Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 58

Science mag goes bonkers on abortion, and related stories

At The Scientist, we are informed, “Scientists Predict “Brain Drain” From States That Ban Abortion: Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, numerous researchers have announced plans to either vacate or decline career opportunities in states where abortion is or will soon be illegal.” Well, if the right to [ … ] live babies matters so much to them, the rest of us might think the bargain worthwhile. Although, later in the article, we read:

It’s unclear how many scientists will follow through with their stated plans to leave and avoid abortion-banning states or to leave the country altogether, and it may take years for the effects to emerge in enrollment and hiring data. Many may find such declarations impossible or infeasible to act upon. Amanda Meshey, a cancer biology graduate student at the University of South Florida who tweeted in 2019 that she would leave the country if Roe v. Wade was overturned, tells The Scientist over email that, despite the great personal risk she now feels, she and her husband don’t have the financial freedom to pack up and leave. Additionally, she says that doing so would mean abandoning both of their PhDs altogether.

Dan Robitzski, “Scientists Predict “Brain Drain” From States That Ban Abortion” at The Scientist (June 30, 2022)

Stop and think about what’s being said here… The person who contacted The Scientist, giving her name, wants to live where she can [ … ]

By the way, the vast majority of biologists believe that human life begins at conception (though the researcher who did the study got into trouble for asking).

Okay. As noted earlier, at least one pundit believes that the abortion people did not state strongly enough that they do believe that abortion is killing. “When “pro-life” forces agitate against feticide on the basis that it is killing, pro-abortion feminists should be able to acknowledge, without shame, that yes, of course it is.”

U.S. President Joe Biden apparently acknowledges that very thing:

Joe Biden: “abort a child”pic.twitter.com/Kxr2D537LZ

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 1, 2022

However, some abortion advocates still think that emphasizing the “child” part is a mistake: Their colleagues may have gone a bit overboard on that theme. At Unherd, a writer mourns the demise of Bill Clinton’s formula for appealing to the center: Abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare”:.

And yet, in the past 10 years, “safe, legal and rare” has fallen out of favour, as arguments emerged in the more language-obsessed corners of the Left that the “rare” part was unduly stigmatising. “It posits that having an abortion is a bad decision and one that a pregnant person shouldn’t have to make”, one activist wrote last year, in an essay demanding the phrase be retired.

It’s hard to overstate the utter self-sabotaging lunacy of this argument, which not only undermined one of the most popular lines of party messaging in decades but is also farcically nonsensical: “safe, legal, and rare” are surely a solid and desirable set of criteria for any medical procedure that is both unpleasant and unplanned, as abortions (but not only abortions) invariably are. And yet, the argument prevailed: by the time Hillary ran for president in 2016, the word “rare” had been excised from the Democratic party platform.

Kat Rosenfield, “The Left killed the pro-choice coalition” at Unherd (June 29, 2022)

“Rare” is apparently not a Woke value, even if it is a selling point with the culture:

Goodbye, “rare”. Goodbye, “women”. Goodbye, “choice” — the beating heart of the movement, now categorised as “harmful language” — and goodbye to the allies who favoured these terms, now severed and drifting away from the movement like Inuit elders who have outlived their usefulness, cast onto an ice floe to die.

Kat Rosenfield, “The Left killed the pro-choice coalition” at Unherd (June 29, 2022)

Given the rapid advance of euthanasia, the “ice floe” image Rosenfield provides of allies like herself is more apt than she probably realizes.

Time will tell but the current trend to sever the relationship between “women” and “pregnancy” altogether (which Rosenfield goes on to discuss) does not sound mainstream.

One group we don’t hear much from, of course, is the children who survived abortion and lived to grow up. Theyare an awkward problem. The natural instinct of an abortion supporter must surely be to wish that they had just been quietly killed despite their demonstrated viability. But the advance of euthanasia in jurisdictions favorable to the Woke point of view will doubtless take care of that.

