Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 579

The Woeful State of Modern Debate

In debate after debate I’m sure we’ve all noticed that some people continually recycle the same statements over and over as if those statements represent something more than emotion-laden rhetoric that hasn’t already been factually and logically refuted or otherwise sufficiently responded to.  While this is hardly surprising, what has piqued my interest are discussions involving the election of Donald J. Trump and abortion, I suppose because those subjects carry a great deal of emotional weight for many people. I think the reaction to these subjects reveals something extremely interesting and dangerous to society.

I’m not just talking about atheists/materialists here, but people in general. In every single discussion I had with anyone not supporting Trump, their reaction to Trump was not one of cool political discourse, but of outright hate.  They hated Trump.  However, not a single one of them could give me even a single policy position of the candidate.  Not a single one of them could tell me anything whatsoever about his history other than that he was a rich businessman and star of The Apprentice.  None of them had ever even watched a single, whole Trump rally video. Having a discussion with them brought out all the negative characterizations of Trump you find/found everywhere in various media outlets, including comments about his “orange” skin and  comb-over hair.

Similarly, when having a “debate” about abortion, the same emotion-laden polemic is used over and over.  Recently, on this blog, some commenters offer supposed “righteous indignation” about how pro-life advocates act (or rather, in their eyes, refuse to act appropriately) in response to what they refer to as a “holocaust” – the mass-murder of the unborn.  Others react with emotional, “shaming” and “virtue-signalling” talking points about “reproductive rights” and “patriarchical oppression”. Ignoring the scientific fact that human life is known to begin at conception, they talk about other points of the growth of a human from conception that they personally feel would be better marks for granting human right protections – like where they think the fetus might be self-aware, or feel pain, or upon birth.  While birth, unlike the other points, is not a vague marker, it suffers from other, logical problems as far as being the best marker fo application of human rights, rendering it simply an arbitrary point after conception with respect to application of human rights.

Now, what do these rhetorical responses and positions have in common? They are all based on subjective feelings and arbitrary points of factual reference that support those arbitrary feelings. In other words, it is the personal, subjective feeling that grounds many views, not relevant facts, grounded principles and logical examination.

For example, attacks on Trump and protests against him are not based upon substantive principles, relevant facts and logical examination; if they were, one would realize that unless they have known a person for many years, they are not likely to have a good understanding of that person’s character or views. Certainly, there is no logical or principled basis for taking a few minutes of snippets of what anyone says – especially in private in certain situations – and using those snippets to form a supposedly valid opinion of a person’s entire history or character.  Also, ignoring the relevant facts – the actual entire history of that person in word and deed, and their official statements and policy points unfiltered by perhaps biased interpretation – is at best an unconscious effort to protect one’s negative feelings about that person.

In our other example, some here have made the claim that making abortion illegal might not, in the long term, reduce the number of abortions. If we assume it is a fact (and it is hardly that), it is an irrelevant one with respect to the arguments actually being made about abortion – that accepting and promoting the killing of innocent human life is corrosive to a decent culture based on unalienable human rights.  Pointing out that they themselves would act violently to stop the killing of an innocent and so pro-lifers cannot actually consider abortion the killing of an innocent because they are not reacting violently is nothing more than emotional, self-righteous rhetoric and a false comparison.

There is a principle involved here: that all humans have unalienable rights.  Defenders of abortion make the claim that there are some situations where humans should not have such rights.  This reasoning necessarily opens the door to the subjective view that this group of humans or that group of humans are not protected by human rights.  One might say that a human without apparent self-awareness doesn’t deserve that right; but what is the “self-awareness” marker other than an arbitrarily-assigned category?  Post-birth humans – another arbitrarily assigned category.  How about the comatose?  Severely autistic?  Deformed? One can make the case that if you are missing a limb, then you aren’t “fully” human. Who gets to define what is “human” enough to be deserving of human rights?  Whatever government is in power? Whatever the majority decides?

If we go down that path of reasoning, then the holocaust is – according to that line of reasoning – no different than abortion; government and society defining a category of human life as “not human enough to deserve the basic protection of their right to life” and thus creating the legal and moral freedom to exterminate that class of human life.  Moral subjectivism only exacerbates the hypocrisy of the abortionist argument; if it is society that decides what is and is not human life, then abortion is exactly like the holocaust.

This post-modernist moral relativism renders all “social justice” positions inherently absurd and hypocritical; if I can identify as anything and expect acceptance and tolerance for my position, how then does one justify spewing hate and intolerance for those who self-identify even as racists, misogynists and homophobes? If they can hate Trump, I can hate Clinton.  If they can hate patriarchy, I can hate equality. If they can hate homophobes, then by post-modernist moral subjectivism I am certainly entitled to hate homosexuals.

