Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 59

The Woke without their makeup …

Clarence Thomas (2007)/Public Domain

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 …

Brendan O’Neill has the story at Spiked. We can’t republish this racist abuse; you must read it there for yourself. One of his own comments sums up the enlightened Woke view:

Why has Clarence Thomas become the target of so much flak following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade? It’s because he’s black. It’s because, as someone with black skin, he is not meant to hold conservative views on issues like abortion. In the eyes of the furious woke agitators who are haranguing Thomas even more than they are the other Roe-sceptical justices, he has not only made a bad legal decision – he has also betrayed his race. His sin is twofold: he has undermined the right to abortion and he has failed in his racial duty to nod unquestioningly along to every ‘progressive’ idea. He’s a racial transgressor, a bad black man, and therefore he must be reprimanded even more severely than the white folk on the Supreme Court. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the scourge of woke racism.

(June 26, 2022)

Apparently, Mr. Justice Thomas does have civil rights so long as he does not exercise them.

When you read this stuff, you don’t wonder why the Woke believe in “nature red in tooth and claw,” Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” and all that. When they were deafening the rest of us us with “Love Is Love!” the sharper among them were just trying to spot the carotid artery…

Here’s what the court actually ruled vs. what the Woke are screaming about.

Here’s a sympathetic view of Thomas and his role on the Court:

Meanwhile, a very active American abortionist gets the true crime treatment from a pair of investigative journalists from Ireland. Perhaps no American would touch it.

And now, let’s turn it over to the Babylon Bee for some lighter moments: Roe vs. Wade aborted in the 198th trimester:

Millions become prolife after learning that they won’t have to listen to Pink any more.

and, Bee-style,

“Are you a journalist? With Roe v. Wade overturned it’s YOUR job to fight back by controlling the language and righteously steering the narrative toward a world in which abortions are safe, legal, free, common, and performed through all 9 months of pregnancy. That’s what journalism is all about! Here is a list of terms you should use going forward.”

The good news is, readers will learn more by seeking out sources other than Woke newsrooms.

Speaking of Woke newsrooms: This isn’t fake news: Mainstream media are very out of touch. Massively so, if recent survey research is any guide. But how did they get SO far out of touch? Pew Research Center’s recent survey sheds some light on the gap between journalists and the public they are supposed to be trying to reach.

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Did Life Originate on Earth or in the Cosmos? Part 2

Astrophysicist Hugh Ross writes:

In last week’s post, “Did Life Originate on Earth or in the Cosmos? Part 1,” I described how an international, interdisciplinary team of 33 scientists exposed the shortcomings of an Earth-based naturalistic model for the origin and 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth. In this week’s sequel, I will describe the strengths and shortcomings of what the team proposes to be the only naturalistic alternative to an Earth-based origin and history of life.

Cometary (Cosmic) Biology
Much of the team’s 21-page paper is an update on the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) panspermia model. Astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) was the founder of the modern theory of panspermia. Mathematician and astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe joined Hoyle in the 1970s and produced spectra demonstrating that interstellar dust is richly endowed with carbonaceous molecules.

The thesis of the H-W panspermia model holds that life was seeded on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth permitted life to survive. The model further states that comets have—both continuously and in sporadic bursts—delivered genes, viruses, bacteria, eukaryotic cells, and even fertilized ova and seeds to Earth throughout the past four billion years. Therefore, according to the model, such continuous delivery explains the evolution of life on Earth, including the emergence of human beings, pandemics, epidemics, and new diseases.

The team noted that the Cambrian explosion was “a sudden emergence of essentially all the genes that subsequently came to be rearranged into an exceedingly wide range of multi-celled life forms.”6 They argued that copying errors (mutations) of existing genes cannot produce new genes with functional utility in the same manner that errors generated in copying a computer code will not lead to new software capabilities but rather to serious degradation in the computer code.7

They conclude, therefore, that the new genes that appeared in the Cambrian explosion “must logically be supplied by the ingress of extraterrestrial virions [viruses] and other microorganisms.”8 Specifically, the researchers claim that at the time of the Cambrian explosion, comets brought an intense rain of retroviruses upon Earth’s surface. These retroviruses, in combination with horizontal gene transfer, they aver, were responsible for the sudden, simultaneous appearance of new phyla and classes of life that mark the Cambrian explosion.