You may also wish to read: The Woke without their makeup… After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Roe (abortion on demand everywhere) unconstitutional, the elite Woke have been rampaging generally – but against one judge in particular. Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas is black and, wouldn’t you know …

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

At Mind Matters News: 1. Why Infinity Does Not Exist in Reality

Robert J. Marks: A few examples will show the absurd results that come from assuming that infinity exists in the world around us as it does in math:

Cantor’s theory of the infinite can be explained, starting with the lowly shepherd tending sheep. Imagine a shepherd who does not count well. He gathers stones until the number of stones is equal to the number of sheep he is tending. The set of stones is said to have the same size, or cardinality, as the set of sheep. If there are ten sheep, the size of the set of sheep is ten and the shepherd picks up ten stones. The size of the set of sheep is the same as the size of the set of stones because there is a one-to-one correspondence. At the end of the day, the shepherd compares the number of stones to the number of sheep. If the number of the stones is the same as the number of sheep, no sheep have been lost. Sheep #1 corresponds to stone 1, sheep #2 to stone 2, sheep #3 to stone 3 all the way up to the tenth sheep…

A set with a true infinite size is the set of counting numbers.

{ 1,2,3,4,…}.

The infinite size of this set is said to be the Hebrew letter aleph: . Let’s play around. Take away the first number in this set, namely 1, to get the set

{2,3,4,5,…}.

Even though we’ve made the original set smaller in one sense, both sets have the same size. Think of sheep and stones. Sheep number 1 now maps to stone #2. Sheep number 2 maps to stone #3. Sheep 3 to stone #4 etc. The sets never end so this correspondence goes on forever. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the two infinite sets so the size of both sets is identical.

This result should strike you as ludicrous. The infinite size of the sets might be the same, but the diminished set is clearly smaller than the set of counting numbers in another sense. This is weird. Let’s apply this same simple idea to the infinite. We’ll show that doing so leads to ludicrous conclusions. Such conclusions are common when dealing with infinities.

Robert J. Marks , “1. Why Infinity Does Not Exist in Reality” at Mind Matters News

But this is nothing compared to what happens when Dr. Marks gets to Hilbert’s Hotel …

Takehome: Robert J. Marks: In a series of five posts, I explain the difference between what infinity means — and doesn’t mean — as a concept.

Next: Infinity illustrates that the universe has a beginning. The age of the universe is shown to necessarily be finite if ridiculous properties of infinity are to be avoided.

You may also wish to read: Yes, you can manipulate infinity in math. The hyperreals are bigger (and smaller) than your average number — and better! (Jonathan Bartlett)

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Four things physicists still wonder about the Higgs boson

Scientists have learned a lot about the Higgs boson in the decade since they discovered it. But intriguing questions remain.

When the news came, on July 4, 2012, it moved some scientists to tears. Others jumped and cheered. After decades of anticipation, physicists had at last discovered the Higgs boson. 

In the years since that initial detection, physicists have become more and more familiar with this fundamental, force-carrying particle that is produced by the invisible field that gives particles mass. They’ve improved measurements of the Higgs boson’s mass, width, spin, couplings to different particles and other characteristics. They’ve gotten more precise measurements than they expected to be able to make. 

Yet there’s still a lot to learn. Most measurements of the Higgs haven’t yet reached the precision scientists need to differentiate between models that could lead to new insights and discoveries. Some aspects of the Higgs boson haven’t even been probed yet. 

Today, physicists are continuing to refine their measurements—and even develop ideas for future colliders—in order to fully unveil the mysteries of the Higgs boson and its place in the universe. 

1. Does the Higgs boson interact with itself?

One of the biggest questions about the Higgs is how it might interact, or couple, with itself. 

Experiments have shown the Higgs couples with other particles, including a menagerie of fundamental particles like the W and Z bosons, quarks, taus and muons. According to the Standard Model, it’s also expected to couple with itself. Uncovering the exact details of how this happens could help physicists further refine the Standard Model, and even shed light on the evolution of the early universe and the matter and antimatter imbalance. 

