Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 61

At Evolution News: From Darwinists, a Shift in Tone on Nanomachines

William Dembski reviews Jason Rosenhouse’s new book, The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism (Cambridge University Press).

Image source: Discovery Institute.

Unfortunately for Darwinists, irreducible complexity raises real doubts about Darwinism in people’s minds. Something must be done. Rising to the challenge, Darwinists are doing what must be done to control the damage. Take the bacterial flagellum, the poster child of irreducibly complex biochemical machines. Whatever biologists may have thought of its ultimate origins, they tended to regard it with awe. Harvard’s Howard Berg, who discovered that flagellar filaments rotate to propel bacteria through their watery environments, would in public lectures refer to the flagellum as “the most efficient machine in the universe.” 

Why “Machines”?

In 1998, writing for a special issue of Cell, the National Academy of Sciences president at the time, Bruce Alberts, remarked:

We have always underestimated cells… The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines… Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts. [Emphasis in the original.]

A few years later, in 2003, Adam Watkins, introducing a special issue on nanomachines for BioEssays, wrote: 

The articles included in this issue demonstrate some striking parallels between artifactual and biological/molecular machines. In the first place, molecular machines, like man-made machines, perform highly specific functions. Second, the macromolecular machine complexes feature multiple parts that interact in distinct and precise ways, with defined inputs and outputs. Third, many of these machines have parts that can be used in other molecular machines (at least, with slight modification), comparable to the interchangeable parts of artificial machines. Finally, and not least, they have the cardinal attribute of machines: they all convert energy into some form of ‘work’.

Neither of these special issues offered detailed step-by-step Darwinian pathways for how these machine-like biological systems might have evolved, but they did talk up their design characteristics. I belabor these systems and the special treatment they received in these journals because none of the mystery surrounding their origin has in the intervening years been dispelled. Nonetheless, the admiration that they used to inspire has diminished.

The shift in tone from then to now is remarkable. What happened to the awe these systems used to inspire? Have investigators really learned so much in the intervening years to say, with any confidence, that these systems are indeed over-engineered? To say that something is over-engineered is to say that it could be simplified without loss of function (like a Rube Goldberg device). And what justifies that claim here? Have scientists invented simpler systems that in all potential environments perform as well as or better than the systems in question? Are they able to go into existing flagellar systems, for instance, and swap out the over-engineered parts with these more efficient (sub)systems? Have they in the intervening years gained any real insight into the step-by-step evolution of these systems? Or are they merely engaged in rhetoric to make flagellar motors seem less impressive and thus less plausibly the product of design? To pose these questions is to answer them.

Read more at Evolution News.

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At Mind Matters News: Why science news sucks — a response to a disgusted physicist

There are reasons why science journalists can’t usually be skeptical in the way that other journalists can. Here are some of them:

In her usual forthright manner, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder asks, by blog post and Youtube video, “Why does science news suck so much? It’s hardly an original question but among her suggested answers are some thoughtful reflections, including

News, “Why science news sucks — a response to a disgusted physicist” at Mind Matters News

– 0 –

9. Don’t forget that science is fallible

A lot of media coverage on science policy remembers that science is fallible only when it’s convenient for them. When they’ve proclaimed something as fact that later turns out to be wrong, then they’ll blame science. Because science is fallible. Facemasks? Yeah, well, we lacked the data. Alright.

But that’d be more convincing if science news acknowledged that their information might be wrong in the first place. The population bomb? Peak oil? The new ice age? Yeah, maybe if they’d made it clearer at the time that those stories might not pan out the way they said then we wouldn’t today have to cope with climate change deniers who think the media can’t tell fact from fiction.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Why does science news suck so much?” at BackRe(Action) (June 18, 2022)

The difficulty, of course, is that a great many people read science news looking for certainty — certainty of a specific type. People who worry about a rising human population, for example, want to be told that their fears are real and Something Should Be Done. They don’t want to be told that the birth rate in most places has been slowing for decades or that a key contributor to rising population is the fact that humans are not dying as young as they used to. That’s a big change but it’s not a panic.

