Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 550

Fossilized bird lung tissue controversial; Big if true

Archaeorhynchus spathula with preserved plumage and lung tissue/J. ZHANG, INSTITUTE OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY AND PALEOANTHROPOLOGY, BEIJING

Here’s an interesting premise for science finds of 2018: Big, If True. Among them,

Bird breath
Are white speckles in the chest cavity of a 120-million-year-old bird fossil traces of a respiratory system similar to that of modern birds (SN: 11/10/18, p. 12)? If so, the fossil, found in China, could be the first to preserve lungs of a bird. Some paleontologists aren’t convinced, partly because it’s so rare for delicate lung tissue to survive fossilization. Cassie Martin, “These 2018 findings could be big news — if they turn out to be true” at ScienceNews

Note: What makes the Big, If True premise interesting is that researchers were not looking to find this; it happened on them and it raises questions.

In this case, as with the plants noted earlier today, there weren’t all those years of natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism) to perfect the system, even assuming it could be done that way.

From the earlier story:

Unlike mammalian lungs that are elastic and pump air in and out, bird lungs don’t change size when the bird breathes. Instead, several air sacs connected to the lungs act like a bellows to draw the air in through the lungs. The lungs themselves contain highly subdivided tissue with tiny air capillaries that are responsible for the transfer of oxygen and carbon dioxide gases.

The new Archaeorhynchus fossil surprisingly contains many of the same structures, the team announced. That suggests that these important respiratory adaptations were present very early in the modern bird lineage. Carolyn Gramling,  “In a first, scientists spot what may be lungs in an ancient bird fossil” at ScienceNews

About soft tissue in general, we probably ain’t seen nothin’ yet. See, for example, Researchers: Soft tissue shows Jurassic ichthyosaur was warm-blooded, had blubber

See also: Soft tissue find shows dinosaurs had birdlike lungs

and

Developing story: Young Earth creationist microscopist, fired in wake of finding soft tissue from dinosaurs, sues (2014)

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Belief in string theory is becoming, at this point, a sort of social virtue

Calabi-Yau manifold

Despite the well-recognized problems with string theory, the hope that it will lead to a Theory of Everything is imperishable: Of course it is imperishable; it is the the gateway to the multiverse.

Here’s a year-end classic – string theory might unite general relativity and quantum mechanics:

For decades, many researchers have pinned their hopes of unification on something called string theory. On the up side it points to a curious connection between gravity and the behaviour of subatomic particles. On the down side … it’s string theory.

…

String theory does this by portraying particles as a single dimension that changes shape within multiple dimensions. Or, to put it another way, a line that ‘hums’ at a range of frequencies, which accounts for a particle’s unique characteristics.

…

“My guess is, the theory of the real world may have things to do with string theory, but it’s not string theory in its formal, rigorous, mathematical sense,” Susskind recently said in an interview.

“The exact thing – which I call string theory, which is this mathematical structure – is not going to be able to, by itself, describe particles.” Mike McRae, “Here’s Why String Theory Might Actually Point Us Towards a ‘Theory of Everything'” at ScienceAlert

“In the real world?” So string theory is not about the real world? Even the author of the article, Mike McRae, does not sound hopeful for the theory. He compares string theory to a means of bringing warring divorced parents to talk to each other at Christmas. Virtuous, yes, but not what we usually mean by science.

Some of us were surprised that there is actually a PBS vid out there now discussing what’s wrong with string theory, as if it were the sort of topic that could be treated as an ordinary theory rather than as the gateway to the multiverse.

See also: PBS Video: Why String Theory Is Wrong

Sabine Hossenfelder: Black holes do not behave as string theorists say they should

“Perhaps physics has slipped into a post-empirical era…” (from a review of Hossenfelder’s book at Physics World)

Post-modern physics: String theory gets over the need for evidence

and

Post-modern physics: String theory gets over the need for evidence

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Origin of life thesis: Asteroid impacts scattered life-friendly chemicals

Impact crater/NASA

In which case, says an astrobiologist, the origin of life may be quite a bit easier than many of us envision:

Two newly published papers underline how important the process of panspermia—the transport of organic material and possibly even microbes through space—is to astrobiology. The first paper, by Michel Nuevo from NASA’s Ames Research Center and colleagues, shows how DNA-related molecules (sugars of DNA and their derivatives) can be produced in space when ultraviolet light hits mixtures of water ice and methanol. The researchers found some of those derivatives in carbon-rich meteorites on Earth, which shows not only that these building blocks of life can be synthesized in deep space, but also that they can be transported to a planetary surface, where they could play a role in constructing cells. In fact, this may have happened on our own planet about 4 billion years ago. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, “It Came From the Heavens” at AirSpaceMag

But then, we are back where we started. After all these hundreds of millions of years, where are They?

If the thesis were to work as a general thesis instead of a stopgap suggestion, it must address that as well. 

