Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 528

Social Justice Warriors to Believers in Truth: Drop Dead

Those of us who believe in truth, virtue and “justice” (unadorned with the modifier “social”) are inimical to the “social justice” movement. So says this UN report:

“Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders of social justice.”

Social Justice in an Open World The Role of the United Nations, The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, Division for Social Policy and Development, The International Forum for Social Development, 2006, 2-3

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

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.

First, background: Recently, an online science mag, Undark, published a rather nasty little attack on Inference Review, an online journal devoted to publishing carefully argued and sourced opinion, whether popular or not. It published an article by Michael Denton on Darwinism’s problems (yes, yes, at #TwitterforScience!, that’s a no-no). As Becker tells it, when Inference Review contacted him about a possible assignment, he found:

Several articles on the site argued against the theory of evolution, for example, and at least one dismissed the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming. Later, through tax documents and interviews, I would learn that all of Inference’s funding came from a surprising source: Peter Thiel. Since Inference’s start, Thiel, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has donated at least $1.7 million to the outlet.Adam Becker, “Junk Science or the Real Thing? ‘Inference’ Publishes Both.” at Undark

So Inference Review allows dissenting opinion and Peter (PayPal) Thiel made money in the new economy. Which proves what, exactly?

Becker goes on at length, editorializing against Inference Review, which he is compelled neither to read nor support through his tax funds. Then he finds some mediocrities marketing snobbery (you have nothing else to market maybe?) to quote:

In May, Robert Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, wrote a book review for the publication. When I asked Dunn if he knew about Inference’s record on evolution, he said no, calling the revelation a “rather horrifying surprise.” Monica Green, a historian of medicine at Arizona State University who wrote for Inference, was similarly unaware of both the outlet’s publication history and funding. “I had not heard that Inference is a journal with a history of publishing articles” arguing against evolution, she said. Adam Becker, “Junk Science or the Real Thing? ‘Inference’ Publishes Both.” at Undark

Hello? Darwin’s world is collapsing around us, snowflakes. See Suzan Mazur’s new book Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology and the Dissent from Darwinism list now topping 1000 career scientists. And these are unrelated events we heard about just this week, never mind all the others of the last two decades.

The question now isn’t so much whether “evolution” happened as, What, exactly, happened?

Sure, we got here somehow but the old science stories aren’t holding up anymore. Sorry, Darwin cult. We didn’t do this to you. Blame genome mapping, for one.

If Inference Review is publishing on that topic and Undark wouldn’t dare do so—but publishes a rather stupid attack on Inference Review instead—that tells us something about which publication is worth spending time on.

Anyway, it turns out that Nobelist Sheldon Lee Glashow, a physicist associated with Inference Review, published a less-than-flattering review of Becker’s What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books, 2018) there. A motive?

Inference Review responded to Becker and it’s fun reading. One senses mathematician David Berlinski’s shadow in the background. Wade through Becker’s whining first, to get the context, but here’s the gist of the response:

Inference commissioned Sheldon Glashow to review Becker’s book in the spring of 2018, well before Becker was known to Inference. The idea that we would require the services of a Nobel Laureate in order to make a fool of Becker is absurd. Becker is capable of doing that quite by himself. More.

While we are on the topic anyway: Here are Columbia mathematician Peter Woit’s reservations about Becker’s book and Becker’s reply.

Note: Becker has come up on our screen a few times recently, mainly disparaging falsification as a theory in science:

See also: If quantum mechanics were a researcher, she’d be fired

Is The Search For Meaning In Quantum Physics A Form Of Religion? (cf Adam Becker)

Laszlo Bencze On The Current Campaign Against Karl Popper’s Falsification Criterion For Science

Does A “Fetish For Falsification And Observation” Hold Back Science?

and

The difficult birth of science’s assisted suicide: The multiverse

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

The Fourier series & rotating vectors in action (with i lurking) — more on the mathematical fabric of reality

The Fourier series is a powerful technique that can be used to break down any repeating waveform into sinusoidal components, based on integer number harmonics of a fundamental frequency:

Video:

This is already amazing, that by summing up harmonically related sinusoids (with suitable amplitudes and lagging) we can analyse any repeating waveform as a sum of components. This then extends to any non-repeating pulse, once we go to an integral, which brings in the idea of a continuous spectrum where some wave “energy” is found at every particular frequency in a band.

