Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 580

March 16, 2017

Plants saved Earth from permanent ice age?

Nick Stockton asks, at Wired, why didn’t the ice ages that began at 800,000 ago just remain? What reversed the cooling trend?

A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, has a hypothesis what that something was: plants. Or, more specifically, a complicated process in which plants wear down certain kinds of rocks, and how those rocks remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they wear down—leaving just enough CO2 out there to trap solar warmth, and gradually bring summer back. More.

Most ecology on the planet actually depends on plants. Everything seems organized around them, including temperatures.

See also: How plants see, hear, smell, and respond without animal sense organs

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Published on March 16, 2017 06:42

Yes, a fluorescent tree frog… using unique method to glow

From Anna Nowogrodzki at :

The ability to absorb light at short wavelengths and re-emit it at longer wavelengths is called fluorescence, and is rare in terrestrial animals. Until now, it was unheard of in amphibians. Researchers also report that the polka dot tree frog uses fluorescent molecules totally unlike those found in other animals.

…

The researchers first thought that they might find red fluorescence in these frogs, because they contain a pigment called biliverdin. Normally, biliverdin turns the amphibian’s tissues and bones green. However, in some insects, says Carlos Taboada, a herpetologist at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, proteins bound to biliverdin emit a faint red fluorescence. But in the polka dot tree frog, biliverdin turned out to be a red herring. More.

Right up there with wheels in nature. Wallace seems to have been right about the plenitude of life.

Is there anything we should not expect to find in nature? Are there parameters we can use?

via GIPHY

See also: Mechanical gears seen in nature for the first time.

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Published on March 16, 2017 05:58

Tucker Carlson challenges Planned Parenthood

. . . on just what it is that we are killing in the womb:

>>“Why are you giving me robotic responses? I’m asking you a human question, and I hope you’ll favor me with a human answer?”

That was Tucker Carlson on his primetime Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” interviewing Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens Monday night.

Carlson was looking for the answer to a simple question – the most basic, yet profound, question of the entire abortion debate: What exactly is the little “something” with a beating heart, residing in a mother’s womb, that is destroyed during an abortion? Is it a human being, a clump of tissue or something else? . . . . Carlson’s question has been the moral and legal touchstone for abortion opponents for decades, and as Laguens demonstrated, one that is virtually always sidestepped by abortion providers and proponents . . . .

Finally, after multiple attempts, Carlson doubled down with Laguens even more earnestly: “I’ve let you repeat your talking points, which I’ve heard a thousand times. … But I want to take it just a level deeper, because I think it’s worth it. It’s a big deal to a lot of people. And people say, ‘Look, this is killing a life.’ A heart is beating, you can hear it at five-and-a-half weeks, and the majority of your abortions take place after five-and-a-half weeks. So I want to know if that bothers you at all. … Do you ever stop and think, ‘Wow, what is happening here, is a life being taken?’ People say a life is being taken. Do you think that?”

As the clock ran out on the interview, Carlson gave the Planned Parenthood chief still one more crack at the question: “Why are you giving me robotic responses? I’m asking you a human question, and I hope you’ll favor me with a human answer. … You can hear the heartbeat. Is that a human being or not? Is it separate from the mother or not? Different blood type, often different sex, different DNA. It doesn’t seem like a tumor. … What does that mean?”

True to form, Laguens, herself the mother of triplets, answered with yet more “abortion rights” talking points that totally avoided the question.

“With respect,” responded Carlson, “I know you’re smart, but you’re giving me a series of rehearsed and very childish answers and it’s just disappointing.”>>

Let us watch the segment:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

There is one thing to be said about all of this, given the context of holocaust of our posterity under false colour of law, rights and the like: what are we doing to our consciences, minds, souls, posterity — and in the end, our civilisation? (If you can come up with a cogent answer that does not reduce to absurdity and/or march of folly to ruin, I would like to hear it: _______ .) END

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Published on March 16, 2017 04:55

March 15, 2017

Physicist: Regrettably, materialism can’t explain mind

From Adam Frank at Aeon:

It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself.

…

Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. Regardless of the direction ‘more’ might take, the unresolved democracy of quantum interpretations means that our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of mind. It seems just as likely that the opposite will be the case. More.

The reader who mentioned the story to us points out that Frank fails to so much as mention Thomas Nagel or his book Mind and Cosmos.