See also: Planets with oxygen not necessarily good candidates for ET life

What Earth vs Mars can teach us about fine tuning

and

Light-loving cyanobacteria found, improbably, nearly 2,000 feet underground

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Key plant groups pushed back tens of millions of years

Ancient confiers have been backdated tens of millions of years:

Paleobotanists exploring a site near the Dead Sea have unearthed a startling connection between today’s conifer forests in the Southern Hemisphere and an unimaginably distant time torn apart by a global cataclysm. Exquisitely preserved plant fossils show the podocarps, a group of ancient evergreens that includes the massive yellowwood of South Africa and the red pine of New Zealand, thrived in the Permian period, more than 250 million years ago. That’s tens of millions of years earlier than thought, and it shows that early podocarps survived the “great dying” at the end of the Permian, the worst mass extinction the planet has ever known.Elizabeth Pennisi, “Middle East fossils push back origin of key plant groups millions of years” at Science

The report backdates the origin, not only of podocarps (the evergreens), but of seed ferns and cycad types of plants. Those are millions of years of natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism) that these plants did not turn out to have. If Darwinism seemed unbelievable before, what do you think now?

Abstract: The latitudinal biodiversity gradient today has deep roots in the evolutionary history of Earth’s biota over geologic time. In the marine realm, earliest fossil occurrences at low latitudes reveal a tropical cradle for many animal groups. However, the terrestrial fossil record—especially from drier environments that are thought to drive evolutionary innovation—is sparse. We present mixed plant-fossil assemblages from Permian equatorial lowlands in present-day Jordan that harbor precocious records of three major seed-plant lineages that all became dominant during the Mesozoic, including the oldest representative of any living conifer family. These finds offer a glimpse of the early evolutionary origins of modern plant groups in disturbance-prone tropical habitats that are usually hidden from observation. (paywall) – A hidden cradle of plant evolution in Permian tropical lowlands, Patrick Blomenkemper1, Hans Kerp1, Abdalla Abu Hamad2, William A. DiMichele3, Benjamin Bomfleur1,* Science 21 Dec 2018: Vol. 362, Issue 6421, pp. 1414-1416
DOI: 10.1126/science.aau4061 More.

See also: Researchers: Flowers bloomed in early Jurassic, 50 million years earlier than thought “Researchers were not certain where and how flowers came into existence because it seems that many flowers just popped up in the Cretaceous from nowhere,” explains lead author Qiang Fu” It now looks as though they just popped into the Jurassic from nowhere.

A complex network of genes helps plants cope with DNA damage

and

Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

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Does human mortality really slow down between 105 yrs and 110 years?

Remember the story earlier this year about the anomalous plateau found in the human lifespan, such that “after the age of 105, human mortality seems to hit a plateau. That is, you aren’t any more likely to die at 110 than at 105”?

It’s been challenged by a study in PLOS Biology which suggests that the finding may be an artifact of errors in record-keeping re births and deaths:

Age-recording errors can theoretically lead to plateaus in very old ages, Newman and other demographers have suggested, because at those extreme ages, most people with age underestimation errors have already died, meaning that people with age overestimation errors—whose mortality rates correspond to their true, younger ages—make up a greater and greater proportion of the data and drag down apparent mortality rates.

But the original authors stand by their data:

In a response published in the same issue as Newman’s comment, Wachter argues that Newman’s model predicts a “wildly implausible” rate of age misreporting.

“If we tried to apply Saul Newman’s model to our data, that would be claiming that every one of the 118 people we observe over the age of 110 was really born 10 years after the entry shown in their birth registration. And that’s just absurd,” Wachter tells The Scientist. He adds that in his dataset, there are birth and death records for all of the 110-year-olds and that, combined with the particular way births were recorded at the time (in handwritten books kept by village officials, one volume per year), virtually eliminates the possibility of errors. Ashley P. Taylor, “New Study Questions Whether Death Rate Levels Off in Old Age” at The Scientist

The fact that more people are living longer means that we may get lots more data in coming decades, from periods when error was simply less likely. We shall see.

Several organisms, including humans, display a deceleration in mortality rates at advanced ages. This mortality deceleration is sufficiently rapid to allow late-life mortality to plateau in old age in several species, causing the apparent cessation of biological ageing. Here, it is shown that late-life mortality deceleration (LLMD) and late-life plateaus are caused by common demographic errors. Age estimation and cohort blending errors introduced at rates below 1 in 10,000 are sufficient to cause LLMD and plateaus. In humans, observed error rates of birth and death registration predict the magnitude of LLMD. Correction for these sources of demographic error using a mixed linear model eliminates LLMD and late-life mortality plateaus (LLMPs) without recourse to biological or evolutionary models. These results suggest models developed to explain LLMD have been fitted to an error distribution, that ageing does not slow or stop during old age in humans, and that there is a finite limit to human longevity. Abstract: (open access) More.

See also: Anomaly: Human mortality hits a plateau after 105 years of age

and

Study suggesting human life span limit of 115-125 years draws fire

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Feser (and Ross) on the immateriality of the mind

Edward Feser has presented a lecture on the immateriality of the mind, which is worth listening to:

The papers here and here will flesh out details.