2. How does the Higgs couple to other particles?

While physicists don’t yet know if the Higgs couples to itself, they do know it couples to other particles. In some cases—as with the top quark, the heaviest of the Standard Model particles—the coupling is quite well understood. But physicists are just starting to get a handle on how much other particles, like the comparatively lighter muon, interact with Higgs bosons. 

How much a given particle will couple with a Higgs is predicted by the Standard Model and is related to the particle’s mass: The more massive the particle, the greater the coupling. So far, measurements of couplings match these predictions. But the precision of these measurements isn’t yet great enough to see if there could be any deviations from the Standard Model. Knowing exactly how the Higgs couples can help scientists understand how particles get their mass.

3. Are there other Higgs particles?

So far, physicists have found only one Higgs boson, which is what the Standard Model predicts. But some alternative theories that extend the Standard Model call for many more types of Higgs particles.  

“There is no reason why there shouldn’t be more,” says Sally Dawson, a theoretical particle physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “There’s a whole host of possibilities on what that could look like.” 

4. Is the Higgs connected to dark matter or other unusual particles?

Because the Higgs boson helps explain where mass comes from, many scientists think it should interact with dark matter: the mysterious substance that seems to be connected with everyday matter only through gravity. 

“The Higgs could be the portal between us and this dark sector that could hide dark matter,” Gonzalez Suarez says. 

Certain theories predict that dark matter interacts with normal matter by swapping Higgs bosons. If this is the case, then a collision that produces Higgs particles could also create dark matter particles. 

Fascinating research into the fundamental aspects of our universe! If past trends in physics and cosmological discoveries are any indication, we can expect that new findings will uncover further evidence of fine-tuning within our universe.

Complete article at Symmetry.

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

At Evolution News: More on Self-Replicating Machines

Professor of Mathematics, Granville Sewell, writes:

Imagine that we did somehow manage to design, say, a fleet of cars with fully automated car-building factories inside, able to produce new cars — and not just normal new cars, but new cars with fully automated car-building factories inside them. Who could seriously believe that if we left these cars alone for a long time, the accumulation of duplication errors made as they reproduced themselves would result in anything other than devolution, and eventually could even be organized by selective forces into more advanced automobile models?

A More Careful Look

But I don’t think this makes sufficiently clear what a difficult task it would be to create truly self-replicating cars. So let’s look at this more carefully. We know how to build a simple Ford Model T car. Now let’s build a factory inside this car, so that it can produce Model T cars automatically. We’ll call the new car, with the Model T factory inside, a “Model U.” A car with an entire automobile factory inside, which never requires any human intervention, is far beyond our current technology, but it doesn’t seem impossible that future generations might be able to build a Model U. 

Of course, the Model U cars are not self-replicators, because they can only construct simple Model T’s. So let’s add more technology to this car so that it can build Model U’s, that is, Model T’s with car-building factories inside. This new “Model V” car, with a fully automated factory inside capable of producing Model U’s (which are themselves far beyond our current technology), would be unthinkably complex. But is this new Model V now a self-replicator? No, because it only builds the much simpler Model U. The Model V species will become extinct after two generations, because their children will be Model U’s, and their grandchildren will be infertile Model T’s! 

So Back to Work 

Each time we add technology to this car, to move it closer to the goal of reproduction, we only move the goalposts, because now we have a more complicated car to reproduce. It seems that the new models would grow exponentially in complexity, and one begins to wonder if it is even theoretically possible to create self-replicating machines. Yet we see such machines all around us in the living world. You and I are two examples. And here we have ignored the very difficult question of where these cars get the metals and rubber and other raw materials they need to supply their factories.

