Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 581

Webinar Saturday: Richard Weikart on “The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life”

From Jonathan McLatchie at Apologetics Academy:

This coming Saturday (8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 2pm CST / 12noon PST), our own Dr. Richard Weikart (California State University) is going to do a webinar for my *Apologetics Academy* on his book, which argues that secular philosophies have eroded a Judeo-Christian sanctity of life ethic.

Here is the link for joining this week’s webinar.

Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic. has a new book out, The Death of Humanity.

See also: Richard Weikart’s new book, Death of Humanity

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Climate change to be discussed at Christian Scientific Society meet, Knoxville, April 7–8, 2017

Schedule and abstracts here. Note:

10:00 A.M. Kevin Birdwell. “Understanding Climate Change Factors”

What variables affect climate change? Are they natural? Manmade? Both? Do greenhouse gases provide the sole basis for modern climate concerns? Or are their other important factors to consider? How does the need for large sources of energy to power society affect the climate debate? Finally, how do we approach these issues ethically?

Bio: Kevin Birdwell received a PhD in physical geography, with emphasis in meteorology and environmental change, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2011. He also holds a BS and an MS in geography, with an emphasis in remote sensing and math, from Murray State University, as well as an AA in the Bible from Evangel University. Kevin is a member of the American Meteorological Society and the Nuclear Utilities Meteorological User’s Group (American Nuclear Society). He has 30 years of experience in meteorological operations and research, focusing on areas of complex terrain meteorology, dispersion modeling, air quality, and Quaternary paleoclimate. His dissertation research described the interaction of winds in complex terrain and how to categorize and predict such flows in terms of the underlying atmospheric physics. Kevin currently manages an operational meteorology program in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and also teaches earth and space science part-time for the Department of Adult and Online Learning at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. He has also been a Christian apologist in areas of earth science and meteorology since the mid-90s.More.

But, if that guy expresses any skepticism about the earnest bumf blathered in traditional media, doesn’t Bill Nye, the science guy, think he should be in jail because it might be a trigger warning episode for  Bill Nye?

Actually, a lot of the other talks could be controversial too, which means—these days—it might be worth going to hear them – but only if thinking doesn’t act as a “trigger” for you.

Consider this your trigger warning.

See also: Bill Nye would criminalize dissent from human-caused global warming claims.

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Are polls scientific?

Well, what happens when human complexity foils electoral predictions? From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at Salvo:

The Pew polling group admits it was stumped by last November’s U.S. presidential election. The results “came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling.” Most pollsters put Hillary Clinton’s chances of defeating Donald Trump at 70 to 99 percent.

Few will care if fashion critics call the hemlines wrong this season. But election pollsters consider their work both important and scientific: “Polling is an art, but it’s largely a scientific endeavor,” says Michael Link, president and chief executive of the Abt SRBI polling firm in New York City and former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.2 That perception may help explain preeminent science journal Nature’s account of scientists being “stunned” and reacting to the results with “fear and disbelief.”

But the scientists’ response raises a question: Was the badly missed prediction a failure of the scientific method, or is opinion polling just not a science anyway?More.

See also: Evo-Elitism: Darwinism’s Missing Link to Civil Liberties

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But why DID Darwin tear his notes up into 25, 540 little pieces?

Which 15 computer whizzes have now been putting back together at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. From Constance Gustke at New York Times:

A chronic reorganizer, Darwin arranged his notes according to topics that interested him at the time. One page, for example, might be observations made about bees visiting flowers in 1840, originally placed in a portfolio on the behavior of bees. Perhaps 10 years later, he tore or cut that page, moving some of the observations into a portfolio on the pollination of flowers. By reassembling the original pages, researchers hope to understand fully the long arc of Darwin’s research and the gradual maturation of his thinking.

Before the manuscripts project began 10 years ago, Dr. Kohn tried to crack the code of Darwin’s handwriting.More.

Instantly explosive when it was published in 1859, the book is still viewed as the keystone of evolutionary biology. Legions of scientists remain devoted to its text and to the observations that went into its preparation.

Is the sacred text yet covered by anti-blasphemy laws?

Note:

“We love cool problem-solving under the dinosaur tail,” said Jin Chung, a software engineer at eBay. “You’re looking at a piece of history. We’re even touching the Darwin artifacts themselves.”

Sort of like a first-class relic, one guesses.