However, something subtler lurks: As the illustration based on clips from the video shows, a sinusoid can be seen as the projection of a rotating vector (= a phasor). Thus, what the Fourier series is doing is that it is adding up a set of harmonically related rotating vectors instant by instant, yielding the overall result of the periodic waveform (here, a square wave). And indeed, we can get the rotation by adding up two perpendicular oscillating vectors, one on oX, the other on oY. This then gives us two summed harmonic motions, which allows us to bring in the forces and inertia at work. (Where, yes, we can then go on to elliptical, parabolic, hyperbolic and even linear motion.)

Rotating vectors should ring a few bells for those who have been following our discussion recently.

Yes, we can start with the von Neumann construction of the natural counting numbers, N:

{} –> 0

{0} –> 1

{0,1} –> 2, etc

And from that define integers (Z), then rational numbers (Q) then reals, R, eventually the surreals:

That is interesting, but let us take the reals, R, and define a vector rotation operator i* so that it rotates R through a right angle anticlockwise pivoting on 0. So, any positive x in R is transformed to i*x, along i*R, going upwards. (Yes, the y-axis, oY.) Now, apply i* again, so we see i*i*x = – x, on the negative reals. That is, we have a natural interpretation of i, i.e. i^2 = -1, i is sqrt(-1). The rotating vectors approach makes for a more coherent understanding of so-called imaginary numbers. Thus, complex numbers, C are actually 2-d vectors that help us to do all sorts of interesting things, especially once they get to rotate.

We can go on from here, using power series to define a complex exponential form of the rotating vectors approach, which then yields the famous expression 0 = 1 + e^(i*pi).

All of this then comes back to the Fourier analysis, as the video demonstrates by showing rotating vectors added up tip to tail to form complex wave forms. Which, then points to how we can move freely between the time domain and the frequency domain to better understand phenomena in the real world.

Where, the underlying message clearly is that the logic of structure and quantity — mathematics — is deeply embedded in reality. And no, this is not flogging a dead horse, it is awakening human (as opposed to equine) understanding. END

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

Jay Richards: That Robot Is Not Self-Aware

The way the media cover AI, you’d swear they had invented being hopelessly naïve:

intact robotic arm/Columbia University

Chances are, you’ve already seen this headline or one of many like it: “Robot that thinks for itself from scratch brings forward rise the self-aware machines” It’s from a story first published inThe Telegraph (UK), then by Yahoo News and MSN, and then (of course) linked on Drudge. Henry Bodkin, “health and science correspondent” for The Telegraph, tells us, with no hint of caution, that “the rise of “self-aware” robots has come a major step closer following the invention of a machine capable of thinking for itself from scratch, scientists have said.” The first problem with both the headline and the story is confusion. They claim both that the robot under discussion is already self-aware and that it heralds the rise of “self-aware robots” in the future. Take this bundle of confusion and exaggeration as a harbinger for the next twenty years of reporting on robotics and artificial intelligence. It’s likely to get worse from here.Jay Richards, “That Robot Is Not Self-Aware” at Mind Matters More.

Jay Wesley Richards

Jay Richards is a research assistant professor at the Busch School of Business and author, with Jonathan Witt, of The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that J.R.R. Tolkien Got and the West Forgot. His most recent book is The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines.

Also by Jay Richards: A Short Argument Against the Materialist Account of the Mind:

See also: A computer engineering prof’s Top Ten AI hypes of 2018 (Robert Marks)

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

This time it was a taste for fat that made us human

From ScienceDaily:

“Our ancestors likely began acquiring a taste for fat 4 million years ago, which explains why we crave it today,” says Jessica Thompson, the paper’s lead author and an anthropologist at Yale University. “The reservoirs of fat in the long bones of carcasses were a huge calorie package on a calorie-poor landscape. That could have been what gave an ancestral population the advantage it needed to set off the chain of human evolution.”

