Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 65

At Mind Matters News: The hive mind: Leafcutter ants behave like farmhands but…

But they are actually following a colony algorithm rather than making individual decisions, as Eric Cassell discusses in Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts (2021):

Ant behavior specialist Elva Robinson offers an example of how the hive mind works: The colony’s survival depends in part on fat stored in ants’ bodies and the younger ants are the fatter ones. They stay in the colony and look after the eggs, larvae, and pupae — also guarding the fat. The older ants, who go out to forage, are leaner (and perhaps therefore hungry). They also have shorter expected life spans so overall, their greatly increased risk of dying outside the nest is less of a loss to the colony. They bring back food but mainly give it to the fatter, protected ants, remaining lean themselves. Robinson comments:

News, “The hive mind: Leafcutter ants behave like farmhands but… ” at Mind Matters News (June 3, 2022)

These ants are great examples of self-organisation because each ant is making a decision based only on the information that it has about itself. It doesn’t have to know the overall system of the colony and that’s quite an important lesson for lots of human systems where we tend to focus a lot on centralised control where you have one control centre collecting all the information and deciding what to do. But obviously, if there’s a problem with that control centre then your whole system will break down. For ants, decisions are processed in a very distributed way, so all the individuals contribute. And if any one individual is taken out of the system, it will still work. So in the case of our experiment, if some ants were removed as we did in our experiment, then the next leanest ants will go out. And if you keep on removing ants then more and more corpulent ants — more fat ants — will start to go outside. So it’s all very self regulating.

Elva Robinson, “The Hive Mind — How Ants Know Their Place” at The Naked Scientists (June 6, 2010)

Takehome: Ants’ complex behavior patterns are part of following a colony algorithm rather than making individual decisions. They make immediate individual decisions but the hive mind of the colony makes the big ones. We humans struggle to understand the hive mind because our world is one of uniquely individual minds that can, with effort, be got to work together — for a while.

You may also wish to read: Do ants think? Yes, they do — but they think like computers . Computer programmers have adapted some ant problem-solving methods to software programs (but without the need for complex chemical scents). Navigation expert Eric Cassell points out that algorithms have made the ant one of the most successful insects ever, both in numbers and complexity.

and

How do insects use their very small brains to think clearly? How do they engage in complex behaviour with only 100,000 to a million neurons? Researchers are finding that insects have a number of strategies for making the most of comparatively few neurons to enable complex behavior.

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At Nature: NASA’s Perseverance rover begins key search for life on Mars

More than fifteen months after landing in Jezero Crater on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has finally begun its hunt for ancient life in earnest.

Two aspects of this mission stand out as momentous: First, the amazing technological achievements involved in sending remote-controlled craft to Mars, and second, the potential significance of finding signs of prior life on a planet other than Earth. What are the ramifications of a life signatures in Martian soil? Astronomers have already suggested that remnants of Earth-life has been “contaminating” Mars for millions of years. Sufficiently powerful meteorite collisions with Earth could eject Earth’s surface material (containing organisms) into an orbit that could eventually settle onto the surface of Mars.

Perseverance arrived at the base of an ancient river delta on Mars in April.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

On 28 May, Perseverance ground a 5-centimetre-wide circular patch into a rock at the base of what was once a river delta in the crater. This delta formed billions of years ago, when a long-vanished river deposited layers of sediment into Jezero, and it is the main reason that NASA sent the rover here. On Earth, river sediment is usually teeming with life.

Perseverance landed in February 2021, several kilometres from the delta’s edge. It spent many of its early months exploring the crater floor — which unexpectedly is made of igneous rocks, a type that forms as molten materials cool. That was a scientific jackpot because scientists can date igneous rocks on the basis of the radioactive decay of their chemical elements. But many researchers have been keen for Perseverance to get to the delta, whose fine-grained sediments have the best chance of harbouring evidence of Martian life.

Like a child assembling a set of gemstones for their prized collection, mission scientists are deliberating over which rocks the rover should sample to amass the most geologically diverse cache. Perseverance carries 43 tubes for samples, each a little thicker than a pencil. NASA and ESA are planning to bring around 30 filled tubes back to Earth.