See also: And they say Darwinism isn’t a religion

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Hagiography:

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Suzan Mazur: NASA, tax dollars, space aliens, and religion…

I would hardly trust anyone but Suzan Mazur, author of Public Evolution Summit, to get to the bottom of this one, at Huffington Post:

A Chat w/ NASA-funded Italian Jesuit Andrea Vicini

Andrea Vicini was one of two dozen religious scholars who between 2015 and 2017 shared nearly $3M awarded jointly by NASA and the John Templeton Foundation (administered by the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton) to investigate how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space. As I’ve already reported, informants at NASA tell me we will not find life anywhere else in the solar system. So why blow 5% of the NASA Astrobiology Institute budget on such a project?

I spoke recently by phone with Andrea Vicini at Boston College about this matter. Our interview follows.

Suzan Mazur: Did you interview people from the religious community to find out how they would respond to life in the solar system outside of Earth? Or are you just speaking and writing from your perspective?

Andrea Vicini: Well, more than interviewing. It’s the result of our research last year. The team of our researchers involved in the research project at the Center of Theological Inquiry on the societal implications of astrobiology was composed of 10 theologians and one philosopher and one expert in management.

Suzan Mazur: But what I’m asking is did you go to the religious community, canvas the religious community and find out how it would respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial life or was the research just conducted within the group of 12?

Andrea Vicini: Well, I would say I think there is another way in which we can explore what is in the religious traditions at least – to look at what is at the core of the various religious traditions. Christianity is not only—

Suzan Mazur: But did the funded researchers go to the religious community and ask: How would you respond to the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system? Was that done or no? More.

The answer would seem to be, probably, no, or not much. Which feels odd, somehow. It wouldn’t be difficult to get a film night discussion going. Here is a list of ten science fiction films with religious themes. 

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. The bookish ones may have more ideas on the subject though and would be more likely to attend the film night.

Note: One of the twentieth century’s best-known Christian apologists, C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) was the author of an enduring trilogy about space aliens. Here also is his essay on the role of science fiction in literature:

It is not difficult to see why those who wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply have increasingly been driven to other planets or other stars. It is the result of increasing geographical knowledge. The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand. As the area of knowledge spreads, you need to go further afield: like a man moving his house further and further out into the country as the new building estates catch him up.

To readers’ interested in Lewis’s sci-fi, I recommend especially the final book of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength. For example,

“His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.”

See also: 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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Taking the Gaia hypothesis seriously at Nautilus

From David Grinspoon at Nautilus:

the truth is, despite its widespread moniker, Gaia is not really a hypothesis. It’s a perspective, an approach from within which to pursue the science of life on a planet, a living planet, which is not the same as a planet with life on it—that’s really the point, simple but profound. Because life is not a minor afterthought on an already functioning Earth, but an integral part of the planet’s evolution and behavior. Over the last few decades, the Gaians have pretty much won the battle. The opposition never actually surrendered or admitted defeat, but mainstream earth science has dropped its disciplinary shields and joined forces with chemistry, climatology, theoretical biology, and several other “ ologies” and renamed itself “earth system science.”

The Gaia approach, prompted by the space-age comparison of Earth with its apparently lifeless neighbors, has led to a deepening realization of how thoroughly altered our planet is by its inhabitants. When we compare the life story of Earth to that of its siblings, we see that very early on in its development, as soon as the sterilizing impact rain subsided so that life could get a toehold, Earth started down a different path. Ever since that juncture, life and Earth have been co-evolving in a continuing dance.

Okay, but then…

Now, very recently, out of this biologically altered Earth, another kind of change has suddenly emerged and is rewriting the rules of planetary evolution. On the nightside of Earth, the lights are switching on, indicating that something new is happening and someone new is home. Has another gateway opened? Could the planet be at a new branching point? More.

Advice: You might get places faster if you see off the hippies and reschedule the interpretive dance. Also, you will need to deal eventually with design in nature.

See also: Pope Francis’ adviser is a science pantheist?

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Dead patient has active brain for ten minutes?

Hmmm. From Maria Gallucci at Mashable:

The researchers said they can’t really explain what happened. Perhaps there was a human or equipment error that falsely simulated brain activity at the time of recording — though there’s no sign that either a person or machine messed up.

“It is difficult to posit a physiological basis for this EEG [electroencephalographic] activity, given that it occurs after a prolonged loss of circulation,” Norton and her team wrote.