Maybe we all feel the need for a bit of existential panic now and then. Science news is often carefully crafted to provide that fix. People who don’t need the fix can get as annoyed as Hossenfelder:

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Takehome: Science writers, and their readers, often seek a certainty from science that it can’t really provide. They graft it in — so, of COURSE, they find it…

You may also wish to read: Flailing news chain Gannett cuts back on opinion pages. Younger readers say they can’t tell the difference between news and opinion. Readers say they can get opinions anywhere online these days and op-ed pages have become dead space — among the least-read pages in the newspaper.

and

Have newspapers simply lost touch with the mainstream public? The depressing stats tell a tale that’s a bit more complex: Readers tolerate out-of-touch media less now because they we need them so much less. Some journalists, says the New York Times’s top editor, see Twitter as the public that matters. That’s why their news medium is doomed.

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Here’s the European Space Agency’s 3-D map of over a billion stars

It’s a survey mission:

The catalog features multiple types of data, which means it can be used by astronomers working in different fields to understand the evolution of stars in our galaxy (and stars in general). The catalog includes data that can be used to infer the stars’ age and mass, their radial velocity (the speed at which they’re moving away from Earth), and even their temperature.

Mihai Andrei, “Almost two billion stars: Largest, most detailed star catalog to date revealed” at ZME Science (June 14, 2022)

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What would really happen if an infinite number of monkeys typed for an infinity…

Not what Darwin’s bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) thought: The works of Shakespeare:

Infinite monkeys type Shakespeare pic.twitter.com/j1MQM1Tzf0

— Adrian Bliss (@adrianbliss) June 18, 2022

You may also wish to read: Why Thomas Huxley Was Wrong About Monkeys, Typing Forever, Producing Shakespeare “Marshaling information requires these two things: at least one dictionary and at least one grammar.” (Russ White)

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Did someone mention Bill Dembski’s Being as Communion?

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Almost. Jeffrey A. Tucker admits he was wrong to think that just giving people more information would reduce panic — or that Big Tech was a force for human freedom:

At one time, Tucker, who describes himself as a “Victorian Whig” (an old-fashioned liberal), believed that merely giving people access to more accurate information would improve our response to crises. He had good reason to believe that: Historically, dictators like Stalin, Hitler, or Xi have restricted access to information in order to keep the public easy to control. So what happened when, in the Western world, the internet opened the dam?

“The speed and abundance of information actually amplified error. At the height of the pandemic response, anyone could have looked up the demographics of risk, the failings of PCR and masks, the history and significance of natural immunity, the absurdities of plexiglass and capacity restrictions, the utter futility of travel limits and curfews, the pointless brutality of school closures. It was all there, not just on random blogs but also in the scholarly literature.”

The problem was, many people were not even trying to make sound judgments …

News, “Economist confronts painful truths about COVID-19 information” at Mind Matters News (June 10, 2022)

Takehome: Tucker’s dilemma is easier to interpret if we keep in mind something Bill Dembski stressed in Being as Communion (Routledge, 2014) about the nature of information: it is connective, not causal, and using it wisely is an act of the will.

You may also wish to read:

Dox show Disinformation Board was for use against Americans too. A whistleblower leaked a cache of documents to two U.S. senators who have put them online. Special targets for attack were U.S. public doubt about face masks and COVID vaccines and suspicion of Big Science claims that the virus arose naturally.

and

Whew! Twitter now offers Musk a “firehose” of data from Botworld. Looming in the background is Musk’s proposal to make Twitter more of a free speech zone, a prospect that worries many Big Tech power players. An independent group found that 10% of Twitter is bots, not the 5% Twitter told the feds). It comes down to 1) how you count and 2) what’s an agreed fair price?

