Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 79

Breaking: Twitter accepts Musk’s Share offer buyout plan

Breitbart, as I just saw:

After a two-week battle against opposition from the platform’s board members, self-declared free speech absolutist Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the richest man in the world, has succeeded in his bid to buy Twitter.

In a press release, the Twitter board announced that they had reached an agreement with the multi-billionaire to sell 100 percent of the company at Musk’s original price of $54.20 per share.

Where does this point?

DEVELOPING.

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What blocks new ideas in science?

How about old ideas?

Let’s start at the end. Suppose we’ve recently published an article on an unusual new idea. How is it received by the scientific community?

Wang, Veugelers, and Stephan (2017) look at academic papers published across most scientific fields in 2001 and devise a way to try and measure how novel these papers are. They then look at how novel papers are subsequently cited (or not) by different groups.

To measure the novelty of a paper, they rely on the notion that novelty is about combining pre-existing ideas in new and unexpected ways. They use the references cited as a proxy for the sources of ideas that a paper grapples with, and look for papers that cite pairs of journals that have not previously been jointly cited. The 11.5% of papers with at least one pair of journals never previously cited together in the same paper are called “moderately” novel in their paper.

But they also go a bit further. Some new combinations are more unexpected than others. For example, it might be that I am the first to cite a paper from a monetary policy journal and an international trade journal. That’s kind of creative, maybe. But it would be really weird if I cited a paper from a monetary policy journal and a cell biology journal. Wang, Veuglers, and Stephan, create a new category for “highly” novel papers, which cite a pair of journals that have never been cited together in the past, and also are not even in the same neighborhood. Here, we mean journals that are not well “connected” by some other pair of journals.

Matt Clancy, “Conservatism in science” at What’s New Under the Sun (October 12, 2021)

Clancy admits that his article is a work in progress and subject to change.

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Theoretical physicist on why she stopped working on black hole information loss

The Sabine Hossenfelder found that “no one can tell which solution is correct in the sense that it actually describes nature, and physicists will not agree on one anyway.”

Not because it’s unsolvable. But because you can’t solve this problem with mathematics alone, and experiments are not possible, not now and probably not in the next 10000 years.

Why am I telling you this? I am not talking about this because I want to change the mind of my colleagues in physics. They have grown up thinking this is an important research question and I don’t think they’ll change their mind. But I want you to know that you can safely ignore headlines about black hole information loss. You’re not missing anything if you don’t read those articles. Because no one can tell which solution is correct in the sense that it actually describes nature, and physicists will not agree on one anyway. Because if they did, they’d have to stop writing papers about it.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “I stopped working on black hole information loss. Here’s why.” at BackRe(Action) (April 23, 2022)

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Would you believe? Time doesn’t really exist?

Good news for those racing a deadline. This from mathematician and philosopher Sam Baron:

So we know we need a new physical theory to explain the universe, and that this theory might not feature time.

Suppose such a theory turns out to be correct. Would it follow that time does not exist?

It’s complicated, and it depends what we mean by exist.

Theories of physics don’t include any tables, chairs, or people, and yet we still accept that tables, chairs and people exist.

Why? Because we assume that such things exist at a higher level than the level described by physics.

We say that tables, for example, “emerge” from an underlying physics of particles whizzing around the universe.

But while we have a pretty good sense of how a table might be made out of fundamental particles, we have no idea how time might be “made out of” something more fundamental.

So unless we can come up with a good account of how time emerges, it is not clear we can simply assume time exists.

Time might not exist at any level.

Sam Baron, “Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay” at The Conversation (April 14, 2022)

Most readers are likely way too young to remember Maxwell Smart and Would You Believe? But couldn’t resist so here anyway:

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A search for the most complex thing in the universe?

In this case, a Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP):

Biology and cosmology. Two fields that are normally thought to have nothing in common and nothing to teach each other. We — Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle, Lee Smolin and I — are putting an end to this. By reformulating cosmological physics to include biological systems, we have developed a common currency with which their respective systems can be counted and compared. This ‘currency’ allows us to quantify the value of biologicals systems when set against the character cast of cosmology: galaxies, dark energy and black holes.

This synthesis of biology and cosmology required a shift away from reductionism and the belief that all systems can be understood by breaking them down into their constituent elements. Instead, the new way of thinking makes sense of complex systems and their evolution by considering the number of possible future states those systems could take.

In a technical sense, this synthesis uses the idea of a system’s expanding space of possible outcomes, which Stuart Kauffman established as the Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP).

Marina Cortês, “The most complex thing in the universe” at IAI.TV (April 21, 2022)

It could be a lot simpler (but where would that lead?):

Yes, the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe. But that’s not even the most remarkable thing about our brains. Our complex brains mirror the universe — 27 orders of magnitude bigger — yet some humans function with only half a brain or split brains.

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Darwinians make their living off claims of bad design – eye division

And it works, so no, they won’t stop:

Yesterday we looked at a paper by Tom Baden and Dan-Eric Nilsson in Current Biology debunking the old canard that the human eye is a bad design because it is wired backwards. We saw them turn the tables and show that, in terms of performance, the inverted retina is actually as good or better than the everted retina. Vertebrate eyes “come close to perfect,” they said. Ask the eagles with “the most acute vision of any animal,” which would include cephalopods with their allegedly more logical arrangement. Eagles win! Squids lose! Baden and Nilsson looked at eyes from an “engineer’s perspective” and shared good reasons for the inverted arrangement. They even spoke of design seven times; “the inverted retinal design is a blessing,” they argued.

