Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 564

November 26, 2018

Theoretical physicist: My field is not going to the dogs

In recent years, a number of theoretical physicists have raised concerns about stagnation and cool-sounding programs that produce little but TED talks.

Now one replies, pointing out that if we leave the wild world of string theory out of the picture, theoretical physicists work with experimentalists more than ever before:

In one example, theorists teamed with experimentalists to probe quantum correlations spread across space and time. In another example, theorists posited a mechanism by which superconducting qubits interact with a hot environment. Other illustrations from the past five years include discrete time crystals, many–body scars, magic-angle materials, and quantum chaos.

These collaborations even offer hope for steering quantum gravity with experiments. Certain quantum-gravity systems share properties with certain many-particle quantum systems. This similarity, we call “the AdS/CFT duality.” Experimentalists have many-particle quantum systems and are stretching those systems toward the AdS/CFT regime. Experimental results, with the duality, might illuminate where quantum-gravity theorists should and shouldn’t search. Perhaps no such experiments will take place for decades. Perhaps AdS/CFT can’t shed light on our universe. But theorists and experimentalists are partnering to try.

These illustrations demonstrate that theoretical physics, on the whole, remains healthy, grounded, and thriving. This thriving is failing to register with part of the public. Nicole Yunger Halpern, “Theoretical physics has not gone to the dogs.” at Quantum Frontiers

Fair enough. But when you need a press agent, Madam Physicist, you need one. Why are you letting crackpots control the news stream from your field?

It’s no use blaming the public for what we assume. We assume that what you and like-minded theoretical physicists don’t challenge IS the news from your field. If it’s not, good for you for speaking up!

You write, “John Horgan wrote that ‘physics, which should serve as the bedrock of science, is in some respects the most troubled field of’ science. The evidence presented consists of one neighborhood in the theoretical fraction of the metropolis of physics: string and multiverse models.”

Well, Horgan gets the same news feed as we do. You have to change the flow of water from the source, not from downstream.

Are you prepared to challenge the string theorists hogging the coverage? It starts there.

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See also: Is cosmology in crisis over how to measure the universe? One wonders how much of the problem stems from the need for a different universe from the one we have.

Theoretical physicist: Present phase of physics “not normal” – stagnation, not crisis Sabine Hossenfelder notes that working on the hard mathematical problems led to breakthroughs in physics but fears that, once again, the continued organization of conferences and production of papers will be the choice. Oh, and nonsense: “blathering about naturalness and multiverses and shifting their ‘predictions,’ once again, to the next larger particle collider.”

and

Physicist: The ultimate theory will be “geometrically natural” Garrett Lisi at Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog: “The high energy physics community has spent far too much time following the bandwagon of superstring theory, long after the music has stopped playing. It’s time for theorists to spread out into the vast realm of theoretical possibilities and explore different ideas.” He also thinks that the “naturalness” aesthetic that the fundamental constants should be near 1 is a “red herring” because “the universe doesn’t seem to care about that.” Many will likely welcome the freedom to explore new ideas.

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Published on November 26, 2018 09:26

A TED talk for the truly erudite

Your co-workers just won’t know WHAT to think, when they hear you expound this Ted Talk:

Self proclaimed “thought leader,” Pat Kelly gives his talk on “thought leadership” at the annual This Is That Talks in Whistler, B.C. In the seminar, Kelly covers: How to talk with your hands, how to get a standing ovation, and how to inspire people by saying nothing at all.

Courtesy the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation *

Yes, a parody, but we knew we didn’t need to tell our readers that. Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: “Neil deGrasse Tyson” debuts at the Babylon Bee in an op-ed

Babylon Bee: Bill Nye To Dress Up As Real Scientist For Halloween

and

Yes, there IS an Old Earth Creation Museum! Open six billion years a week.

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Published on November 26, 2018 08:35

November 25, 2018

Could the recent Pew Center survey on meaning help us interpret some controversies?

What do Americans think matters in life?

Americans with high levels of household income and educational attainment are more likely to mention friendship, good health, stability and travel. A quarter of Americans who earn at least $75,000 a year mention their friends when asked to describe, in their own words, what makes life meaningful, compared with 14% of Americans who earn less than $30,000 each year. Similarly, 23% of higher-income U.S. adults mention being in good health, compared with 10% of lower-income Americans. And among those with a college degree, 11% mention travel and a sense of security as things that make their lives fulfilling, compared with 3% and 2%, respectively, who name these sources of meaning among those with a high school degree or less.