A productive mission

NASA and ESA are working on a US$5-billion plan to send two landers to Mars — carrying a rover that would pick up the samples, and a rocket that would send them into Mars orbit — as well as a spacecraft that would grab them out of orbit and fly them back to Earth. The first launches were supposed to happen in 2026, but that timeline was changed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ESA halted all cooperation with Russia’s space agency over the war. The tensions have derailed a planned Russian–European Mars rover — and now NASA and ESA are redrawing their Mars-landing plans. They have some time: Perseverance’s sampling tubes are designed to last for decades under Martian conditions.

Along with taking rock samples, Perseverance has made other discoveries in Jezero, including how dust devils loft large amounts of dust into the air1 and how the speed of sound fluctuates in Mars’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere2. The rover has so far driven more than 11 kilometres, and it set an extraterrestrial distance record when it covered 5 kilometres in 30 Martian days, in March and April.

Perseverance’s sidekick, the tiny helicopter Ingenuity, has been instrumental in some of the rover’s achievements — but its time on Mars might be coming to a close. Originally designed to make just 5 flights, it defied expectations by completing 28. From its vantage point in the skies, it has helped to scout the best routes for Perseverance, and it surveyed the flat area at the delta’s base where future missions could land.

Nature

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At Mind Matters News: Researchers: Humans process information differently from monkeys

In a paper at Nature Neuroscience, researchers reported on human vs. macaque brains on input/output systems and synergy between regions:

Our brain regions for sensory and motor functions use a simple input/output system with high reliability due to high redundancy (repetition). Our eyes duplicate most of each other’s information but that helps ensure that our view of the scene is correct. However, there is a very different way of processing information — synergistic processing — which integrates signals from across a variety of brain networks. This approach is better adapted, the researchers say, to “attention, learning, working memory, social and numerical cognition.” Unlike the visual system, it is not hardwired. It adapts readily to changing circumstances, connecting different networks in different ways at different times.

News, “Researchers: Humans process information differently from monkeys” at Mind Matters News (June 2, 2022)

Takehome: The researchers found that, from an information theory perspective, human brains engage in less redundant and more synergistic processing than macaques. So information theory supports human exceptionalism where Darwinism doesn’t?

You may also wish to read: Information theory: Evolution as the transfer of information. Information follows different rules from matter and energy, which might change the way we see evolution. A pair of researchers have introduced an Information Continuum Model of Evolution (ICM) which takes into account that information is immaterial. The is open access.

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Fun: A giant undersea meadow turned out to be a single organism – the world’s largest

It’s a hybrid of two sea grass species that kept all the chromosomes of both mother and father, so continued with genetic diversity, researchers say:

Scientists at the University of Western Australia (UWA) got a fascinating surprise when, while attempting to study genetic differences between plants in a massive undersea meadow, their samples revealed that the “meadow” was in fact just one very old — and very large — organism.

According to The Guardian, this single Posidonia australis plant, more commonly known as ribbon weed, spans an astonishing 77 square miles of undersea land off the coast of western Australia’s Shark Bay. For perspective, that’s three times the size of Manhattan. Move over, trees! There’s a new — well, ~4,500 year old — giant in town.

Maggie Harrison, “Scientists discover world’s largest organism, chilling out under ocean” at Futurism (June 1, 2022)

It grows by rhizomes rather than reproducing in a conventional way.

Here’s another seagrass meadow, to give some sense of the environment.

