Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 539

January 16, 2019

Seversky Makes the Case for Design

In a comment to a prior post frequent guest Seversky writes:

If I tell you that I tried to drop a stone but it flew up in the air and disappeared out of sight, would you believe me? Probably not. Why not? Because every time you have dropped a stone it has fallen to the ground and, when you check with other people, they report the same experience.

Mankind’s uniform and repeated experience over countless trillions of trials: Release stone; stone drops to ground. Never in a single one of those trials has it been: Release stone; stone flies up in the air. Sound reasoning Sev.

Now, let’s try Sev’s formula with respect to an extraordinarily complex semiotic code:

If I tell you that an extraordinarily complex semiotic code came about through blind, unguided, and mindless natural processes, would you believe me? Probably not. Why not? Because every time you have seen an extraordinarily complex semiotic code you have found it was the product of a mind, and, when you check with other people, they report the same experience.

Yep, that works. Mankind’s uniform and repeated experience over countless trillions of trials: Extraordinarily complex semiotic code whose provenance is know with certainty; provenance is a mind. Never in a single one of those trials has it been: Extraordinarily complex semiotic code whose provenance is know with certainty; provenance is blind, unguided, and mindless natural processes.

How has Sev made the case for Design? Easy. The genetic code is just that, a code. In fact, according to Bill Gates, who knows a thing or two about codes, it is the most elegant and extraordinarily complex semiotic code known to man. It takes a tremendous amount of blind, grit-your-teeth faith in metaphysical materialism to believe it came about by blind, unguided, and mindless natural processes. And this leads to an abductive inference that “mind” is the best explanation for the origin of that code.

Thanks Sev!

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Published on January 16, 2019 06:39

How do cells in a body know where they are supposed to be?

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

We’re not sure. From ScienceDaily:

As cells divide to form tissues and organs in multicell organisms, they move to where they belong, informed by a series of cues that scientists have yet to observe or fully understand.

These collective movements traditionally have been studied in the context of biochemical recognition between cell types. For example, the protein cadherin (found in, and named for, calcium dependent adhesions) is one element responsible for cells’ ability to recognize one another, with various types of cadherin occurring at different sites in the organism. These cadherin receptors enable like cells to combine with each other to build specific types of tissue; for example, E-cadherin is so named because it is found in epithelial cells.

“Cadherins provide an initial signal for the ‘handshake’ between cells, but they are not the primary keeper of the connection,” says UC Santa Barbara professor and mechanical engineer Beth Pruitt, who studies mechanobiology and is working to gain a greater understanding of how cells combine to form tissues and maintain their integrity under the normal loads they experience …

As cells slide past each other while migrating toward their destinations during development or wound healing, they exert shear forces. Exactly how these local in-plane shear forces are spread throughout a tissue — important in collective tissue behavior — is not understood, in part because it is difficult to apply direct, localized shear within a tissue…

“Through observing these oscillations and measuring overall forces, as enabled by the inline spring, we were able to put forward a mechanical model that includes a mechanical signal-storage-and-relay element for simulating epithelial cell monolayers,” Pruitt explained. “This element, in parallel with the cells’ well-known viscoelastic property, can account for the collective behavior we observed. Cells might utilize this behavior following a shear-induced force imbalance to maintain tension homeostasis within a developing tissue.” Paper. (open access) – Ehsan Sadeghipour, Miguel A Garcia, William James Nelson, Beth L Pruitt. Shear-induced damped oscillations in an epithelium depend on actomyosin contraction and E-cadherin cell adhesion. eLife, 2018; 7 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.39640 More.

While the researchers don’t, of course, come right out and say this, massive communications exist within each cell, whether of a mouse, a grapevine, or a human. And we really don’t know very much about it at all. Yet many presume to insist that such structures arose randomly as a result of natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism), which cannot possibly be true. If it were, strange things would be happening all over the place. Yet they are not.

Is it just imagination or do people increasingly write in such a way as to simply abandon the pretense without wanting to discuss it?

See also: 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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Published on January 16, 2019 05:45

A science journal’s editors resign en masse over open access foot-dragging

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

They’ve heard lots of noise but also seen lots of foot-dragging, about making research reports available publicly for free:

The board told Nature that given the journal’s subject matter — the assessment and dissemination of science — it felt it needed to be at the forefront of open publishing practices, which it says includes making bibliographic references freely available for analysis and reuse, and being open access and owned by the community.

“It’s essential that this work be made openly available and that the communication of the research be managed by the community,” says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University Bloomington and a resigning board member.

Board members also wanted Elsevier to lower the journal’s article-publishing charges for authors and participate in the Initiative for Open Citations — a project aiming to free up citation data for study. Dalmeet Singh Chawla, “Open-access row prompts editorial board of Elsevier journal to resign” at Nature

Elsevier said no, hence the farewell letter from the editors.