If there are no fundamental principles or relevant facts from we all agree to submit to and from which we agree to draw rational conclusions, all one is left with is the whim of subjective feelings and arbitrarily organized references to support those feelings.  What that ends up looking like is reliance upon rhetoric, invective, intimidation and, ultimately, violence.  It also ends up looking like what we have on this site – a plethora of people utterly incapable of making a rational argument based upon logical inference derived from principle and relevant fact, ending up in self-conflicting absurdities and hypocrisies.

I’m at a loss at how to begin debating those who have absolutely no understanding of critical reasoning; it’s not like you can educate them in such skill during the debate; they have no idea what you are objecting to.  They don’t comprehend arguments based on principle.  They think any fact that feels like it supports their view actually helps their argument or actually rebuts the other person’s.  They think a comparison of feelings  and hypothetical personal reactions is a valid argument.  They think mockery and personal insult is a valid form of debate.  They think shaming and virtue-signalling is the be-all and end-all of public discourse.  They think some ideas should not be discussed and actually think free speech is “hate” speech.  IOW, as soon as you argue for Trump, or against abortion, you are automatically beyond the realm of civil discourse and the only appropriate response is shaming and ridiculing.

It’s bizarre.  At times, the responses are so orthogonal to rational debate that it requires a massive effort just to explain how their point is entirely irrelevant, but doing so makes no difference because their position is entirely rooted in subjective feelings and arbitrary associations.

Armand Jacks and RVB8 don’t even understand that they have just shown, by their own reasoning, under their own worldview, and according to their own subjective, post-conception, arbitrary ideas about the application of human rights, that the Holocaust and abortion are morally, ethically and legally the same exact thing, even while insisting (because of their feelings) that they are not. This is the woeful state of modern debate.

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Cells’ garbage disposal also has another job

From ScienceDaily:

A subset of protein complexes whose role has long been thought to consist only of chemically degrading and discarding of proteins no longer needed by cells appears to also play a role in sending messages from one nerve cell to another, researchers report.

…

Paper. (paywall) Together, the researchers say, these findings suggest that the neuronal membrane-bound proteasome is vitally important for cell signaling. Their experiments bring up a host of new questions about what specific proteins this complex is degrading, what compounds it’s expelling and what happens when this system breaks down, Ramachandran says. He and Margolis, he says, are already discovering links between glitches in this system and neurological disease, such as neurodegeneration.

“Realistically, understanding the different facets of this newly discovered proteasome could take a lifetime to work out,” he says. – Kapil V Ramachandran, Seth S Margolis. A mammalian nervous-system-specific plasma membrane proteasome complex that modulates neuronal function. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nsmb.3389 More.

Right. More layers of entirely accidental complexity that could take a lifetime to figure out.

See also: Discovery of 7 times higher complexity of protein folding!

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Advance multicellular plant-like fossils appeared “much earlier than thought”

fossil thread-like algae 1.6 bya/Stefan Bengtson; CCAL

From ScienceDaily:

Scientists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History have found fossils of 1.6 billion-year-old probable red algae. The spectacular finds, publishing on 14 March in the open access journal PLOS Biology, indicate that advanced multicellular life evolved much earlier than previously thought.

…

Discoveries of early multicellular eukaryotes have been sporadic and difficult to interpret, challenging scientists trying to reconstruct and date the tree of life. The oldest known red algae before the present discovery are 1.2 billion years old. The Indian fossils, 400 million years older and by far the oldest plant-like fossils ever found, suggest that the early branches of the tree of life need to be recalibrated.

“The ‘time of visible life’ seems to have begun much earlier than we thought,” says Stefan Bengtson.

The presumed red algae lie embedded in fossil mats of cyanobacteria, called stromatolites, in 1.6 billion-year-old Indian phosphorite. The thread-like forms were discovered first, and when the then doctoral student Therese Sallstedt investigated the stromatolites she found the more complex, fleshy structures.Paper. (public access) – Stefan Bengtson, Therese Sallstedt, Veneta Belivanova, Martin Whitehouse. Three-dimensional preservation of cellular and subcellular structures suggests 1.6 billion-year-old crown-group red algae. PLOS Biology, 2017; 15 (3): e2000735 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2000735

More.

Less and less time for purely Darwinian explanations, but we digress.

See also: Plants moved to land earlier than thought

and

Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

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Mathematical model says humans’ larger brains evolved via food, not culture

From ScienceDaily:

Animals with high cognitive ability also have relatively large brains, but the factors that drive evolution of big brains remain unclear. Scientists have hypothesized that ecological, social, and cultural factors could each play a role. Most of these hypotheses have not been formalized mathematically, but doing so would allow scientists to refine their tests.