Then there’s The Blob at the ParisZoo …

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At Mind Matters News: A little-known structure tells our brains what matters now

Work with monkeys and mice has shed light on the filtering role of a neglected feature of the mammalian (including human) brain:

Upper right, at 2:00 o’clock, is the cuneate nucleus
(Nucleus cuneatus)/Gray’s Anatomy ,Public Domain

Neuroscientists knew about the cuneate nucleus (CN) but believed it to be a “passive relay station.” Anyway, stuck at the join between the head and the neck and surrounded by life-or-death brain regions, it was hard to research. The current team’s work with monkeys and mice however, suggests a much larger and more important role than relay…

The researchers posit that the cuneate nucleus highlights some signals and suppresses others before sending them up to the brain regions that enable “perception, motor control and higher cognitive functions.” And it receives signals from those regions too. That’s pretty important because it could be a gatekeeper — or a door blocker. They hope that their findings will prove useful in understanding and treating some aspects of paralysis.

News, “A little-known structure tells our brains what matters now” at Mind Matters News (June 1, 2022)

Takehome: The cuneate nucleus (CN) in the brain stem turns out to communicate regularly with your prefrontal cortex and spine as to what you had better notice. The more we learn about the brain, the less likely it seems to be purely a product of material, natural causes.

You may also wish to read: What neuroscientists now know about how memories are born and die. Where, exactly are our memories? Are modern media destroying them? Could we erase them if we wanted to?

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At Quanta: Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law That Leads to Disorder

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.

The connection between the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and information is receiving further grounding through studies of quantum entanglement. The importance of this research is that the boundaries of what cannot happen naturally, as implied by the 2nd Law, are shifting away from the realm of probabilities into definite impossibilities.

In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” No violation of this law has ever been observed, nor is any expected.

Is the rise of entropy merely probabilistic, or can it be straightened out by use of clear quantum axioms?
Maggie Chiang for Quanta Magazine

But something about the second law troubles physicists. Some are not convinced that we understand it properly or that its foundations are firm. Although it’s called a law, it’s usually regarded as merely probabilistic: It stipulates that the outcome of any process will be the most probable one (which effectively means the outcome is inevitable given the numbers involved). Yet physicists don’t just want descriptions of what will probably happen. “We like laws of physics to be exact,” said the physicist Chiara Marletto of the University of Oxford. Can the second law be tightened up into more than just a statement of likelihoods?

A number of independent groups appear to have done just that. They may have woven the second law out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics — which, some suspect, have directionality and irreversibility built into them at the deepest level. According to this view, the second law comes about not because of classical probabilities but because of quantum effects such as entanglement. It arises from the ways in which quantum systems share information, and from cornerstone quantum principles that decree what is allowed to happen and what is not. In this telling, an increase in entropy is not just the most likely outcome of change. It is a logical consequence of the most fundamental resource that we know of — the quantum resource of information.

Many-particle systems that are more disordered and have higher entropy vastly outnumber ordered, lower-entropy states, so molecular interactions are much more likely to end up producing them. The second law seems then to be just about statistics: It’s a law of large numbers. In this view, there’s no fundamental reason why entropy can’t decrease — why, for example, all the air molecules in your room can’t congregate by chance in one corner. It’s just extremely unlikely.

Yet this probabilistic statistical physics leaves some questions hanging. It directs us toward the most probable microstates in a whole ensemble of possible states and forces us to be content with taking averages across that ensemble.

But the laws of classical physics are deterministic — they allow only a single outcome for any starting point. Where, then, can that hypothetical ensemble of states enter the picture at all, if only one outcome is ever possible?

David Deutsch, a physicist at Oxford, has  for several years been seeking to avoid this dilemma by developing a theory of (as he puts it) “a world in which probability and randomness are totally absent from physical processes.” His project, on which Marletto is now collaborating, is called constructor theory. It aims to establish not just which processes probably can and can’t happen, but which are possible and which are forbidden outright.

Recently, Marletto, working with the quantum theorist Vlatko Vedral at Oxford and colleagues in Italy, showed that constructor theory does identify processes that are irreversible in this sense — even though everything happens according to quantum mechanical laws that are themselves perfectly reversible. “We show that there are some transformations for which you can find a constructor for one direction but not the other,” she said.

