Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 527

The problem of anti-conscience, anti-theistic prejudice driving opinion, views and policy

In a current thread on the morality or otherwise on the Pagan practice of infanticide, frequent, objecting commenter BB gives us a summary of a common prejudice of our time:

BB, 69: ” The fact that we no longer blindly accept discrimination based on the justification of freedom of conscience or freedom of religion is a good thing. Freedom of conscience and freedom of religion were historically used as justification for many acts of discrimination, including the subjugation of women and the ban on interracial marriage. How can we be certain that some of the discriminations now justified using freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are not equally unjustifiable? ” [emphases added]

The presumption of discrimination and implication that religiously motivated or linked views are to be regarded as generally lacking warrant so suspect, needs to be firmly answered. Especially, given the context of recent discussions in this blog on warrant and degrees of certainty as well as on moral truth and knowledge. Where, it turns out that our entire thought life and context of arguing, debating and even quarrelling pivot on known duties to truth, right reason, prudence, fairness, justice etc. Where, when such reaches a court room or a legislature, moral government of reason emerges through duty to justice, best summarised as the due balance of rights, freedoms and responsibilities under law.

Accordingly, I responded:

KF, 72: BB,
Do you see what you imply:

>>The fact that we no longer blindly accept discrimination based on the justification of freedom of conscience or freedom of religion is a good thing>>

This is first a dismissal of already offered grounding of moral truth and knowledge, as well as obvious refusal to seriously ponder already linked discussions that lay out legal, genetic, socio-cultural, ethical etc evidence and argument. In effect just on your sneering dismissal, we are invited to hold that once someone’s conscience and duty to God and to truth, evidence, right reason, prudence, fairness etc are at odds with your politically correct notions, agenda or imposition, such must be swept away as blind without further consideration. Moreover, this implies targetted religious discrimination on the presumption that religiously motivated or linked views can never be reasonable or responsible, being presumed to be empty, blind adherence to myths and superstitious prejudices. Given abundant and readily accessible evidence to the contrary (e.g. cf. a 101 here on in context), such is of course, plainly turnspeech, toxically loaded projection on your part.

Sorry, it does not work that way.

And, again, we see directly from you further evidence of just how far wrong our civilisation is going today.

So, that you are by your own admission blind and deaf to the shipwreck shoals ahead, we have good reason not to take your objections, dismissals and sneering at the despised, stereotyped, scapegoated religious other seriously. Save, as evidence of deep-rooted, conscience-numbing hostility.

This already explains the immediate context, an exchange on the Abortion holocaust:

BB, 63: >>Banning pederastry in Ancient Greece would have been considered a
radical agenda. The Civil War was fought over the radical anti-slavery
agenda. Banning child labour was the result of a radical agenda.
Allowing women to vote was the result of a radical agenda. Allowing
interracial marriages was the result of a radical agenda. Allowing
blacks to sit at the front of the bus was the result of a radical
agenda. A five day work week was the result of a radical agenda. Not
jailing homosexuals was the result of a radical agenda.

The point I am making is that today’s radical agenda is often tomorrow’s concept of a just society.>>

KF, 64: >> the first established evil of our day, the central cancer sending out metastases is the holocaust of our living posterity in the womb. 800+ millions in 40+ years, mounting up at about another million per week. This has utterly corrupted our views, values and institutions until we now have the passage or attempted passage of laws to essentially abort children during child birth . . . >>

BB, 65: >> I am very comfortable with the direction civilization is heading. Abortions are on the decline, the more mysogenystic and homophobic aspects of religious doctrine are being questioned, and many of those doing the questioning are the religious people themselves. Discrimination under the false color of religious freedoms are being confronted. Violence is on the decline. Tolerance is on the increase. Infant mortality is low, life expectancy is high, education and healthcare are available to more and more people . . . >>

KF, 67: >> your response unfortunately is revealing. For example, would you have been comfortable to hear that the rate of the holocaust of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc was lower than previously? The issue is not rates (and about a million more victims per week globally cannot reasonably be deemed an acceptable rate), it is that we have distorted our civilisation and law, benumbed our consciences and are enabling the mass killing of our living posterity in the womb under false colour of law . . . >>

BB, 69: >>KF

For example, would you have been comfortable to hear that
the rate of the holocaust of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc was
lower than previously?