Of course, materialists will say that evolution didn’t create advanced self-replicating machines directly. Instead, it only took a first simple self-replicator and gradually evolved it into more and more advanced self-replicators. But beside the fact that human engineers still have no idea how to create any “simple” self-replicating machine, the point is, evolutionists are attributing to natural causes the ability to create things much more advanced than self-replicating cars (for example, self-replicating humans), which seem impossible, or virtually impossible, to design. I conceded in my earlier post (and in my video “A Summary of the Evidence for Intelligent Design”) that human engineers might someday construct a self-replicating machine. But even if they do, that will not show that life could have arisen through natural processes. It will only have shown that it could have arisen through design.

For the rest of the article, see Evolution News.

Using Professor Sewell’s notation, what is needed for ongoing self-replication is a Model W that produces other Model W’s. Each Model W produces not just a sterile Model T, or a Model U that can only produce sterile Model T’s, nor even a Model V that can only produce a Model U. Perhaps we could call this fully self-replicating version a Model VW.ID.∞.

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Domesticated Rice: the Power of Artificial Selection.

I suspect that almost every week there’s at least one article published somewhere that undermines Darwinian theory.

Now using the term, ‘Darwinian theory’, might ruffle some people’s feathers. Yet, without Darwinian theory, neo-Darwinism makes no sense; it lacks any intellectual foundation. And, so, here we are inching towards the 200th anniversary of Origin of Species and 21st-Century evolutionary biologists remain saddled with 19th-Century thinking.

With that said, this “week’s” article comes from Phys.Org and it offers a newer understanding of rice domestication. We find out that the results of an international collaboration “suggest that the emergence of cultivated rice from wild rice plants is the result of three gene mutations that make the seeds (i.e. the grains of rice) fall from the plant less easily.” They tell us that they believe “the domestication of wild rice began when our ancestors discovered and started to cultivate rice plants that do not drop their seeds easily, paving the way for stable rice production.”

Now why should this be a problem for “Darwinian theory”? Because Darwin’s firm belief is that “natural selection” is much more powerful than even artificial, or human, selection. He says: “But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.”

So, the power of “natural selection” is a power always ready to act and one that is “immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts.” Yet, the researchers found that “each of the three mutations individually have little effect but when all three mutations are present the panicles of the rice plant retain more of their seeds- resulting in a greater crop yield.” It took humans, then, to “force” nature to go in a direction it desired. And when humans got involved, all three mutations could come together all at once.

In the, “Significance” portion of their abstract, the researchers speak of the ‘significance’ of their work: “We demonstrate that closed panicle formation controlled by SPR3 both increases yield and facilitates recruitment of sh4 and qSH3, which synergistically augment yield, leading to a stepwise model for rice domestication.”

Aren’t we told by evolutionary biologists that Mt. Improbable is climbed in a “step-wise” fashion. Well, here is a stepwise opportunity that natural selection didn’t take. It can be argued, rightly, that it is NOT in the best interest of the wild rice to stick to the plant and not fall down into the earth below where they might find a place to reproduce. However, it seems that a simple THREE-STEP progression is one that nature is unable to make. (Again, it can be argued that if such an occurrence takes place, then the wild type seed will have the advantage and so drive the domesticated type to extinction. Yet one would think that somewhere in the world this would have happened and that those studying nature would have run across them.) The scientists tell us this:

“Non-seed-shattering behavior” caused by sh4 and qSH3 mutations and “closed panicles” caused by the SPR3 mutation are completely unrelated characteristics, however the incidental collaboration between these characteristics is considered to be what enabled rice to become a crop.

They then add this parable from the 16th century Japanese warlord Mori Motonari:
“Motonari gave each of his three sons an arrow and they were able to break the individual arrows easily. However, a bundle of three arrows is stronger and by showing his sons that three arrows together could not be broken, he explained that the three of them should work together govern the land. In rice cultivars, three mutations that have little effect on their own incidentally work together—an important stepping stone towards the success of rice as a crop.”

