffrey Weiler, Paul L. Gribble, J. Andrew Pruszynski. Spinal stretch reflexes support efficient hand control. Nature Neuroscience, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0336-0 More.

Intelligent spine? Intelligent design? It’s getting to the point that everything in the system of life is intelligent except the system itself—which is supposed to have come about randomly. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

See also, for example: Researchers: How the immune system “thinks” They can say that “thinks” is “just an image” if they like. But at what point does it become clear that somehow something must have been doing something that we would normally describe as thinking or else this wouldn’t be happening.

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

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Malaria mosquito found in amber from 100 million years ago

 anopheline mosquito, in amber, 100 mya/George Poinar Jr.

From ScienceDaily:

The anopheline mosquitoes that carry malaria were present 100 million years ago, new research shows, potentially shedding fresh light on the history of a disease that continues to kill more than 400,000 people annually.

“Mosquitoes could have been vectoring malaria at that time, but it’s still an open question,” said the study’s corresponding author, George Poinar Jr. of Oregon State University’s College of Science. “Back then anopheline mosquitoes were probably biting birds, small mammals and reptiles since they still feed on those groups today.”

In amber from Myanmar that dates to the mid-Cretaceous Period, Poinar and co-authors described a new genus and species of mosquito, which was named Priscoculex burmanicus. Various characteristics, including those related to wing veins, proboscis, antennae and abdomen indicate that Priscoculex is an early lineage of the anopheline mosquitoes.

“This discovery provides evidence that anophelines were radiating — diversifying from ancestral species — on the ancient megacontinent of Gondwana because it is now thought that Myanmar amber fossils originated on Gondwana,” said Poinar, an international expert in using plant and animal life forms preserved in amber to learn more about the biology and ecology of the distant past. Paper. (paywall) – George Poinar, Thomas J. Zavortink, Alex Brown. Priscoculex burmanicus n. gen. et sp. (Diptera: Culicidae: Anophelinae) from mid-Cretaceous Myanmar amber. Historical Biology, 2019; 1 DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2019.1570185 More.

The previous “earliest” record was from a fossil dated to 15 to 20 million years ago but what we don’t yet know is, did the mosquito then have the relationship it now has with the malaria parasite plasmodium? It’s a complex relationship, apparently. That could shed light on theories around evolution and strategies around malaria.

Amber is like video when it comes to information about life forms because it so often traps movement:

See also: Millipedes Found In 100 Mya Amber Comprise 13 Of 16 Known Groups

Beetle trapped in amber 99 mya offers window into prehistoric ecology So, in another instance of “earlier than thought,” pollination seems to have preceded flowering plants.

Spider in amber is 49 million-year-old member of living genus

Stasis: Dinosaur-era baby snake looks just like modern ones

“Live action” captured in a spider’s web from 100 million years ago

How did 20-30 myo salamander in amber get IN there?

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Can we program morality into a self-driving car?

A software engineering professor tells us why that’s

Any discussion of the morality of the self-driving car should touch on the fact that the industry as a whole thrives on hype that skirts honesty …

The cars raise the same problem as do other types of machine learning: The machine isn’t responsible, so who is? That gets tricky…

Companies may say one thing about their smart new product in the sales room and another in the law courts after a mishap. The European Parliament has proposed making robotic devices legal persons, for the purpose of making them legally responsible. But industry experts have denounced the move as unlikely to address real-world problems. McDermid thinks we should forget trying to make cars moral and focus on safety instead: “Currently, the biggest ethical challenge that self-driving car designers face is determining when there’s enough evidence of safe behavior from simulations and controlled on-road testing to introduce self-driving cars to the road.” “Can we program morality into a self-driving car?” at Mind Matters

See also: Self-driving cars hit an unnoticed pothole “Not having to intervene at all”? One is reminded of the fellow in C. S. Lewis’s anecdote who, when he heard that a more modern stove would cut his fuel bill in half, went out and bought two of them. He reckoned that he would then have no fuel bills at all. Alas, something in nature likes to approach zero without really arriving…

and

AI Winter is coming Roughly every decade since the late 1960s has experienced a promising wave of AI that later crashed on real-world problems, leading to collapses in research funding. (Brendan Dixon)

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Swamidass et al’s hit review at Science on Behe’s forthcoming Darwin Devolves “borders on fraud”

According to John West of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture,

