Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 70

At New Scientist: Astronomers question if the first picture of a black hole is accurate – Rob Sheldon comments

The Event Horizon Telescope’s first image of a black hole showed a distinctive ring feature, but a reanalysis of their data has raised concerns over whether that ring of light is real New Scientist (May 19, 2022)

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon comments,

This analysis gets seriously into the weeds of data analysis and theoretical models. Before I start, let me make an analogy to “mRNA vaccines”. The innovations in the vaccine were numerous, and many were never before used, so that in many ways, it is not a traditional vaccine at all.

However, by naming it that way, most people thought it was something traditional and familiar, which gave them an unfounded trust in the shot. In exactly the same way, by calling this a “image” of the M87 core, taken by a “telescope”, most people associate this with “Astronomy Picture of the Day” which gave them an unfounded trust in the picture. It is nothing of the sort.

First off, radio telescopes do not operate like visible light telescopes. Rather they scan in frequency like a slit spectrometer moved over the image, and the image is then reconstructed or “inverted” from the data. Inversion is not a deterministic process, but can give very different answers depending on the inversion algorithm used and assumptions made. This has been known for 60 years.

For example, the CAT scans or MRI scans use the “Radon transform” to reconstruct an image from the many line-of-sight intensities through the body. Computers make this look effortless, but there are a lot of assumptions that go into this inversion. The more you know about the brain before hand, the better you can “steer” the computer in the right direction to get the MRI image back. But if a random sack of items were placed in the scanner, it is doubtful that the algorithms will “converge” on a consistent image.

Let me try another analogy. Suppose you took a picture of a person and sent it through a “SnapChat” filter to make it look old, then fed it into another to make it look young, another bald, another funhouse mirror and finally a cat filter. Could you tell who it was originally? Now your friend sees that and says “I know what to do. I’ll send a picture of everybody on your contact list through the same filters, and the right one will match!” But what if none of the pictures in the contact list were used? Will the best match be right? It depends whether the library of pictures was accurate or not, and whether the person closely matched one of them. That’s what the inversion problem is like. The more you know about the person, the better your chances of figuring it out, but there is no “deterministic” way to invert the snapchat filters.

Why is this a problem? Because we don’t know what the core of M87 is supposed to look like.

This is the problem with the “Event Horizon Telescope” which is actually a consortium of radio telescopes around the world who are combining their data to make a “virtual” telescope some 7000 miles wide. The wider it is, the smaller the details they can resolve, which is why they named it “Event Horizon” which is much, much smaller than their resolution, but they are gambling on using sophisticated computer models to regain the resolution. They took data on two objects—the core of the M87 galaxy, and the core of the Milky Way galaxy known as Sagitarius A* (or SgA*) The picture of M87 was easier to analyze and they released that “image” several years ago. It is this data analysis that the Japanese team is contesting.

Second problem. There’s dust between us and M87, and it is circulating, so the image is constantly changing. In the case of M87 the “circulation” time is about a week. In the case of SgA, the circulation time is a few minutes. That’s why they took 3 more years before releasing SgA image, which looks amazingly like M87, so one suspects they used M87 as the assumption of what SgA* should look like. Oh, and SgA* is imaged through the dust of the whole Milky Way edge on, whereas M87 was seen head on, perpendicular to the plane. I wouldn’t trust SgA* image to be evenly roughly correct.

Third problem, if we say “the object making the photons fits in this size box” we discover a “ring” roughly the diameter of the box we choose. But our resolution can only see crates much larger than the box we want to use. And if we make the box the actual size of our resolution (essentially an open box) we don’t get a ring. So now our image depends on the size of what we think the object looks like theoretically. This is circular logic, and even running thousands of computer models and noise models does not fix this circular problem (despite what modellers tell you).

Fourth problem. There’s some consistency checks we can perform. Does the small object fit nicely into the large picture we have from lower resolution telescopes? When we subtract the reconstructed image from the data, does the remainder (residual) look evenly distributed and small, like random noise should? The Japanese team argue that unlike the “ring”, their reconstruction fits in the bigger picture nicely. Likewise their reconstruction produces smaller and more even residuals than the “ring” image.