Thompson, who recently joined Yale’s faculty, completed the paper while on the faculty at Emory University.

While focusing on fat over meat may seem like a subtle distinction, the difference is significant, Thompson says. The nutrients of meat and fat are different, as are the technologies required to access them. Meat eating is traditionally paired with the manufacture of sharp, flaked-stone tools, while obtaining fat-rich marrow only required smashing bones with a rock, Thompson notes.

The authors review evidence that a craving for marrow could have fueled not just a growing brain size, but the quest to go beyond smashing bones with rocks to make more sophisticated tools and to hunt large animals.

“That’s how all technology originated — taking one thing and using it to alter something else,” Thompson says. “That’s the origin of the iPhone right there.”Paper. (paywall) – Jessica C. Thompson, Susana Carvalho, Curtis W. Marean, Zeresenay Alemseged. Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins. Current Anthropology, 2019; 000 DOI: 10.1086/701477

More.

The theory jostles any number of similar ones, including: Starchy food may have aided human brain development. Also, eating meat. And processing food.

Also ketchup. Okay, okay, we made that one up. But just wait …

None of these explanations can explain what they set out to: How did the capacity for reason develop? Many life forms wish to hunt large animals but do not develop sophisticated tools and throwing skills as a result. Naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” will—one senses—always be stuck in this rut and never recognize it as a rut.

See also: Human evolution: The war of trivial explanations

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

Theoretical Physicist weary of people telling her 2+2 = 5

Yes, it’s the excellent Sabine Hossenfelder again, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, trying to understand a world where intelligent people are expected to pretend that nonsense is good sense:

How often can you hold up four fingers, hear a thousand people shout “five”, and not agree with them? How often can you repeat an argument, see it ignored, and still believe in reason? How often can you tell a thousand scientists the blatantly obvious, hear them laugh, and not think you are the one who is insane?

I wonder.

Every time a particle physicist dismisses my concerns, unthinkingly, I wonder some more. Maybe I am crazy? It would explain so much. Then I remind myself of the facts, once again.

Fact is, in the foundations of physics we have not seen progress for the past four decades. Ever since the development of the standard model in the 1970s, further predictions for new effects have been wrong. Physicists commissioned dozens of experiments to look for dark matter particles and grand unification. They turned data up-side down in search for supersymmetric particles and dark energy and new dimensions of space. The result has been consistently: Nothing new…

Those who, a decade ago, made confident predictions that the Large Hadron Collider should have seen new particles can now not be bothered to comment. They are busy making “predictions” for new particles that the next larger collider should see. We risk spending $20 billion dollars on more null-results that will not move us forward. Am I crazy for saying that’s a dumb idea? Maybe. Sabine Hossenfelder, “Maybe I’m crazy” at BackRe(Action)

No, Sabine, you’re not crazy. But you live in crazymaking times. Cosmology has degenerated into the pursuit of cool nonsense like the multiverse via string theory. So much now seems to revolve around whether findings help or hurt the nonsense. Not about learning more about what is really happening here now.

At least, that’s what it looks like from the outside. So – if it’s any help – outsiders would not think you are crazy. And usually, when a person is crazy, it’s the outsiders who notice first.

Keep hold of this: Even the multiverse can’t come to exist just because people can imagine it.

See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Physics Problems That Lead To Breakthroughs Arise From Inconsistencies In Data, Not Beautiful Math

and

Theoretical Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder Shares Her Self-Doubts About Exposing Nonsense In Cosmology

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

Many plankton behave like both plants and animals, challenging biological concepts

Tales from the Tree Bundle of Seedlings, or maybe best called Web of Life:

Traditionally, marine microplankton had been divided similarly to species on land. You had plant-like phytoplankton, such as algae, and animal-like zooplankton that ate the phytoplankton. What Stoecker found was that some of these organisms were somewhere in the middle: They could eat like animals when food was present and photosynthesize like plants in the light. “If you think about it, it can be the best of both worlds,” says marine ecologist Dave A. Caron of the University of Southern California.

