Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 57

At Panda’s Thumb: Worry that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule for creationism

Remember them? Maybe you’d have to be there:

Unfortunately, one of the fatal flaws in the now-dominant constitutional theory of Originalism is that it substitutes appeals to past generations’ subjective understandings for any conceptual and logical legal argument. Since such a substitution is not literally possible, some of the better Originalist thinkers have fashioned clever ways to smuggle in the latter by dressing up “abstract and ahistorical” arguments in ancient clothing (this is called “the Construction Zone”). Pointing to historical practice is not only confusing, since these practices sometimes conflicted and can be interpreted in different ways, but because we must infer general rules from those practices, and inferring general rules is, like it or not, necessarily an “abstract and ahistorical” undertaking. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the Kennedy decision itself employs an “abstract an ahistorical” principle, when it bases its decision on the presence or absence of “coercion” — which is an abstraction; a concept, not a list of specific historical events. Obviously history can inform a proper grasp of the law — just as the views of previous generations of scientists can help us understand a natural phenomenon — but actually understanding what the law is requires an objective analysis, which must rely on abstractions and “ahistorical” appeals to principle rather than, as Alexander Hamilton put it, rummaging through musty parchments. Given this confusion, it’s unsurprising that the Court drops the entire issue at that point, and gives us no guidance as to what exact kinds of “historical practices and understandings” should govern the question of whether something constitutes an “establishment of religion” or the “free exercise thereof.”

Given that government-funded schools are a century and a half older than the Constitution itself, and were in America’s early years quite heavily saturated in religion, it seems unlikely that a court relying on history alone — without any “abstract and ahistorical principle” to reinforce its constitutional understanding — would reach the same conclusion as the district court in the Dover case. Of course, schools — both public and private — were teaching Intelligent Design in 1791 (when the First Amendment was ratified), since it was the state of the art back then. And the Establishment Clause itself expressly allowed states to maintain their state-established churches; it was only over the course of the nineteenth century that they were abolished, and later still that the Fourteenth Amendment was viewed as forbidding states to force people to subsidize churches.

Timothy Sandefur, “Religious Conservatism on the Supreme Court: Implications for Creationism?” at Panda’s Thumb (June 28, 2022)

For some, tormenting themselves with this stuff probably seems to make more sense than confronting the fact that Darwinism (which is generally what they mean by “evolution”) isn’t as widely believed as it used to be within biology. Never mind what a judge thinks should be taught to kids in school.

From Mind Matters News:

Note: The issues around evolution have become much more complex in the last couple of decades. Many evolutionary biologists find traditional Darwinian theory too narrow to encompass the broad range of changes observed in life forms over time. Groups like the Third Way, for example, are not in any sense creationists; they incorporate recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer,  epigenetics, and devolution into their thinking. Just today in The Guardian, there was another call from mainstream evolutionary biologists for a new approach to evolutionary theory. It is possible that some bloggers who were comfortable defending a traditional Darwinian point of view have gotten tired of keeping up with the changes the field is undergoing.

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At Evolution News: Conservation of Information — The Idea

William Dembski writes:

I am reviewing Jason Rosenhouse’s new book, The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism (Cambridge University Press), serially. For the full series so far, go here.

Rosenhouse devotes a section of his book (sec. 6.10) to conservation of information, and prefaces it with a section on artificial life (sec. 6.9). These sections betray such ignorance and confusion that it’s best to clean the slate. I’ll therefore highlight some of the key problems with Rosenhouse’s exposition, but focus mainly on providing a brief history and summary of conservation of information, along with references to the literature, so that readers can determine for themselves who’s blowing smoke and who’s got the beef.

The importance of “conservation of information” can’t be overstated. The inability of nature to ratchet up information by any natural process in the universe is a hardwired property of the way the universe works.

Blowing Smoke

Rosenhouse’s incomprehension of conservation of information becomes evident in his run-up to it with artificial life. Anyone who has understood conservation of information recognizes that artificial life is a fool’s errand. 

The term artificial life has been around since the late 1980s, when Christopher Langton, working out of the Santa Fe Institute, promoted it and edited a conference proceedings on the topic. I was working in chaos theory at the time. I followed the Santa Fe Institute’s research in that area, and thus as a side benefit (if it may be called that) witnessed first-hand the initial wave of enthusiasm over artificial life. 