The connection between quantum mechanics and thermodynamics is linked to the tendency of a quantum wave function of a system to evolve with time. The wave function changes in such a way as to increase the uncertainty (and decrease the information) an observer can have about the system at a later time

A pure state is one for which we know all there is to be known about it. But when two objects are entangled, you can’t fully specify one of them without knowing everything about the other too. The fact is that it’s easier to go from a pure quantum state to a mixed state than vice versa — because the information in the pure state gets spread out by entanglement and is hard to recover. It’s comparable to trying to re-form a droplet of ink once it has dispersed in water, a process in which the irreversibility is imposed by the second law.

So here the irreversibility is “just a consequence of the way the system dynamically evolves,” said Marletto. There’s no statistical aspect to it.

Read the full article here.

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At Big Think: How the Multiverse could break the scientific method

Theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser raises the issue that the multiverse hypothesis suffers from the unscientific property of non-falsifiability. Embedded in his article is a solid acknowledgement of the fine-tuning of physical parameters for life to exist in our universe.

Today let’s take a walk on the wild side and assume, for the sake of argument, that our Universe is not the only one that exists. Let’s consider that there are many other universes, possibly infinitely many. The totality of these universes, including our own, is what cosmologists call the Multiverse. It sounds more like a myth than a scientific hypothesis, and this conceptual troublemaker inspires some while it outrages others.

Credit: rolffimages / Adobe StockHow far can we push the theories of physics?

The controversy started in the 1980s. Two physicists, Andrei Linde at Stanford University and Alex Vilenkin at Tufts University, independently proposed that if the Universe underwent a very fast expansion early on in its existence — we call this an inflationary expansion — then our Universe would not be the only one. 

When a sufficiently large region of space is filled with the field of a certain energy, it will expand at a rate related to that energy. 

The result for cosmology is a plethora of madly inflating regions of space, each expanding at its own rate. Very quickly, the Universe would consist of myriad inflating regions that grow, unaware of their surroundings. The Universe morphs into a Multiverse. Even within each region, quantum fluctuations may drive a sub-region to inflate. The picture, then, is one of an eternally replicating cosmos, filled with bubbles within bubbles. Ours would be but one of them — a single bubble in a frothing Multiverse.

Is the multiverse testable?

This is wildly inspiring. But is it science? To be scientific, a hypothesis needs to be testable. Can you test the Multiverse? The answer, in a strict sense, is no. Each of these inflating regions — or contracting ones, as there could also be failed universes — is outside our cosmic horizon, the region that delimits how far light has traveled since the beginning of time. As such, we cannot see these cosmoids, nor receive any signals from them. The best that we can hope for is to find a sign that one of our neighboring universes bruised our own space in the past. If this had happened, we would see some specific patterns in the sky — more precisely, in the radiation left over after hydrogen atoms formed some 400,000 years after the Big Bang. So far, no such signal has been found. The chances of finding one are, quite frankly, remote. 

We are thus stuck with a plausible scientific idea that seems untestable. Even if we were to find evidence for inflation, that would not necessarily support the inflationary Multiverse. What are we to do?

Different kinds of different in the multiverse

The Multiverse suggests another ingredient — the possibility that physics is different in different universes. Things get pretty nebulous here, because there are two kinds of “different” to describe. The first is different values for the constants of nature (such as the electron charge or the strength of gravity), while the second raises the possibility that there are different laws of nature altogether. 

In order to harbor life as we know it, our Universe has to obey a series of very strict requirements. Small deviations are not tolerated in the values of nature’s constants. But the Multiverse brings forth the question of naturalness, or of how common our Universe and its laws are among the myriad universes belonging to the Multiverse. Are we the exception, or do we follow the rule? 

The problem is that we have no way to tell. To know whether we are common, we need to know something about the other universes and the kinds of physics they have. But we don’t. Nor do we know how many universes there are, and this makes it very hard to estimate how common we are. To make things worse, if there are infinitely many cosmoids, we cannot say anything at all. Inductive thinking is useless here. Infinity gets us tangled up in knots. When everything is possible, nothing stands out, and nothing is learned.

That is why some physicists worry about the Multiverse to the point of loathing it. There is nothing more important to science than its ability to prove ideas wrong. If we lose that, we undermine the very structure of the scientific method.

