Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 547

Astrophysicist: Climate change killed the ET civilizations

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

Start 2019 off with vintage “why They never write, never phone” stuff. In this scenario, They are all dead due to climate change:

For Earth, intelligent life took roughly 4 billion years to evolve, says Kane. But he notes that there is a large range of stellar ages for the exoVenus host stars he and colleagues have discovered. And they lie mostly in the one to ten billion-year range. So, Kane thinks that many of these Venus-like planets will be more than 4 billion years old and could well have evolved intelligent life on them at some point. …

Would alien civilizations living on their own Venus-type planets be helpless in staving off this inevitable climate change? Or could they geo-engineer their way out of an eventual runaway greenhouse?

If so, Kane says it would need to be a coordinated planet-wide effort. Bruce Dorminey, “Galaxy May Be Littered With Dead Aliens Blindsided By Natural Climate Change” at Forbes

Funny he should mention “a coordinated planet-wide effort” just now…

Planetary astrophysicist Stephen Kane thinks the overheated Venusians would be better off to just find another planet than try to engineer less Venus. We can argue about it when we find the detritus of their civilizations, right?

See also: SETI finds more creative ways to keep looking. As long as there’s an Out There, They’ll always be Out There, of course.

SETI reacts to the study that says not to wait up for the extraterrestrials

Researchers: We have dissolved the Fermi Paradox!

Extraterrestrial civilizations: When all else fails, try Bayesianism. The good news is, no one can ever prove They’re Not Out There.

and

How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?

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Top Ten AI Hype 2: AI Can Write Novels and Screenplays Better than the Pros!

AI help, not hype, with Robert J. Marks: Software can automatically generate word sequences based on material fed in from existing scripts:

In 2016, Ars Technica was proud to be sponsoring “the first AI-written sci-fi script:”

As explained in The Guardian, a recurrent neural network “was fed the scripts of dozens of science fiction movies including such classics as Highlander Endgame, Ghostbusters, Interstellar and The Fifth Element.” Sunspring, the title of the AI written play, was computed after the trained neural network was given a “set of prompts.” A Guardian writer terms the resulting script “gibberish.” Here’s a description from sponsor Ars Technica:

Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin. AnnaLee Newitz, “Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense” at Ars Technica

Marks: It is “hilarious” if watching traffic cracks you up and “intense” if Barney the Dinosaur keeps you on the edge of your seat. The enjoyment comes from watching an actor interpret and convey emotions even when the dialog is meaningless.

It turns out that meaning matters. So. fiction and song writers, please do keep writing. Don’t leave us with just this stuff in 2019.

Note: There are web sites that compose close to normal technical prose using an expert system type approach. The most popular is SCIgen,
an automatic computer science paper generator. If you are interested, check it out. More.

See also: 2018 AI Hype Countdown 3: With Mind-Reading AI, You Will Never Have Secrets Again! AI help, not hype: Did you read about the flap they had to cut out of a volunteer’s skull? With so many new developments in AI, the real story is usually far down in the fine print. And not a close match with the headlines.

2018 AI Hype Countdown 4: Making AI Look More Human Makes It More Human-like! AI help, not hype: Technicians can do a lot these days with automated lip-syncs and smiles but what’s behind them? This summer, some were simply agog over “Sophia, the First Robot Citizen” (“unsettling as it is awe-inspiring”)…

2018 AI Hype Countdown 4: Making AI Look More Human Makes It More Human-like! AI help, not hype: Technicians can do a lot these days with automated lip-syncs and smiles but what’s behind them? This summer, some were simply agog over “Sophia, the First Robot Citizen” (“unsettling as it is awe-inspiring”)…

2018 AI Hype Countdown 5: AI Can Fight Hate Speech! AI help, not hype: AI can carry out its programmers’ biases and that’s all. Putting these kinds of decisions in the hands of software programs is not likely to promote vigorous and healthy debate.

2018 AI Hype Countdown 6: AI Can Even Find Loopholes in the Code! AI help, not hype: AI adopts a solution in an allowed set, maybe not the one you expected.

2018 AI Hype Countdown 7: Computers can develop creative solutions on their own! AI help, not hype: Programmers may be surprised by which solution, from a range they built in, comes out on top Sometimes the results are unexpected and even surprising. But they follow directly from the program doing exactly what the programmer programmed it to do. It’s all program, no creativity.

2018 AI Hype Countdown 8: AI Just Needs a Bigger Truck! AI help, not hype: Can we create superintelligent computers just by adding more computing power? Some think computers could greatly exceed human intelligence if only we added more computing power. That reminds me of an old story…

2018 AI Hype Countdown 9: Will That Army Robot Squid Ever Be “Self-Aware”? The thrill of fear invites the reader to accept a metaphorical claim as a literal fact.