In fact, the only thing going for the original “ring” picture, was that it matched expectations. Which is another way of saying, it was a circular logic reconstruction. My claim is that this is too often true of numerous “scientific discoveries”, where we use computer models to help perform the reconstruction. This is true of “gravitational waves”, it is true of “global climate models” it is true of “evolutionary trees”, it is true of “tree ring dendochronology”. We have been deceived by the ease with which computer models can simulate real data, and as my retired nuclear engineer friend would say, “How do we know when our computer model is done? When we get the answer we want.”

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II .

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How could we test universal common descent?

Paul Nelson offers some thoughts to A Goy for Jesus (“We’re just a humble Christian channel that largely focuses on Catholic & Jewish-related apologetics from a classical Protestant perspective, but we also deal with things like UFOs or random stuff.”):

May 18, 2022: The Challenge of Testing Universal Common Descent

Also:

April 27, 2022: Can Universal Common Descent be Tested?

You may also wish to read: Novel RNA and peptide species thought to have sparked evolution of complex life Researcher: According to the new theory, a decisive element at the beginning was the presence of RNA molecules that could adorn themselves with amino acids and peptides and so join them into larger peptide structures. “RNA developed slowly into a constantly improving amino acid linking catalyst,” says Carell. (He talks about the emergence of “information-coding properties” as if that would just happen.)

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Dave Coppedge on how whales give evidence for the design of life

The Illustra Media documentary Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth shares amazing information about humpback whales: their enigmatic songs, their multiple adaptations for aquatic life that defy the evolutionary mechanism, and the “miraculous web” of blood vessels that refrigerates the male reproductive organs to safe levels for sperm production. All of it defies explanations based on natural selection. But that’s just the beginning when it comes to the largest animals that have ever lived — larger even than the largest dinosaurs (see Brian Switek’s discussion on Slate). Want to see humpback songs as sheet music? The Smithsonian has printouts and recordings.

More About the Male Refrigeration System
The system actually works better when the whale swims hard. How can that be, when the testes are located right between the abdominal swimming muscles? It’s like trying to keep a refrigerator cold between two furnaces.

It works because the blood pumps harder during exercise, allowing more heat to escape into the water through the dorsal fin and tail. The higher volume of cool venous blood then enters the “miraculous web” (Latin rete mirabile, read more here) between the abdominal muscles, where the heat from the arteries is transferred to the cooler veins before entering the testes. It’s a marvelous solution: a “counter-current heat exchanger” (CCHE) mechanism.

As Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson explain in the film, without both internal testes and the refrigeration mechanism existing simultaneously, natural selection would halt, and whales would have gone extinct. Females, too, have a CCHE to protect the young during pregnancy. Similar CCHE systems are found in other marine mammals such as manatees and seals, providing more unlikely examples of “convergent evolution.”

Evolution News

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Richard Weikart muses on the Buffalo shooter

At TownHall:

Interestingly, the manifesto this white supremacist wrote confirmed my description of white nationalism in my recent book, Darwinian Racism: First, he completely rejects Christianity, even professing not to believe in any kind of afterlife. This debunks the common view being promoted in the main-stream media that white nationalists are motivated by religion, especially evangelical Christianity. On the contrary, he continually claims that he is a man of reason and logic, and he tries to demonstrate that his racist views are actually scientific, not based on religion or emotion.

He also appeals to science to explain why races are unequal. According to this young man—and most white nationalists today—races arose through biological evolution. He argues that races are subspecies that have diverged, not only in physical traits, but also in their mental and moral characteristics. He believes that the white race has evolved to have higher intelligence and that blacks have evolved with greater biological tendencies to crime, rape, and other immoral behavior.

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Is Earth’s soil designed? Look what happened when we tried moon soil…

David Tyler writes to say,

Samples of dust collected in Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions have been used to grow plants. After two days, the seeds sprouted. “I can’t tell you how astonished we were” said one of the scientists involved. By day 6, all the samples were stunted – the seedlings were suffering from ionic stresses. All this work is to “inform prospects for lunar exploration”.

I am puzzled by the astonishment expressed. Seeds can sprout without soil – all that is needed is moisture. Hydroponics replaces soil by providing water with the right minerals.