No surprise. The way these elegant essays work: One is allowed to wring one’s hands politely over the distressing state of affairs as long as one does not address serious alternatives, except to rule them offside.

Okay, the problem awaits those who can even afford to address it and are not required by the demands of their position to come up with something that sounds ridiculous but not heretical.

See also: 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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Published on March 15, 2017 13:49

Absolute zero proven mathematically impossible?

rubidium atoms a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero/NIST/JILA/CU-Boulder

From Leah Crane at New Scientist:

It’s an absolute. Mathematics has put speed limits on cooling, finally proving a century-old law – that unless you have infinite time and resources, you can’t get to the absolute zero of temperature.

…

Now Jonathan Oppenheim and Lluís Masanes at University College London have mathematically derived the unattainability principle and placed limits on how fast a system can cool, creating a general proof of the third law.

…

By applying mathematical techniques from quantum information theory, they proved that no real system will ever reach 0 kelvin: it would take an infinite number of steps. More.

Paper is open access.

Abstract: The most accepted version of the third law of thermodynamics, the unattainability principle, states that any process cannot reach absolute zero temperature in a finite number of steps and within a finite time. Here, we provide a derivation of the principle that applies to arbitrary cooling processes, even those exploiting the laws of quantum mechanics or involving an infinite-dimensional reservoir. We quantify the resources needed to cool a system to any temperature, and translate these resources into the minimal time or number of steps, by considering the notion of a thermal machine that obeys similar restrictions to universal computers. We generally find that the obtainable temperature can scale as an inverse power of the cooling time. Our results also clarify the connection between two versions of the third law (the unattainability principle and the heat theorem), and place ultimate bounds on the speed at which information can be erased

Curious indeed, the difference that exists between something and nothing. Consider, for example, Physics and the contemplation of nothing.

Note: We are told that the current coldest spot in the universe is planned for the International Space Station:

This August, NASA plans to launch to the ISS an experiment that will freeze atoms to less than 1 billionth of a degree above absolute zero — more than 100 million times colder than the far reaches of deep space, agency officials said. (Earlier NASA statements put the experiment temperature at one ten billionth of a degree.)

The instrument suite, which is about the size of an ice chest, is called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL). It consists of lasers, a vacuum chamber and an electromagnetic “knife” that together will slow down gas particles until they are almost motionless. (Remember that temperature is just a measurement of how fast atoms and molecules are moving.)

See also: Is celeb number pi a “normal” number? Not normal. And things get worse. Surely this oddity is related in some way to the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

and

Must we understand “nothing” to understand physics?

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Published on March 15, 2017 08:24

The ethics of colonizing other planets. Some think it’s wrong.

The other day, we noted that NASA has been spending money on the question of how world religions would view the discovery of life on other planets.

(Meanwhile, Stephen Hawking insists that we must colonize other planets to avoid extinction (he gives us 1000 years) and that world government is needed to stop technology destroying us, which will sound to most people like a choice of methods of execution.

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Published on March 15, 2017 07:10

Is celeb number pi “normal”?

A photograph of the Greek letter pi, created as a large stone mosaic embedded in the ground.

pi in mosaic, Berlin/Holger Motzkau

Yesterday was pi day (3.14) From Tia Ghose at LiveScience:

Pi is definitely weird, but is it normal? Though mathematicians have plumbed many of the mysteries of this irrational number, there are still some unanswered questions.

Mathematicians still don’t know whether pi belongs in the club of so-called normal numbers — or numbers that have the same frequency of all the digits — meaning that 0 through 9 each occur 10 percent of the time, according to Trueb’s website pi2e.ch. In a paper published Nov. 30, 2016, in the preprint journal arXiv, Trueb calculated that, at least based on the first 2.24 trillion digits, the frequency of the numbers 0 through 9 suggest pi is normal. Of course, given that pi has an infinite number of digits, the only way to show this for sure is to create an airtight math proof. So far, proofs for this most famous of irrational numbers has eluded scientists, though they have come up with some bounds on the properties and distribution of its digits. [fact 8] More.

So no. Not normal. And things get worse. Surely this oddity is related in some way to the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

See also: Pi: How did mathematics come to be woven into the fabric of reality?