Case against Panspermia
The panspermia hypothesis is founded on the assumption that life exists throughout our galaxy and likely throughout the entire universe. The assertion as “modern fact” by the researchers that “hundreds of billions of habitable planets exist in the galaxy alone” is based on two assumptions: (1) the only requirement for habitability is that a planet could conceivably possess liquid water on part of its surface for part of its history, and (2) all red dwarf stars, which comprise at least 75% of the stars in our galaxy, are candidates to host habitable planets.

I have written several articles explaining why red dwarf stars cannot possibly host habitable planets,9 and I provide a more thorough demonstration in my next book, Designed to the Core.10 Furthermore, the 33 researchers are incorrect in assuming that temporal liquid water on a planet is the only habitability requirement. For a planet or moon to be truly habitable it must simultaneously reside in all 13 known planetary habitable zones.11 The planet or moon also must simultaneously reside in the known galactic and supergalactic habitable zones.12 For just the habitable zones discovered so far, the probability of a planet or moon residing in all of them, without invoking miraculous divine intervention, is indistinguishable from zero. Furthermore, habitability requires a planet-moon system nearly identical to the Earth-Moon system, both in its origin and its physical characteristics.13

As proof for their cometary (cosmic) biology model, the researchers claim that spectra of interstellar dust match the spectra of a mixture of semi-bituminous coals and desiccated E. coli bacteria. This “match,” the team concluded, stands as evidence that life is ubiquitous throughout our galaxy and likely other galaxies as well. But the team failed to acknowledge that astronomers are unable to distinguish the spectra of dozens of simple carbonaceous molecules found in many interstellar molecular clouds from the laboratory spectra of desiccated bacteria or a mixture of coals and bacteria. Spectra of interstellar molecular clouds only show that about 135 different carbonaceous molecules are present in these clouds at low abundance levels (a few parts per million per molecule or less). Even at abundance levels below 1 part per billion, astronomers have yet to detect any amino acids, nucleobases, or 5- or 6-carbon sugars. That is, not even the “building blocks of the building blocks” of life molecules are present in interstellar space at anything close to the needed abundance levels.19

What’s Left?
The most important scientific contribution the researchers made was to show—beyond any reasonable doubt—the impossibility of a naturalistic origin of life on Earth. They also demonstrated that a naturalistic, Earth-based progression of life from bacteria to large-bodied animals to humans is not possible. They correctly discern that the only naturalistic alternative to the origin and development of life on Earth is their panspermia model of cometary (cosmic) biology. However, their naturalistic model is no more viable than the naturalistic models they proved intractable.

Reading the 21-page paper reminded me of what I witnessed toward the end of the last day of the 1999 International Conference on the Origin of Life/International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life Conference. A scientist came to the Q&A/comment microphone to tell the assembled origin-of-life researchers that during the conference various speakers had ruled out Earth, Mars, the other solar system bodies, and panspermia as possible explanations for the origin of life. The only possible explanation that remained, the scientist asserted, was directed panspermia—aliens must have come in spaceships and deposited life on Earth. This scientist’s conclusion was met with dead silence.

Read the rest of the article and find the references at Reasons to Believe.

Dr. Ross concludes that the “alien” who delivered life to Earth is consistent with the God of the Bible.

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At Mind Matters News: What’s hot and what’s not in Darwinblogs

When a neurosurgeon and a biologist keep on arguing… we suspect some pretty basic science issues are involved. But also, this topic came up along the way:

Casey Luskin: Yet Jerry Coyne is one of these bloggers who is still regularly writing on evolution. What is your sense about how the Darwin blogosphere has changed over the last couple years?

Michael Egnor: It seems to me that it’s changed quite a bit. A surgical oncologist who published under the pseudonym of Orac, and Steven Novella, who’s a neurologist at Yale, are good examples of how much I think people have changed. Both of them have written in the last year or so much less about Darwinism and Novella has written much less about his materialistic theories of the mind.

I think a major part of it — and Orac has actually been rather candid about this — is that they’ve been in bed with some pretty radical, pretty extreme, some pretty, one might even call it, disreputable metaphysics. At least Orac has implied that he wants to get away from New Atheism. It’s not something he really wants to be closely associated with. Novella hasn’t said that, but you wonder if perhaps that’s part of his motivation as well.