I would definitely be comforted by that information if it was true. Wouldn’t you?

The issue is not rates…

When attaining zero abortions is a completely unattainable goal then
rates are critical. If you saw a train load of Jews heading to a
concentration camp and you had the opportunity to save only two of them,
would you not do anything because rates aren’t the issue? >>

The issue, of course, is always justice and in a civilisation full of democratic polities we are not trying to hide one or two Jews to save them from the SS and the death camps. We are dealing with the implementation — under false colour of law and through manipulating and warping media, perceptions, institutions, professions, courts, parliaments and more — of a holocaust that dwarfs the Nazi holocaust and even the Communist one. Likewise, under similar false colour, we have undermined and warped marriage, family and personal identity (destabilising the foundations of stable society) — notice how X-phobia is rhetorically used to imply that objections to such are invariably irrational [contrast the lack of serious engagement of say this on conjugal marriage and this on claimed genetic determination of sexual habituation and linked attitudes as already linked], and are now setting out on definitively pushing conscience and religiously link-able moral principles beyond the pale of the Overton Window into the zone of the despised other:

Indeed, we have set out on the path of undermining moral truth and moral government. Which implies, undermining of responsible, rational thought and freedom itself.

Therefore, I think it relevant to highlight the exchange as above. END

PS: Has any law against murder, theft, rape etc been able to reduce the incidence of such crimes to nil? Would that inability warrant us in simply regulating or trying to regulate the rate at which such happen? (It seems to me that, fundamentally, we are dealing with those who have so dehumanised our living posterity in the womb that they are desensitised to the implications of taking unborn children’s lives at will, now literally to the point of birth. If that is not an example of the real, destructive slippery slope in action with benumbing of conscience and media-amplified marginalisation of principled objections on some convenient excuse or the other as the acting ratchets, nothing is.)

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

WJM Schools Brother Brian on Why He is an Oppressor Under His Own Definition

It is amusing to watch WJM hoist a materialist with his own petard. All that follows is WJM:

Brother Brian,

So, if you could, you’d force others to live by your preference – let’s call it the non-oppression of women. Your position is that it is your subjective preference as to how people should behave, and attach no “absolute” value to that preference, and that there is no “absolute truth” as to how people should behave or treat others.

From your perspective, then, the oppressors in your example are also forcing others to live by their preference, even though they mistakenly believe that their preference is an absolute truth.

So, again from your perspective (correct me if I’m wrong), both you and the oppressor group are, ultimately, forcing others to live according to your personal preferences.

Outside of the fact that one group mistakenly believes (under your view) that their beliefs represent absolute truth, isn’t oppression and non-oppression achieved the same way – forcing people to behave in a way that they don’t want to behave?

Let’s look at the definition you provided for oppression:

Oppression is when an identifiable group is forced to do something because another identifiable group says they must.

Aren’t those you’ve identified as oppressors being forced to do something (not behave the way they have been, behave in an acceptable way) because another identifiable group (you and those enforcing your laws) say they must? Does this not make YOU every bit as much an oppressor, by the very definition you provided?

Let’s look at another part of your definition:

Oppressed is being forced to do something that everyone else is not forced to do.

Those whom you have identified as the oppressed are being forced, by you and your law enforcers, to do something that you and your law enforcers are not being forced to do – they are being forced to not act on their beliefs or preference, to stop engaging in their preferred behavior.

Hmm. You might counter here that both your group and the oppressor group are being held to the same specific behavioral standard – you can’t forcefully segregate women at that time of the month. Therefore it wouldn’t meet the second part of your definitional standard of oppression: “Oppressed is being forced to do something that everyone else is not forced to do.”

Let’s illustrate the problem here with a more revealing example: what if the preferred behavior of a group is homosexuality. What if another group creates a law outlawing that behavior and enforces it. Now, they could say “We do not engage in homosexuality so we are not forcing them to give up any activity we ourselves engage in.” But, what the first group would be doing is denying the homosexual group the ability to engage in adult, consensual sexual relationships with their preferred gender, which the first group gets to do.

So, it seems clear logically that you would be just as guilty of oppression as those whose oppression you are seeking to eliminate; in fact, there would be no way to impose enforced behavioral restrictions on anyone with out oppressing them in some way, because you would be forcing them to stop acting on their beliefs and preferences, while other groups can freely act on theirs.