There are sites on Earth where plants experience ionic stresses: notably old mine workings. However, the processes of soil development eventually make these sites more productive. On the Moon, there is the additional factors of exposure to cosmic rays and solar wind.

It seems to me that the authors would frame their research in a more holistic way if they recognised that soil is an ecosystem:

The authors are setting out to design a fertile lunar soil, but it would help them if they recognised that soils on Earth have the marks of design.

He suggests:

Plants grown in Apollo lunar regolith present stress-associated transcriptomes that inform prospects for lunar exploration Anna-Lisa Paul, Stephen M. Elardo & Robert Ferl Communications Biology, volume 5, Article number: 382 (12 May 2022)

and

Moon soil used to grow plants for first time in breakthrough test BBC News, 13 May 2022

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At The Federalist: What design can explain about life’s origins that chance can’t

Granville Sewell explains:

The scientific establishment is slowly beginning to allow scientists who believe in intelligent design to have a platform. Why? It may be because the theory that the universe was crafted intentionally explains many essential realities that theories based on spontaneous chance do not…

1. The Origin of Life

To appreciate that we still have no idea how the first living things arose, you only have to realize that with all our advanced technology we are still not close to designing any type of self-replicating machine; that is still pure science fiction. We can only create machines that create other machines, but no machine that can make a copy of itself.

When we add technology to such a machine, to bring it closer to the goal of reproduction, we only move the goalposts because now we have a more complicated machine to reproduce. So how could we imagine that such a machine could have arisen by pure chance?

Maybe human engineers will someday construct a self-replicating machine. But if they do, I’m sure it will not happen until long after I am gone, and it will not show that life could have arisen through natural processes. It will only have shown that it could have arisen through design.

Granville Sewell, “3 Realities Chance Can’t Explain About Life’s Origins That Intelligent Design Can” at Federalist (May 17, 2022)

You may also wish to read: Novel RNA and peptide species thought to have sparked evolution of complex life. Researcher: According to the new theory, a decisive element at the beginning was the presence of RNA molecules that could adorn themselves with amino acids and peptides and so join them into larger peptide structures. “RNA developed slowly into a constantly improving amino acid linking catalyst,” says Carell. (He talks about the emergence of “information-coding properties” as if that would just happen.)

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At Mind Matters News: Why cats can remember other cats’ names

University of Kyoto scientists found that they can indeed remember, provided they

But cats recognize their names They likely recognize other cats’ names as signals in the same way.

We humans recognize our names both as signals and as abstractions. You may see your name on a bill. That’s a signal: Pay this. But you may also see your name on an old photo. You know it’s about you but it’s not a signal that you should do anything. It’s an abstraction around your identity.

Cats are more intelligent than they have been given credit for in the past but they don’t do abstractions. To the extent that a cat recognizes his own name or another cat’s name, he interprets it as a signal that attention is being paid and that something may happen.

News, “” at Mind Matters News (May 18, 2022)

Takehome: The researchers are unsure exactly how cats remember other cats’ names. But that may not be a great mystery if we keep in mind what is involved.

You may also wish to read: In what ways are cats intelligent? Cats have nearly twice as many neurons as dogs and a bigger and more complex cerebral cortex.

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Casey Luskin at Hillfaith: Using the Positive Case for Intelligent Design to Answer Common Objections

Part of a series:

An article from the theistic evolutionist BioLogos Foundation argues that “pragmatically” the argument for design “is in fact an argument from ignorance” because “it seems like you need to test for (lack of) natural explanations to discover irreducible or specified complexity.”5

These accusations bear little resemblance to the actual theory of intelligent design, as put forth by ID proponents. Indeed, if the positive case for ID shows anything, it’s that this objection is incorrect.

ID’s positive arguments are based precisely upon what we have learned from studies of nature about the origin of certain types of information, such as CSI-rich structures. In our experience, high CSI or irreducible complexity derives from a mind.

If we did not have these observations, we could not infer ID. We can then go out into nature and empirically test for high CSI or irreducible complexity, and when we find these types of information, we can justifiably infer that an intelligent agent was at work.

Thus, ID is not based upon what we don’t know — an argument from ignorance or gaps in our knowledge — but rather, is based upon what we do know about the origin of information-rich structures, as testified to by the observed information-generative powers of intelligent agents.