Many evangelicals find meaning in faith, while atheists often find it in activities and finances. Spirituality and religious faith are particularly meaningful for evangelical Protestants, 43% of whom mention religion-related topics in the open-ended question. Among members of the historically black Protestant tradition, 32% mention faith and spirituality, as do 18% of mainline Protestants and 16% of Catholics. Evangelical Protestants’ focus on religious faith also emerges in the closed-ended survey: 65% say it provides “a great deal” of meaning in their lives, compared with 36% for the full sample. At the other end of the spectrum, atheists are more likely than Christians to mention finances (37%), and activities and hobbies (32%), including travel (13%), as things that make their lives meaningful. Atheists tend to have relatively high levels of education and income, but these patterns hold even when controlling for socioeconomic status.

Politically conservative Americans are more likely than liberals to find meaning in religion, while liberals find more meaning in creativity and causes than do conservatives. Spirituality and faith are commonly mentioned by very conservative Americans as imbuing their lives with meaning and fulfillment; 38% cite it in response to the open-ended question, compared with just 8% of very liberal Americans – a difference that holds even when controlling for religious affiliation. By contrast, the closed-ended question finds that very liberal Americans are especially likely to derive “a great deal” of meaning from arts or crafts (34%) and social and political causes (30%), compared with rates of 20% and 12% among very conservative Americans. “Where Americans Find Meaning in Life” at Pew Forum

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See also: Skeptic asks, why do people who abandon religion embrace superstition? Belief in God is declining and belief in ghosts and witches is rising (keeping it real about what people really believe… )

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Published on November 25, 2018 18:00

Naturalism and ethics: an inevitable contradiction?

Ken Francis, author, with Theodore Dalrymple, of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd, writes to tell us of an effort to account for objective moral laws and duties form the perspective of pure naturalist atheism. He thinks it doesn’t work but you, the reader, shall judge:

From Reasonable Faith: And the atheist answer to all these moral dilemmas (Slavery, Child Abuse, Genocide, Molestation, Murder, Rape, etc.) is, “Well, it’s all relative!” Dr. William Lane Craig and Ravi Zacharias tells atheist Dr. Bernard Leikind that if his morality rests upon relativism he cannot in principle label literally anything as absolutely wrong, be it slavery, child abuse, or child molestation, torture, genocide, racism, murder, etc.,

This clip comes from the debate “Is There Meaning in Evil and Suffering?”

Atheists Trying to Have Their Cake and Eat It Too on Morality

Atheists Trying to Have Their Cake and Eat It Too on Morality. This video shows that when an atheist denies objective morality they also affirm moral good and evil without the thought of any contradiction or inconsistency on their part.

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See also: Terror of Existence: Cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer loved, then loathed, Darwinism

Theodore Dalrymple and Ken Francis on the terror of a materialist atheist’s existence

Why Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse is not a new atheist Ruse: Partly it is aesthetic. They are so vulgar. Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course…

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Published on November 25, 2018 12:15

Adam and Eve and Shakespeare

Here’s the take of a Christian scholar, Hans Madueme, review of a book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve , by a secular Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Greenblatt:

Greenblatt tells the Adam and Eve story from a non-Christian, outsider’s perspective. On the one hand, he treats many of the historical actors fairly and avoids anachronism or trivializing their unique concerns. I commend him for that. On the other hand, the book is far less helpful at conveying the deep theological significance of our first parents. Many readers will therefore likely disagree with key elements of Greenblatt’s narrative. Theological insights are scattered throughout, but they’re cut off from their deeper, organic connections to Adam and Eve.

This problem is heightened by Greenblatt’s gauzy view of Scripture. He never really questions the standard historical-critical readings of Genesis, almost all of which are debatable and often highly speculative (cf. Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament). Taking his cues from that scholarship, Greenblatt thinks Genesis 2–3 is a creative reworking of the origin story in the Gilgamesh epic (see esp. 62–63). More significantly, the book gives the overwhelming impression that the Bible is a fallible mishmash of human writings. There’s no inkling of anything divine or supernatural about these texts, a bias that severely handicaps Greenblatt’s ability to deliver the goods…

This reticence to take the biblical narrative realistically may explain why his final chapter rushes too quickly to tie up his story. Greenblatt oversimplifies the significance of Darwin for the Christian understanding of human origins.Hans Madueme, “A Secular Shakespeare Scholar on Adam and Eve” at Gospel Coalition

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See also: Adam and Eve reappear in a recent study Story originated last May. Seems to have slept a bit. The recent Daily Mail retread of this story offers a valuable take-home point: Much on offer from science today is very provisional knowledge at best and flimflam at worst, bolstered by research on what’s wrong with the people who don’t trust it.

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Published on November 25, 2018 06:42

Adam and Eve reappear in a recent study

File:DNA simple.svg Or someone does. We haven’t quite figured this out yet:

All modern humans descended from a solitary pair who lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, scientists say.

Scientists surveyed the genetic ‘bar codes’ of five million animals – including humans – from 100,000 different species and deduced that we sprang from a single pair of adults after a catastrophic event almost wiped out the human race.