2018 AI Hype Countdown: 10. Is AI really becoming “human-like”?: AI help, not hype: Here’s #10 of our Top Ten AI hypes, flops, and spins of 2018 A headline from the UK Telegraph reads “DeepMind’s AlphaZero now showing human-like intuition in historical ‘turning point’ for AI” Don’t worry if you missed it.

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Do strange numbers explain reality?

octonion fanocube/jgmoxness (CC)

Some think that the properties of our universe are based on strange numbers which have eight dimensions, called octonions:

An Irish mathematician by the name of William Rowan Hamilton discovered in 1843 that if you pair the complex numbers in a certain way, they can form 4-D “quaternions.” He was apparently so excited about figuring out that formula, that he immediately carved it into the Broome Bridge in Dublin. Not to be outdone, John Graves, a friend of Hamilton’s who was a lawyer and math whiz, showed that quarternions can be paired up to become “octonions” – numbers that can assume coordinates in an abstract 8-dimensional (8-D) space.

…

The mystery of these numbers has led to speculation among researchers that they have a special purpose and can eventually explain the deeper secrets of the universe. In an email interview with Quanta Magazine, the particle physicist Pierre Ramond from the University of Florida explained that “Octonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses.” Paul Ratner, “Physicists puzzled by strange numbers that could explain reality” at BigThink

Well, if all that New Year’s partying out there is keeping you awake, here is more on octonions.

See also these odd number facts: New Scientist on the glitch at the edge of the universe (the saga of the strange number 137)

and

Prime numbers are not nearly as scattershot as previously thought

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What’s The Point of Materialist Psychology?

I have often wondered what the point of materialist psychology is.  Set aside mental illnesses that are manifestations of biological pathologies.  I am talking about, for example, the man who goes to a therapist because he is having marital difficulties  Why shouldn’t the therapy session proceed along these lines:

Patient (let’s call him John):  Doc, I feel terrible.  My marriage is on the rocks.

Therapist (let’s call him Sigmund):  Let’s explore why that might be.

John:  Oh, way
ahead of you there doc.  My wife Jill caught
me having sex with her best friend Sally. 
Let me tell you; she was not keen on that.  And you know I feel kinda bad about it too.

Sigmund:  Do you hope to save your marriage and reconcile with Jill?

John:  Of
course.  I really love that woman.

Sigmund:  Then you should stop having sex with Sally.

John:  Well, that’s
the problem.  I really enjoy having sex with
Sally.  I don’t want to stop.

Sigmund:  You have
to choose Jill or Sally.  You can’t have
both.

John:  Why
not?  You aren’t one of those religious
nuts are you?

Sigmund:  No, of
course not.  90% of psychologists are
materialists, and I count myself in that vast majority of my colleagues.  I just mean that as a practical matter Jill
is unlikely to tolerate you having sex with Sally while you are married to her,
and even you mentioned that it made you feel bad.

John:  Those are both practical problems to overcome, not insurmountable obstacles to me getting what I want.  Suppose I figure out a way to hide my trysts with Sally from Jill. That problem is solved.  Now, I just need to get over the “makes me feel bad” part, and that’s why I came to you.  I’ve read a little in your field, and I assume I feel bad because of the tension between my actions and the outdated and restrictive societal norms holding up monogamy within marriage as an ideal, not to mention the fact that when I married Jill I swore an oath to “forsake all others until death do us part.” 

Sigmund:  Yes,
those tensions could lead to anxiety.

John:  Exactly.  So what do you think?  How can I stop feeling so anxious?

Sigmund:  I am not
sure I can help you.  For better or
worse, society considers adultery and oath-breaking to be immoral.  

John:  But you and I both know the word “immoral” has no real meaning.  As materialists you and I have seen past all of that religious mumbo jumbo.  We know that particles in motion just are.  At bottom everything is caused by blind, unguided, amoral material forces.  There is nothing wrong with me having sex with Sally while I am married to Jill, because there is nothing really wrong with anything at all.

Sigmund:  Still, powerful
societal forces millennia-in-the-making are arrayed against you.  You’ve already told me you feel bad, so you
are not a sociopath with no empathy.  The
tension you describe won’t just go away.

John:  But isn’t the very essence of the psychoanalytical model of treatment helping people – people like me – to get past a mental conflict that triggers anxiety?

Sigmund:  Well,
yes, that’s a large part of what we do . . .

John:  Well, I have
some kind of conflict that causes me anxiety when I have sex with Sally and
hide it from Jill.  I know it is not
wrong in any meaningful sense.  But I still
feel bad.  What do you mean you can’t
help me?  That’s what you do.