Artificial life is computer simulations that produce life-like virtual things, often via a form of digital evolution that mimics selection, variation, and heredity. The field has had its ups and downs over the years, initially generating a lot of enthusiasm, then losing it as people started to ask “What’s this got to do with actual biology?”, after which people forgot these nagging concerns, whereupon a new generation of researchers got excited about it, and so on to repeat the cycle. Rosenhouse, it seems, represents the latest wave of enthusiasm. As he writes: “[Artificial life experiments] are not so much simulations of evolution as they are instances of it. In observing such an experiment you are watching actual evolution take place, albeit in an environment in which the researchers control all the variables.” (p. 209) 

Smuggled Information

Conservation of information, as developed by my colleagues and me, arose in reaction to such artificial life simulations. We found, as we analyzed them (see here for several analyses that we did of specific artificial life programs such as Avida, which Rosenhouse lauds), that the information that researchers claimed to get out of these programs was never invented from scratch and never amounted to any genuine increase in information, but rather always reflected information that was inputted by the researcher, often without the researcher’s awareness. The information was therefore smuggled in rather than created by the algorithm.

Displacing Information

Darwinists are in the business of displacing information. Yet when they do, they typically act all innocent and pretend that they have fully accounted for all the information in question. Moreover, they gaslight anyone who suggests that biological evolution faces an information problem. Information follows precise accounting principles, so it cannot magically materialize in the way that Darwinists desire.

What my colleagues and I at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab found is that, apart from intelligent causation, attempts to explain information do nothing to alleviate, and may actually intensify, the problem of explaining the information’s origin. It’s like filling one hole by digging another, but where the newly dug hole is at least as deep and wide as the first one (often more so). The only exception is one pointed out by Douglas Robertson, writing for the Santa Fe Institute journal Complexity back in 1999: the creation of new information is an act of free will by intelligence. That’s consistent with intelligent design. But that’s a no-go for Darwinists.

Evolution News

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Are We Free?

There is a constant struggle in every man’s heart between what he does and what he knows he should do.  Freud and the Apostle Paul wrote about this conflict in the following famous passages:

Thus the ego, driven by the id, confined by the super-ego, repulsed by reality, struggles to master its economic task of bringing about harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it; and we can understand how it is that so often we cannot suppress a cry: ‘Life is not easy!’ If the ego is obliged to admit its weakness, it breaks out in anxiety – realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the super-ego and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id.1

Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.  What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?2

Arch-atheist and Christian saint agree about at least two things:  A war rages within every human and the conflict sometimes makes us very miserable indeed.

The existence of this conflict presents a very difficult (indeed insurmountable) conundrum for materialists, who insist that a person consists of his physical body and nothing else.  But if that is true, how can there be a conflict?  How can the body be at war with itself?  Doesn’t a war require two opposing sides?  Freud can describe the conflict, but he can’t even begin to account for its existence given his metaphysical commitments. 

Christianity has no such problem.  As Paul taught in the wider context of the passage quoted above, all men have an immaterial spirit (which he sometimes called the “heart”), and the essential requirements of morality “are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.”3 

Freud’s metaphysics rendered him blind to the cause of the war that raged in his own breast.  And since he was blind to the reason the war raged, he was powerless to offer any effective solution to the war.  Not so for Paul.  He understood the underlying cause of the conflict that raged within, and he also understood how he could be free.  God has provided a way out through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, which allowed Paul to answer his own question.

Q.  “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” 

A.  “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.”4

Which brings me back to the question posed in the title to this post.  Are we free?  It turns out the answer is neither “yes” nor “no,” but “if you are not you can be.”  We can be free but not all of us are.  Some people are slaves to their fallen nature.  But it need not be so.  There is a path from slavery into freedom, but no one is ever forced to walk down that path.  It must be chosen. 

______________________

1“LECTURE XXXI: The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho Analysis. The Standard Edition. 1933. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1965, 97-98.

2The Apostle Paul, Romans 7:21-24.

3Romans 2:15.

4Romans 8:2.

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At Mind Matters News: Can we eliminate the idea of function from the study of life?

The question is, can biology journals take away what they did not give, without harming their own enterprise?:

We tend to assume that our values come in part from the careers we follow. In part, that’s true. If a given mindset works well at work, we may try it at home. But that process can work in reverse. We can start with a mindset and try to graft it onto our work.

That seems to have happened in some quarters in biology. For example, the term “function” in life forms is linked historically with the idea that life forms show evidence of design. Therefore, philosopher Emmanuel Ratti and molecular biologist Pierre-Luc Germain argue, biologists shouldn’t use it …

The trouble is, biologists did not invent either function or the concept of function in human language. Life itself and the language we use to describe it literally run on function — and on purpose as well. We have things — shovels, feet, thoughts — to fulfil functions associated with our purposes. And so do all life forms. The lives of cats and dogs are full of function and purpose. So are the lives of slime molds in pursuit of food. Bacteria are purpose-driven. So are plants.