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

Becoming: Design in action

Becoming from Aeon Video on Vimeo.

Watch a single cell become a complete organism in six pulsing minutes of timelapse. A film by Jan van Ijken

More about the life form portrayed.

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

Researchers: Male Y chromosome not a genetic wasteland after all

The Y chromosome has been notoriously difficult to sequence due to repetitive elements. Junk, right?

Now, researchers from the University of Rochester have found a way to sequence a large portion of the Y chromosome in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster—the most that the Y chromosome has been assembled in fruit flies. The research, published in the journal GENETICS, provides new insights into the processes that shape the Y chromosome, “and adds to the evidence that, far from a genetic wasteland, Y chromosomes are highly dynamic and have mechanisms to acquire and maintain genes,” says Amanda Larracuente, an assistant professor of biology at Rochester.

Using sequence data generated by new technology that reads long strands of individual DNA molecules, Chang and Larracuente developed a strategy to assemble a large part of the Y chromosome and other repeat-dense regions. By assembling a large portion of the Y chromosome, they discovered that the Y chromosome has a lot of duplicated sequences, where genes are present in multiple copies. They also discovered that although the Y chromosome does not experience crossing over, it undergoes a different type of recombination called gene conversion. While crossing over involves the shuffle and exchange of genes between two different chromosomes, gene conversion is not reciprocal, Larracuente says. “You don’t have two chromosomes that exchange material, you have one chromosome that donates its sequence to the other part of the chromosome” and the sequences become identical.

The Y chromosome has therefore found a way to maintain its genes via a process different from crossing over, Larracuente says. “We usually think of the Y chromosome as a really harsh environment for a gene to survive in, yet these genes manage to get expressed and carry out their functions that are important for male fertility. This rampant gene conversion that we’re seeing is one way that we think genes might be able to survive on Y chromosomes.” Newscenter, “Male Y chromosomes not ‘genetic wastelands’” at University of Rochester

Should someone offer a reward for absolutely genuine junk DNA, the DNA equivalent of three metric tons of unrecyclable discarded gum wrappers?:

See also: Humans may have only 19,000 coding genes

“Junk DNA” regulates regeneration of tissues and organs

Note: One junk DNA defender just isn’t doing politeness anymore. Hmmm. In a less Darwinian science workplace, that could become more a problem for him than for his colleagues.

Junk DNA can actually change genitalia. Junk DNA played the same role in defending Darwinian evolution as claims that Neanderthal man was a subhuman. did: The vast library of junk genes and the missing link made Darwin’s story understandable to the average person and the missing link even became part of popular culture. With Darwinism so entrenched, the fact that these beliefs are not based on fact will be difficult to root out of the culture. Darwin-only school systems are part of the problem.

Been a while since we’ve heard much about humans as the 98% or 99% chimpanzee. If the human genome is this fuzzy how would we know? And doubtless, things have gotten more complex.

At Quanta: Cells need almost all of their genes, even the “junk DNA”

“Junk” RNA helps regulate metabolism

Junk DNA defender just isn’t doing politeness any more.

Anyone remember ENCODE? Not much junk DNA? Still not much. (Paper is open access.)

Yes, Darwin’s followers did use junk DNA as an argument for their position.

Another response to Darwin’s followers’ attack on the “not-much-junk-DNA” ENCODE findings

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

Paul Davies: The really tough question is how life’s hardware can write its own software

Paul Davies, author of The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life thinks we overlook the difficulty and offers a solution:Nature got there first:

It turns out that nature got there first. Living cells are replete with demonic nanomachines, chuntering away, running the business of life. There are molecular motors and rotors and ratchets, honed by evolution to operate at close to perfect thermodynamic efficiency, playing the margins of the second law to gain a vital advantage. A much-studied example is a two-legged molecule called kinesin. It transports cargo along fibres inside cells, gingerly walking one step at a time, all the while buffeted by a hail of thermally agitated water molecules. Kinesin harnesses this thermal pandemonium and converts it into unidirectional motion, functioning as a ratchet. It isn’t a totally free lunch: kinesin performs its feat by exploiting small, energised molecules known as ATP that are made in vast quantities to pay the fuel bills of life. But by converting information about molecular bombardment into directed motion, it achieves a much higher efficiency than it would by using brute force to slog through the molecular barrage. There are many other examples: our brains contain a type of Maxwell demon called a voltage-gated ion channel. This uses information about incoming electrical pulses to open and close molecular shutters in the surfaces of axons, the wires down which neurons communicate with each other, and so permit signals to flow through the neural circuitry. These gates are operated using almost no energy: astoundingly, the human brain processes as much information as a megawatt supercomputer using little more power than a small incandescent light bulb. (paywall) Paul Davies, “What is life?” at New Scientist