Psychiatrist Jeffrey Burke Satinover wrote:

As a science, psychology thus inevitably tends toward an amoral view of man, in just the same way that it tends toward a view of him that has no place for free will and choice. Some psychologists have had the courage—if that is indeed what it is: foolhardiness might be a better term; intellectual consistency, at least—to claim that if the scientific view of man is both true and complete, and if this view leads inevitably to the abolition of “man” as embodied in such concepts as “freedom” and “goodness” (and consequent upon these, such concepts as “dignity” and “nobility of character”), why then, let us be truly abstemious and do away with them entirely, as has proposed B. F. Skinner. 

Why indeed, John asks Sigmund.  Why doesn’t the materialist, reductionist psychoanalyst
try to help John stop feeling bad and enjoy the freedom that comes from his
clear-eyed metaphysics? 

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New find sheds light on how and when DNA replicates

From ScienceDaily:

Gilbert and Sima examined a single segment of the DNA in the highest possible 3D resolution and saw three sequences along the DNA molecule touching each other frequently. The researchers then used CRISPR, a sophisticated gene editing technology, to remove these three areas simultaneously.

And with that, they found that these three elements together were the key to DNA replication.

“Removing these elements shifted the segment’s replication time from the very beginning to the very end of the process,” Gilbert said. “This was one of those moments where just one result knocks your socks off.”

In addition to the effect on replication timing, the removal of the three elements caused the 3D structure of the DNA molecule to change dramatically.

“We have for the first time pinpointed specific DNA sequences in the genome that regulate chromatin structure and replication timing,” Sima said. “These results reflect one possible model of how DNA folds inside cells and how these folding patterns could impact the hereditary materials’ function.” …

“If you duplicate at a different place and time, you might assemble a completely different structure,” Gilbert said. “A cell has different things available to it at different times. Changing when something replicates changes the packaging of the genetic information.”
Paper. (paywall) – Jiao Sima, Abhijit Chakraborty, Vishnu Dileep, Marco Michalski, Kyle N. Klein, Nicolas P. Holcomb, Jesse L. Turner, Michelle T. Paulsen, Juan Carlos Rivera-Mulia, Claudia Trevilla-Garcia, Daniel A. Bartlett, Peiyao A. Zhao, Brian K. Washburn, Elphège P. Nora, Katerina Kraft, Stefan Mundlos, Benoit G. Bruneau, Mats Ljungman, Peter Fraser, Ferhat Ay, David M. Gilbert. Identifying cis Elements for Spatiotemporal Control of Mammalian DNA Replication. Cell, 2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.11.036 More.

Note this:

“If you duplicate at a different place and time, you might assemble a completely different structure,” Gilbert said. “A cell has different things available to it at different times. Changing when something replicates changes the packaging of the genetic information.”

Huh? Some of us remember when heredity was a lockstep, diagrammable process, and not the least bit plastic.

See also: Remarkable Vid Of A Mouse Embryo Developing

and

Quantum Biology: Did Researchers Produce Quantum Entanglement In Living Organisms?

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2018 saw mechanobiology, including biophysics, come to the fore

The mechanome, “the body of knowledge about mechanical forces at work in the molecular, cellular, anatomical, and physiological processes that contribute to the architecture of living structures and their physical properties,” became more prominent this year in discussions of biology (though one story on the physics of biology late last year garnered 354 comments). For so long, the genome ran away with all the interest and publicity but maybe that’s changing.

At her blog, science writer Suzan Mazur talks about the way that mechanobiology is becoming mainstream:

“When I say mechanobiology is all the rage, I’m not simply referring to lab research and scientific conferences on the subject, although they are, of course, central. But also to: (1) mechanobiology university courses based on current scientific papers (not textbooks); (2) academic bootcamp to train high school teachers about mechanobiology; (3) university fellowships tied to the mentoring of students K-12 on mechanobiology; (4) various museum installations, including a permanent, full scale exhibit on shape designed to interactively educate kids as young as toddlers—to cite a few examples.”  Suzan Mazur, Mechanobiology — Tour de Force” at Oscillations

That’s going to make a big difference in terms of the number of people who will know what “mechanobiology” means and does not mean. For example, it does not mean a (a life form with both biological and mechanical parts integral to the system — which, in fairness, a person might take a guess on if they had never heard the term “mechanobiology” before).

Webcast: New Horizons flying by Ultima Thule New Year’s Day

  For a far out New Year’s Day, try Ultima Thule, 4 billion km from the sun. “The object was subsequently designated 2014 MU69, given the minor planet number 485968, and based on public votes, nicknamed “Ultima Thule”, which means ‘beyond the known world.’”

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is about the make the most distant planetary flyby in the history of spaceflight, and you can follow the action live.