Ironically, in this same review where the main point seems to be that Behe doesn’t engage with evidence counter to his views, the authors state (without appreciating the irony) that Behe devotes much of one chapter to discussing Richard Lenski’s bacterial evolution experiments. Since Lenski is listed as a co-author of this book review, I was looking forward to reading a robust critique of what Behe had to say about his experiments. Get ready to be underwhelmed. Here’s the critique: “[Behe] dedicates the better part of chapter 7 to discussing a 65,000-generation Escherichia coli experiment, emphasizing the many mutations that arose that degraded function — an expected mode of adaptation to a simple laboratory environment, by the way — while dismissing improved functions and deriding one new one as a ‘sideshow.’” That’s it? Yes, that’s it. On the one topic where the authors surely might have provided a devastating critique of Behe — if they had one — they effectively offer nothing.

If scientists like Swamidass, Lenski, and Lents want to continue to offer these faux critiques of Behe, that is certainly their right. But they are damaging their own credibility, not Behe’s. Such critiques will no doubt continue to convince true believers like atheist Darwinist Jerry Coyne. But they won’t impress scientists who are open-minded enough to read Behe or other ID proponents for themselves. How do I know this? Because I’ve met such scientists. Scientists like German paleontologist Günter Bechly, who thought intelligent design was bosh… until he actually read Behe and discovered that the caricature of intelligent design he had been offered wasn’t true.John G. West, “Darwinists Devolve: Review by Swamidass, Lenski, and Lents Borders on Fraud” at Evolution News and Science Today:

Well, somebody out there must think Behe worth hearing. Have a look at this string of Amazon numbers 8:00 pm EST February 11, 2019:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#1 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Biology >  Developmental Biology #1 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology >  Creationism #4 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies >  Science & Religion

#1 in Developmental Biology. The book ships on February 26.

See also: Science Mag’s hit on Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves avoids his main point In these times, are you better off knowing the problems or innocently citing approved sources of misinformation as your reason for making decisions? You decide.

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Are there “dark” neurons in the brain left over from a “Jurassic Park” past?

Only a minority of neurons in the brain fire in response to a given stimulus, leading to the speculation that many neurons never fire at all and are leftovers from an evolutionary past:

I didn’t find Ovsepian’s evolutionary argument that persuasive, because I’m skeptical of the whole ‘dark matter’ concept. Still, the idea that remnants of our ancestors’ brains still exist in our own skulls is a rather fascinating one. It suggests Jurassic Park-like scenarios in which someone succeeds in reactivating these lost neural functions – and there is evidence that this can happen in very specific cases such as reflexes. In general, though, I don’t think we can say that the majority of our neurons are fossilized.Neuroskeptic, “Silent Neurons: The Dark Matter of the Brain?” at Discover Nagazine

Notice that the neurons aren’t being called “junk neurons,” as in the exploded concept of vast libraries of “junk DNA.” Quite the contrary, they are given the somewhat glamorous cachet of “dark” neurons, as in “dark matter.” Perhaps something has been learned from the collapse of the concept of “junk DNA.”

The neurons from the deep dark past story sounds like the myth of the triune brain (that is, our mammal brain is built on top of a reptile brain, and our human brain is built on that). It sounds really convincing if you believe it anyway but it doesn’t represent how the brain is organized very well. A lot of this stuff would make great sci-fi, of course.

See also: Life Forms Are Not Machines And Neurons Are Not Neural Networks

Unique Type Of Cell Found In Human Brain: Rosehip Neurons

Researcher: Y chromosome not a genetic wasteland after all

and

Do We Have A Reptilian Brain? At Last, A Question We Can Easily Answer.

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Amazing! Science journal op-ed gets real about why so many people don’t “trust science”

What’s hot? What’s not?/Niklas Bildhauer, Wikimedia

Admittedly, it’s an opinion piece but it sounds as though the author lives on the same planet we do:

As a scientist and an organizer of this conference, I had walked into the planning of this meeting with my own frustrations and preconceptions about “science denial,” and how to fix it. On the day of the event I cautioned the audience that they should prepare to have their assumptions challenged, because after immersing myself in the field I had thrown all of mine away.