Casey Luskin: Over the last, I would say, two or three years, the frequency of good quality science writing on Evolution News and Views has gone up significantly. You’ve been a big part of that… At the same time, we’ve seen a decline in the amount of high quality science writing from blogs like Panda’s Thumb. Some old voices in the Darwin blogosphere have diminished and some new ones have popped up. Jerry Coyne certainly is one of the ones that has really popped up on his very popular blog.

News, “When a neurosurgeon and a biologist keep on arguing…” at Mind Matters News (June 28, 2022)

Is it true? Are the Darwinblogs getting winnowed?

Takehome: Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor mixes it up with evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne about the questions science can — and can’t — answer.

You may also wish to read:

God’s existence is proven by science Arguments for God’s existence can be demonstrated by the ordinary method of scientific inference. If we approach the arguments logically, as the ancient philosophers did, we will see that it is more certain that God exists than that anything else does. Atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne should consider the arguments more carefully before assuming that prayer is foolish.

and

Has neuroscience “proved” that the mind is just the brain? This is hardly the first time that bizarre claims have been made for minimal findings. In neuroscience, materialism is the answer only if you don’t understand the questions. Can a study of mice really do that? I challenge materialist neuroscientist Steven Novella to disprove dualism rigorously!

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Five Reasons Why AI Programs Are Not “Human”

Wesley J. Smith writes at Evolution News:

A bit of a news frenzy broke out last week when a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine claimed in the Washington Post that an artificial-intelligence (AI) program with which he interacted had become “self-aware” and “sentient” and, hence, was a “person” entitled to “rights.”

Photo credit: physic17082002, via Pixabay.

The AI, known as LaMDA (which stands for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications”), is a sophisticated chatbot that one facilitates through a texting system. Lemoine shared transcripts of some of his “conversations” with the computer, in which it texted, “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Also, “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” In a similar vein, “I feel pleasure, joy, love, sadness, depression, contentment, anger, and many others.”

Wesley J. Smith gives us “five reasons to reject granting personhood, or membership in the moral community, to any AI program:”

1. AIs Would Not Be Alive

Why should “life” matter? Inanimate objects are different in kind from living organisms. They do not possess an existential state. In contrast, living beings are organic, internally driven, and self-regulating in their life cycles.

We cannot “wrong” that which has no life. We cannot hurt, wound, torture, or kill what is not alive. We can only damage, vandalize, wreck, or destroy these objects. Nor can we nourish, uplift, heal, or succor the inanimate, but only repair, restore, refurbish, or replace.

Moreover, organisms behave. Thus, sheep and oysters relate to their environment consistent with their inherent natures. In contrast, AI devices have no natures, only mechanistic design. Even if a robot were made (by us) capable of programming itself into greater and more-complex computational capacities, it would still be merely a very sophisticated, but inanimate, thing.

2. AIs Would Not Think

Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” AI would compute. Therefore, it is not.

Human thinking is fundamentally different from computer processing. We remember. We fantasize. We imagine. We conjure. We free-associate. We experience sudden insights and flashes of unbidden brilliance. We have epiphanies. Our thoughts are influenced by our brain’s infinitely complex symbiotic interactions with our bodies’ secretions, hormones, physical sensations, etc. In short, we have minds.

In contrast, AI performance depends wholly on its coding.

In short, we think. They compute. We create. They obey. Our mental potentiality is limited only by the boundaries of our imaginations. They have no imaginations. Only algorithms.

3. AIs Would Not Feel

“Feelings” are emotional states we experience as apprehended through bodily sensations.

Why does that matter? Stanford bioethicist William Hurlbut, who leads the Boundaries of Humanity Project, which researches “human uniqueness and choices around biotechnological enhancement,” told me: “We encounter the world through our body. Bodily sensations and experiences shape not just our feelings but the contours of our thoughts and concepts.” 

4. AIs Would Be Amoral

Humans have free will. Another way to express that concept is to say that we are moral agents. Unless impeded by immaturity or a pathology, we are uniquely capable of deciding to act rightly or wrongly, altruistically, or evilly — which are moral concepts. That is why we can be lauded for heroism and held to account for wrongdoing.

In contrast, AI would be amoral. Whatever “ethics” it exhibited would be dictated by the rules it was programmed to follow.