The problem with their position is not that it is opposed to intelligent design theory but that it is in conflict with the self-evident nature of life forms.

Denyse O’Leary, “Can we eliminate the idea of function from the study of life?” at Mind Matters News (July 3, 2022)

What difference would it make if we said that these ants’ legs and mandibles “function” to build a bridge or that they “fulfill a biological role” to build a bridge – except that the latter lards up the prose?

Takehome: A philosopher and a biologist propose to eliminate terms from biology that imply that there is evidence of purpose in life. But would that make sense?

You may also wish to read: Why do many scientists see cells as intelligent? Bacteria appear to show intelligent behavior. But what about individual cells in our bodies?

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Remember when the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 was “just a conspiracy theory”?

Conveniently for politicians who might otherwise be ansering tricky questions about their countries’ involvement. Science writer Matt Ridley, author with Alina Chan of Viral (2021) has the story:

The central question is, and always has been, who or what brought a bat virus more than a thousand miles north in the autumn of 2019 to the middle of a modern city? …

In effect, the new paper reveals that the Chinese government (which approves all publications on the topic of Covid’s origins within China) is in a dilemma. It cannot concede that the virus started in its legal or illegal wildlife trade without huge embarrassment to the Xi Jinping regime, which has encouraged the first and tried to eliminate the second. But nor can it admit that the virus escaped from one of its labs without even greater humiliation. Yet it still cannot think of a remotely plausible alternative…

But there is one thing that stands out about Wuhan. It is the home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is China’s leading bat SARS-like virus research laboratory. It (and nowhere else in China) is the lab that tracked down the ancestral source of the first SARS epidemic. It led more expeditions to look for bat SARS-like viruses in southern China than any other lab. It sampled that mineshaft in Mojiang county at least seven times after the guano shovelers fell ill and found the then closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 in bats there. It is where scientists sent samples from bats in Laos, a country where an even closer relative to the pandemic virus was found. It has the largest database of SARS-like viruses in the world by some distance, but has refused to release it, even though doing so at the start of the pandemic would have been the easiest way to exonerate its scientists.

And that is only the start of the coincidences.

We don’t say this virus definitely jumped out of a laboratory, but we do say that if there is one city in the world where a laboratory leak of a novel SARS-like virus from bats would be most likely to happen, it would be Wuhan.

Matt Ridley , “ The case for the lab leak theory ” at Spiked Online (June 27, 2022)

Incidentally, the U.S. has quietly stopped funding a number of overseas virus labs. Naw. Nothing to see, folks. Move along.

Or maybe … not!

You may also wish to read: We’re not your lab rats any more.

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At Mind Matters News: Why free will is philosophically and scientifically sound

Michael Egnor

As Michael Egnor points out in a recent podcast, it has been nearly a century since determinism

Michael Egnor: … But even irrespective of the theories, it’s a fact, and I should point out not merely a theoretical construct, but an experimental fact that determinism in physics is not true. And a materialist like Coyne, who bases his rather bizarre rejection of free will on an assertion that physics has proved determinism to be true, when in fact since the 1930s, it’s been very clear according to quantum mechanics, that determinism is not true and since the 1980s, it’s been proven experimentally, really makes you wonder how well Coyne understands the science. I mean, his metaphysics is off the wall, but his science is about a century behind.

Casey Luskin: Coyne is, of course, a diehard defender of Neo-Darwinism, which many scientists are now beginning to reject. Even mainstream evolutionary scientists are becoming very critical of Neo-Darwinism and of course, Coyne has had his own debates with some of those folks. He’s dead set on defending the modern version of Darwin’s 19th-century theory.

News, “Why free will is philosophically and scientifically sound” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that, though free will may be unpopular with atheist thinkers like biologist Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, science doesn’t refute it.

You may also wish to read: Is consciousness the sort of thing that could have evolved? Researchers Simona Ginsberg and Eva Jablonka have written a book attempting to trace the evolution of consciousness. Material processes cannot, for example, account for the power to grasp infinity or perfection — which are not material ideas. (Michael Egnor)

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At Socrates in the City: Eric Metaxas and Stephen Meyer Tackle Science and God

Jun 29, 2022: “Bestselling authors Eric Metaxas and Stephen Meyer have a free-wheeling discussion of science, faith, and God during a special episode of Socrates in the City taped live at the 2022 Westminster Conference on Science and Faith in the greater Philadelphia area in April 2022. Meyer is author of “The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.” Eric Metaxas is a radio talk show host and author of Is Atheism Dead?