And yet they maintain that eyes evolved by blind, unguided natural processes. How can they believe that? In this follow-up, we look at the strategies they use to maintain the Darwinian narrative despite the evidence.

David Coppedge, “Darwinists Seek to Explain the Eye’s Engineering Perfection” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 22, 2022)

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But isn’t this an argument for divine creation?

Genesis is a bit more literary:

In less time than it takes to snap your fingers, the universe flashed into existence.

Cosmogenesis is the breathtaking story of how this happened. It includes, in its later moments, the creation of the primordial elements and depicts their organization by dark matter and gravity into vast cosmic structures on the largest scales. Meanwhile, on smaller scales, local gravitational collapse created stars and, later, planets.

The prelude to this story began with a major cosmological event: inflation. Between 10-36 and 10-34 seconds after the Big Bang, the physical scale of our universe doubled in size more than 50 times, so that by today, it is trillions of times larger than the 14 billion-light-year extent we can observe.

Inflation’s effects shaped the cosmos we see today: geometrically flat, homogeneous, and with the right mix of matter and energy. But what happened before inflation? The answer takes us deep into the nature of reality itself, and face to face with a time called the Planck era.

Sten Odenwald, “The Planck era: Imagining our infant universe” at Astronomy Magazine (April 21, 2022)

Hugh Ross might have said it:

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Intelligent Design=Pattern Recognition

This Phys.Org press release isn’t about a particularly interesting scientific paper. However, what the authors tells us about how this paper came to be is very interesting. And, I may add, very revealing.

Listen to what they have to say about their “aha” moment:

Inside some of the data that a standard mapping algorithm normally clips out, Zhang and postdoctoral fellow Xiaolong Chen, Ph.D., recognized that the clipped pattern in the DNA looked like an L1 inside of the FOXR2 gene. In a moment of serendipity, Diane Flasch, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow who previously worked with L1s, recognized the signs of an L1 regulatory element. The researchers performed a special technique that sequences longer regions of DNA to decode the structure of this retrotransposed L1 in FOXR2.

This is exactly the mental process William Dembski proposes as underlying “design” recognition and so confirming a “design inference.” In the movie, Contact, the SETI researchers recognized that a string of 1s and 0s was not random but was actually the prime numbers from 2 to 101 and from this concluded this was evidence of “extraterrestial intelligence.” One has to ask: how is what is described by the authors here any different?

All this is now followed by the authors telling us why their “aha” moment hadn’t occurred to other scientists before:

The scientists used samples obtained over time to learn when the retrotransposition occurred during the tumor’s development. The L1 promoter donation happened before other cancer-associated mutations, so it likely was the driving event that caused the cancer.

Since inserted L1 regulatory elements had never been suspected to be involved in tumorigenesis, existing computational algorithms were not designed to detect such an event.

And what happened in their case?

It took a human mind to see and understand the pattern for the first time.

Yes, indeed, intelligence is all about recognizing patterns, as is intelligent design.

And the author’s bottom-line on all of this:

“Scientists need to keep their eyes open for all the possibilities,” Chiang said. “Don’t filter out information that you think is garbage. Sometimes the gold is in the garbage.”

Sometimes the “gold” is the “garbage”; as in evolutionary theory. Sometimes the “garbage” (in the mind of the evolutionary biologists, otherwise known as Darwinists) is “gold”; as in intelligent design.

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At Evolution News: Silence around Cambrian Brains

This was bound to come up eventually:

First, notice the quote marks around “Cambrian explosion,” a subtle hint that the term is controversial. It’s not. They state clearly that it is “marked by the appearance of most major animal phyla.” Panarthropoda is a taxon that combines arthropods with tardigrades and onycophorans. The sentence means that yes, lots of different arthropods appear throughout the fossil record, revealing “extreme morphological disparities,” i.e. outward differences.

Yet these Chinese specimens show that the brains are conservative — not that they vote Republican, but that CNS structures throughout the panarthropod collection are similar, not showing extensive evolution. They’re not just conservative; they are “remarkably conservative.” In terms of general body plan, it’s a picture of sudden appearance and then stasis for the rest of time — not exactly what Darwin hoped the fossils would demonstrate.

You can read this open-access paper and appreciate the delicate features preserved in these fossils. The authors present a theory of taphonomy (the study of how things fossilize) to explain what they see.

David Coppedge, “Darwin Wept: Cambrian Brains and Other Challenges for Evolution” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 21, 2022)

Sure they do.

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Have dominant paradigms failed psychiatry?

In a review of Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness by Andrew Scull, a Cornell prof gives his reasons for wondering:

Scull’s book is a must-read for those who have been – or fear they will be – touched by mental illness. The rise of psychiatry, he reminds us, was linked to the emergence of asylums based on the premise that a carefully calibrated regimen could restore lunatics to sanity. By the end of the 19th century, however, therapeutically inclined institutions had become “mausoleums with a mad, captive population.”

Psychiatrists then reinvented themselves as “bio-psychologists.” Deploying an array of treatments for what had been deemed intractable diseases over the objections of family members, they claimed substantial success rates. Convinced that sepsis acting on brain cells caused psychosis, Henry Cotton removed the teeth and tonsils of asylum inmates. The insulin coma therapy of Manfred Sakel, “the Pasteur of Psychiatry,” was hailed as a treatment for schizophrenia. In 1927, Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for inoculating syphilis patients with malaria. In 1949, Egas Moniz, the pioneer of frontal lobotomies, became psychiatry’s second Nobel Laureate.

Glenn C. Altschuler, “Is Psychiatry Facing an Existential Crisis?” at Psychology Today (April 20, 2022)

We didn’t know this. And the rest is worth a read too.

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