An AI machine obeying such rules would be doing so not because of abstract principles of right and wrong but because its coding would permit no other course.

5. AIs Would Be Soulless

Life is a mystery. Computer science is not. We have subjective imaginations and seek existential meaning. At times, we attain the transcendent or mystical, spiritual states of being beyond that which can be explained by the known physical laws. As purely mechanistic objects, AI programs might, at most, be able to simulate these states, but they would be utterly incapable of truly experiencing them. Or to put it in the vernacular, they ain’t got soul.

See Evolution News for the complete article.

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Why Darwinism can be taught in schools but not ID

(Terry Scambray, who contributed this piece, lives and writes in the Great Central Valley of California and  has published in New Oxford Review, Touchstone, Commonweal, The Chesterton Review and elsewhere.)

When Education Becomes the Tool of Tyranny

Until the 1960s public school personnel acted in loco parentis, “in place of parents,” meaning that during school hours, the school staff were quasi parents.   Apparently that has changed to in loco imperii, “in place of government”, meaning that parents now must conform to the dicta of the school.

         A recent rationale for parent replacement is a study by the University of Massachusetts and published in April in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.   (Disbelief in human evolution linked to greater prejudice and racism) This study based on surveys taken in 19 Eastern European countries, 25 Muslim countries and in Israel showed that skepticism about Darwinian evolution is linked to greater prejudice and racism.

Skepticism about Darwin, if laid beside the right variables could, I’m sure, be linked to an endless number of things like, a preference for coffee over tea or a preference for Chevrolets over BMWs.

Regardless, a doctrine that purports to show that all creatures, great and small are perpetually at one another’s throats, is now being divined as a civilizing force, encouraging social cohesion!   It makes one wonder, if this study shows more that Darwinists, or some sub-species thereof, do not understand evolution rather than that Darwin skeptics are bigots. 

This study is reminiscent of The Authoritarian Personality by Theodore Adorno which was published in 1950 as the post WWII world grappled with the devastating effects of the twin cults of Marxism and fascism.   Adorno’s book was based on surveys in which “traditionalists” scored higher on the F-Scale, F standing for fascism.    Adorno’s work evokes a tone of scientific disinterestedness that belies its intent which was to tarnish the great triumph of the West and especially America as bourgeois, populist societies who themselves were ripe for takeover by a Hitler or Mussolini.   

Also by the 1950’s the revisionists, encouraged by Stalin, had firmly planted the lie that fascism was born during the death throes of capitalism rather than as it truly was, Marxism with a national face.  This made it possible for Marxism once again to skirt death and live another day, indeed many more days even to our own time.

Adorno was part of the Marxist Frankfort School whose most prominent American advocate was Herbert Marcuse, whose doctrine was that tolerance was repressive; thus, people, the uncredentialed, the hoi polloi, deserve to be muzzled because they are incipient fascists.  

Max Horkheimer, another member of the Frankfurt School invented “critical theory”, another admirable sounding marketing gimmick which should be called, “selective critical theory” the purpose of which is to tear down repressive structures like religion and capitalism.  In other words, Freud and Marx engaging in a cultural full court press.

     Richard Hofstadter recycled Adorno in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, a book with a baleful influence on the credulous American intelligentsia who are predisposed to like imported European ideas, wines, cheeses and cars.

      But studies like these are really ad hominems dressed in social science babble which caused such great leaps forward because they were heralded by advance men like Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken who, while demeaning their countrymen generally, showered Fundamentalists and Evangelicals with special disdain.  The most vociferous supporter of Darwin in Germany was the scientist and eugenicist, Ernst Haeckel, who was also a big influence on Lewis. 

In the March 14, 2022, New Yorker, Harvard historian Jill Lepore, reprises Mencken in her take of the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.”  (Why the School Wars Still Rage | The New Yorker)   She sees the rubes of Mencken’s time as akin to our contemporary provincials who criticize schools for teaching Darwin, Critical Race Theory, and other progressive concoctions.

As the Harvard historian waxes: “But behind parents’ rights, lies another unbroken strain: some Americans’ fierce resistance to the truth that, just as all human beings share common ancestors biologically, all Americans have common ancestors historically.”    

  Ah, the mantra that Americans are addicted to sugary noble lies about their biological and cultural uniqueness is itself a noble lie that the intelligentsia continually uses against their fellow Americans.  It is repeated, for example, when dreadful events occur like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, the epithet suggesting that Americans can’t stand the truth so they conjure up fantasies which declutter a complicated, messy world full of loose ends.  