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From Science News: No signs (yet) of life on Venus

University of Cambridge researchers conclude, “The unusual behavior of sulphur in Venus’ atmosphere cannot be explained by an ‘aerial’ form of extra-terrestrial life, according to a new study.”

Venus from Mariner 10. NASA ID: PIA23791

Any life form in sufficient abundance is expected to leave chemical fingerprints on a planet’s atmosphere as it consumes food and expels waste. However, the Cambridge researchers found no evidence of these fingerprints on Venus.

Even if Venus is devoid of life, the researchers say their results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, could be useful for studying the atmospheres of similar planets throughout the galaxy, and the eventual detection of life outside our Solar System.

“We’ve spent the past two years trying to explain the weird sulphur chemistry we see in the clouds of Venus,” said co-author Dr Paul Rimmer from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “Life is pretty good at weird chemistry, so we’ve been studying whether there’s a way to make life a potential explanation for what we see.”

The researchers used a combination of atmospheric and biochemical models to study the chemical reactions that are expected to occur, given the known sources of chemical energy in Venus’s atmosphere.

“We looked at the sulphur-based ‘food’ available in the Venusian atmosphere — it’s not anything you or I would want to eat, but it is the main available energy source,” said Sean Jordan from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, the paper’s first author. “If that food is being consumed by life, we should see evidence of that through specific chemicals being lost and gained in the atmosphere.”

They found that the metabolic reactions can result in a drop in SO2 levels, but only by producing other molecules in very large amounts that aren’t seen. The results set a hard limit on how much life could exist on Venus without blowing apart our understanding of how chemical reactions work in planetary atmospheres.

“To understand why some planets are alive, we need to understand why other planets are dead,” said Shorttle. “If life somehow managed to sneak into the Venusian clouds, it would totally change how we search for chemical signs of life on other planets.”

Science Daily

“To understand why some planets are alive…” This is the big question. I hope that researchers will acknowledge that the existence of life on the only planet known to contain life depends on far more than just getting the habitability conditions correct.

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At Phys.org: Chinese fossils show human middle ear evolved from fish gills

Embryonic and fossil evidence proves that the human middle ear evolved from the spiracle of fishes. However, the origin of the vertebrate spiracle has long been an unsolved mystery in vertebrate evolution.

It seems that evolutionists have a much softer definition of what amounts to proof than in other fields of science.

Many important structures of human beings can be traced back to our fish ancestors, such as our teeth, jaws, middle ears, etc. The main task of paleontologists is to find the important missing links in the evolutionary chain from fish to humans.

The spiracle is a small hole behind each eye that opens to the mouth in some fishes. In sharks and all rays, the spiracle is responsible for the intake of water into the buccal space before being expelled from the gills. The spiracle is often located towards the top of the animal allowing breathing even while the animal is mostly buried under sediment.

The 3D braincase of Shuyu.
Credit: IVPP

In the Polypterus, the most primitive, living bony fish, the spiracles are used to breathe air. However, fish spiracles were eventually replaced in most non-fish species as they evolved to breathe through their noses and mouths. In early tetrapods, the spiracle seems to have developed first into the Otic notch. Like the spiracle, it was used in respiration and was incapable of sensing sound. Later the spiracle evolved into the ear of modern tetrapods, eventually becoming the hearing canal used for transmitting sound to the brain via tiny inner ear bones. This function has remained throughout the evolution to humans.

Phys.org

So this amounts to “proof”. By such means of rationalization, the ability of the geocentric model of the solar system to make approximate predictions of the location of the planets would constitute proof of that plausible but completely incorrect model.

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At Science Daily: Military cannot rely on AI for strategy or judgment, study suggests

Using artificial intelligence (AI) for warfare has been the promise of science fiction and politicians for years, but new research argues only so much can be automated and shows the value of human judgment.