Casey Luskin, “Using the Positive Case for Intelligent Design to Answer Common Objections” at Hillfaith (May 17, 2022)

Casey Luskin links to the whole series at this page.

You may also wish to read: Casey Luskin: ID as fruitful approach to science The trouble is, many people would just as soon that research into evolutionary computation anatomy and physiology, and bioinformatics, however fruitful, not be done if it undermines a comfortable Darwinism.

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Jonathan Wells asks, Is the human shoulder badly designed?

Personal misfortune taught him otherwise:

A few months ago, I fell and dislocated my left shoulder. My upper arm bone was put back in its socket the same day, but then I spent months in physical therapy to regain full function. In the process, I have learned a lot about an amazing joint that I previously took for granted.

The more I have learned about the shoulder joint, the more I have been impressed by its specified complexity, which points to intelligent design. Imagine my surprise when I came across a six-and-a-half-minute video claiming that the human shoulder is a “design disaster.” The video was made by Cheddar News, which describes itself as “the only news network focused on the next generation of innovators and decision-makers[.] Cheddar News is where forward thinkers go to learn about the people, ideas and innovations that are driving change and creating what’s next.”

Jonathan Wells, “Is the Human Shoulder Badly Designed?” at Evolution News (May 13, 2022)

Wells proceeds to take apart the video, including

The video’s producer is Natalia Ryzak, who has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. At the beginning, Ryzak explains that “human shoulder blades tilt down and outwards, whereas chimps tilt up. Small variations like this are the reason humans have awful shoulders. And chimps, with whom we share nearly 99% of our DNA, don’t.” For that, Ryzak continues, “we can thank evolution — or more specifically, how we are outpacing it.”

But the tilt difference does not explain why the human shoulder is “awful.” If we spent most of our time swinging from tree branches, it might; but we don’t. And the claimed 99% similarity between human and chimp DNA has no bearing on the issue.

Jonathan Wells , “ Is the Human Shoulder Badly Designed? ” at Evolution News (May 13, 2022)

You may also wish to read: Claim: Why human brains were once bigger The researchers cite writing as one possibility for shrinking brains.

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At Evolution News: How Science Fueled the White Supremacist Mass Murderer in Buffalo, NY

His views on religion and politics were all over the map but of one thing he was sure:

In his purported manifesto, the shooter asserts that blacks “are a different subspecies of human.” Why? Because “Whites and Blacks are separated by tens of thousands of years of evolution, and our genetic material is obviously very different.” (emphasis mine, p. 14) Elsewhere he suggests that Europeans and Asians are more recently evolved than blacks (p. 17), which sounds eerily reminiscent of the view of countless racists of the past (including Charles Darwin himself) that blacks are the lowest humans on the evolutionary ladder.

You won’t find the shooter drawing on Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump in his manifesto. You will find lots of citations to articles in mainstream peer-reviewed science journals, including Nature Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Molecular Psychiatry, Journal of Research in Personality, Personality and Individual Differences, and Current Directions in Psychological Science. You will also find citations to science articles published in media outlets like the New York Times. The shooter cites those sources to try to justify genetic reductionism and his abhorrent belief in black genetic inferiority.

Unfortunately, the Buffalo shooter’s evolutionary racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. Arguments drawn from evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters in recent years, including Anders Breivik in 2011, a Norwegian mass murderer cited as a role model by the Buffalo shooter. Other shooters smitten by Darwinian evolution have included the Columbine High School shooters in 1999, Finnish shooter Pekka Eric Auvinen in 2007, the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter in 2009, and the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter in 2019.

John G. West, “How Science Fueled the White Supremacist Mass Murderer in Buffalo, NY” at Evolution News (May 16, 2022)

Do they still teach Darwin in the schools? Maybe that’s dangerous.

You may also wish to read: Richard Weikart on the non-religious racism that anti-racists ignore Weikart: While researching my book, Darwinian Racism, I examined the websites and publications of many neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and alt-right individuals and organizations. What I discovered was that most white nationalists and white supremacists today embrace a social Darwinist version of scientific racism and vehemently oppose Christianity.

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