Eric Metaxas is the author of a number of books and the host of a nationally syndicated radio program, The Eric Metaxas Show. Steve Meyer is the author of The Return of the God Hypothesis.

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At Mind Matters News: The Software of the Gaps: An excerpt from Non-Computable You

Non-Computable You: What You Do That
Artificial Intelligence Never Will
(Discovery Institute Press, June 2022) is available  here.

In his just-published book, Robert J. Marks takes on claims that consciousness is emerging from AI and that we can upload our brains:

… some hold that as code becomes more and more complex, human-like emergent attributes such as consciousness will appear. (“Emergent” means that an entity develops properties its parts do not have on their own — a sum greater than the parts can account for.) This is sometimes called “Strong AI.”

Those who believe in the coming of Strong AI argue that non-algorithmic consciousness will be an emergent property as AI complexity ever increases. In other words, consciousness will just happen, as a sort of natural outgrowth of the code’s increasing complexity.

Such unfounded optimism is akin to that of a naive young boy standing in front of a large pile of horse manure. He becomes excited and begins digging into the pile, flinging handfuls of manure over his shoulders. “With all this horse poop,” he says, “there must be a pony in here somewhere!”

News, “The Software of the Gaps: An excerpt from Non-Computable You” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: He reminds us of the tale of the boy who dug through a pile of manure because he was sure that … underneath all that poop, there MUST surely be a pony!

You may also wish to read the earlier excerpt published here: Why you are not — and cannot be — computable. A computer science prof explains in a new book that computer intelligence does not hold a candle to human intelligence. In this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Non-Computable You, Robert J. Marks shows why most human experience is not even computable.

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Another paper on the uses of junk DNA — which means something else for Dan Graur to be grumpy about

A friend points us to a new open-access paper pointing to further examples of the expression of “pseudogenes” (junk DNA), contrary to theory.

Readers may recall evolutionary biologist Dan Graur who at one time was past any effort to “do politeness” any more about the ENCODE findings that implied that junk DNA is not nearly as prevalent as supposed. This should give him something to complain about. Whoops, it did:

Why can’t pan-selectionists (a nicer word than ignoramuses) understand that in additional to “transcriptional noise” there is “translational noise,” and that “low protein expression” does not mean “function.”https://t.co/KMgrzknpuM

— Dan Graur (@DanGraur) June 30, 2022

Our friend notes, Graur will probably now want to say something like: just because the pseudo-pseudogene’s protein product is functional, doesn’t mean its function is important…

Note: Yes, many have favored the theory of junk DNA: Because that vast sunken library of dead information was a slam dunk for Darwinism, as politically powerful theistic evolutionist Francis Collins was quick to point out in The Language of God. (2007). To say nothing of atheist cultural icon Richard Dawkins here, Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne (here), and unidirectional skeptic Michael Shermer (here). Notice how that history is quietly being erased.

Otherwise, it would be necessary to acknowledge that what many regarded as a correct prediction from Darwinism is not true.

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At Mind Matters News: The human brain has neural networks not found in lab mice

They are complex special networks whose purpose is silencing other neurons:

Moritz Helmstaedter of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, asks a telling question: “So, is it primarily the fact that our brains are 1,000-fold larger, house 1000-fold more nerve cells that allows us to play chess and write children’s books, which mice arguably cannot do?”

In a just-published study that he led, the researchers examined human tissue removed by neurosurgeons during operations. Studying it, they discover neuron networks (connectomes) unknown in mouse brains:

Helmstaedter and his team have discovered that human cortical networks have evolved a novel neuronal network type that is essentially absent in mice. This neuronal network relies on abundant connections between inhibitory interneurons… “This suggests to us an almost ten-fold expansion of an interneuron-to-interneuron network,” says Sahil Loomba, one of the studies’ lead authors. – Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, “Silence for Thought: Special Interneuron Networks in the Human Brain” at Sciencedaily (June 23, 2022) The paper requires a fee or subscription.

The interesting part is that this network exists mainly in order to silence other neurons…

News, “The human brain has neural networks not found in lab mice” at Mind Matters News (June 29, 2022)

Takehome: Researchers theorize that these interneuron networks help us focus on complex tasks where we must keep many different factors in play.

You may also wish to read:

Another new communications network discovered in the human brain. Our brains are smarter than we thought.
Oscillations of over 100 Hertz synchronize across several brain regions. That may help us understand brain diseases better.

and

“What neuroscientists now know about how memories are born and die” Where, exactly are our memories? Are modern media destroying them? Could we erase them if we wanted to?

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