Today, there’s growing realization that these in-between beasties — dubbed mixotrophs — are not only widespread but also play vital roles in the ecology of the oceans.Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, “Mixing it up in the web of life” at Knowable Magazine

It turns out that these “mixotrophs” are fairly common and they may play a key role in the carbon cycle of the ocean due to their general flexibility (they can also eat each other). No one knows why,k apart from carnivorous plants, mixotrophy is far more common in the ocean than on land.

But none of this does much for traditional biological classifications like “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” and a tidy Tree of Life.

Maybe horizontal gene transfer was involved? Plankton could adapt swiftly borrowing genes from nearby organism.

See also: A physicist looks at biology’s problem of “speciation” in humans

and

Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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

Severskey is Honest About the Logic of Materialism

You’ve gotta love Sev’s refreshing honesty. In this post I noted that killing little babies was not uncommon in ancient cultures. And then I asked:

[Materialists] say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. If that is so, was it an affirmatively good thing when an ancient pagan killed a baby girl because she was a baby girl instead of a baby boy?

Sev’s response:

it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it.

I wonder if Sev will continue to following his logic with these examples:

Enslaving African Americans in the American South prior to the Civil War:

it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it.

Human sacrifice in Aztec religious rituals:

it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it.

The communists kill 7 million in Ukraine in the 1930s:

it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it.

The National Socialists kill 18 million in Europe in the 1940s:

it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it.

The communists kill 45 million in China in the 1960s:

it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it.

How about it Sev? Does your logic extend to all of these examples? If not, why not?

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

Coffee! Politicians and the origin of life

Philip Cunningham’s vid on calculations of a single protein forming by chance was picked up recently:

Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance:

“For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids.” Axe is among the science types involved with a fascinating video entitled “Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance.” It’s just over nine minutes long, but beautifully produced and imminently accessible for those who aren’t already cosmologists, physics profs or other super-high grade brains.Mark Tapscott, “Would You Stake Your Life On A 1-In- 10-To-The-140th-Power Chance Of Surviving?” at HillFaith

Tapscott talks to US congressional staffers who are doubtless used to big numbers but, heck, not like this.

Of course, if you did get politicians involved with the origin of life, it would … just never happen. The odds against anything getting done would become infinite. Good thing politicians had to come later.

See also: Paul Davies and the struggle to define life

and

Rob Sheldon On The Canadian Lab “Solving” The Origin-Of-Life Problem

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

The Dissent from Darwinism list now tops 1000 scientists

In time for Darwin’s birthday February 12:

The Dissent statement represents a splash of cold water on the great man. It reads, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” The signers hold professorships or doctorates from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and many other prominent institutions.

They are also an increasingly international group. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences are represented. Discovery Institute began taking names of signatories in 2001 in response to frequently heard assertions that there is no dissent, or “virtually” none … David Klinghoffer, ““Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” List: The Tip of an Iceberg” atEvolution News and Science Today:

Here’s the list. A characteristic statement:

“Darwinism was an interesting idea in the 19th century, when handwaving explanations gave a plausible, if not properly scientific, framework into which we could fit biological facts. However, 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.” – Professor Colin Reeves, Dept of Mathematical Sciences Coventry University

and

“As a biochemist I became skeptical about Darwinism when I was confronted with the extreme intricacy of the genetic code and its many most intelligent strategies to code, decode, and protect its information,” said Dr. Marcos Eberlin, founder of the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in Brazil.

See also: Detailed bat and dolphin convergence in echolocation 200 genes? Is this magic, design, or a miracle? a friend asks. Or what?

Does the war on cancer reveal limits to random mutation? Time will tell if their treatment works but note that actual numerical limits are suggested here on the number of mutations that can happen randomly at the same time. Mathematics, not religion, is the enemy of Darwinism.

and

Cultural evolution theories “challenged” by multiple dwelling cave This kind of find is treated as problematic because it means that the missing link is still missing. Nobody is the subhuman. That’s not good news for a Darwinian approach to human evolution, in which someone must be the subhuman.

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