Applied here, the parable tells us that “natural selection” can’t “find” domesticated rice–the force against it is like the three arrows: too strong for NS to break through. But humans, on the other hand, had very little difficulty in bringing about this change. So, if NS is really a power “immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts,” then why can artificial selection bring about what NS has not brought about in nature?

The dachshund and the Great Dane were not brought about by “Nature”. Has any fossils been recovered corresponding to these forms? Yet man has brought them about. Why does this 19th century way of thinking hold any influence in our 21st century world? Is it the intransigence of science?

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

At SciTech Daily: Rocket Lab Launches NASA’s CAPSTONE Mission to the Moon

A cubesat the size of microwave oven launched to space on June 28 from New Zealand by commercial company Rocket Lab and their Electron rocket. The small satellite will conduct tests to ensure the unusual lunar orbit proposed for NASA’s future Lunar Gateway is actually stable.

ILLUSTRATION OF GATEWAY IN LUNAR ORBIT. THE GATEWAY IS CRITICAL TO SUSTAINABLE LUNAR EXPLORATION AND WILL SERVE AS A MODEL FOR FUTURE MISSIONS TO MARS. CREDIT: NASA

The Gateway is a lunar space station that will support NASA’s Artemis program to return to the Moon and enable future missions to Mars. The unique orbit, called a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), is an elongated polar orbit that brings a spacecraft within 1,600 km (1,000 miles) of one lunar pole on its near pass and 70,000 km (43,500 miles) from the other pole every seven days. Because the orbit uses a balance point in the gravities of the Earth and the Moon, it is theorized that spacecraft flying from this type of orbit will require less propulsion capability for traveling to and from the Moon’s surface than other circular orbits and requires minimal energy to maintain.

CAPSTONE’s main mission is to attempt to establish that this location in space provides a stable and ideal location for a space station, as well as a staging area for missions to the Moon and beyond.

The spacecraft is currently in low Earth orbit, and is attached to Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon, an interplanetary third stage that will send CAPSTONE on its way to deep space. It will take about four months for it to reach the targeted lunar orbit.

“CAPSTONE is a pathfinder in many ways, and it will demonstrate several technology capabilities during its mission timeframe while navigating a never-before-flown orbit around the Moon,” said Elwood Agasid, project manager for CAPSTONE at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “CAPSTONE is laying a foundation for Artemis, Gateway, and commercial support for future lunar operations.”

SciTech Daily

Everything about this mission is intelligently designed. (Or is it merely a result of the forces of nature acting on atoms produced in the big bang and supernovae?)

What do you think about plans for humans to further establish a presence in interplanetary space?

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Found: The ‘holy grail of catalysis’—turning methane into methanol under ambient conditions using light

An international team of researchers, led by scientists at the University of Manchester, has developed a fast and economical method of converting methane, or natural gas, into liquid methanol at ambient temperature and pressure. The method takes place under continuous flow over a photo-catalytic material using visible light to drive the conversion.

Credit: ORNL/Jill Hemman

The method involves a continuous flow of methane/oxygen-saturated water over a novel metal-organic framework (MOF) catalyst. The MOF is porous and contains different components that each have a role in absorbing light, transferring electrons and activating and bringing together methane and oxygen. The liquid methanol is easily extracted from the water. Such a process has commonly been considered “a holy grail of catalysis” and is an area of focus for research supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Details of the team’s findings, titled “Direct photo-oxidation of methane to methanol over a mono-iron hydroxyl site,” are published in Nature Materials.

Naturally occurring methane is an abundant and valuable fuel, used for ovens, furnaces, water heaters, kilns, automobiles and turbines. However, methane can also be dangerous due to the difficulty of extracting, transporting and storing it.

Methane gas is also harmful to the environment when it is released or leaks into the atmosphere, where it is a potent greenhouse gas.

Industry has long sought an economical and efficient way to convert methane into methanol, a highly marketable and versatile feedstock used to make a variety of consumer and industrial products. This would not only help reduce methane emissions, but it would also provide an economic incentive to do so.