Following a day of conversation with more than 20 expert speakers, six key takeaways emerged from the event: …

Check yourself. Remember when bloodletting was a thing? For centuries, leading physicians thought that removing a person’s blood could treat a wide swath of ailments. As it should, scientific consensus evolves over time as new knowledge is uncovered, so what we perceive as “truth” today may change. On top of that, science is a power structure with its own flaws. It still struggles with diversity, and is full of hierarchies, biases, and norms that are not easily disrupted. Before we engage with those who challenge scientific thinking, we should first answer the following questions for ourselves: What were the motivations behind the research? How well corroborated is the data? What oversight and criticism has it received? And—this may the most important of all—why do we believe it? Kari Fischer, “Opinion: What You Believe about “Science Denial” May Be All Wrong” at The Scientist

That’s a new one. “Why do we believe it?” as opposed to “Here is what you must believe!” Caution! You never know what doors that could open.

Sadly, all too often, the scenarios we encounter are not like that. They include stuff like: Forensic science is “in crisis” (innocent people are going to jail due to “science”) or breast cancer research is dogged by failed replication. Next we hear, a study of the causes of science skepticism sails right by the most obvious cause of skepticism: Repeated unreliability.

Good thing someone is getting it right: If you want trust, first, be trustworthy. And start by listening.

See also: Why, in many cases, you’d be a fool to “trust science”

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Taming the silver fox, taming ourselves…? Oh, please…

Many decades ago, in the former Soviet Union, some geneticists set out to produce tame foxes by systematically choosing the most human-adaptable foxes in each generation. They succeeded and a minor theory holds that that’s how human beings tamed animals generally. A change in fox chromosome 15 since been isolated: “thought to be linked to memory and learning”. The foxes even follow a human gaze the way a dog or cat would.

Sounds about right. But then the story gets strange:

To this day, no study has taught us more about domestication, the very process responsible for our pets and farm animals (and crop plants), than Belyaev’s fox experiment. The research, in conjunction with the human fossil record, even led anthropologist Richard Wrangham and others to argue that humans self-domesticated themselves by choosing the behaviorally tamest mates and groupmates, and that over the last 30,000 years, this has led to changes in our body and facial characteristics, stress hormones levels, and other traits.

The fox experiment has shed light not only on domestication but on the entire process of evolution itself. Before this experiment, the notion that natural selection based on behavior, and only behavior, could influence what an organism looks like, how often it reproduces, which hormones it produces, and how smart it is was the stuff of stories.Lee Dugatkin, “he Fox in the Time Machine” at Undark

First, as a commenter points out, with respect to the foxes, “This is NOT “evolution”! This IS Intelligent Design of a species.”

We can certainly call it evolution if we agree that intelligent design is one form of evolution. Breeding an animal for generations so as to be able to live with humans is, of course, a classic in intelligent design.

Adam and Eve/Albrecht Dürer , 1504

Now, as to the second part, that we humans “tamed ourselves” over the generations, on the face of it, it fails a logical test. Who decided that that was a good idea? Who created the benchmark? Why? Why didn’t the bonobos do it?

Such farout claims, advanced as “science,” remind me (O’Leary for News) of a passage in the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit and then run off to hide. The Lord calls them and Adam answers:

“I heard Your voice in the garden,” he replied, “and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.” “Who told you that you were naked?” asked the LORD God. “Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?” Gen 3:10–12

Yes, that’s the point. How did Adam know he was naked? Something must have generated the idea. It was certainly not an outcome of his mere existence. Nor is human culture and the resulting domestication of animals the outcome of mere existence.

Evolution theory of this speculative type often includes good stories like the one about the foxes. What you won’t get from it is much critical thinking, such as that commenter offered.

Recently, Undark came up on our screen about something else. See: Inference Review did NOT set out to make a fool of cosmologist Adam Becker. It’s not a job that needs doing, the editors say. (Becker had launched a vulgar attack on Inference Review at Undark, for publishing alternative points of view.)

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John Lennox vs Peter Atkins: Can science explain everything?

From Unbelievable?:

Can we answer all life’s questions using the scientific method?

Unbelievable? presenter Justin Brierley chairs a live dialogue between Oxford professors John LennoxJohn Lennox and Peter Atkins followed by audience Q&A.

See also: Where Did The Laws Of Nature Come From?: Astrophysicist Hugh Ross vs Chemist Peter Atkins (2018)

and

Mathematician John Lennox Asks, Is Information Evidence Of Something Beyond Nature?

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