BigThink

If there is “nothing more important to science than its ability to prove ideas wrong,” is it fair to ask, “What is the means by which the theory of evolution could be proved wrong?”

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Eukaryogenesis: The Rise of an Emergent Superorganism

An article published in Frontiers of Microbiology highlights the “the chasm in design between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.”

The Dominant Biological Paradigms of Life and Evolution

Three paradigms established in the 19th century, combined with advances in quantitative genetics in the 20th century, led to the dominant ‘textbook’ paradigm of biology where all life is cellular and descends from a common ancestor via the neo-Darwinian process of natural selection (e.g., Keeton and Gould, 1986).

Although the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis and the universal Tree of Life are very powerful paradigms, they are under challenge as several major tenets of the synthesis are being questioned (e.g., Doolittle, 1999; Dagan and Martin, 2006; Koonin, 2009; Koonin and Wolf, 2012). One challenge is their incompatibility with endosymbiotic processes operating at the origin of the eukaryotic domain (Koonin, 2009). Since the mitochondrion initially evolved separately from the ancestor of the eukaryotic cytoplasm, it arose via a symbiotic event (i.e., saltation) rather than an autogenous incremental process expected under the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis paradigm.

The “Grand Chasm” Between Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes

The eukaryotic cell is extraordinarily distinct from the much simpler bacterial and archaeal cells of the prokaryotic domains. It possesses not only a nucleus and a mitochondrion, but also a sophisticated endomembrane system, a complex cytoskeleton and a unique sexual cycle, leaving the gap between cells of prokaryotic and eukaryotic design as the greatest chasm in biology. 

Finally, a notorious ‘queen of evolutionary problems’ related to the origin of the nucleus is the unresolved paradox of the origin of the eukaryotic sexual cycle (Bell, 1982). For the sexual cycle to function, two highly complex integrated but temporally and mechanistically unrelated processes must occur. Firstly, meiosis must occur to convert a diploid cell into four haploid daughter cells. This complex process is achieved by a single cycle of chromosomal replication generating a nucleus with 4 N ploidy and is followed by two mitosis-like cell divisions reducing the ploidy of the four daughter cells to 1 N.

The origin of this process is a paradox that has defied any generally accepted explanation for over 50 years and in part revolves around the challenge of determining which came first, meiosis that allows haploid gametes to be formed from a diploid or syngamy that allows 1 N haploid gametes to mate and create a 2 N diploid in the first place.

According to the modern evolutionary synthesis, incremental changes leading to the complex, unique and interrelated eukaryotic systems associated with the nucleus must have each provided an immediate selective advantage to an archaeal cell. Arguing these innovations were beneficial because they allowed the future evolution of complexity in the eukaryotic domain is clearly a teleological argument. It is particularly thought-provoking to explain these discontinuities in terms of incremental benefit when it appears that the eukaryotic system evolved only once in over 3.7 billion years and left no currently recognised intermediates, while the prokaryotic system remained highly efficient and conserved by the bacterial and archaeal domains for over 3.7 billion years.

In his lengthy article, Bell draws attention to evolutionary hurdles to the origin of eukaryotic cells. The “chasm” between eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells is causing a re-think of the universal common ancestor notion. Separate origins, however, of these types of cells would introduce further strain to the unguided evolution theory. Can we surmise that the evidence is more suitably consistent with intelligent design of these types of organisms?

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Nature article: Origin of life theory involving RNA–protein hybrid gets new support

Structure that links amino acids suggests that early organisms could have been based on an RNA–protein mix.

Chemists say they have solved a crucial problem in a theory of life’s beginnings, by demonstrating that RNA molecules can link short chains of amino acids together.

Carell and colleagues were inspired by ribosomes — shown here translating a strand of RNA.
Credit: Omikron/Science Photo Library

The findings, published on 11 May in Nature1, support a variation on the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis, which proposes that before the evolution of DNA and the proteins it encodes, the first organisms were based on strands of RNA, a molecule that can both store genetic information — as sequences of the nucleosides A, C, G and U — and act as a catalyst for chemical reactions.