To address the issue, Mauricio González-Forero of University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and colleagues developed a mathematical model that predicts how large the human brain should be at different stages of an individual’s life, depending on different possible evolutionary scenarios.

The model relies on the assumption that the brain expends some energy on cognitive skills that allow an individual to extract energy from the environment (food), which in turn helps the brain grow. Given natural selection, it predicts how much energy is used to support brain growth at different ages under different biological settings.

The researchers used the model to test a simple scenario in which social interactions and cultural factors are excluded, revealing the influence of ecological factors alone. In the scenario, a human must hunt or gather food alone, but may receive some help from its mother while it is still young.

Under those specifications, the hypothetical human brain grew as big as ancient humans’ brains are thought to have grown, and the slow growth rate matched that of modern human brains. This runs counter to prevailing thought, which holds that social and cultural influences are required to achieve these sizes and growth rates. (public access) Paper. – Mauricio González-Forero, Timm Faulwasser, Laurent Lehmann. A model for brain life history evolution. PLOS Computational Biology, 2017; 13 (3): e1005380 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005380More.

One difficulty with the model is that it is hypothetical. At each stage that enabled a gain in intelligence, ecological, social, and cultural factors would become more evident and important. Whether brains could get larger in the absence of these factors may amount to answering a question that isn’t part of the overall puzzle. Still, interesting.

See also: Faster metabolism enabled larger brains?

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An elusive fifth force of nature?

3-D impression of dark matter via Hubble

From Philip Ball at Nautilus:

The hypothesis of a fifth force is, then, anything but exhausted. In fact it’s fair to say that any observations in fundamental physics or cosmology that can’t be explained by our current theories—by the Standard Model of particle physics or by general relativity—are apt to get physicists talking about new forces or new types of matter, such as dark matter and dark energy. That’s simply the way physics has always worked: When all else fails, you place a new piece on the board and see how it moves. Sure, we haven’t yet seen any convincing evidence for a fifth force, but neither have we seen a direct sign of dark matter or supersymmetry or extra dimensions, and not for want of looking. We have ruled out a great deal of the territory that a fifth force might inhabit, but there is still plenty of terrain left in shadow.More.

A layperson feels prompted to ask, if things that just gotta be true ain’t, could we just be on the wrong track? Hidden assumption guiding the search could mean getting nowhere faster than ever.

See also: Physics flowering — yet in one of its “deepest funks”?

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Have neuroscientist been on the wrong track about the brain for centuries?

Well, how about this: Would another hundred and fifty articles offering brand new theories of consciousness, each newer than the last, cause you to consider that possibility? Or will you just say, a decade from now, “That’s how science progresses!”

From neuroscientist Henrik Jörntell at the Conversation:

Understanding the human brain is arguably the greatest challenge of modern science. The leading approach for most of the past 200 years has been to link its functions to different brain regions or even individual neurons (brain cells). But recent research increasingly suggests that we may be taking completely the wrong path if we are to ever understand the human mind.

…

But what if we instead considered the possibility that all brain functions are distributed across the brain and that all parts of the brain contribute to all functions? If that is the case, correlations found so far may be a perfect trap of the intellect. We then have to solve the problem of how the region or the neuron type with the specific function interacts with other parts of the brain to generate meaningful, integrated behaviour. So far, there is no general solution to this problem – just hypotheses in specific cases, such as for recognising people.

…

Some researchers now believe the brain and its diseases in general can only be understood as an interplay between tremendous numbers of neurons distributed across the central nervous system. The function of any one neuron is dependent on the functions of all the thousands of neurons it is connected to. These, in turn, are dependent on those of others. The same region or the same neuron may be used across a huge number of contexts, but have different specific functions depending on the context. More.

Consciousness would require at least that and much more, but the search for modules will continue unabated. People like to read about it.

See also: Physicist: Regrettably, materialism can’t explain mind

Split brain does NOT lead to split consciousness? What? After all the naturalist pop psych lectures we paid good money for at the U? Well, suckers r’ us.

Does the ability to “split” our brains help us understand consciousness? (Apparently not.)

What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness

Or else: Consciousness as a state of matter

Rocks have minds?

Researcher: Never mind the “hard problem of consciousness”: The real one is… “Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind”

Searle on Consciousness “Emerging” from a Computer: “Miracles are always possible.”

Psychology Today: Latest new theory of consciousness A different one from the above.

Evolution bred a sense of reality out of us

Claim: Science is afraid of animal consciousness. Why? Won’t crackpot theories work as well as they do for human consciousness?

So then: Question: Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness?

Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away

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Peter and Rosemary Grant (of Darwin’s finches’ fame) reply to their critics.