The core logic of the argument pivots on the principle of distinct identity, turned to how distinguishable entities are inherently different. Syllogistically:

1: Formal thought processes can have an exact or unambiguous conceptual content.

However,

2: Nothing material can have an exact or unambiguous conceptual content.

So,

3: Formal thought processes are not material.

Worth pondering as we reflect on this season.

Enjoy the Christmas season. END

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Science op-ed: Humans should get over the idea we are exceptional

Op-ed here. Further to the benefits of human extinction, there is the need to see humans as nothing special:

Environmentalism is growing darkly anti-human. That misanthropy has also seeped into science.

Vivid case in point: Science, one of the world’s most prominent scientific journals, just published a screed directed against human exceptionalism. The author, Eileen Crist, has a PhD in sociology, not in any of the natural sciences. She writes to warn that the end is nigh — and the reason for the pending catastrophe is “human supremacy.” From “Reimagining the Human”:

“This worldview esteems the human as a distinguished entity that is superior to all other life forms and is entitled to use them and the places they live. The belief system of superiority and entitlement — or human supremacy — manifests in a range of anthropocentric commonplace assumptions, linguistic constructs, institutional regimes, and everyday actions of individual, group, nation-state, and corporate actors.”

Crist wields the term “human supremacy” to create a mental association in the reader’s mind with the evils of racial supremacists — in much the same way that global-warming activists denigrate skeptics as “climate-change deniers” to associate them with Holocaust deniers. Wesley J. Smith, “Science Article Castigates “Human Supremacy”” at Evolution News and Science Today

Those who fund the war on humans as exceptional, as somehow “mattering,” will certainly get more of it. Crist wants an “all-species commonwealth,” which should work out well for the lettuce and bedbugs.

See also: Human extinction as collateral damage It’s funny how confused one can be today and still teach philosophy. What’s wrong with a spider eating her mate? One can provide a moral account of why it would be wrong for humans to do that but spiders do what they do. On what basis could a spider be doing something “wrong”?

Intelligence tests unfair to apes?

and

Is salad murder? If we think plants are “equal organisms” with respect to humans, it’s not clear whether salad is or isn’t murder. Or whether murder is even a serious ethical problem.

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2018 AI Hype Countdown 8: AI Just Needs a Bigger Truck!

AI help, not hype, with Robert J. Marks: Can we create superintelligent computers just by adding more computing power?

The claim that AI can be written to evolve even smarter AI is slowly being abandoned. AI software pioneer François Chollet, for example, concluded in “The Impossibility of Intelligence Explosion” that the search should be abandoned: “An overwhelming amount of evidence points to this simple fact: a single human brain, on its own, is not capable of designing a greater intelligence than itself.” A computer cannot do that either. Some think computers could greatly exceed human intelligence if only we added more computing power. That reminds me of an old story… More.

See also: 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.

and

2018 AI Hype Countdown: 10. Is AI really becoming “human-like”? Robert J. Marks: 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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J. R. Miller on the SJWs

Further to “Social justice warriors turn their sights on evo psych prof,” J. R. Miller has some thoughts on the SJWs at More Than Cake:

About Reprogrammed: Every Thursday at 11:00 Pacific, former SJW Keri Smith joins Unsafe Space to co-host “Deprogrammed.” We’ll explore the philosophy, strategy, and tactics that Marxist and postmodern nihilists use to program “Social Justice Warriors,” turning otherwise thoughtful, critically-minded individuals into armies of extreme leftist NPCs. Each week, we’ll talk about a different aspect of “social justice” culture, drawing both from Keri’s personal experience as well as current events.More.

Who knew that the Enlightenment would end in Punch Yer Lights Out?

See also: Social justice warriors turn their sights on evo psych prof. We thought Darwin’s Magic Dust prevented this sort of thing. But we were wrong. We were not taking into account the fact that, in practice, most Darwinians probably enable it, making certain that it will eventually be directed against them, if only after all other easy targets are exhausted.

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Human extinction as collateral damage

Recently, Clemson U philosopher Todd May whistled through the system on the pros and cons of human extinction:

May’s reasoning is fascinatingly nihilistic. He argues that human extinction would be tragic because we have a tragic flaw – our shortsighted use of the environment – which would be recitified by our extinction. “Humanity,” he says, “is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.” And while he recognizes that “nature itself is hardly a Valhalla of peace and harmony,” humans are uniquely cruel (in our defense, we don’t have a generalized habit of cannibalizing our mates, as some species do). He explains that we’re wrecking the world. Ben Shapiro, “Clemson Philosopher In NYT: Maybe We Should All Kill Ourselves, Or At Least Abort All Future Children To Save The Planet” at Daily Wire

It’s funny how confused one can be today and still teach philosophy. What’s wrong with a spider eating her mate? One can provide a moral account of why it would be wrong for humans to do that but spiders do what they do. On what basis could a spider be doing something “wrong”?

Readers can address the rest.

See also: Is salad murder? If we think plants are “equal organisms” with respect to humans, it’s not clear whether salad is or isn’t murder. Or whether murder is even a serious ethical problem.

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