The discovery “opens up vast and fundamentally new avenues of pursuit for early chemical evolution”, says Bill Martin, who studies molecular evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany.

Chemists say they have solved a crucial problem in a theory of life’s beginnings, by demonstrating that RNA molecules can link short chains of amino acids together.

The findings, published on 11 May in Nature1, support a variation on the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis, which proposes that before the evolution of DNA and the proteins it encodes, the first organisms were based on strands of RNA, a molecule that can both store genetic information — as sequences of the nucleosides A, C, G and U — and act as a catalyst for chemical reactions.

The discovery “opens up vast and fundamentally new avenues of pursuit for early chemical evolution”, says Bill Martin, who studies molecular evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany.

“This is a very exciting finding,” says Martin, “not only because it maps out a new route to RNA-based peptide formation, but because it also uncovers new evolutionary significance to the naturally occurring modified bases of RNA.” The results point to an important part played by RNA at the origins of life, but without requiring RNA alone to self-replicate, Martin adds.

To show that this is a plausible origin of life, scientists must complete several further steps. The peptides that form on the team’s RNA are composed of a random sequence of amino acids, rather than one determined by information stored in the RNA. Carell says that larger RNA structures could have sections that fold into shapes that ‘recognize’ specific amino acids at specific sites, producing a well-determined structure. And some of these complex RNA–peptide hybrids could have catalytic properties, and be subject to evolutionary pressure to become more efficient. “If the molecule can replicate, you have something like a mini organism,” says Carell.

Nature

It is apparent from the article that researcher intervention was critical in obtaining the reported outcome. Also, the pre-existence of complex, functional biomolecules is assumed (RNA itself, and ribosomes consisting of RNA segments and proteins). Evolution is mentioned several times as a means of guiding the nascent process into a fully self-replicating “mini organism.” Wishful thinking cannot overturn the information-barrier challenges involved in producing functional, self-replicating biomolecular machinery.

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At Mind Matters News: Asked at The Scientist: Do invertebrates have feelings?

Just as vertebrates differ greatly in intelligence and sentience, invertebrates may differ greatly too. The seafood industry is taking heed:

Assessing the evidence is tricky. In recent years, we have discovered that some invertebrates — octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, for example — are much more intelligent than we used to think. That’s also true to some extent of lobsters and crabs. But they are special cases. Many other invertebrates, like clams, show little sign of cognitive awareness.

As Mesa goes on to note, it is hard to tell without skilful research. Many invertebrates do not have “faces” and their brains are organized very differently from ours. And, bluntly, some invertebrate behavior does not point in the direction of much sentience. As she observes, “Locusts continue to chew leaves as they’re being consumed by predators, and many insects don’t limp in response to injury.” Then there’s the praying mantis:

Denyse O’Leary, “Asked at The Scientist: Do invertebrates have feelings?” at Mind Matters News (May 31, 2022)

Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms (2021) and entomologist Deborah M. Gordon describe the behavior of insects like ants as algorithmic, like that of a computer — which means that they probably aren’t “feeling” anything.

Denyse O’Leary, “Asked at The Scientist: Do invertebrates have feelings?” at Mind Matters News (May 31, 2022)

Takehome: What we are learning is that invertebrate status is not, by itself, evidence of an inability to think or feel — as we used to suppose. In a world full of information and intelligence, it’s not nearly as tidy as our biology teachers thought.

You may also wish to read:

Researchers ask—serious question — do crabs have emotions?Recent research has created some unexpected ethical problems for the seafood industry. There are no simple answers to why some invertebrates show more intelligence and emotion than we would expect.

How could we know if an octopus or lobster felt pain? Researchers found that, when it comes to awareness, octopuses were the stars, followed by lobsters, crayfish, crabs, etc. How a life form acquires the ability to make intelligent decisions (and feel pain) is a fruitful mystery but it might blow up some assumptions about evolution.

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