Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 551

New atheism in decline?

Well, we have heard that astrology is on the rise but not much about new atheism being in decline. A Google Trends graph from 2004 through 2017 shows Sam Harris, rising and Richard Dawkins declining:

Dawkins has always been the heart of New Atheism, meaning its decline and his decline are linked at the hip. Harris, probably because of his Hollywood background/connections, is much more media savvy and branched out from New Atheism, first with meditation related stuff and now, with the “Intellectual Dark Web” stuff. “Dawkins vs. Harris” at Shadow to Light

It’s worth considering. Keep in mind though that the Google Trend decline could be accounted for in part by the fact that Dawkins is 77 and Harris is only 51. It could be a matter of personal energy as well. Neither is likely a keeper for the ages.

Naturalist (nature is all there is) atheism + meditation = what? Keep an eye on this one.

Note: The plug for memberships at Richard Dawkins ‘s site is “Our Members Have Unselfish Genes.” If Dawkins must denyThe Selfish Gene, the icon of his career, to stay afloat, well, …

Or what? Check out the graph.

See also: Sceptic asks, why do people who abandon religion embrace superstition? Belief in God is declining and belief in ghosts and witches is rising

and

Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.

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Nature (journal) goes to Tackytown for Christmas

Christmas carols with “science” lyrics:

[30:52 Hark! It’s Hayabusa2: The last of this year’s songs is an ode to a lander that touched down on an asteroid millions of miles away from Earth. Scroll to the transcript section below for the lyrics.podcast with Benjamin Thompson and Ali Jennings, “Podcast: Quantum physics adds a twist and festive fun” at Natureem>

When some of us were young, mischievous teens and nerdy grad students used to do this at Hallowe’en. We didn’t think the fad would end up finding a home but, who can tell?

Meanwhile, Messiah Oratorio:

See also: Eureka! Christmas spirit located in brain…

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Social justice warriors (SJWs) turn their sights on another evo psych prof

We always thought evolutionary psychology was bunk but we never thought the enraged Woke would start stalking the likes of evolutionary psychologist Sayatoshi Kanezawa the way they have:

More than 4,200 Northwestern University students have signed a petition demanding that administrators ban from campus an evolutionary psychologist whose research they deem “offensive” and “nonsense.”

The petition, “Ban Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa from conducting research at Northwestern,” takes aim at Dr. Kanazawa, a psychologist who researches topics such as sex differences and intelligence. (See his list of published research here).

“Problem: Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa’s request to conduct research on Northwestern’s campus was approved without scrutiny. … [H]is past research … is considered to be offensive,” claims student Deborah Shoola in the petition.

In an interview with PJ Media, Shoola cited articles from as far back as 2010 to prove her claims. These include one on terrorism, titled “What’s Wrong with Muslims?,” and “Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?,” which concludes that “women are not inferior versions of men.”Toni Airaksinen, “Students Petition to Ban ‘Offensive’ Evolutionary Psychologist” at PJ Media

It actually doesn’t matter what Kanazawa concludes. You can’t reason with a pack. Having been taught from childhood that humans are animals, the SJWs have become a pack. For technical reasons, that is easier than becoming a hive.

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.

Mind you, Kanazawa lives dangerously. When he got dumped as a columnist at Psychology Today for Incorrectness, Andrew Ferguson wrote at Commentary,

Now, a few characteristics immediately leap out at any reader unlucky enough to happen upon Kanazawa’s piece. First among them is this: It is the work of a man unconstrained by prudence of any kind—intellectual, moral, social. There is the grandiosity, his unexamined confidence that the truths of human behavior can be captured in numbers and under controlled conditions. And there is the obvious methodological flaw: He uses subjective rankings by anonymous questioners of unidentified research subjects as a proxy for large, objective facts about entire classes of people. More. (2014)

All which said, Kanazawa was unfortunate enough to attract the attention of the enraged campus Woke. Apparently, he is going back to Japan soon, where they may have culturally polite way of addressing odd ideas that don’t involve bellowing, trampling, or motor vehicle arson.

See also: 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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Little Foot, 3.67 mya, died in a conflict with a baboon-like monkey?

That’s the story suggested at New Scientist, re the death of the 3.67 mya hominin.