At PBS: Puzzle of mathematics is more complex than we sometimes think

and

Eugene Wigner: Nobel Prize Winner Promotes ID, Ccirca 1960

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Published on March 15, 2017 06:34

March 14, 2017

3-D structures of active DNA now available

Mouse cell with 20 chromosomes colored differently/U Cambridge, MRC Lab

From ScienceDaily:

Most people are familiar with the well-known ‘X’ shape of chromosomes, but in fact chromosomes only take on this shape when the cell divides. Using their new approach, the researchers have now been able to determine the structures of active chromosomes inside the cell, and how they interact with each other to form an intact genome. This is important because knowledge of the way DNA folds inside the cell allows scientists to study how specific genes, and the DNA regions that control them, interact with each other. The genome’s structure controls when and how strongly genes — particular regions of the DNA — are switched ‘on’ or ‘off’. This plays a critical role in the development of organisms and also, when it goes awry, in disease.Paper. (paywall) – Stevens, TJ et al. 3D structures of individual mammalian genomes studied by single-cell Hi-C. Nature, 3 March 2017 DOI: 10.1038/nature21429 More.

It also makes it easier to discuss genetics in a non-reductive way.

See also: Cod gene puzzle: At least no one is claiming it is “junk DNA”

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Published on March 14, 2017 13:43

Human cranium from 400 thousand years ago found in Portugal: Tool user

Aroeira 3 cranium/Javier Trueba

Oldest so far. From ScienceDaily:

The cranium represents the westernmost human fossil ever found in Europe during the middle Pleistocene epoch and one of the earliest on this continent to be associated with the Acheulean stone tool industry. In contrast to other fossils from this same time period, many of which are poorly dated or lack a clear archaeological context, the cranium discovered in the cave of Aroeira in Portugal is well-dated to 400,000 years ago and appeared in association with abundant faunal remains and stone tools, including numerous bifaces (handaxes). Paper. (public access) – Joan Daura, Montserrat Sanz, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Dirk L. Hoffmann, Rolf M. Quam, María Cruz Ortega, Elena Santos, Sandra Gómez, Angel Rubio, Lucía Villaescusa, Pedro Souto, João Mauricio, Filipa Rodrigues, Artur Ferreira, Paulo Godinho, Erik Trinkaus, João Zilhão. New Middle Pleistocene hominin cranium from Gruta da Aroeira (Portugal). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017; 201619040 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1619040114 More.

The find bears, the authors say, on “the origin of the Neanderthals and the pattern of human evolution in the Middle Pleistocene of Europe”:

We describe a recently discovered cranium from the Aroeira cave in Portugal dated to around 400 ka. This specimen is the westernmost Middle Pleistocene cranium of Europe and is one of the earliest fossils from this region associated with Acheulean tools. Unlike most other Middle Pleistocene finds, which are of uncertain chronology, the Aroeira 3 cranium is firmly dated to around 400 ka and was in direct association with abundant faunal remains and stone tools. In addition, the presence of burnt bones suggests a controlled use of fire. The Aroeira cranium represents a substantial contribution to the debate on

See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips: Human evolution

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Published on March 14, 2017 12:43

Nature: Open data demanded for psychology journals?

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

From Gautam Naik at Nature:

An editor on the board of a journal published by the prestigious American Psychological Association (APA) has been asked to resign in a controversy over data sharing in peer review.

Gert Storms — who says he won’t step down — is one of a few hundred scientists who have vowed that, from the start of this year, they will begin rejecting papers if authors won’t publicly share the underlying data, or explain why they can’t.

The idea, called the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, was launched by psychologists hoping to increase transparency in a field beset by reports of fraud and dubious research practices. And the APA, which does not ask that data be made available to peer reviewers or shared openly online, seems set to become an early testing ground for the initiative’s influence. With Storms’ situation still unresolved, the society’s council of editors will discuss whether it should change its policies at a meeting in late March. More.

It’s amazing how long a watched pot takes to boil. Social psychology has been the biggest locus of scandal in science (or, in this case, “science”) research in the last few decades. All sides agree: Progressive politics is strangling social sciences.

The critical question — and this may be a few conferences’ worth (to say nothing of books, TED talks, and journal articles) is: Is social science really a science? If so, how? Under what circumstances?

See also: Even Michael Shermer thinks social science is politically biased

Are polls scientific? Well, what happens when human complexity foils electoral predictions?

and

Peer review “unscientific”: Tough words from editor of Nature

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Published on March 14, 2017 11:57