These bar codes, or snippets of DNA that reside outside the nuclei of living cells, suggest that it’s not just people who came from a single pair of beings, but nine out of every 10 animal species, tooLeigh McManus, “All humans are descended from just TWO people and a catastrophic event almost wiped out ALL species 100,000 years ago, scientists claim” at Daily Mail, November 24, 2018

Animal species? [Noah! Wake up. Get sober. Put on a tie… Somebody give ‘im a washcloth… ]

Actually, this story originated last May:

Who would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge?

And who would have thought to trawl through five million of these gene snapshots—called “DNA barcodes”—collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the US government-run GenBank database?

That would be Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who together published findings last week sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds.

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations—think ants, rats, humans—will become more genetically diverse over time.

But is that true?

“The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution.

For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity “is about the same,” he told AFP. [Agence Presse France] Marlowe Hood, “Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution” at Phys.org

Story seems to have slept a bit. Then got picked up again by the Daily Mail the other day.

Here’s the paper. Here’s Evolution News’s take:

An exciting new paper in the journal Human Evolution has been published which you can read here. Popular science reports such as this have incautiously claimed, “They found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.”

But to be more precise, what they actually found is that the most recent common ancestor of those species seems to have lived during that time period.

This could indicate intelligent design, an event where species came into existence for the first time. But it could also indicate something else, such as a population crash (or crashes) that affected almost all life on Earth. Either way, if the paper is right, it would be a shock to established scientific expectations.

“This conclusion is very surprising,” co-author David Thaler of the University of Basel is quoted as saying, “and I fought against it as hard as I could.” His co-author is fellow geneticist Mark Stoeckle of Rockefeller University in New York. Andrew Jones, “New Paper in Evolution Journal: Humans and Animals Are (Mostly) the Same Age?” at Evolution News and Science Today

The recent Daily Mail retread of this story offers a valuable take-home point: Much on offer from science today is very provisional knowledge at best and flimflam at worst, bolstered by research on what’s wrong with the people who don’t trust it.

We just don’t know the history because we don’t know enough to fill it in reliably. Don’t trust anyone who tells you we do.

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See also: John Sanford on claims about brand new nylonase genes

Ann Gauger talks about Adam and Eve with World editor Marvin Olasky Gauger found two papers a few years later which suggested that the number of variants (allegedly disproving Adam and Eve) was much smaller. She is working on “an alternative population genetics model that doesn’t depend on evolutionary assumptions.”

and

Adam and Eve and Ann Gauger

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Published on November 25, 2018 06:02

November 24, 2018

Facial Recognition Aids Persecution of Chinese Christians, Muslims

The crackdown on religion is said to stem from Xi Jinping, who became President in 2012. After he got term limits removed in March 2018, some have begun to privately call him “Emperor Xi”:

Pastor Bob Fu, a Chinese civil rights activist since Tiananmen Square in 1989 and founder of ChinaAid, reports that facial recognition technology is being used to discourage churchgoing in China:

“The government-sanctioned churches that are allowed to exist right now have unique restrictions. Each church has to install a facial-recognition camera in front of the pulpit. The purpose is to identify certain people in the congregation.”

…

Christians are treated with special wariness because they are associated with Western political values but, as Shepherd points out, there are severe persecutions of Muslims in China as well:

“The Chinese government regime has designed special headphones for the Uyghurs [Muslims of Chinese descent] to wear. They have to have them on seven days a week, 24 hours a day. It broadcasts the Communist Party songs to brainwash them. After three days of hearing this nonstop, how could you bear that? Many have gone crazy.” More. “Facial Recognition Aids Persecution of Chinese Christians, Muslims” at Mind Matters

Western companies still seek business ties with an increasingly authoritarian regime

See also: If a robot read the news, would you notice a difference? The Chinese government thinks not. Is this the way of the future?

Chilling snippet from mass surveillance in China China is helping other countries restrict their citizens’ internet, while shunning the U.S.

Senior Google scientist quits over Google’s censorship in China

and

Is the Future of Work Relentlessly Urban? Amazon’s new combined New York and Washington headquarters may provide an unintended test (Some wonder if one of the real attractions is that New York and Washington feature a greater proportion of childless, religion-free workaholics. But is that the draw it might have been at one time?)

The idea of two different locations would likely be unworkable apart from the internet. But some wonder if Amazon has grasped all the implications of the internet.

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Published on November 24, 2018 16:00

Is religion vs. science warfare “far from inevitable”?

It’s usually just fake news*, as some thoughtful academics point out:

There are many sciences, many religions. A scientific innovation problematic for one religious tradition may be irrelevant to another. One science may pose a threat to religious beliefs when other sciences do not. Arguing for an essential conflict between science and religion fails because, as the philosopher John Gray has written, terms such as “religion” and “atheism” have no essence.