We know that fig and other fruit trees grow around the entrances to such caves today, and they must have done in prehistory too. This would have made the area attractive for fruit-eating primates including hominins.

So it’s possible that Little Foot had a violent face-off with the male monkey above the cave entrance. “She may have been looking for food in the trees and got into a confrontation with the large Parapapio,” says Clarke.

Both individuals could have lost their footing during the fight and fallen down the cave shaft, dying in the fall.Colin Barras, “Hominin v monkey deathmatch ended in a draw when they fell down a hole” at New Scientist

Option the movie rights.

Seriously, it’s amazing how detailed finds can be these days, whether or not the story offered at New Scientist is the correct account of what happened.

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See also: So what’s this about “Little Foot”? Ninety percent of the skeleton found in South Africa is complete, compared to (possibly) fellow Australopithecus Lucy’s 40%. The papers will be published in a special edition of the Journal of Human Evolution. An early announcement described Little Foot as an Australopithecus prometheus, but as Barras notes above, that’s disputed. And we don’t know much more than that.

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PBS Video: Why String Theory Is Wrong

Hmmm. We don’t often see serious skepticism of Cool ideas like string theory except from brave souls like Sabine Hossenfelder. 

With luck, if this pans out to be a serious discussion, it will begin a trend.

Note: Some of us would be okay with “Why String Theory Is Right,” provided it is a response to skepticism taken seriously and the theory is treated as a theory with serious problems—not a sort of foregone conclusion, upholding a multiverse.

Hat tip: RealClearScience

See also: 

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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9: Will That Army Robot Squid Ever Be “Self-Aware”?

From the 2018 AI Hype Countdown at Mind Matters #9: AI help, not hype, with Robert J. Marks: What would it take for a robot to be self-aware?

The Army Times headline would jolt your morning coffee:

Army researchers are developing a self-aware squid-like robot you can 3D print in the field

Reporter Todd South helpfully adds, “your next nightmare.” The thrill of fear invites the reader to accept the metaphorical claim that the robot will be “self-aware” as a literal fact.

Although we could, for technical reasons, quibble with the claim that the robot squid will be printed in 3D, we won’t just now. Let’s focus instead on the seductive semantics of the term “self-aware.” For humans, Oxford tells me, self-aware means “having conscious knowledge of one’s own character and feelings.” Computers have no character and no feelings. So we can rule that out.

In a more general sense, “self-aware” could mean being aware of ourselves in our surroundings. Could mechanisms be self-aware in that sense? For example, does placing sensors on a car cause the car to be self-aware? More.

What they are actually doing with the robot is kind of interesting but let’s not get carried away.

See also: 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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Chinese researchers who stray could face “social penalties”

That might include not being able to get a loan, run a company, or apply for a job:

The policy, announced last month, is an extension of the country’s controversial ‘social credit system’, where failure to comply with the rules of one government agency can mean facing restrictions or penalties from other agencies.

The punishment overhaul is the government’s latest measure to crack down on misconduct. But the nature and extent of the policy has surprised many researchers. “I have never seen such a comprehensive list of penalties for research misconduct elsewhere in the world,” says Chien Chou, a scientific integrity education researcher at Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.

…

As of April, the number of times people were denied airline tickets as a result of the system reached 11 million, and train tickets were denied on 4.2 million occasions. More than two million people have paid debts or fines after facing these restrictions. David Cyranoski, “China introduces ‘social’ punishments for scientific misconduct” at Nature

If the usual pattern in totalitarian countries prevails, “misconduct” need not mean what it means in, say, the United States. It could mean failing to produce the results higher ups want, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or being in the way of someone’s advancement or a targeted member of a minority group. And penalties could go beyond the ones mentioned. It’s a far cry from the professional self-discipline a field needs.

Read Solzhenitsyn.

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See also: A chilling snippet from mass surveillance in China

and

Digital dictatorship: China’s “social credit” system coming under scrutiny

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Paywall for science articles, yes or no?

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

Science funders are now getting into the act: Why should people have to pay to read science that has been funded?:

This new initiative, dubbed Plan S, mandates that starting in 2020, academics receiving grants from participating agencies—which include funders in the UK, France, and the Netherlands—must make all scientific articles open access immediately upon publication. The coalition also outlines 10 key principles, such as commitments from funders to help cover publication fees, provide incentives to establish quality open-access journals and publishing platforms, and a promise to sanction those who do not comply with the new rules.