Methanol is a more versatile carbon source than methane and is a readily transportable liquid. It can be used to make thousands of products such as solvents, antifreeze and acrylic plastics; synthetic fabrics and fibers; adhesives, paint and plywood; and chemical agents used in pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals. The conversion of methane into a high-value fuel such as methanol is also becoming more attractive as petroleum reserves dwindle.

The complete article is available at Phys.org.

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

What is Life?

Without a good definition of life, how do we look for it on alien planets? Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist, and Sheref Mansy, a chemist, to learn more.

Scientists don’t really agree on a definition for life. We may recognize life instinctively most of the time, but any time we try to nail it down with set criteria, some stubborn counterexample spoils the effort. Still, can we really search for life on other worlds, or understand the earliest stages of life on this planet, if we don’t know what to look for? On this episode, Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist, astrobiologist and senior staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Earth and Planets Laboratory, along with Sheref Mansy, professor of chemistry at the University of Alberta, to learn more about how new taxonomies and a “cellular Turing test” might help us answer this essential question.

Transcript

Steven Strogatz (00:02): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about what it means to be alive. What is life? Can you define it? 

The question of what life is also matters, because if we’re going to be looking for life on other planets, don’t we need to at least have some idea of what we’re looking for?

Strogatz (01:40): Great. Well, let’s jump right into this. Why is it so hard for scientists to agree on something that, common-sensically, most people would say they already understand? Like, we know that a plant is alive and a rock is not. Why is it so hard to come to some agreement about the definition of life?

Hazen (01:57): Yeah, that seems strange, doesn’t it? Because we all know things that are alive. And we all know things that aren’t alive. And yet, it’s that gray area in between. So when we start saying, this is alive and this is dead, that’s fine. But when you say everything either has to be alive or dead, you’re setting up a false dichotomy. Because the taxonomy of what it means to be alive, I think is much, much richer than just dead or alive.

Hazen (02:29): Well, think about it, you have an origin of life. So, that’s a really good metric. There was a point in our Earth’s history when there wasn’t a single living thing. It was a blasted surface, it was covered with volcanoes and magma, and it was just basically inhospitable. There was no place that life could even get a tiny foothold. But gradually, as the Earth cooled, as oceans formed, as the atmosphere became more palatable for some kind of living thing, we think there was a process. A historical process, the origin of life, in which chemical systems became gradually more complex, became more interesting. And at some point, yes, there was a first cell that probably had proteins and DNA. But there had to be something before that, and where do you draw the line? It’s just difficult to say there’s an absolute point in space and time when there was no life, and then the next point in space and time there was.

(05:21): But life is very, very particular. And one thing I think we can say is, if something is alive, it’s going to put its energy into making a few molecules that work really well. And ignoring the vast number of molecules that don’t do much of anything. So, if you have a system that has the biological overprint, it’s going to show very specific groups of molecules. Maybe molecules that are what are called “chiral,” or left- and right-handed, maybe you’ll have a predominance of just the left-handed or just the right-handed molecule. Maybe you’ll have just strings of carbon that have multiples of 2, 2-4-6-8, rather than all the other odd numbers as well. Maybe you’ll have some other characteristic that wouldn’t form just by a random process, but forms by a selective process. So that’s what NASA was looking for. And I think that’s a smart thing to do.

Strogatz (06:13): That’s very interesting. The idea of chemical selectivity, you say, could be or at least was proposed by NASA to be a possible — well, nowadays, we speak of biosignatures, I don’t know if that would be the language they would have used at that time.

Hazen (06:26): Yeah, exactly right. That you’re looking for biosignatures. So I think if you see those chemical idiosyncrasies, you can say, wow, something really interesting happened here. And it doesn’t look like just the normal natural process, it looks like there was some real selection for function. Molecules that did a job, you know, they metabolized or they, they help build strong cellular structures or something like that. So, I think that’s what they were looking for.

