Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 80

Another species of “hominin” still alive?

No, it does not make nearly that much sense. The Flores people were real.

Meanwhile, here’s the story by anthropologist Gregory Forth, author of Between Ape and Human (2022) — a summary of his book, more or less — advancing a remarkable claim about still-missing “hominins” at The Scientist:

Coming from a professional anthropologist and ethnobiologist, my conclusions will probably surprise many. They might even be more startling than the discovery of H. floresiensis—once described by paleoanthropologist Peter Brown of the University of New England in New South Wales as tantamount to the discovery of a space alien. Unlike other books concerned with hominin evolution, the focus of my book is not on fossils but on a local human population called the Lio and what these people say about an animal (as they describe it) that is remarkably like a human but is not human—something I can only call an ape-man. My aim in writing the book was to find the best explanation—that is, the most rational and empirically best supported—of Lio accounts of the creatures. These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly. And I conclude that the best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times.

Gregory Forth, “” at The Scientist (April 2018, 2022)

So no one has ever found one of them but we are supposed to take this seriously?

Also:

Lio folk zoology and cosmology also include stories of natural beings, specifically humans, transforming permanently into animals of other kinds. And they do this, in part, by moving into new environments and adopting new ways of life, thus suggesting a qualified Lamarckism.

Gregory Forth, “” at The Scientist (April 2018, 2022)

Which is supposed to make the evidence stronger?

Our initial instinct, I suspect, is to regard the extant ape-men of Flores as completely imaginary. But, taking seriously what Lio people say, I’ve found no good reason to think so.

Gregory Forth, “” at The Scientist (April 2018, 2022)

There is no evidence for the existence of any such life form.

Okay. Untraceable hominins. Elves, fairies, the Abominable Snowman? So this is all “science” now?

Note: The Scientist story riffs off Flores Man, which was a genuine find.

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What “delegitimizing science” has come to mean…

Not what you thought:

New documents obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the University of Pittsburgh asked the federal government for help dealing with negative media reports over its harvesting of fetal organs for experimentation.

Calling the critical coverage “an organized attempt to delegitimize science,” Pitt Vice Chancellor for science strategy and planning Dr. Jeremy Berg wrote to then-head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, asking for his help to combat “efforts to undermine important science using fetal tissue.”

“We feel that the scientific community would benefit if more institutions could stand together to take some of the power out of the one at-a-time strategy that appears to be operating,” Berg wrote to Collins.

Berg claimed that the press had been pursuing a series of “rotating attacks” against universities that use fetal tissue derived from abortion, saying that Pitt was the latest target. The school had been under fire for experiments that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats and allegations about utilizing organs from full-term and past-term infants. — Meghan Basham, “University of Pittsburgh Asked NIH For Help With Bad Press Over Fetal Organ Harvesting” at Daily Wire (April 20, 2022) 

It’s been a long time since “delegitimizing science” meant anatomically correct drawings. Now it could mean protesting the coverup of murders.

You may also wish to read:

At Evolution News And Science Today: The appalling moral failure of Francis Collins. John West provides a, er, surprising and enlightening picture of the theistic evolution great. Not for the faint of heart.

and

Collins’s role in an experiment on premature babies: “Medical ethicists were appalled. “The word ‘unethical’ doesn’t even begin to describe the egregious and shocking deficiencies in the informed-consent process for this study,” said Michael Carome, MD, the director of the Health Research Group at the nonprofit (and politically liberal) group Public Citizen. “Parents of the infants who were enrolled in this study were misled about its purpose. … They were misled to believe everything being done was in the ‘standard of care’ and therefore posed no predictable risk to the babies.”

One way of looking at it: In light of the appalling treatment of infants under Collins’s regime, he is just the sort of individual that the New Yorker would want to represent evangelical Christians — or any other group that its staff despise.

Many children have died in great torment.

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Natural or artificial? How to tell?

You gotta see the graphic. It’s astonishing:

“What’s good for something is tied to its nature … Nature is whatever a thing is supposed to be or become on its own,” Fr. Walshe says. “It’s important to distinguish a natural inclination from a conscious or emotional desire.”

Ruth Institute, “How to Tell When Something is Natural or Artificial” at The Stream (April 20, 2022)

How do we know the tree did not grow itself that way? Can someone come up with a concise explanation?