Since September, two additional national funders and three charitable foundations—the Wellcome Trust in the UK, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the US, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in Sweden—have joined the coalition.

Overdue. But note:

In early November, more than 600 researchers signed a different open letter—this one criticizing the plan for being “unfair for scientists” and “too risky for science in general.” The letter states that Plan S is a “serious violation of academic freedom,” and outlined several specific problems the academics have with the plan, including a ban on many valuable journals, the possible risk to international collaboration if funders in others parts of the world did not adopt a similar policy, and the potential for the cost of scholarly dissemination to increase under a model focused on “gold” open access, in which authors pay article processing charges (APCs)—sometimes in the thousands of dollars—for individual papers.Diana Kwon, “Plan S: The Ambitious Initiative to End the Reign of Paywalls” at The Scientist

It’s hard to see why all these problems cannot be addressed without limiting public access. Simply include foreseen/foreseeable costs while fundraising. If we know it will cost $1500 to process something, it’s a line item in our budget. If we think our research won’t get published anyway and therefore publishing costs shouldn’t be a line item in the budget, why are we doing the research?

File under: Change long overdue

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See also: Surprise: Science thrives when people can admit they didn’t prove something

What can a huge retractions database teach us? Overall, improved vigilance has slowed the trend, but key problems remain, including manipulated images. If a picture is worth a thousand words, that’s about three to five paragraphs of falsehood.

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Jonathan Bartlett: Google’s secret of success is the human mind, not Big Data

                  Jonathan Bartlett, Research and Education Director of the Blyth Institute

No, Google found a way to harness YOUR wants and needs:

To understand how this works, think back to the Google’s early days (founded 1998). It actually had the smallest dataset of the competitors in the field of search engines. Other companies could find more words faster. Other companies had better document searches. So what made Google a better search engine in the long run?

Google’s original success came from harnessing the linking structure of the web. But where do these links come from? From nature? No. Links unearth a sea of human intentionality lurking in the pages.

While people can and do say almost anything about themselves on a web page, they rarely refer users elsewhere unless they really want those users to go and check out the other page. After all, they are asking you, the user, to pay attention to something other than themselves. Therefore, the links provide a way to identify the greatest level of human intentionality. The famed Google PageRank algorithm is Google’s first method of harnessing intentionality. More.

Bartlett goes on to talk about the second method, where the money was.

But just think, intentionality is all over the place but no one had found a way to actually capture and harness it in quite the same way.

Also by Jonathan Bartlett: Who built AI? You did, mostly.

and

“Artificial” artificial intelligence: What happens when AI needs a human I?

Also: Explore the concept of intentionality, an immaterial power of the human mind connected with free will, with Michael Egnor in Do either machines—or brains— really learn? and Neurosurgeon outlines why machines can’t think.

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50th anniversary of Apollo 8: Earth as a privileged planet

Earth/NASA, DSCVR

We know far more about that now than we did then:

Astronomers now know that Earth is a rare, life-friendly “oasis in the big vastness of space,” as Borman later reflected. In the past few decades they have discovered that life on our planet depends on many improbable “rare-earth” factors. Earth must orbit the sun at just the right distance, with just the right axial tilt, and with just the right-shaped orbit and right planetary neighbors. Life depends on Earth having a moon of the right size at the right distance. The solar system as a whole must also reside in a narrow life-friendly band of space within our galaxy, the “galactic habitable zone.”

We’ve also come to appreciate that we inhabit a privileged platform for scientific discovery. Earth’s crust is endowed with the abundant mineral and energy resources required for advanced technology, including that necessary for sending astronauts to the moon. Our clear atmosphere and location far from the center of a large galaxy allow us to learn about the universe near and far.

At a deeper level, physicists now know that the universe itself exhibits extreme fine-tuning. Guillermo Gonzalez & Steve Meyer , “” at National Review

Sadly, in the intervening years, computer-modelled claims about string theory, eternal cosmic inflation, the multiverse, and the universe as a computer sim have come to rival news of exploration of Mars for public attention. TED talks are easier, cheaper, and safer than space missions too.

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See also: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

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