It’s not clear how that’s a solution unless he thinks nature is an intelligent being. He must know that it cannot have fallen into place randomly. But what else can he dare think?

See also: Paul Davies And The “Struggle To Define Life”

and

Paul Davies: Life’s defining characteristics are better understood as information

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

A flat earth is popular among iGen – kids who grew up with the internet

(

Hellerick projection of Earth sphere as flat/
/CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Various parties are looking for someone to blame:

I am still stunned that there are seemingly average people walking around today with the firm belief that the world is actually flat. The numbers, while still small, are also surprisingly high. In a recent survey only 84% of those surveyed were confident that the Earth is “round”. The rest expressed some doubt, were confident the Earth is flat, or were unsure. For those 18-24 only 66% were confident the world is round. (The survey was presented as a dichotomy between round and flat – it’s hard to say if this had any effect on the responses, but we’ll put that aside.) Belief in a flat Earth correlated with being young, religious, and poor.
Steven Novella, “What Drives the Flat-Earthers?” at Neurologica

It correlates more with living in a culture where there is an academic war on science waged by old, rich, naturalists for their own advancement. Ditto the war on math.

Put another way: Getting answers right is no longer considered a plus; it’s a suspect quality. So then, people believe what they want.

Most of Novella’s piece has to do with people who seriously espouse a flat earth as opposed to people who check the box and go back to their Twitter feed, surely the vast majority. It won’t be fun when those people have responsible positions, imparting their knowledge of the world.

Note: In the same spirit, they accept a multiverse where everything is true. Spares thinking. 

See also: Historian: Darwinists Kept The “Flat Earth” Myth Going, To Attack Opponents Of Their Views

and

Surely The Flight From Intellectual Curiosity Relates To Flat Earth Beliefs Among Millennials

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

Jonathan Bartlett: Is Lack of Human Trust Bitcoin’s Biggest Security Threat?

Get a load of this story, as Bartlett tells it:

In a previous article, I noted that Bitcoin’s security features actually work against the users, rather than for them. The “anonymizing” features don’t actually make you anonymous unless you are already a super-geek. And the fact that transactions can’t be overridden by a third party actually winds up benefitting the criminals more than the users.

This week, it has been reported that there is a Bitcoin exchange with $190 million dollars worth of assets which are no longer accessible by the users.

What happened? Were they misspent? Misinvested? Laundered? Stolen?

Nope. None of the above.

In some ways, it’s worse than that: Gerald Cotton, founder of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, reportedly died of Crohn disease in India December 9, 2018, taking the secret password to a reported $190 million with him to the grave, according to his widow Jennifer Robertson …

In fact, if the reports are true, the $190 million hasn’t moved at all. And it never will. The problem is that they can’t unlock the wallet that contains the assets without the deceased’s password. More.

Some think it’s a scam. Anyhow, intelligent trust is a uniquely human thing. Maybe it can’t be imported to an environment run by machines.

Jonathan Bartlett

Jonathan Bartlett is the Research and Education Director of the Blyth Institute. See also: Also by Jonathan Bartlett on cryptocurrencies: How Bitcoin works: The social value of trust

Is bitcoin safe? Why the human side of security is critical

Also: How do bitcoins work anyway?

