Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 84

April 10, 2022

David Coppedge: Brain neurons “comparable to a library”

Researchers at Max Planck, Rockefeller, and Duke Universities examined the connections in brain tissue from the visual cortex, the first stop for information coming in from the retina. It was a tall order. A news item from Max Planck, “No cable spaghetti in the brain,” describes the cabling nightmare:

Nerve cells in the human brain are densely interconnected and form a seemingly impenetrable meshwork. A cubic millimeter of brain tissue contains several kilometers of wires. A fraction of this wiring might be governed by random mechanisms, because random networks could at least theoretically process information very well. Let us consider the visual system: In the retina, several million nerve cells provide information for more than 100 Million cells in the visual cortex. The visual cortex is one of the first regions of the brain to process visual information. In this brain area, various features as spatial orientation, color and size of visual stimuli are processed and represented.

Not Spaghetti Cables

But they did not find randomness. They found a well-organized structure like a library.

David Coppedge, “Brain Neurons Are “Comparable to a Library”” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 8, 2022)

Here’s the Max Planck news item (November 23, 2015).

The more we study, the more complex it gets. Consider:

Our neurons’ electrical synapses are the dark matter of the brain. These aren’t the familiar chemical synapses but a second set, the electrical synapses that enable currents to travel directly between neurons from pore to pore. A recent study in fruit flies shows that without the little-understood electrical synapses, neurons’ reaction is much weaker and some of them became unstable.

Memory leans more on the brain’s electric field than on neurons. MIT researchers compare the electric field to an orchestra conducting the neurons as players. The neurons associated with our memories may change; it’s the electric field that holds the memories together, the neuroscientists say.

and

The brain unfolds like a drama, with neurons in different roles. Researchers studying fruit flies hope that spotting the stages at which human neurons go missing or wrong can help develop treatments to insert or replace them. Human and fruit fly brains are strikingly similar but with vastly different results. Clearly, the brain is not all we need to know about a life form.

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Published on April 10, 2022 20:26

Coca Cola? There’s also an interesting story re Nye and climate change

Readers responded to our note on Bill Nye fronting Coca Cola… For most of the response, you can read the comments below yesterday’s story on Coke and Nye.

But one reader sent in a link to a 2012 post at Watts Up With That?, a skeptical climate change site. Seemed of interest:

Al Gore and Bill Nye FAIL at doing a simple CO2 experiment

Replicating Al Gore’s Climate 101 video experiment (from the 24 hour Gore-a-thon) shows that his “high school physics” could never work as advertised

Readers may recall my previous essay where I pointed out how Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 Video, used in his “24 hours of climate reality”, had some serious credibility issues with editing things to make it appear as if they had actually performed the experiment, when they clearly did not. It has taken me awhile to replicate the experiment. Delays were a combination of acquisition and shipping problems, combined with my availability since I had to do this on nights and weekends. I worked initially using the original techniques and equipment, and I’ve replicated the Climate 101 experiment in other ways using improved equipment. I’ve compiled several videos. My report follows.

Climate change is secularists’ favorite Doom so it wouldn’t be surprising if there was some distance between stuff we read and stuff we can test.

You may also wish to read: Has Bill Nye sold out to… Coca Cola? The writer at Gizmodo is not convinced that “the good people at Coca Cola” are making anything like the difference Nye says they are but interested readers can read the article and watch the vid. Note: A similar issue came up a couple years back in connection with his flipflop on GMOs.

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Published on April 10, 2022 19:45

Is Christianity Today twisting the Bible to fit Darwinian evolution?

That’s the accusation by editor Tom Gilson at The Stream. He is responding to a review by Jay Johnson of Loren Haarsma’s When Did Sin Begin?:

Christianity Today is asking how we can fit evolution with the Bible. I’m trying to figure out why…

Why Try Jury-Rigging the Bible to Fit a Failed Theory?

Evolution doesn’t fit the facts of nature, so why should it fit the account in Genesis? Why even try to make it fit?

We can’t solve that problem by adding God into the evolution equation. Most theistic evolutionists today are pretty stingy about what they’ll let God do there anyway (as if it were up to them). They want Him in the background, so nature can run without Him. That’s just the same evolution, though, with “God” sprinkled on top of it. It’s an insult to both God and evolution.

Others say God gets involved from time to time. In that case, Genesis is just fine as is. There’s no need to doubt that God that made Adam and Eve by special creation, just as it says in the Bible. (If you want more on this, here’s more — 1,000 pages more!)

Can We Harmonize Christianity Today With Evangelical Christianity?

So where does this leave us? Christianity Today is supposed to be the voice of evangelical Christianity. Here, though, it has totally capitulated to a naturalized view of human origins. It’s giving in to a view that many evangelicals reject for good scientific reasons.

I’d say that leaves us with one more “harmonization” problem to solve. Christianity Today has always been supposed to be the voice of evangelical Christianity. It’s supposed to be biblical. How does that fit with reality today? Answer: It doesn’t.