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Hey, more Babylon Bee…

Sure, they are still rotting in Twitter jail but maybe it is mattering less:

How to cope how that everyone around you isn’t forced to wear those masks

Roman Soldier Assigned To Guard Tomb Of Some Jewish Carpenter Looking Forward To Uneventful Weekend

Twitter Headquarters Suffers Severe Water Damage From Liberal Employees’ Tears

Apple’s nine new Woke emojis

This is still a favourite on the part of those who have actually had to work with completely useless people like this:

You may also wish to read:

Hey, more fun from the Babylon Bee… Still in Twitter jail, before we go back to our regular work (It is hard to both work and gather Easter eggs at the same time so… .)

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Darwin wrote a book about orchids — and it was better received than Origin of Species

Someone is looking into this:

I wrote here yesterday about Charles Darwin’s orchid book. Shortly after its publication, reviews of the book began appearing in the British press. Unlike with the Origin, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Reviewers were extremely impressed with Darwin’s detailed documentation of the variety of contrivances in orchids. But much to Darwin’s dismay, they did not see this as evidence of natural selection.

An anonymous reviewer in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History wrote in response to Darwin’s contention that nature abhors perpetual self-fertilization:

“Apart from this theory and that of ‘natural selection,’ which we cannot think is much advanced by the present volume, we must welcome this work of Mr. Darwin’s as a most important and interesting addition to botanical literature.”

Other reviewers went much further. M. J. Berkeley, writing in the London Review, said …

Robert F. Shedinger, “Charles Darwin’s “Intelligent Design”” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 20, 2022)

Robert F. Shedinger is the author of The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion

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At Mind Matters News: Yes! There is evidence for the intelligent design of the brain (Michael Egnor)

Michael Egnor: If our brains were not intelligently designed, we would have no reason to believe anything our senses tell us:

Imagine that you are on a train in England and you see a collection of stones on a hillside that says THE BRITISH RAILWAYS WELCOMES YOU TO WALES.

In theory there would be two ways that the stones could be arranged that way. One way would be if they were deliberately arranged by an intelligent agent to convey the message that you are entering Wales. The other way would be that wind and rain randomly moved the stones so they resembled a meaningful message but in fact had no intelligent source. The likelihood of either possibility is irrelevant to the argument.

Now you could believe, based on the stones, either that you were in fact entering Wales or you could not believe that. Whichever you believe is also irrelevant to the argument. Taylor’s point is that you could not justifiably believe that the stones came to be by random arrangement and at the same time believe that they were conveying the message that you are entering Wales. That is, you are only justified in believing semantic content conveyed by matter if the arrangement of the matter is intelligently designed.

News, “Yes! There is evidence for the intelligent design of the brain” at Mind Matters News (April 19, 2022)

Takehome: When we believe that our perceptions and concepts point to the truth, we implicitly acknowledge the existence of God who designed them.

PS: Overheard from the Peanuts cartoons: Trust the Science is the most anti-science statement ever. Questioning science is how you DO science!

You may also wish to read: My challenge to two atheists who deny free will Michael Egnor: There is too much of this nonsense in the science blogosphere. If Pigliucci or Coyne would like to debate free will, they can consider this a challenge from me. Free will has no physical cause? At least four categories of events in nature have no physical cause. Free will denial isn’t science, just atheism in a lab coat

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Few want to hear this but … Darwinism made racism science

A retired surgeon offers some thoughts about John West’s Darwin Day in America (2014, second edition):

At first glance, it might seem that whether we believe in evolution as a purely material, unguided process should make no difference to values or morality. Yet, in his 2007 book Darwin Day in America: How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, Discovery Institute’s John West looks at the question more deeply and shows otherwise. In a nearly encyclopedic manner, he documents the numerous impacts Darwinism has had in the public square. It has had a distinctively destructive effect on our society. Dr. West provides a plethora of examples in each chapter of how Darwinism has changed the courts, the schools, the medical establishment, the conduct of the scientific community, and, indeed, the man on the street.

A War of Worldviews

As the book shows, Darwinism is a Weltanschauung at war with the Judeo-Christian theistic system on which Western civilization and scientific inquiry are based. Many of Dr. West’s examples were unknown to me, and will be news to many other readers. In a skillful and scholarly fashion, he unearths the contest between faith and “science,” while providing references for any claims that he makes. The book is divided into sections, with each oriented around a specific theme. I’ll be as brief as possible in this two-part review.