Elsevier is an odd fish flopping around out of water when you consider this: Who paid for most of the research published?

Do people think it’s better for open science if the public pays (in the form of taxes) or if private corporations pay for what they want? But what reasonable case can be made for the research not usually being open-access if the public paid for it?

See also: One reason some scientists choose low-quality predatory journals But always remember, doubts about science – as practiced – are always because the public is narrow and stupid, according to pundits, and doesn’t “trust science. ”

Pay wall for science articles: Yes or no?

and

How Unpaywall is opening up science

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Published on January 16, 2019 04:46

One reason some scientists choose low-quality predatory journals- government money

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

Journals that are the science equivalent of the vanity press. A geographer identifies a reason for the survival of predatory journals:

Why are South Africans relying so much on journals that do little or nothing to ensure quality? In an effort to boost academic productivity, the country’s education department launched a subsidy scheme in 2005. It now awards roughly US$7,000 for each research paper published in an accredited journal. Depending on the institution, up to half of this amount is paid directly to faculty members. At least one South African got roughly $40,000 for research papers published in 2016 — about 60% of a full professor’s annual salary. There is no guarantee (or expectation) that a researcher will use this money for research purposes. Most simply see it as a financial reward over and above their salaries. South African publications listed in the Scopus database each year more than doubled in the decade after the payout programme began. But the number of publications by South African researchers in predatory journals jumped more than 140-fold in the same period (J. Mouton and A. Valentine S. Afr. J. Sci. 113, 2017-0010; 2017). Clearly, many researchers in South Africa are being forced to choose: cash or quality? David William Hedding, “Payouts push professors towards predatory journals” at Nature

“Cash or quality?” might be a hard decision if there are many reasons why quality wasn’t going to happen anyway.

But always remember, doubts about science – as practiced – are always because the public is narrow and stupid, according to pundits, and doesn’t “trust science. ”

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

and

From Chemistry World: Forensic science is “in crisis”

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Published on January 16, 2019 04:26

January 15, 2019

We’re NOT easily fooled by fake news

Worker in blue uniform cleaning graffiti

And the science paper that claimed so has been retracted.

A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy”:

“The paper found that even though individuals may prefer to read and share “quality information”, factors such as “information overload and limited attention” contributed to “a degradation of the market’s discriminative power”. In other words, Qiu and colleagues concluded, quality material and the rate at which it spreads across the internet “reveals a weak correlation”. Low quality material – fake news, complete rubbish – is just as likely to go viral as the good stuff.” Andrew Masterson, “Fake news journal paper revealed as fake news” at Cosmos

Their June 2017 study, retracted by Nature earlier this month, had been quoted widely, due to widespread concern about the risk that “fake news” skews election results…

Intuitively, most of us would expect the researchers’ corrected outcome to be more likely than their original one. False or doubtful information can be exciting. But, once its uncertain status is known, those who continue to disseminate it are classed as unreliable sources. Thus, doubtful news is dropped whereas confirmed news continues to circulate. This would hold as true for social media today as for a company cafeteria in the 1970s. News, “Research showing that fake news easily fools us collapses” at Mind Matters

See also: Your phone knows everything now And in a world where no data is anonymous, yours may be sold to the highest bidder

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Published on January 15, 2019 19:00

Did Neanderthals create the first Spanish cave paintings?

If they did, that’ll be even less reason to think of them as some kind of “missing link”:

What if, long before Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, the Neanderthals were humanity’s first artists? At any rate, this is the hypothesis raised by new dating of Spanish rock paintings published in February 2018 in the journal Science (link is external),indicating that the hands and animals depicted on the walls of three caves date back 65,000 years. This would mean that they were painted 25,000 years before the arrival of the first Homo sapiens in the Iberian peninsula. The estimated ages are based on uranium-thorium dating of the calcite layer that coats the frescoes. Could these be the work of Neanderthals? A certain amount of additional data supports this view. For example, traces of pigments in a shell have been dated to 115,000 years ago, while drawings of cats and handprints in the Grotte des Merveilles, Rocamadour (southwestern France) are believed to be between 50,000 and 70,000 years old. In light of this evidence, it is not difficult to imagine that the Neanderthals were endowed with artistic ability.

The interpretation of this research, however, is purely speculative at present. Firstly, the estimated ages will have to be confirmed by other dating methods, especially since no Neanderthal bones were found in these caves. Léa Galanopoulo, “Who Was the First Artist?” at CNRS News

Drawings of cats 50,000 to 70,000 years ago? The ultimate ancestor of the now saturation-point funny cat vids at YouTube?

See also: Neanderthal art found.

Was Neanderthal man fully human? The role racism played in assessing the evidence

and

A deep and abiding need for Neanderthals to be stupid. Why?