Strogatz (10:31): So then, getting back to NASA for a second, are there are some kinds of things that you think they should be looking for when searching for life on other planets? Or should they just be kind of going for the most glorious, rich, bountiful taxonomy they can come up with?

Hazen (10:46): Aha! Why not both? Because, you think about it. One thing we do have a hunch about is habitability. That is sort of the range of temperature, pressure, composition. A water-rich world, a sunlit world, you have to have energy, you have to have various other criteria that allow chemical systems to do interesting things. If it’s, if it’s, everything’s molten, or a vapor, it’s much too hot. If everything’s frozen, and nothing moves, like on Pluto, then that seems much too cold. So, so we do think there’s some sweet spots. And we do think there are things we can look for, like liquid water, or some other fluid, but water is the only one that really seems to do the job.

(11:28) We need to look for carbon-based molecules, because it seems like carbon’s the only element that forms the kind of richly varied backbones that you need for the structures of what we think of as life. And I really don’t believe in cloud-based life or, you know, electronic life, or life in a plasma or something like that. I mean, that just, you don’t see the kinds of structures that you need, that spell what I think of as the complexity of a living system. So there are parameters, and that’s what NASA is looking for. Let’s look for water-rich worlds, let’s look for worlds that have the right kind of temperature and pressure and atmospheric composition. And rocks and minerals play a really interesting role. And they provide all sorts of chemical elements in addition to carbon, that might be essential for a complex chemical system.

Strogatz (15:39): Wow. It’s a cosmic thought. You know, I’m sort of encouraged by how quickly life started here. Speaking of geology, like let’s put it in a geological perspective. Give me the numbers, roughly, how old the Earth is and how soon it starts to teem with life.

Hazen (15:56): Sure. So, Earth began to form at 4.567 billion years ago. And it was not habitable for the first period of time. It may have had a window of habitability for a few tens of millions of years, and then that huge impact, the Theia impact that formed the moon, and that just smooshed everything — the whole planet was encircled by a magma ocean, glowing, red hot, that had to cool. So that may have been 4.45 billion years ago, I think, something on that order, maybe as recently as 4.4. But that’s the kind of extreme beginning date that we can think about. And we know that by 3.8, life was well established. We have stromatolites, we have other signs of life that were clearly there.

(16:47) So that’s a block of, what, 600 million years, but I think life started much, much more quickly. But that’s a hunch, I think probably we are looking at millions or tens of millions of years for a process to occur. If it’s going to happen, you know, chemistry, you’ve got a vast surface area of Earth, you’ve got millions of years to play with, you’ve got all different kinds of chemical systems and fluxes. And so, Earth is a great experimental laboratory for chemistry. And with hundreds of millions of years to play with over the entire surface of the planet. Wow, that’s, that’s a lot of combinations of chemicals you can try. And life pops out of it.

OK, that’s enough. This lengthy transcript contains much more dialog, but from a scientifically sensible point of view, I think we’ve reached the end of the track… “And life pops out of it.” What kind of science is that?! Surely, it’s not too difficult to understand how utterly improbable it is for even a single protein molecule to “pop out” of a random mix of abiotic ingredients, let alone a living cell, with its exponentially greater complexity.

The full transcript can be read at Quanta Magazine.

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Mars Curiosity Rover Collects Rock Samples Containing Key Ingredient Of Life

Dillon Burroughs at The Daily Wire reports:

Rock samples collected from Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover have revealed signs of key ingredients of life, according to a statement by the agency.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS via Getty Images

The Monday press release noted the discovery of high levels of organic carbon, a key basis for molecules measured for the first time on the red planet.

“Total organic carbon is one of several measurements [or indices] that help us understand how much material is available as feedstock for prebiotic chemistry and potentially biology,” said Jennifer Stern of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“We found at least 200 to 273 parts per million of organic carbon. This is comparable to or even more than the amount found in rocks in very low-life places on Earth, such as parts of the Atacama Desert in South America, and more than has been detected in Mars meteorites,” she added.