Readers may remember the Darwinian icon of the Galapagos finches that were supposed to be turning into new species but then just drifted back and forth.

One would think the finches didn’t give a hoot about Science.

From Evolution News & Views:

In a new Perspective piece in Science Magazine, “Watching Speciation in Action,” they show that they are not the only ones who have witnessed the origin of species. Beginning with the Darwin quote about “grandeur in this view of life” that evolves, they describe a number of studies like theirs that illustrate organisms that have varied and diversified from parent stock. Let’s begin by listing the examples and what is known about them, both genetically and phenotypically. These can be considered their finest “icons of evolution” for 2017.

The list includes

11. High-altitude humans. They say that Tibetans may have obtained adaptation to high altitude via interbreeding with Denisovans.

12. Sunflowers. Members of Helianthus colonized salt marshes via “transgressive segregation,” a form of hybridization whereby individuals can “colonize novel habitats where neither parental lineage can survive.” – More.

It doesn’t amount to much and the Grants admit that, to their credit. The problem is, there doesn’t seem to be any reliable science-based way of determining even what a new species is. So one is always hearing these legends instead. But, probably, Darwinism benefits from indefinitely putting off addressing the problem.

See also: Redefining species: Nuclear vs. mitochondrial genes in birds

and

Nothing says “Darwin snob” like indifference to the mess that the entire concept of speciation is in

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Do Christians believe that there could not be life on other planets?

In a survey article of centuries of views, Jon Garvey offers at Hump of the Camel:

God might indeed decide to make life on earth a unique case, and the vastness of a cosmos uninhabited by other physical beings a matter for himself alone. Indeed, one of the intriguing aspects of cosmic fine tuning is the realisation that a vast universe is necessary to enable the conditions a tiny inhabited world like ours requires. God’s prodigality in doing so much for us would make as plausible, and inconclusive, a case. Yet Chalmers once more shows that extraterrestrial life poses no inherent problem whatsoever for Christianity. Neither, though, does a universe in which life is unique to the earth – a situation (presently the only one for which actual evidence exists) that in contrast poses a big problem for metaphysical naturalism.More.

One can’t help wondering why the “faith problem” is being manufactured in some quarters. Conceivably, rumoured budget cutbacks at space agencies will get people thinking about problems where research might actually help instead.

See also: Suzan Mazur: NASA, tax dollars, space aliens, and religion… Of course, it’s yet to be determined that most religious people have much invested in the matter one way or the other, relative to their irreligious neighbours.

and

NASA cares what your religion thinks about ET One would expect that those world religions that care much one way or the other if NASA finds bacteria in space could fund their own examination of the question.

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Dark matter: What if gravity just doesn’t stick to the rules?

Hubble image captures what dark matter is supposed to be.

From Mark Anderson at New Scientist:

Fresh suspicions have reopened the case against dark matter, forcing a fundamental rethink of the familiar force that keeps our feet on the ground

…

But what if we never really knew gravity at all? What if out there, beyond where we can easily keep our eye on it, the universal force doesn’t stick to the rules? (paywall) More.

It’s hard to know what to make of the question. Whatever gravity does is the rules.

See also: A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion

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Biologist Wayne Rossiter on Joshua Swamidass’ claim that entropy = information

From Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, at Shadow of Oz:

Swamidass surprises us with a very counter-intuitive statement:

“Did you know that information = entropy? This means the 2nd law of thermodynamics guarantees that information content will increase with time, unless we do something to stop it.”

…

Of course, he is arguing much more than just the observation that entropy = information. He’s arguing that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics guarantees an increase in information. This seems very sloppy to me. Yes, if we consider time as a variable, then the universe will develop pockets of increased information (complexity?), while still experiencing a global loss of information and complexity. The universe putatively began as a maximally dense, maximally hot locus. As it expands, heat and potential energy will dissipate, even if locally, structure and information emerges.

In some ways, Swamidass’s argument sounds similar to that of Lawrence Krauss (a devout nonbeliever). Swamidass is basically arguing that the universe begins at maximum energy, but minimum complexity (no information-rich structures, just the simplest atoms–hydrogen and helium). It then moves through stages of more complex (information-rich) structures, even as it loses available energy. It then ends largely as it began, and those complex structures reduce and decay back to a uniformly distributed universe, devoid of free energy, and the universe becomes a “sparse soup of particles and radiation.”It emerges as simplicity and ends as simplicity.More.

If Swamidass (or any similar person is funded by Templeton), he can argue anything he wants, including any form of fake physics. Making sense is optional.

Sorry, gotta go fill up another trash bag full of suddenly appearing Boltzmann brains … Quite the plague this year.

See also: 2016 worst year ever for “fake physics”?

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