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Published on January 15, 2019 16:04

Trying to have a discussion when others want a diversion

Douglas Axe talks about a long-running dialogue he has had as a result of his 2016 book, Undeniable , where he can’t seem to get his dialogue partner to focus on what he is saying in his book and not what someone else is saying and what a fourth party is saying about them:

But why address what Douglas Axe is saying when so many talking points against design in nature are tailored to what someone/anyone else is saying? We wish Axe all the luck.

I think we’re addressing the same question, Hans. You’re absolutely right to focus on my treatment of the probability of organisms evolving by chance.

Veering Off Course

On the other hand, if you’re focusing on someone else’s treatment of that probability, then we’re going to get off track. When you say: “what I [Hans] have claimed are assumptions of the method aren’t necessarily assumptions I attribute to you [Doug], personally,” we do indeed seem to have veered off course.

Since the point in question is whether the argument I put forward in Undeniable is valid, and you and I are the people trying to resolve our disagreement on that, Van Till’s critique of Dembski needs to be set aside. If background reading helps you address what I’m saying, that’s great! But do address what I’m saying. Douglas Axe, “Keeping the Debate Over Undeniable on Track” at Evolution News and Science Today:

See also: “Undeniable” Author Doug Axe On The Recent “Directed Evolution” Nobel For Chemistry

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Published on January 15, 2019 15:22

The Evidence for Cell-Directed Mutations

I’ve found that a lot of people, including biologists, aren’t aware of the evidence for cell-directed mutations. Therefore, I did a video describing the evidence for this.

Video here:

It’s kind of long, but I try to cover most of the objections. I’ll have a second video covering more about how to use this information to conceptualize mutational processes in the light of directed mutation, and use these ideas in research.

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Published on January 15, 2019 11:27

Sabine Hossenfelder: Physics problems that lead to breakthroughs arise from inconsistencies in data, not beautiful math

And afterwards, we find the math works. Sabine Hossenfelder author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, asks us to consider what distinguishes a good problem in physics, hence in cosmology, from a trip through some interesting weeds:

That breakthrough problems were those which harbored an inconsistency is true even for the often-told story of the prediction of the charm quark. The charm quark, so they will tell you, was a prediction based on naturalness, which is an argument from beauty. However, we also know that the theories which particle physicists used at the time were not renormalizable and therefore would break down at some energy. Once electro-weak unification removes this problem, the requirement of gauge-anomaly cancellation will tell you that a fourth quark is necessary. But this isn’t a prediction based on beauty. It’s a prediction based on consistency.

This, I must emphasize, is not what historically happened. Weinberg’s theory of the electro-weak unification came after the prediction of the charm quark. But in hindsight we can see that the reason this prediction worked was that it was indeed a problem of consistency. Physicists worked on the right problem, if for the wrong reasons. Sabine Hossenfelder, “Good Problems in the Foundations of Physics” at BackRe(Action)

See also: Theoretical Physicist Takes On Panpsychism. Bam! Pow! It’s the basic problem of the coffee mug. If naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” is true, either you and the mug are both conscious or neither of you is. The comments at BackRe(Action) illustrate the difficulty many have grasping that that is a serious problem.

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Published on January 15, 2019 06:46

Worm blobs behave like both fluids and solids

They show several phase properties at once, according to researchers:

A blob can hold itself together like a solid: When released to fall a short distance on a hard surface, it plops instead of splashing, Bhamla, a biophysicist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, said. And video from his lab also revealed a worm blob version of melting. In a container of water where a hot spot develops, the blob starts fraying and “melts” away as some blackworms (Lumbriculus variegatus) disentangle themselves and swim off, while others collectively move to a spot with a lower temperature. Adding chilly water, however, will cause the blob to solidify again as the animals rejoin the ball.Susan Milius, “How worm blobs behave like a liquid and a solid” at Science News

Now that mechanobiology is becoming a bigger topic, the worms’ ability to easily behave according to two states may help us understand life forms better.

Abstract: S4-5 AYDIN, YO; CULVER, J; TENNENBAUM, M; GOLDMAN, DI; BHAMLA, MS*; Georgia Institute of Technology;
Dynamics of a worm blob Organisms across all length scales (from cells to humans) cluster and forms large social groups for evolutionary advantages. In some cases, aggregates exhibit and enable new functionalities: floating on water (fire ants), nest-building (bees) and mobbing predators (birds). In this talk, we describe new insight into aggregation behavior in worms, where hundreds of thousands of worms entangle together to form a large, wet, and squishy ‘blob’. These worm blobs have emergent viscoelastic properties of the collective – they can flow through tubes, while bouncing off hard substrates; they can ‘sense’ each other and merge; they can rapidly unknot and dissipate into individual units within a few seconds; and lastly the worm blob as a whole can break symmetry and move across substrates in response to external gradients More.

See also: 2018 Saw Mechanobiology, Including Biophysics, come to the fore

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Published on January 15, 2019 05:52

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