“All of the hard problems in AI really are judgment and data problems, and the interesting thing about that is when you start thinking about war, the hard problems are strategy and uncertainty, or what is well known as the fog of war,” said Jon Lindsay, an associate professor in the School of Cybersecurity & Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. “You need human sense-making and to make moral, ethical, and intellectual decisions in an incredibly confusing, fraught, scary situation.”

AI decision-making is based on four key components: data about a situation, interpretation of those data (or prediction), determining the best way to act in line with goals and values (or judgment), and action. Machine learning advancements have made predictions easier, which makes data and judgment even more valuable. Although AI can automate everything from commerce to transit, judgment is where humans must intervene, Lindsay and University of Toronto Professor Avi Goldfarb wrote in the paper, “Prediction and Judgment: Why Artificial Intelligence Increases the Importance of Humans in War,” published in International Security.

Many policy makers assume human soldiers could be replaced with automated systems, ideally making militaries less dependent on human labor and more effective on the battlefield. This is called the substitution theory of AI, but Lindsay and Goldfarb state that AI should not be seen as a substitute, but rather a complement to existing human strategy.

“Machines are good at prediction, but they depend on data and judgment, and the most difficult problems in war are information and strategy,” he said. “The conditions that make AI work in commerce are the conditions that are hardest to meet in a military environment because of its unpredictability.”

“All the excitement and the fear are about killer robots and lethal vehicles, but the worst case for military AI in practice is going to be the classically militaristic problems where you’re really dependent on creativity and interpretation,” Lindsay said.

“If AI is automating prediction, that’s making judgment and data really important,” Lindsay said. “We’ve already automated a lot of military action with mechanized forces and precision weapons, then we automated data collection with intelligence satellites and sensors, and now we’re automating prediction with AI. So, when are we going to automate judgment, or are there components of judgment cannot be automated?”

Until then, though, tactical and strategic decision making by humans continues to be the most important aspect of warfare.

Science Daily

Creativity, interpretation, strategy, value judgments, morality and ethics–these are all the purview of humans, especially humans who acknowledge God as the foundation of a moral society.

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At Skeptic: Why Christians Should Accept the Theory of Evolution

Larry Arnhart writes:

American Christian fundamentalists reject Darwinian evolution for at least two reasons. The first is their belief that the Bible has revealed a clear teaching about the divine creation of the world that denies Darwinian evolution. The second reason is their belief that Darwinian evolution contradicts the foundational principle of the American creed that human beings have been created equal and endowed with rights by their Creator, as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence. In this article I will argue that both beliefs are mistaken, and that Christians should all accept the theory of evolution.

American Christian fundamentalists reject Darwinian evolution for at least two reasons. The first is their belief that the Bible has revealed a clear teaching about the divine creation of the world that denies Darwinian evolution. The second reason is their belief that Darwinian evolution contradicts the foundational principle of the American creed that human beings have been created equal and endowed with rights by their Creator, as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence. In this article I will argue that both beliefs are mistaken, and that Christians should all accept the theory of evolution.

In short, religious fundamentalists reject the Darwinian idea of human evolution from earlier species of animals because they believe this contradicts what the Bible says about God creating everything, including human beings, and about God as a personal deity who hears prayers and demands faithful obedience. They think … the Bible as God’s Revelation contradicts Darwin’s naturalistic science of evolution.

Let’s see what Arnhart has to say about the evidence for intelligent design:

To all of this, the intelligent design theorist Stephen Meyer responds by arguing that although he personally believes in biblical revelation, he sees that the case for an Intelligent Designer as an alternative to materialist natural science is best made on purely scientific grounds without any appeal to biblical authority. He claims that the evidence of science based on our natural observations of the world point to the existence of an Intelligent Designer to explain the appearance of design in the natural world that cannot be explained plausibly by Darwinian evolutionary science.

Meyer’s argument suffers, however, from a fundamental sophistry. Intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the Intelligent Designer. This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design are offering no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer miraculously caused these forms of life. Meyer insists that the proponents of evolutionary science satisfy standards of proof that he and his fellow proponents of intelligent design cannot satisfy, because his sophistical strategy is to put the highest burden of proof on his opponents, while refusing to accept that burden of proof for himself.

