Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 81

April 18, 2022

Sabine Hossenfelder tells us who’s killing physics

The theoretical physicst explains at Cosmos Magazine:

Nowadays, headlines covering the foundations of physics won’t tell you about new discoveries, but merely what “might be” or “could be”. The phrase “physicists say” is all too frequently followed by speculations about multiverses, non-existent particles, or fifth forces that we have no evidence of. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be associated with this discipline.

But the worst part is that most of my colleagues think this situation perfectly okay.

For starters, they would probably disagree that we have a problem in the foundations of physics at all. They’d tell you about lots of exciting papers that have been published in recent years. At present the biggest fad is throwing artificial intelligence at everything, closely followed by claiming that quantum simulations or quantum computing is the way forward. About this I can only say that scientific progress isn’t measured by how many papers have been written.

But this illusion of progress is the minor problem. Worse is that they seem resigned to the idea that foundational work in physics is detached from experiment and technological application.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Who’s killing physics?” at Cosmos Magazine (April 15, 2022)

We keep asking: To what extent has it become a sort of religion?

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Published on April 18, 2022 07:09

A lost flower named “extinctus” has been rediscovered

Lost South American wildflower named “extinctus” rediscovered (but still endangered)

The bright orange flowers of the Ecuadorian cloud forest herb Gasteranthus extinctus, long believed to have gone extinct, light up the forest understory as if begging to be seen. Credit: Riley Fortier.

In Ecuador:

Scientific names get chosen for lots of reasons— they can honor an important person, or hint at what an organism looks like or where it’s from. For a tropical wildflower first described by scientists in 2000, the scientific name “extinctus” was a warning. The orange wildflower had been found 15 years earlier in an Ecuadorian forest that had since been largely destroyed; the scientists who named it suspected that by the time they named it, it was already extinct. But in a new paper in PhytoKeys, researchers report the first confirmed sightings of Gasteranthus extinctus in 40 years. po1 “Extinctus was given its striking name in light of the extensive deforestation in western Ecuador,” says Dawson White, a postdoctoral researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum and co-lead author of the paper. “But if you claim something’s gone, then no one is really going to go out and look for it anymore. There are still a lot of important species that are still out there, even though overall, we’re in this age of extinction.”

Field Museum, “Lost South American wildflower named ‘extinctus’ rediscovered (but still endangered” at Phys’org (April 15, 2022)

Maybe they will have to change the name now. One term for this kind of life form is “Lazarus species”

The paper is open access.

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Published on April 18, 2022 05:44

April 17, 2022

Why the Miller-Urey experiment was so important to many high school science teachers

Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), offers some thoughts on the ultra-famous Miller-Urey experiment, which is supposed to have shown that life can get started sort of accidentally:

As I have suggested already in this series, there undoubtedly was much at stake in the Miller-Urey experiment — considerably more than was realized at the time by those who listened uncritically to Carl Sagan and others with an interest in deceptively boosting the supposed importance of the experiment. Its implicit promise for many observers as well as eager readers of the American and world press would have been that it would extend Darwin’s timeline back to the pre-organic formation of the first living cell, and so establish the fundamental point of departure for the mechanism of natural selection to go to work on. It would also of course have delivered a stunning victory for the materialist position. In the event, though, it succeeded only in dealing a disabling body-blow to materialist notions by giving game set and match to the theistic position. This point has not, to my knowledge, been publicly acknowledged.

Hot Springs, Hydrothermal Vents, Etc.

Most devastatingly for Darwinists, the complete failure of this and more recent experiments to find the origins of primitive life forms in hot springs, hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor, et al., have removed the indispensable foundation for the operation of natural selection. By that I mean that any postulated selective mechanism must obviously have something to select. No raw material means no evolution, no nothing. Without an “abiogenetic moment” Darwin’s entire theory of evolution via natural selection falls flat.

Neil Thomas, “Existential Implications of the Miller-Urey Experiment” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 14, 2022)

Here’s the rest of the series.

You may also wish to read: So life on Earth is even older than we thought? At ScienceDaily: The researchers say that, while some of the structures could conceivably have been created through chance chemical reactions, the ‘tree-like’ stem with parallel branches was most likely biological in origin, as no structure created via chemistry alone has been found like it.

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Published on April 17, 2022 18:19

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… )

Father Of 5-Year-Old Pterodactyl Finds It’s Not Easy To Get Species-Affirming Care In America

Bottom Story of the day!:

Canadians furious over “Don’t Say Eh” bill.

Nothing ever happens in Canada if you don’t count Convoy! If you don’t have to wear a stupid, useless, smelly mask today, thank a Canadian trucker. Chances are, he is rolling up the Alaska Highway and won’t hear you. But never mind.

Meanwhile:

Here are Woke changes Disney is making to old cartoons.

And — remember that English teacher? — Can you name the Christ figure in each of these

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Published on April 17, 2022 09:40

Somebody wonders: Why did Harvard University go after its best black professor?

Here’s the story:

Fryer was heavily recruited after his time at the University of Chicago, and ultimately accepted a tenure-track position at Harvard. He quickly established himself as a political outlier through his willingness to ask provocative questions and publish the results, even when they challenged liberal pieties. There’s no apparent partisan agenda, only a genuine search for truth…

Last fall, Fryer returned to Harvard. But he’s been stripped of his named professorship, banned from interacting with graduate students, subjected to constant Title IX surveillance, and demoted to teaching undergraduates. All of which makes it hard not to conclude that Harvard is more concerned with protecting the integrity of its ideological codes—and making an example of a successful black scholar who challenged them—than with the future of black America.

Rob Montz, “Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors?” at Quillette (April 15, 2022)

Increasingly, academia in these parts is becoming — not an education in the western classics — but an introduction to a social elite. A black guy who asks too many questions would be implying that he was a smart person, not the sort of “victim” the elite need. Thoughts?

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Published on April 17, 2022 08:34

Weird story: Darwin prof targets Discovery Institute

See, most Darwin profs aren’t very smart. They emit crap that they heard fifty years ago to students and if we are lucky, they remember to feed worms to the garter snakes in the class terrarium. But this guy has bigger ambitions.

“Professor Dave” (Dave Farina with 1.92 million YouTube subscribers) — has started a campaign against the Discovery Institute. His first video, attacking Casey Luskin, went up yesterday.

He plans more videos. He allowed the world to know his idea for this campaign on January 31, 2022, in an interview with another anti-ID YouTuber, the biology student Jackson Wheat:

A friend observes that “Professor Dave” presents himself as a science educator, but his hatred of Discovery (or anyone supporting design) is so great that, wildly swinging the broadsword of “science,” he chops off heads and limbs of would-be allies.

Take the term “Darwinism,” for instance. Dave claims “Darwinism” is “outdated” and “dishonest”:

Dave should let the leading origin-of-life researcher Steven Benner know. In his prestigious Mendel Lecture in Brno, Czech Republic, Benner uses, without hesitation, the very term Dave said was DI propaganda:

Isn’t Darwinism the Darwinist’s proudest boast? Didn’t even Lynn Margulis have to go along with it?

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Published on April 17, 2022 07:36

April 16, 2022

Who but C.S. Lewis to unmask the pretensions of SETI…

Look, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been a wonderful thing. Like a favorite teddy bear. But finally, you have to ask,

How can METI / SETI advocates repudiate intelligent design while depending on the design inference for their work? The rationale goes like this: since intelligence “evolved” here on Earth, it must have “evolved” on many other habitable planets where life “evolved.” They think, therefore, that since their reasoning is evolution-based, it has no need for a Designer. Evolved things with intelligence can design things.

The Argument from Reason

This is where the argument from reason can unmask the pretentions of SETI with devastating clarity. Explicated from multiple points of view in John West’s book The Magician’s Twin, the argument from reason exposes the self-refuting nature of the materialist enterprise, because to think about materialism requires exercising an immaterial reality: logic.

We can let C. S. Lewis masterfully express the materialist’s dilemma in a few cogent thoughts.

“The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.”

David Coppedge, “C. S. Lewis Unmasks the Pretensions of SETI” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 12, 2022)

True. Anyone who witnessed the naturalist government of Canada’s crackdown on anyone who opposed its rule during the COVID-19 Crazy can answer that right away:

Materialists do not care who they must destroy in order to preserve their rule. If you agree to rule by materialists, that is what you have agreed to.

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Published on April 16, 2022 18:31

Get rid of the science paper?

At the The Guardian, here’s a thought from a prof at King’s College. He begins with an overview of all the problems, then,

The solution to all these problems is the same as the answer to “How do I organise my journals if I don’t use cornflakes boxes?” Use the internet. We can change papers into mini-websites (sometimes called “notebooks”) that openly report the results of a given study. Not only does this give everyone a view of the full process from data to analysis to write-up – the dataset would be appended to the website along with all the statistical code used to analyse it, and anyone could reproduce the full analysis and check they get the same numbers – but any corrections could be made swiftly and efficiently, with the date and time of all updates publicly logged.

This would be a major improvement on the status quo, where the analysis and writing of papers goes on entirely in private, with scientists then choosing on a whim whether to make their results public.

Stuart Richie, “The Big Idea: Shoud we get rid of the science paper” at The Guardian (April 11, 2022)

Could we try it for five years and see?

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Published on April 16, 2022 10:17

Ethan Siegel tries busting Albert Einstein

Theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel writes popular science. Here here he tries “demythologizing” Albert Einstein:

That’s the myth we frequently tell ourselves about Einstein. That he, an outcast and a dropout, taught himself everything he needed to know on his own and revolutionized the field of physics in a number of ways. In the early days, his work thinking about light gave us the photoelectric effect, special relativity, and E = mc sup>2, among other advances. Later on, his work alone gave us General Relativity, arguably his greatest achievement. All by his lonesome, Einstein single-handedly dragged the field out of Newtonian stagnation and into the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries. Here’s why that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Ethan Siegel, “Einstein wasn’t a “lone genius” after all” at Big Think (April 12, 2022)

Sorry, Ethan. Good thoughts but overall, it doesn’t work. Lots of people had help and they never did what Einstein did.

The spark of genius is real.

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Published on April 16, 2022 08:57

The really strange story about creationism and racism took a new turn recently

It ought to be obvious to anyone that Darwinism was made in Hell as the perfect theory of origins for racists: It turns out, we are not all the children of Adam and Eve — that’s just … superstition. the truth is: We good, they bad. So we hit hard first.,

Something a chimpanzee would understand.

Anyway, UCal Stanislaus prof Richard Weikart catches us up with the latest efforts to keep all that going by deflecting blame for racism onto creationists:

A recent psychological study by Stylianos Syropoulos et al. published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that Americans who disbelieve in human evolution have higher levels of racism and prejudice (Stylianos Syropoulos, et al., “Bigotry and the Human–Animal Divide: (Dis)Belief in Human Evolution and Bigoted Attitudes Across Different Cultures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2022)). The implication seems to be that disbelief in evolution somehow contributes to racism.

Interestingly, however, at the beginning of the study, the authors admit that belief in evolution has been used in the past to promote and justify racism. Clearly the authors — who embrace evolution, but reject racism — find these historical connections troubling. Thus, while admitting that evolution has been historically connected to racism, they seek to counter this by allegedly demonstrating that belief in human evolution today makes one less prone to racism.

There are numerous problems with this study, but I will focus on three: (1) The correlations that they find are not necessarily caused by the idea of evolution; (2) their definition of racism is problematic; and (3) some of their findings do not support their thesis.

Richard Weikart, “Does Disbelief in Human Evolution Foment Racism?” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 15, 2022)

Just think how many people make their living off Darwinism and we can see a motive right there for the kind of study that attempts to exculpate Darwinism.

You may also wish to read: Richard Weikart: Scientific racism is more virulent than religious racism.

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Published on April 16, 2022 08:02

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