At 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) on Jan. 1, New Horizons will zoom past the small object Ultima Thule, which lies 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto in the realm of icy bodies known as the Kuiper Belt. Mike Wall, “How to Watch New Horizons’ Ultima Thule Flyby on New Year’s Day: A Webcast Guide” at Space.com

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Getting at what we MEAN by “truth”

Yeah, truth. In an age when fishwraps claim to be telling us “The Truth” even while books are written about post-truth (Oxford’s Word of the Year 2016), a look at the different things people can mean does not come amiss.

J. R. Miller offers some guidance: “It seem like a simple questions, but when you start talking to people you realize we don’t all share the same answer:

“In fact, much of the conflict we find on social media is because not everyone defines “truth” in the same way. Let me share with you three competing views of truth:

The Epistemic theory of truth holds that truth is a relationship between a proposition and the criteria of the person’s mind. E.g. “What’s true for you may not be true for me.” The Pragmatic theory of truth holds that truth is only that which is useful. E.g. “As long as it works for you…” The Correspondence theory of truth holds that truth is a proposition which corresponds to reality. In this case (unlike the epistemic and pragmatic theories), truth is independent of human knowledge. (E.g. The statement, “The sky is blue” is true even for someone who is blind.)] J. R. Miller, “What do you accept as “truth”?” at More Than Cake “

See also: J. R. Miller on the social justice warriors

and

J. R. Miller on Darwinism, racism, and human zoos

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The phony war of science vs. religion pales in the face of the “social justice” assault on Darwin

You’d expect Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne to be among the first to notice what’s changed but he seems not to get it:

” What is not disputable is that today science is practiced as an atheistic discipline – and largely by atheists. There’s a huge disparity in religiosity between American scientists and Americans as a whole: 64 percent of our elite scientists are atheists or agnostics, compared to only 6 percent of the general population – more than a tenfold difference. Whether this reflects differential attraction of nonbelievers to science or science eroding belief – I suspect both factors operate – the figures are prima facie evidence for a science-religion conflict.” Jerry Coyne, “Yes, There Is a War Between Science and Religion” at RealClearScience

Coyne is right. Atheists got hold of science. But the atheists’ opponents have traditionally been theists who are scientists who believe that truth is important. And much that is claimed to be “science” in Coyne’s own field is questionable but is defended because it supports atheism.

Now, along come the social justice warriors and, guess what, they don’t care what’s true or false; they just want power to impose their ideologies of the moment on whatever they want, based on whatever they feel like. And Coyne’s crowd is buckling because they have no idea how to deal with people who genuinely don’t care whether it’s true or not; they don’t even think that way. They just want everyone to be forced to submit to their demands the way they submit to their own feelings.

The perfect storm.

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See also: If the social justice warriors got rid of Darwinian racism, they might do some good after all In recent months, the heirs of Darwin have come up against the social justice warriors and turned into enraged spaghetti. They are not set up to sustain a long siege. They have always expected to win just by declaring Darwin’s Truth, ridiculing all contrary data, and getting opponents fired. And they have always been allowed to do so. Will that change?

Social justice warriors ( SJWs) turn their sights on another evo psych prof It actually doesn’t matter what he concludes. You can’t reason with a pack. Having been taught form childhood that humans are animals, the SJWs have become a pack. For technical reasons, that is easier than becoming a hive.

The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe…

and

About the facts of life, Darwinian Jerry Coyne is still being stubborn … Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne continues to refuse to follow Nature down the primrose path of political correctness and is doubling down on what people used to be allowed to accept as biological fact (Coyne was president of an evolution society which has started to wobble on whether sexes are real divisions.)

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Michael Egnor on the immateriality of the mind – more

Barry Arrington links to the video of neurosurgeon Michael Egnor (left) on the immateriality of the mind. I (O’Leary for News) was at that talk.

It is much easier to talk about the mind as a “meat robot” than about the reality, especially these days, when a Twitter putdown or TED talk is all you need by way of an argument. Few will bother to seek out someone who knows why it’s absolute nonsense.

Here’s more from Dr. Egnor, neurosurgeon, on the mind and free will:

Hamlet: Did His Perplexing Neurotransmitters Cause the Tragedy? The neuroscientist working from a mechanical perspective would study the material and efficient causes of Hamlet’s act of revenge.

Yes, your brain is a machine—if you choose to see it that way

Does your brain construct your conscious reality? Part I

A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk

Does your brain construct your conscious reality? Part II In a word, no. Your brain doesn’t “think”; YOU think, using your brain

Does brain stimulation research challenge free will?

Is Free Will a Dangerous Myth?

The brain is not a “meat computer”

and

AI is indeed a threat to democracy But not in quite the way historian Yuval Noah Harari thinks

Note: Curiously, a neurosurgeon of a previous generation, Wilder Penfield, came to the same conclusion. Not that you would hear much about it.

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