The author shows an astounding lack of understanding of the positive case for intelligent design, made clearly by Casey Luskin in a series of recent articles (Common Objections, Physics, Genetics, Systematics, and Paleontology). The boundaries of science, or the limitations of natural processes, provide a positive case for intelligent design, as discussed in my book, Canceled Science.

Arnhart’s concluding paragraph:

So, there are good reasons to believe that two of the major arguments against Darwinian evolution made by American Christian fundamentalists are mistaken. There is no clear biblical revelation denying Darwinian evolution. And there is no reason to believe that the Declaration of Independence requires a creationist theology that contradicts Darwinian science.

Skeptic

It turns out that some American Christian fundamentalists may disbelieve in Darwinian evolution for the wrong reasons, but their disbelief is squarely in line with the scientific evidence.

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At Evolution News: Carl Sagan: “An Intelligence That Antedates the Universe”

Paul Nelson examines the available evidence suggesting, “that Sagan’s understanding of design detection was far subtler and more open-ended than many realize.”

The late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) is often seen as an exemplar of a certain attitude on the relationship of science and theology: skeptical, anti-religion, pro-naturalism. Abundant evidence supports this view of Sagan, but there are fascinating hints in both his technical and popular writings that Sagan’s understanding of design detection was far subtler and more open-ended than many realize. Like his British contemporary, the astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), Sagan left evidence that he might well have enjoyed conversations with intelligent design theorists. Such historical counterfactuals are tricky at best, of course, so let’s look at some of the available evidence, and the reader can speculate on her own.

Design Detection in Sagan’s Novel Contact

The last chapter (24) of Sagan’s novel Contact (1985; later made into a film [1997] starring Jodie Foster) is an unmistakable example of number mysticism and design detection, using pi — the mathematical constant and irrational number expressing the ratio between the circumference of any circle and its diameter. Entitled “The Artist’s Signature,” the chapter opens with two epigraphs, as follows:

“Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” (1 COR. 15:51)

“The universe seems…to have been determined and ordered in accordance with the creator of all things; for the pattern was fixed, like a preliminary sketch, by the determination of number pre-existent in the mind of the world-creating God.” NICOMACHUS OF GERASA, ARITHMETIC I, 6 (CA. AD 100)

This passage, from the very end of the chapter — and the book — bears quoting. Sagan places the whole section in italics for emphasis:

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said…As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders,  there is an intelligence that antedates the universe . [Emphasis added.]

Design’s Narrative Power

Of course, Contact is a novel, not a scientific or philosophical treatise. Sagan was writing for drama (Contact actually started out as a movie treatment in 1980-81). But rather like his contemporaries Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, Sagan loved to play around with concepts of design detection and non-human intelligence. Their narrative power was undeniable.

Sagan and Intelligent Design

In 1985, when Contact was first published, intelligent design as an intellectual position was largely confined to the edges of academic philosophy, in the work of people such as the Canadian philosopher John Leslie, and a few hardy souls in the neighborhood of books like Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984).

When ID appeared to become a real cultural threat, however — as it did starting in the mid 1990s in the United States — the dynamic shifted. Still, while Sagan was anti-religious, he was decidedly not anti-design, in the generic sense of the detectability of intelligent causation as a mode distinct from ordinary physical causation. In any case, he died in 1996, and therefore missed the coming high points of the ID debate. Others took up the skeptical mantle, to make sure that design never found a footing in science proper.

As boundary-pushers, both Sagan and Hoyle caught plenty of flak during their lifetimes. Sagan, for instance, was never elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Both paid a price for their popularity and willingness to write novels toying with non-human intelligences. It is interesting, then, to wonder how Sagan would have responded to ID, as articulated by Michael Behe, William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, etc., and how he might have separated his own views from it

Evolution News

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