The sciences may sometimes provide answers to questions once asked within the faith traditions – but they also leave space for religious enquiry and commitment. How do we prioritise competing scientific research projects? With limited resources we must ask what is more important for humankind. But these are not scientific questions – as the historian Noah Yuval Harari identifies in his best-seller Sapiens, only religions and ideologies seek to answer them: “Scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology.” David N Livingstone and John Hedley Brooke, “ War between science and religion is far from inevitable” at The Conversation

Indeed. Apart from anything else, scientists must usually raise money from taxpayers for big projects like space research. Or controversial ones like some national defence strategies. In a free society, scientists need buy-in from people with a variety of views and commitments. Fortunately, goals are usually alignable.

The people promoting a “warfare” thesis almost always have an ax to grind, for example, the claim that religious people would be troubled by the existence of life forms on other planets. There is little evidence for that but it was probably someone’s grant proposal.

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* That is, not entirely false but presented without context, in a misleading way.

See also: NASA cares what your religion thinks about ET

and

Why Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse is not a new atheist Ruse: Partly it is aesthetic. They are so vulgar. Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course…

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Published on November 24, 2018 14:24

Physicist: The ultimate theory will be “geometrically natural”

At her blog, Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, offers a guest post spot to a fellow physicist:

No current unified theory includes quantum mechanics fundamentally as part of its structure. But a truly unified theory must. And I believe the ultimate theory will be geometrically natural. Canonical quantum commutation relations are a Lie bracket, which can be part of a Lie group in a geometrically natural description. I fully expect this will lead to a beautiful quantum-unified theory – what I am currently working on.

I never expected to find beauty in theoretical physics. I stumbled into it, and into E8 in particular, when looking for a naturally geometric description of fermions. But beauty is inarguably there, and I do think it is a good guide for theory building. I also think it is good for researchers to have a variety of aesthetic tastes for what guides and motivates them. The high energy physics community has spent far too much time following the bandwagon of superstring theory, long after the music has stopped playing. It’s time for theorists to spread out into the vast realm of theoretical possibilities and explore different ideas.Garrett Lisi, “Guest Post: Garrett Lisi on Geometric Naturalness” at BackRe(Action)

He also thinks that the “naturalness” aesthetic that the fundamental constants should be near 1 is a “red herring” because “the universe doesn’t seem to care about that.” Many will likely welcome the freedom to explore new ideas.

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See also: Theoretical physicist: Present phase of physics “not normal” – stagnation, not crisis

Sabine Hossenfelder notes that working on the hard mathematical problems led to breakthroughs in physics but fears that, once again, the continued organization of conferences and production of papers will be the choice. Oh, and nonsense: “blathering about naturalness and multiverses and shifting their ‘predictions,’ once again, to the next larger particle collider.”

Is cosmology in crisis over how to measure the universe? One wonders how much of the problem stems from the need for a different universe from the one we have.

Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder shares her self-doubts about exposing nonsense in cosmology

and

Sabine Hossenfelder: Free will is compatible with physics

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Published on November 24, 2018 07:58

Ann Gauger talks about Adam and Eve with World editor Marvin Olasky

Editor in chief of WORLD News Group Marvin Olasky interviews Biologic Institute’s interviews Ann Gauger,

ann-gauger-headshot

Olasky: I used to work at DuPont, the inventor in the 1930s of nylon—and 40 years later scientists found a bacterium with an enzyme dubbed nylonase that was able to digest nylon, which is a synthetic chemical not found in nature. Evolutionists use that as proof that new proteins can rapidly evolve, but you found a different story.

Gauger: It wasn’t what we call a frameshift mutation, a DNA deletion or insertion that shifts the whole way a sequence is read. I discovered a whole body of literature by some Japanese workers who had found pre-existing protein folds. There was no new protein, no novel protein fold, no new mutation.

Olasky: And now you’re undermining what we’ve seen frequently reported in newspapers and magazines: that a special creation of Adam and Eve, one couple from whom all of us are descended, could not have happened.

Gauger: Most of my scientific career seems to be involving people asking me questions and then I start down a path. In this case, a philosopher asked me how strong was the genetic evidence against Adam, because everywhere it’s been proclaimed we had to come from a population of 10,000. It’s led to people in the church suggesting there is no such thing as a historical Adam. So when the philosopher asked me, I said, “I don’t know. I’ll go look.” I started with a paper that Francisco Ayala, a very famous evolutionary biologist, wrote to disprove the possibility of a first pair. Marvin Olasky, “Science vs. Darwinism” at World Magazine

Gauger found two papers a few years later which suggested that the number of variants was much smaller. She is working on “an alternative population genetics model that doesn’t depend on evolutionary assumptions.”

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See also: John Sanford on claims about brand new nylonase genes

and

Adam and Eve and Ann Gauger

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Published on November 24, 2018 03:56