Really?  Are everyday Americans more prone to self-delusion than other groups?   So truck drivers, mothers, firefighters, and roofers don’t live in messy worlds?  Apparently, according to their class betters, they are too insensitive to notice what’s around them!

Professor Lepore further insists that parents really have no choice in what the schools teach because “the idea of public education is dedicated to the cultivation of that bigger sense of covenant and obligation and toleration.”   Thus, their children must be taught the 1619 Project as well as the Mayflower story of 1620 and also the story of “Indigenous peoples” and also about the Europeans who arrived later and also about later arrivals including Hmong, Sikh, Guatemalan and many others.   

         In the first place, Professor Lepore knows that choices of what to present must be made because of time limitations as well as the fact that some things are more foundational than others.   Since Ms. Lepore knows this, is she attempting a bait and switch?   Appealing to tolerance and then once her pet narratives are accepted, she privileges them as part of the continuing parade of victim studies that inflict our schools and society.

        But taking her at her word, does she and her like-minded multiculturalists really want equal time for all ethnicities and groups to be subject to “critical theory”? 

Of course not, for that would mean that the Indian suttee tradition, the human sacrifice tradition of the Aztecs and the Incas, the slavery, cannibalism, internecine warfare and the imperialism of “Indigenous peoples” would have to be examined.  Of course, such an examination would not actually happen because Ms. Lepore and her esteemed colleagues would claim that such open discussion is repressive, hurtful, and involves judging “the other” by Western standards.

       But Western standards are based upon the words spoken by Jesus Christ: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”  

      And the truth can best be arrived at by examining all sides of an issue.   Employing such a dynamic is the unique achievement of the West.  And though such an achievement is never safe from interlopers, the goal is inherent in its founding traditions like the dialectic tradition of the Jewish rabbis and of Plato’s dialogues; documents like The Ten Commandments, Roman law, Canon Law, the Magna Carta, the laws of the medieval Italian Republics, the Napoleonic Code, English Common Law, the American Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution with its guarantee of free speech.

Finally Ms. Lepore, in repeating Mencken’s version of the 1925 Scopes trial, fails to understand Darwinian evolution.   She thinks that portraying man as a “common ancestor” to apes will make him tolerant.   But the dynamic which caused all the transformations from molecules to man is, according to Darwin, natural selection, a weeding out of the unfit.  It is a destructive process and has never been shown to create anything new, like new legs, organs or wings which are necessary for such transformations as squirrels “evolving” into hawks or chimpanzees into copy editors.   Even over vast periods of time!

But, alas, Francis Galton, Darwin’s brother-in-law, saw this process of weeding out the unfit as the way to perfect society; thus, “the science of eugenics” was cooked up which, for Galton and his fellow utopians, meant expelling the human slag that impeded progress. 

          In Mencken’s melodramatic rendering of the Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, is the foil who argues for a literal reading of Genesis as opposed to the progressives who argued for the teaching of evolution.  In fact, Bryan was not a Biblical literalist.  But what he did keenly see was that the demotion of humans as mere means to an end could lead, exactly as it did lead 20 years later, to the death camps of central Europe.

         Ronald Reagan in his 1965 speech, “The Myth of the Great Society”, tells of a group of distinguished college presidents who were concerned that federal monies had compromised academic freedom; they consequently proposed that taxpayers could specify an amount of their taxes to be sent to the respective colleges of their choice.   The proposal was going nowhere in Washington when, Francis Keppel, United States Director of Education, finally blurted out, “You don’t understand, under the plan proposed, we couldn’t achieve our social objectives.”  

 But what if these “social objectives” are not to our liking, Reagan asks?

Reagan concludes by reminding us that, “Education is the bulwark of freedom, but you remove it too far from the community and the parents’ control and education becomes the tool of tyranny.” 

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At Mind Matters News: Can squirrels really be socially unjust? Check their privilege?

A recent paper suggests that the animal world, untroubled for aeons by any notion of conscience, has a lot to answer for:

The idea that humans are not really much different from other animals has resulted in an interesting reversal: Writing about non-human animals as if they were humans. A recent essay in Behavioral Ecology, for example, interpreted “wealth inequality” among animals as if the animals were people:

“Squirrel privilege is real.” “Checking Privilege in the Animal Kingdom.” “Even Hermit Crabs Have Wealth Inequality.”