Kenneth Feucht, “Darwinism and the “So What?” Question: John West’s Darwin Day in America” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 25, 2022)

See, some of us go well back into the 1950s. Darwinism was conveyed in the culture in a way that reinforced racism (like, there were three human “races,” did you know?). As it happened, most of us had little contact with the other two.

For reasons familiar to anyone who follows human psychology, our group was supposed to be the smartest. We were told to be nice to the others anyway. They couldn’t help their stupidity, nor could we.

That was the view smart people had. Stupid Fundamentalists, by contrast, still believed in Adam and Eve…

Most of the legal issues around “race” that we addressed in those days were complicated by Indigenous status or women’s rights (or lack thereof), which is not the same thing as “race.” It was a legal issue in Canada who was or wasn’t entitled to be considered a “registered” Indigenous person and what benefits that such a status did or did not confer. It really didn’t affect our overall assumptions about “race” in general. The implicit assumptions around such ideas were conveyed in the culture.

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Physicist David Snoke: Living systems must obey the same rules as Maxwell’s demons

So even demons must obey rules, just not the same ones?:

It is often argued both by scientists and the lay public that it is extremely unlikely for life or minds to arise spontaneously, but this argument is hard to quantify. In this paper I make this argument more rigorous, starting with a review of the concepts of information and entropy, and then examining the specific case of Maxwell’s demon and how it relates to living systems. I argue that information and entropy are objective physical quantities, defined for systems as a whole, which allow general arguments in terms of physical law. In particular, I argue that living systems obey the same rules as Maxwell’s demons.

David Snoke, “Spontaneous Appearance of Life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” at BioCosmos (12 Apr 2022)

We remember David Snoke from stuff he wrote with Michael Behe and also from the Christian Scientific Society.

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Not only did researchers discover a new type of cell but it has regenerative properties

May help with COPD:

The researchers, who report their findings today in Nature, analyzed human lung tissue to identify the new cells, which they call respiratory airway secretory cells (RASCs). The cells line tiny airway branches, deep in the lungs, near the alveoli structures where oxygen is exchanged for carbon dioxide. The scientists showed that RASCs have stem-cell-like properties enabling them to regenerate other cells that are essential for the normal functioning of alveoli. They also found evidence that cigarette smoking and the common smoking-related ailment called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) can disrupt the regenerative functions of RASCs—hinting that correcting this disruption could be a good way to treat COPD.

“COPD is a devastating and common disease, yet we really don’t understand the cellular biology of why or how some patients develop it. Identifying new cell types, in particular new progenitor cells, that are injured in COPD could really accelerate the development of new treatments,” said study first author Maria Basil, MD, PhD, an instructor of Pulmonary Medicine.

COPD typically features progressive damage to and loss of alveoli, exacerbated by chronic inflammation. It is estimated to affect approximately 10 percent of people in some parts of the United States and causes about 3 million deaths every year around the world. Patients often are prescribed steroid anti-inflammatory drugs and/or oxygen therapy, but these treatments can only slow the disease process rather than stop or reverse it. Progress in understanding COPD has been gradual in part because mice—the standard lab animal—have lungs that lack key features of human lungs.

News Release, “Penn Researchers Discover New Cell Type in Human Lung with Regenerative Properties” at Penn Medicine News (April 1, 2022)

Did anyone notice that last point? “Progress in understanding COPD has been gradual in part because mice—the standard lab animal—have lungs that lack key features of human lungs.”

But then we tend to live much longer than mice too…

The paper requires a fee or subscription.

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Has interest in intelligent design WANED?

If ID has “waned,” why can’t I keep up with my mail?

I don’t see any cobwebs:

A new ID the Future episode continues the debate between design theorist Casey Luskin, an editor of The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, and science historian Adam Shapiro, co-author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Justin Brierley, of the popular British debate program Unbelievable?, hosts. In this second half of the conversation, Shapiro argues that intelligent design’s popularity seems to have waned. Casey Luskin counters, arguing that the number and frequency of New York Times articles on ID is a superficial metric. In truth, the ID research program is exploding, with the number of peer-reviewed ID papers growing every year, and the number of interested graduate students, ID hubs, and conferences expanding around the world. The latter are attended by high-level scientists, including Nobel laureates. This is not an idea that’s on the wane.

Evolution News, “Luskin, Shapiro: Has Intelligent Design Waned?” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 17, 2022)

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