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

Eric Holloway: The Brain Exceeds the Most Powerful Computers in Efficiency

Human thinking takes vastly less computational effort to arrive at the same conclusions:

For example, using a rough estimate for processing, let’s say the DeepMind AlphaGo Zero AI takes 16 quintillion CPU cycles of training, that is, (a thousand raised to the power of six (1018), to exceed a human level of play in Go. On the other hand, let’s say a conscious human being can execute the equivalent of 50 bits per second and concentrates on Go and related skills for an entire lifetime. This effort requires 120 billion CPU cycles, which is less than the AI requirement. Thus, AlphaGo Zero would need to be 100 million times more efficient (a factor of about 100 million for improvement in CPU cycles) in order for AI to exceed human performance on an equivalent task.2

This is just the training part. More. Mind Matters

See also: Will Artificial Intelligence Design Artificial Super-Intelligence? And then turn us all into super-geniuses, as some AI researchers hope? No, and here’s why not

Human intelligence as a halting oracle

and

Artificial intelligence is impossible

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

Deaf moth has “completely new” noise-making defence against predators

From ScienceDaily:

It’s already known that some species of moth have evolved a range of defensive mechanisms to evade insectivorous bats’ highly-tuned echolocation (biosonar) detection skills. The discovery of a wingbeat-powered sound producing structure in the wings of a deaf moth is completely new.

Many larger species of moth use ears tuned to detect the echolocation calls of bats to provide an early warning of approaching bats allowing them to perform evasive manoeuvres. While others, such as some silk moths, have hindwing tails that produce salient echoes which act as false targets to bats — like the towed decoys fighter planes use against radar guided missiles.

The team of researchers from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences and the Natural History Museum, London, were studying a group of smaller British moths known as the small ermine moths (Yponomeuta species), and discovered that despite their lack of hearing they were making continual clicking sounds whenever they fly. Unlike other species of moths, that produce sound in response to detecting an approaching bat, small ermine moths have evolved to produce continual warning sounds.

The sounds these moths produce are very similar to sounds produced by larger moths, such as the tiger moths, which warn bats of the moth’s distastefulness or toxicity (known as acoustic aposematism). At night an unpalatable moth cannot provide a bat with a conspicuous warning colour, so instead it warns its predator acoustically. The team suggest that small ermine moths are acoustically mimicking unpalatable, sound producing moths, to warn bats of their own distastefulness. …

“The fact that sound production in these moths has remained undiscovered for so long reminds us of how little we know of the complex acoustic world of bats and moths.” Paper. (open access) – Liam J. O’Reilly, David J. L. Agassiz, Thomas R. Neil, Marc W. Holderied. Deaf moths employ acoustic Müllerian mimicry against bats using wingbeat-powered tymbals. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-37812-z More.

It’s true. We know little.

Just how the moth developed such a defense is unclear. It doesn’t know about the world of sound and can’t be striving for anything one way or the other. A vast cascade of lucky accidents?

See also: Newly identified gecko is the latest in eerily accurate camouflage

Moths use acoustic camouflage to evade bats

Researchers: Poison Frog Warning Colors Also Act As Camouflage

Insects Used Camouflage 100 Million Years Ago

and

Is this the first recorded instance of smell camouflage?

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

Kangaroos hopped into the planet’s history earlier than thought

Yes, we use the phrase “earlier than thought” rather often, but we have reason. Evolution doesn’t happen the way they told us in school, “daily, hourly,” “silently” “adding up” (the Darwinian claim). Things seem to come about rather suddenly and stay pretty much the same way for a long time, perhaps suddenly changing again. Is there an explanation? Probably, but it seems we don’t have it yet.

Anyway, new fossils show that the famous kangaroo hop dates back 20 million years:

The long-held view has been that the animals evolved the ability to hop to take advantage of a change in the climate, which brought drier conditions and the spread of grasslands.

However the research, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, suggests the story isn’t that simple.

Geometric modelling shows the ancient extinct cousins of modern kangaroos could use the same range of gaits as living kangaroos. Helen Briggs, “When did the kangaroo hop? Scientists have the answer” at BBC News

That’s rather like what happened with the ancient tetrapod Orobates. When researchers built a robot to the exact specification of the skeleton and footprints, the early Permian reptile (280-290 million years ago) turned out to have a more “modern” gait than they expected.

Maybe animals couldn’t afford to be just plain primitive…

See also: Researchers: Coralline Red Algae Existed 300 Million Years Earlier Than Thought

 Flowers bloomed in the early Jurassic, 50 million years earlier than thought

Feathers originated 70 million years earlier than thought It certainly is “amazing,” as Professor Benton says, that a complex array of features appeared 250 million years ago, rather abruptly, just as life was recovering from the Permian extinction. Would anyone have predicted that? Talk about “fossil rabbits in the Cambrian.”

and

Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

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