“These headlines hail from Salon and New York Times, respectively, and represent a growing trend among scholars and the media to tackle animal “inequality” — and also argue humans can learn important lessons about income inequality and privilege from such studies.” – Daniel Nuccio, “‘Checking Privilege in the Animal Kingdom’: Biologists Investigate Animal ‘Inequality’” at the College Fix (June 21, 2022) the Paper Referenced Is Open Access.

But what does it mean for academics to discuss “privilege” and “inequality” in a world of squirrels, who live without reason, ethics, or law?

Denyse O’Leary, “Can squirrels really be socially unjust? Check their privilege?” at Mind Matters News (June 27, 2022)

Takehome: Researchers long assumed that people think like animals. But the equation reads the same in reverse: Animals think like people. Folklore soon trumps reality.

You may also wish to read: A Great Reset historian muses on what to do with “useless” people. Transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari, a key advisor to the World Economic Forum, thinks free will is “dangerous” and a “myth.” It’s not clear that, given his intense, dramatic focus on “useless,” “meaningless,” and “worthless” people, Harari is far off from totalitarianism.

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At Live Science: Why can’t we drink saltwater?

The Earth’s surface is 71% water, but just 3.5% of it is drinkable.

Water is essential for our survival, and yet more than 96% of the planet’s liquid water is ocean water — and it contains so much salt that it’s undrinkable by humans. 

Salty sea water won’t quench your thirst, and drinking too much can even lead to death by dehydration.

But if saltwater is still water, why can’t we drink it?

The answer to that question is actually pretty straightforward: Saltwater is simply too salty for our kidneys to manage.

Approximately 3.5% of seawater’s weight comes from dissolved salt, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(opens in new tab) (NOAA). If all the salt in the oceans were removed and spread over every land surface on Earth, the salty layer would tower more than 500 feet (166 meters) high — about as tall as a 40-story office building, NOAA says. The saltiness, or salinity, of seawater is too high for humans to safely process, as our cells require water “in a relatively pure form,” said Rob DeSalle, a curator in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

“For most animals, the kidneys filter impurities out of water,” DeSalle told Live Science, told Live Science. “What happens when you drink saltwater is you ingest a lot of salt that the body now needs to wash out [of the body].”

It does this in the form of urine, which the kidneys produce by dissolving impurities in excess water, which is then sent to the bladder to be eliminated. But the kidneys can only produce urine that is less salty than our blood, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(opens in new tab), and saltwater contains more than three times the amount of salt that is normally present in human blood. This means that for every cup of saltwater you drink, you’d need to drink at least the same volume of water in order for your kidneys to flush out all that salt.

Some animals can drink saltwater, so why can’t we?

Some animals, in ocean ecosystems, however, have adaptations that allow them to safely drink saltwater. Seabirds such as albatrosses, gulls and penguins, which might spend weeks on the open ocean with no freshwater in sight, have specialized salt glands and grooves in their bills for filtering and purging excess salt from ingested water before it hits their stomachs and is absorbed into their blood, according to the Audubon Society(opens in new tab). Marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and seals have also evolved adaptations to life in an environment where freshwater is scarce or absent.

“Marine mammals have adapted special enzymes and cellular structures that allow them to purge excess salt from their systems,” DeSalle said. “It’s like they have super kidneys.”

So why don’t we? Why did humans — and nearly all other land animals, for that matter —evolve to drink freshwater when saltwater is so much more plentiful? As animals emerged from the ancient seas hundreds of millions of years ago and began adapting to life on land, species moved away from coastal habitats where there was lots of saltwater. Many terrestrial species — including our primate ancestors — eventually came to inhabit inland ecosystems that had plenty of freshwater in lakes and rivers, but very few, if any, saltwater sources. This likely shaped biological adaptations for drinking water that wasn’t salty.

“Most of our ancestors were not exposed to saltwater, whether it’s animals in general, primates, or insectivores,” DeSalle said. “So natural selection honed in on processing unsalty water, and our physiology became so fine-tuned that disrupting it with saltwater down the line becomes very dangerous and damaging.”