The original experiment was conducted in 2014, however, the research took multiple years of analysis to interpret the data and release the results, according to NASA.

A NASA report from earlier this year explains that “organic carbon” refers to the isotope C-12, which is preferentially used in living organisms:

For instance, living creatures on Earth use the smaller, lighter carbon-12 atom to metabolize food or for photosynthesis versus the heavier carbon-13 atom. Thus, significantly more carbon-12 than carbon-13 in ancient rocks, along with other evidence, suggests to scientists they’re looking at signatures of life-related chemistry. Looking at the ratio of these two carbon isotopes helps Earth scientists tell what type of life they’re looking at and the environment it lived in.

However, it’s relevant to note that just finding carbon-12 is not a signature of life. Carbon is the 4th most common element in the universe, and the C-12 isotope is about 90 times more naturally abundant than the C-13 isotope. As usual, the title of the press release unreasonably insinuates the likelihood of life signatures on Mars.

The Mars exploration program noted that “organic carbon on Mars does not prove the existence of life there because it can also come from nonliving sources, such as meteorites, volcanoes, or be formed in place by surface reactions.” Though organic carbon has been found on Mars before, the new measurement gives the total amount of organic carbon in the rock samples.

The news follows another NASA experiment that suggests the search for life on Mars may require digging deeper following the discovery that cosmic rays likely quickly destroy amino acids that would be found on the red planet’s surface.

As The Daily Wire previously reported, the discovery of amino acids on Mars would be a significant step in the search for Martian life, as they are a key component to building proteins in terrestrial life.

“Our results suggest that amino acids are destroyed by cosmic rays in the Martian surface rocks and regolith at much faster rates than previously thought,” Alexander Pavlov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said.

“Current Mars rover missions drill down to about two inches (around five centimeters). At those depths, it would take only 20 million years to destroy amino acids completely. The addition of perchlorates and water increases the rate of amino acid destruction even further,” he added.

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Michael Egnor: 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. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor responds:

In addition to the problem of intentionality, the capacity of human beings to reason and use intellect and will is an insurmountable obstacle for Darwinian theories of the evolution of consciousness. As Aristotle and scientists and philosophers who have followed his thinking have noted for millennia, the human capacity for abstract reasoning is inherently immaterial. No material explanation for the human capacity of reason is even conceivable.

For example, how can human beings contemplate “infinity” using physiological (material) processes in the brain? All material processes are finite and could not thereby account for thoughts about infinity. Nor can material processes explain the perfection inherent in certain mathematical concepts, such as triangularity. All material instantiations of triangularity are imperfect — lines aren’t perfectly straight and angles in actual (material) triangles don’t add up to exactly 180 degrees. Yet our abstract understanding of triangularity is perfect, in the sense that we understand triangularity as involving straight sides and 180 degree sums of angles.

Michael Egnor, “Is consciousness the sort of thing that could have evolved?” at Mind Matters News (June 28, 2022)

The book is Picturing the Mind (MIT Press, 2022). Here’s a free excerpt.

Takehome: Material processes cannot, for example, account for the power to grasp infinity or perfection — which are not material ideas.

Note: A common response among naturalists is to claim that such abstractions, like consciousness itself, are an illusion. Egnor would respond, “If your hypothesis is that your mind is an illusion, then you do not have a hypothesis.” That’s one reason that panpsychism is better tolerated in science than it used to be. The reality is, slowly but surely, sinking in.

You may also wish to read: Did minimal consciousness drive the Cambrian Explosion? Eva Jablonka’s team makes the daring case, repurposing Hungarian chemist Tibor Gánti’s origin of life studies. The researchers point out that life forms that show minimal consciousness have very different brains from each other. Behavior, not brain anatomy, is the signal to look for.

Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana