Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 68

At Science Daily: Dragonflies use vision, subtle wing control to straighten up and fly right

Researchers at Cornell University study the intricate mechanisms of dragonfly flight, and they find…complex, well-designed, interacting systems.

With their stretched bodies, immense wingspan and iridescent coloring, dragonflies are a unique sight. But their originality doesn’t end with their looks: As one of the oldest insect species on the planet, they are an early innovator of aerial flight.

Now, a group led by Jane Wang, professor of mechanical engineering and physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has untangled the intricate physics and neural controls that enable dragonflies to right themselves while they’re falling.

The research reveals a chain of mechanisms that begins with the dragonfly’s eyes — all five of them — and continues through its muscles and wing pitch.

The team’s paper, “Recovery Mechanisms in the Dragonfly Righting Reflex,” was published May 12th in Science.

Science Daily

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At Evolution News: Man, with His Special Place in Nature, Was Designed to Use Fire

Michael Denton gives a fascinating excerpt from his new book, The Miracle of Man.

As I show in my book The Miracle of Man, the path followed by our ancestors from stone tools to our current technological civilization was, in broad outline, the only possible path, and it was a path only possible because of yet another stunning ensemble of prior environmental fitness in nature. Not only was the “chosen path” unique, but only a special type of unique being very close to our own biological design could have taken the first and vital step to technological enlightenment, fire-making.

From first principles, a creature capable of creating and controlling fire must be an aerobic terrestrial air-breathing species, living in an atmosphere enriched in oxygen, supportive of both respiration and combustion. This fire-maker must have something like human intelligence to accomplish the task, and while it is true that other species — e.g., dolphins, parrots, seals, apes, and ravens — possess intelligence and remarkable problem-solving abilities, as far as is known, no other organism comes close to the intelligence of humans. 

The species in question also needs to be mobile and possess high acuity vision in order to be able to create and master fire, and follow the subsequent route via metallurgy to an advanced technology.

Being a social species possessed of language would also have been essential for the peripheral tasks associated with the regular making and controlling of fire among small tribal groups, including the hewing and collecting of the necessary wooden fuels to initiate and sustain the fire. While many other species are social, none possesses a communication system remotely as competent as human language for transmitting information, including abstract concepts.

In addition to being terrestrial, air breathing, sighted, mobile, intelligent, social, and possessed of language, a fire-maker also needs the right anatomy. And in keeping with the anthropocentric claim, only humankind of all the creatures on Earth is properly endowed with the right build to make and control fire. Neither a giraffe, nor an elephant, nor a parrot, nor a cat, nor a chimp nor any other terrestrial organism has the right anatomy to master fire, none apart from humans.

The perfection of the [human] hand was a popular topic among 19th-century natural theologians such as Oxford Professor of Medicine John Kidd, who quoted liberally from Galen. Charles Bell, in his Bridgewater Treatise, also waxed lyrical about the hand, while citing one of the ancient Greek thinkers: “Seeing the perfection of the hand, we can hardly be surprised that some philosophers should have entertained the opinion with Anaxagoras, that the superiority of man is owing to his hand…. it is in the human hand that we have the consummation of all perfection as an instrument.”

So our size is right for approaching a fire, for generating the necessary kinetic forces to hew the wood needed to fuel high temperatures fires, and for mining metal ores from rocks. We could be neither fire-makers nor metallurgists if we were significantly smaller.

 As matters stand, the evidence increasingly points to a natural order uniquely fit for life on Earth and for beings of a biology close to that of humans, a view which does not prove but is entirely consistent with the traditional Judeo-Christian framework.

Evolution News

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At Mind Matters News: Eric Holloway’s Weasel Libs — a variant of Mad Libs, in honor of Richard Dawkins

Eric Holloway looks at Richard Dawkins’ famous Darwinian evolution-only Weasel program in light of epigenetic information.

To demonstrate what is wrong with fully naturalist assumptions like those of Richard Dawkins’ Weasel program, I developed Weasel Libs, modeled on Mad Libs…

When we apply a Mad Libs “epigenetic” approach to Dawkins’ claims about how life’s information can be created, we quickly see a glaring flaw…

You may have caught it…

Exactly! We will never get a dialogue between Elon Musk and the Twitter board.

The reason is that the overall structure of the Weasel Lib is set in stone. The mechanisms of random variation and natural selection can only come up with variants within those constraints. There is no way that filling in the blanks created in the passage will change the interlocutors from Hamlet and Polonius to Elon Musk and the Twitterati, simply because the names themselves are not blanked out.

Eric Holloway, “Dawkins’ Weasel program vs the information life acquires en route” at Mind Matters News (May 23, 2022)

Enjoy. Comment here.

You may also wish to read: Can computers –- and people — learn to think from the bottom up? That’s the big promise made in a recent article at Aeon. A simple word ladder puzzle shows why Michael Levin and Rafael Yuste’s ambitious project cannot succeed.

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Eric Hedin: Information and Nature

In a short article posted recently at Reasons to Believe Scholars’ blog, I present some conceptual considerations of information, nature and life.

The question of the significance of human existence comes sharply into focus as we consider the origin of life itself. Do the laws of nature support the origin of life from nonlife, or do they argue against it? In order to address this question, it is helpful to consider a defining characteristic of all living things, namely their phenomenal information content. Naturalistic explanations attempting to reach the heights of information content found in even the simplest living thing have appealed to “dumb luck” or to some unobserved natural law. However, consideration of the known and observed laws of physics in conjunction with the finite limits of “chance” within our universe appear to rule out any natural origin of the vastly complex biomolecular metropolis found within the cells of life.

The information content of the universe exponentially increased with the formation of the first living organism. Since natural processes always work to lower the information content of any closed (or effectively closed) system over time, the origin of life represents an unnatural event in the history of our universe.

See full article at Reasons to Believe Scholars’ Blog

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Ghostly ‘mirror world’ might be cause of cosmic controversy

The universe may be stranger than we think.

New research suggests an unseen ‘mirror world’ of particles that interacts with our world only via gravity that might be the key to solving a major puzzle in cosmology today – the Hubble constant

problem.

Discrepancies in the expansion rate of the universe

The Hubble constant is the rate of expansion of the universe today. Predictions for this rate — from cosmology’s standard model — are significantly slower than the rate found by our most precise local measurements. This discrepancy is one that many cosmologists have been trying to solve by changing our current cosmological model. The challenge is to do so without ruining the agreement between standard model predictions and many other cosmological phenomena, such as the cosmic microwave background. Determining whether such a cosmological scenario exists is the question that researchers, including Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of New Mexico, Fei Ge and Lloyd Knox at the University of California, Davis have been trying to answer.

According to NASA, cosmology is the scientific study of the large-scale properties of the universe as a whole. Cosmologists study concepts such as dark matter, and dark energy and whether there is one universe or many, sometimes called a multiverse. Cosmology entails the entire universe from birth to death with mysteries and intrigue at every turn.

Now, Cyr-Racine, Ge, and Knox have discovered a previously unnoticed mathematical property of cosmological models which could, in principle, allow for a faster expansion rate while hardly changing the most precisely tested other predictions of the standard cosmological model. They found that a uniform scaling of the gravitational free-fall rates and photon-electron scattering rate leaves most dimensionless cosmological observables nearly invariant.

The research, titled Symmetry of Cosmological Observables, a Mirror World Dark Sector, and the Hubble Constant, was published recently in Physical Review Letters.

“This might seem crazy at face value, but such mirror worlds have a large physics literature in a completely different context since they can help solve important problem in particle physics,” explains Cyr-Racine. “Our work allows us to link, for the first time, this large literature to an important problem in cosmology.”

eurekalert.org

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Article by David Snoke: Spontaneous Appearance of Life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Dr. Snoke’s recent article, published in Biocosmos, dives into the important topic of the link between the 2nd law of thermodynamics, information theory, and living systems. He explores the notion of physical law, similar to the 2nd law, that applies to information, and concludes that “there is a fundamental entropy problem with the origin of life.”

It is natural to define information as an extensive physical property similar to heat and entropy. This approach has been used in the physics community for many decades, following the work of Szilard, Landauer, and others.

Information can be defined as the elimination of possibilities. The more possibilities that are eliminated, the more information that is gained.

The Second Law tells us that entropy cannot decrease. Is there an equivalent law for information? Dembski has proposed, as an axiomatic assertion, that information can never spontaneously increase. Can we do better, to create an information principle based on the Second Law?

Living systems are to all intents and purposes equivalent to Maxwell’s demons, in that they are information processors that perform selection processes. We may therefore conclude that there is a fundamental entropy problem with the origin of life.

Article available at Sciendo

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Eric Hedin and our cultural moment

UD welcomes our new News anchor. As a starter for reflection, let’s clip from his current book:

Naturalism holds that nature is all there is,
and that the order of the universe, including the order of the living world,
is merely the result of the laws of nature, or, as some put it, of “chance and
necessity.” [Jerry] Coyne went a step further. He insisted that this view cannot
even be questioned in a public university science course—or to be more
precise, cannot be questioned even in a cross-disciplinary course on sci-
entific discoveries and their larger cultural implications.
But the question as to whether philosophical naturalism is true is
too important to shove into a corner. This and other closely related ques-
tions are precisely those anyone striving to live an examined life will ask . . . .
They include: Are
matter and the laws of matter all there is? Do the things we have discov-
ered about physical reality undermine or support a conclusion of human
significance? When we experience a sense of wonder in contemplating
the vastness of our universe, what if anything does that feeling signify? If
we feel small and lost as we contemplate the vast reaches of the universe,
what if anything does that tell us? Is either emotional response informa-
tive? How do we fit into the overall scheme of things? Is life meaningful,
or meaningless? Can science shed light on what we might most earnestly
desire to know? What are the implications of the fact that our universe
is not eternal, but had a beginning? Why is there something rather than
nothing? What about intelligent design (ID), the idea that certain fea-
tures of the natural world are best explained by reference to an intelligent
cause rather than to any purely mindless material cause? And going be-
yond that hypothesis, can science provide support not just for intelligent
design but for the existence of God?

Well worth reflecting on. END

PS, it will probably help to put three points of evidence on the table by way of diagrams, to help anchor us to facts:

FACT 1, a presentation of fine tuning, as in it is a fact that this is contemplated seriously:

Barnes: “What if we tweaked just two of the fundamental constants? This figure shows what the universe would look like if the strength of the strong nuclear force (which holds atoms together) and the value of the fine-structure constant (which represents the strength of the electromagnetic force between elementary particles) were higher or lower than they are in this universe. The small, white sliver represents where life can use all the complexity of chemistry and the energy of stars. Within that region, the small “x” marks the spot where those constants are set in our own universe.” (HT: New Atlantis)

FACT 2, what Crick thought by March 19, 1953:

Crick’s letter

FACT 3, some reflections on protein synthesis:

in further detail: Protein Synthesis (HT: Wiki Media)

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Eric Hedin is the new News co-ordinator at Uncommon Descent

Starting tomorrow, Denyse O’Leary is retiring from the News desk at Uncommon Descent. Physicist Eric Hedin, who replaces her, will be known to many readers from the controversy at Ball State University, Indiana, when he was barred from teaching a class on ID, mainly due to the efforts of Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne. As David Klinghoffer puts it,

What I found most despicable about the successful attempt to silence Professor Hedin was the power disparity. Hedin was a young scientist — on tenure track but not holding tenure, and thus highly vulnerable — at Ball State University, an “institution…named after a manufacturer of glass canning jars — a benign backstory for an utterly benign university campus.” Or that was what Hedin imagined. His persecutor, on the other hand, was a prominent academic, enjoying maximum career safety at the University of Chicago. Let’s be honest: between the two, there was no contest. Coyne could move against Hedin without fear, and he did. On the other hand, Hedin’s career was on the line, and both knew it.

Hedin was stunned to find himself accused of violating the First Amendment. He was also anxious that the older, more powerful scientist was about to put an end to Dr. Hedin’s life in science. Amid a media controversy, Discovery Institute sought to intervene, but again, the power was all on the side of the atheists.

News, “David Klinghoffer Muses On The (Almost) Cancelation Of Physicist Eric Hedin” at Uncommon Descent (March 4, 2021)

Since then, Coyne has burnt up a fair amount of time at his blog, Why Evolution Is True, caterwauling about the Cancel Culture he helped create, oblivious to his role in the matter.

Here’s a sample chapter from Hedin’s book, Canceled Science: What some atheists don’t want you to see, in which Hedin tells the story.

Denyse will continue to post now and then, just not as the regular News person.

Over to you, Eric!

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Gene-edited hamsters did not behave as expected

Wait till you hear what happened:

Georgia State University scientists have created gene-edited hamsters for studies of social neuroscience and have found that the biology behind social behavior may be more complex than previously thought.

A team of Georgia State University researchers led by Regents’ Professor of Neuroscience H. Elliott Albers and Distinguished University Professor Kim Huhman used CRISPR-Cas9 technology to eliminate the actions of a neurochemical signaling pathway that plays a critical role in regulating social behaviors in mammals. Vasopressin and the receptor that it acts on called Avpr1a regulates social phenomena ranging from pair bonding, cooperation, and social communication to dominance and aggression. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that knocking out the Avpr1a receptor in hamsters, and thus effectively eliminating vasopressin’s action on it, dramatically altered the expression of social behavior in unexpected ways.

“We were really surprised at the results,” Albers said. “We anticipated that if we eliminated vasopressin activity, we would reduce both aggression and social communication. But the opposite happened.”

Instead, the hamsters without the receptor showed much higher levels of social communication behavior than did their counterparts with intact receptors. Even more interesting, the typical sex differences observed in aggressiveness were eliminated with both male and female hamsters displaying high levels of aggression towards other same-sex individuals.

“This suggests a startling conclusion,” Albers said. “Even though we know that vasopressin increases social behaviors by acting within a number of brain regions, it is possible that the more global effects of the Avpr1a receptor are inhibitory.

“We don’t understand this system as well as we thought we did. The counterintuitive findings tell us we need to start thinking about the actions of these receptors across entire circuits of the brain and not just in specific brain regions.”

Georgia State University, “CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing approach can alter the social behavior of animals” at ScienceDaily (May 16, 2022)

Quote of the decade: “We don’t understand this system as well as we thought we did.”

So we now know how to produce hamsters from hell. What if they get loose and multiply?

One suspects that some of these people are going to learn respect for the design of life the hard way. Hope it’s not too hard on the rest of us.

The is open access.

You may also wish to read: Epigenetics: Editing epigenome decreased alcoholism in rats Epigenetics chips away at the Darwinian edifice in the sense that the question of whether one “inherits” a tendency to drink too much alcohol may be obviated if epigenetics change cements the tendency long after fertilization.

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At Mind Matters News: Study: Eight-week mindfulness courses do not change the brain

The researchers responsible for the study disconfirming the claim suggest that earlier studies may have been hampered by a small, self-selected, particularly needy participant base and by the fact that any intervention can succeed at first.

Mindfulness meditation can change the brain but only if it is a lifetime, intense practice:

Tibetan Buddhist monks who have spent most of their lives meditating (tummo meditation), often from childhood, can control their metabolism to some extent by mindfulness. But they would be the first to tell us that it takes many years of dedication and training:

“For decades, claims that meditating Buddhist monks could greatly raise their temperature or slow their metabolism were assumed to be exaggerations that would yield to a scientific explanation.

“The claims did yield to a scientific explanation. The scientific explanation turned out to be that the monks can do exactly that.”

The monks’ skills, since corroborated, include control of brain waves. But again, they spend much or most of their lives meditating. It would be more surprising if that fact had no effect on their brains than if it does.

Thus the takehome point should not be that mindfulness meditation is debunked but that changing lifetime habits of thought and their signatures in the brain is not a matter of an eight-week course. A fundamental shift in orientation and habits over many years is likely required to produce, say, signatures in the brain.

Denyse O’Leary, “Study: Eight-week mindfulness courses do not change the brain” at Mind Matters News (May 22, 2022)

Takehome: Tibetan Buddhist monks who can control their metabolism and brain waves have spent their lives meditating. Brain changes are consistent with that fact.

You may also wish to read: Researchers: Buddhist monks’ bodies decay very slowly at death According to traditional meditation lore, they are in a meditative state (thukdam) until their consciousness is clear; only then does the body begin to decay. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson and colleagues found no evidence of brain activity accompanying the stasis in decay for maybe a week in such monks. (Note: slow decay may be, in part, due to a very ascetic lifestyle.)

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