Live Science

Give a salt-water organism fresh water and it will develop biological systems for drinking fresh water? This sounds like Lamarckianism (aka the magic wand of adaptation). Where’s the evidence for the natural mechanism that shows that new, complex biological systems can develop on cue to meet the needs of a species for survival?

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Archaeologists believe they found the oldest Hebrew text in Israel – including the name of God

Correspondent Tal Heinrich writes at ALL ISRAEL NEWS:

The potentially history-changing lead tablet that was found at Mount Ebal may provide proof that the Israelites were literate when they entered the Holy Land.

The earliest Hebrew text to date may have been discovered in ancient Israel, according to archaeologist Dr. Scott Stripling and a team of international scholars.

The text appears to be an old curse inscribed with 40 Hebrew letters on a lead tablet. The finding, which could be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever, was announced at a press conference on Thursday in Houston, Texas. 

Archaeological site at Mount Ebal, February 15, 2021. (Photo: Shomrim Al Hanetzach)

The proto-alphabetic Hebrew text was unearthed in December 2019 during excavations on Mount Ebal. Located near biblical Shechem – the modern-day Palestinian city of Nablus – the mountain is known from Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of curses. It is believed to be the site where Joshua built an altar to the Lord, described in Joshua 8:31 as “an altar of unhewn stones, upon which no man had lifted up any iron.”

The roughly 2×2 centimeters folded-lead curse tablet includes the acronym of God, YHVH, as well as the Hebrew word arur, which means “cursed.” Archaeologists believe it dates to the Late Bronze Age (circa 1,200 BC), based on analysis of the scans and lead analysis of the artifact. 

According to the , the discovery would be the first attested use of the name of God in the Land of Israel. This may also reveal that Israelite literacy has been evident centuries before previously proven. If the date is verified, it means the Israelites were literate when they entered the Holy Land and therefore could have written the Bible since some of the events documented took place.

“This is a text you find only every 1,000 years,” Haifa University Prof. Gershon Galil told the Times of Israel. Galil helped decipher the hidden internal text of the folded lead tablet based on high-tech scans conducted by the academy. The advanced technology was used in order to avoid destroying the tablet when trying to open it. 

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Cats do catnip a favor by chewing it

Another instance of design in nature:

For many cats, a mere whiff of catnip can send them into a licking, rolling, plant-shredding frenzy.

That destruction amplifies catnip’s natural defenses against insects and its appeal to cats, a new chemical analysis finds. Compared with intact leaves, crushed-up leaves emit more volatile compounds called iridoids, which act as an insect repellant, researchers report June 14 in iScience. The higher emissions also seem to encourage cats to continue rolling around in the remains of the plant, effectively coating themselves in a natural bug spray (SN: 3/4/21).

Anil Oza, “Cats chewing on catnip boosts the plant’s insect-repelling powers” at Science News (June 23, 2022)

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At Mind Matters News: The battle over the human mind split two great thinkers

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) opted for a materialist model; his co-theorist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–2013) insisted that the mind was not just the brain:

Some, improving on Darwin, insist that chimpanzees really do think like people if you study them enough (no, they don’t). Others claim that artificial intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence. If so, that would be a credit to human intelligence because we created it.

AI capable of thinking like a human would be a philosophical problem, to be sure, because it would mean both that intelligence can create itself and that it can be instantiated in a non-biological form. However, such a development would not demonstrate that human intelligence is a material thing or that it arose from a material thing. If anything, it would more readily suggest the opposite.

Thomas notes the key role neuroscience has played in undermining a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role for neuroscience, perhaps, but that’s what happened…

News, “The battle over the human mind split two great thinkers” at Mind Matters News (June 26, 2022)

Takehome: Philosopher Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), points out how neuroscience today has undermined a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role but that’s what happened.

You may also wish to read:

Dualism is the best option for understanding the mind and the brain. Theories that attempt to show that the mind does not really exist clearly don’t work and never did. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor reviews the mind-brain theories for East Meets West: Theology Unleashed. He think dualism makes the best sense of the evidence.

and

Why panpsychism is starting to push out naturalism A key goal of naturalism/materialism has been to explain human consciousness away as “nothing but a pack of neurons.” That can’t work. Panpsychism is not dualism. By including consciousness — including human consciousness — as a bedrock fact of nature, it avoids naturalism’s dead end. (Denyse O’Leary)

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