The study is the latest effort by doctors to better understand what happens to our bodies after life support is withdrawn, which is an important question for organ donation.

Without a firm explanation, and given the tiny sample size — one patient — the doctors couldn’t make any definitive conclusions about what their findings mean, except to say that more research is required. More.

But then we really don’t know what consciousness is anyway. Keep the file open.

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

Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness?

and

What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness

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Why AI won’t really replace people, despite its bad press

controls for AI/Pbroks13

From Jerry Kaplan at Technology Review:

Artificial intelligence, it seems, has a PR problem. While it’s true that today’s machines can credibly perform many tasks (playing chess, driving cars) that were once reserved for humans, that doesn’t mean that the machines are growing more intelligent and ambitious. It just means they’re doing what we built them to do.

The robots may be coming, but they are not coming for us—because there is no “they.” Machines are not people, and there’s no persuasive evidence that they are on a path toward sentience.

We’ve been replacing skilled and knowledgeable workers for centuries, but the machines don’t aspire to better jobs and higher employment. Jacquard looms replaced expert needleworkers in the 19th century, but these remarkable devices—programmed with punch cards for a myriad of fabric patterns—didn’t spell doom for dressmakers and tailors. Until the mid-20th century we relied on our best and brightest to do arithmetic—being a “calculator” used to be a highly respected profession. Now that comparably capable devices are given away as promotional trinkets at trade shows, the mathematically minded among us can focus on tasks that require broader skills, like statistical analysis. Soon, your car will be able to drive you to the office upon command, but you don’t have to worry about it signing up with Uber to make a few extra bucks for gas while you’re in a staff meeting (unless you instruct it to). More.

But AI can’t have a PR consultant because it wouldn’t know it had a problem.

See also: Crappy AI is more likely to kill us than super AI

and

Steve Fuller: Humans will merge with AI

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Is science refereeing out of date?

From Melinda Baldwin at Physics Today (where she is Books editor)

The imprimatur bestowed by peer review has a history that is both shorter

and more complex than many scientists realize.

…

At the end of the 19th century, an important shift began to take place in the scientific community’s view of referees. With concerns growing about the overall quality of the scientific literature, the referee was no longer simply helping protect the reputation of a scientific society or journal. Instead, the referee was increasingly seen as someone whose work was to protect the reputation and trustworthiness of the entire scientific literature, to staunch a flood of “veritable sewage thrown into the pure stream of science,” as physiologist and Member of Parliament Michael Foster put it.3

Hmmm. Those kinds of crusades usually end badly. For one thing, most actual enemies in these matters are within ourselves.

Peer review’s role in the scientific community has never been static. Its form and purpose have been shaped and reshaped according to what scientists needed from the practice—whether it was credibility for a scientific society, improvements in the scientific literature, or assurances to public funders that their money was being spent responsibly. If scientists are to tranform peer review’s future, they must consider what purpose they want it to serve—and whether that purpose can indeed be fulfilled by reports from two or more referees.

More.

Peer review, was actually a system that “just growed” after World War II and had thrust upon it the role of science cop—without anyone really considering how well the system was adapted to playing that role.

Then, of course, struggling scientists reverently protected its status without addressing the problems, until finally… Finally, they now yell at the public for “doubting science” when—in fields of which many laypeople have every reason to be knowledgeable, such as health concerns—there is good reason for doubt.

If science refereeing isn’t out of date, there has got to be a better way of doing it.

Note: Baldwin is also author of Making “Nature”: the History of a Scientific Journal (2015)

See also: Research group: Up to 85% of medical research funds may be wasted

Blinkers Award goes to… Tom Nichols at Scientific American! On why Americans “hate science” Health science is the way most people interact with science and in many areas, it is running neck and neck with the office rumor mill for credibility.

and

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

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Non-coding RNA: More uses for the “junk” in our genome

[image error]

RNA molecule graphic/Feldman, Wikipedia

A paper at Nature from Karen Adelman & Emily Egan (Nature 543, 183–185 (09 March 2017) doi:10.1038/543183a)

It emerges that nascent non-coding RNAs transcribed from regulatory DNA sequences called enhancers bind to the enzyme CBP to promote its activity locally. In turn, the activities of CBP stimulate further enhancer transcription. (paywall) More.

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

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