Tom Gilson, “Why Would Christianity Today Try Twisting the Bible to Fit Evolution?” at The Stream (April 8, 2022)

Note: Gilson ends by recommending skeptic Neil Thomas’s Taking Leave of Darwin (2021) instead.

Any thoughts on what gives with Christianity Today?

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Published on April 10, 2022 13:34

At Mind Matters News: How plants talk when we’re not around

Some aspects of plant behavior can be studied in the same terms as animal or human behavior:

One genuine surprise in recent decades has been the discovery that plants have nervous systems like animals and use some of the same compounds in communications — for example, TMAO to relieve stress and glutamate to speed transmission.

Biologist Peter Rogers pointed out recently that the similarities may shed a bit of light on issues around anaesthesia. Surprisingly, it is possible to anesthetize a plant.

Denyse O’Leary, “How plants talk when we’re not around” at Mind Matters News

Consciousness (as some almost argue)?

Well, “consciousness” is going a little far because we’d best be clear what we mean by that. With plants, as with, say, worms, there could be an extensive communications network without any actual consciousness in the sense of an “I” in there. The effect would be roughly similar to a “smart” building, though much more complex. That is, the communications are highly sensitive and extensive, whether or not anyone is actually “home.”

Still, the ways plants communicate are remarkable. For example, one researcher tells us that plants can use RNA to “talk to” neighbours, affecting their gene expression, It was a quite unexpected finding…

Denyse O’Leary, “How plants talk when we’re not around” at Mind Matters News

You may also wish to read: Evolutionary psychologist argues that worms feel pain. But how? Wait. Barash’s hypothesis overlooks the fact that suffering is more than an alarm system. An alarm could be going off in an empty building. If some invertebrates show much more self-awareness than expected, it hardly follows that all do. We risk impeding humane reforms if we cast the net too widely.

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Published on April 10, 2022 09:22

April 9, 2022

Eye evolution as a series of miracles of the Darwinian religion

Casey Luskin muses on the many hand-waving accounts of how the complexity of the eye developed by accident, for example:

Hyper-Simplistic Accounts

As a further example of these hyper-simplistic accounts of eye evolution, Francisco Ayala in his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion asserts, “Further steps — the deposition of pigment around the spot, configuration of cells into a cuplike shape, thickening of the epidermis leading to the development of a lens, development of muscles to move the eyes and nerves to transmit optical signals to the brain — gradually led to the highly developed eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods (octopuses and squids) and to the compound eyes of insects.” (p. 146)

Ayala’s explanation is vague and shows no appreciation for the biochemical complexity of these visual organs. Thus, regarding the configuration of cells into a cuplike shape, biologist Michael Behe asks (in responding to Richard Dawkins on the same point):

“And where did the “little cup” come from? A ball of cells–from which the cup must be made–will tend to be rounded unless held in the correct shape by molecular supports. In fact, there are dozens of complex proteins involved in maintaining cell shape, and dozens more that control extracellular structure; in their absence, cells take on the shape of so many soap bubbles. Do these structures represent single-step mutations? Dawkins did not tell us how the apparently simple “cup” shape came to be. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, P. 15 (Free Press, 1996)”

An Integrated System

Likewise, mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski has assessed the alleged “intermediates” for the evolution of the eye. He observes that the transmission of data signals from the eye to a central nervous system for data processing, which can then output some behavioral response, comprises an integrated system that is not amenable to stepwise evolution…

Casey Luskin, “More Implausible Stories about Eye Evolution” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 8, 2022)

Surely the best approach is to see these convenient cascades of functional machinery as the miracle stories of Darwinism. They are not subject to criticism as to their probability, which is why no Darwinian need take such criticism seriously.

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Published on April 09, 2022 19:08

Did virtue signalling evolve via Darwinian evolution?

Practically every decent human being in these parts has been disgusted in recent years by Woke virtue signalling:

You know the sort of thing:

“I don’t go to Florida because I disapprove of… ” [Too bad for the sharks then. They’ll have to eat fish this season.]

“I was going to take a course in sushi but then I realized I was appropriating Japanese culture.” [Fine. The rest of us will take the course and be glad. She can just go on stuffing herself with whatever that awful stuff is that she buys at Correctness Foods, Inc. I just hope she isn’t planning to invite us to an Awareness Dinner again. I am running out of socially appropriate excuses… ]

“I have realized at last that my habit of being polite to strangers is a classic symptom of Whiteness.” [Yes, indeed! You are quite right! Now go ahead and be as rude as possible to everybody you meet. Most likely, your life will soon be a hell of needless contention and maybe you will see the value in moving far away. The rest of us must then, as it happens, learn to live somehow without our Shining Star of Virtue… ]

The Babylon Bee is great for sending up that kind of thing.

Now here’s a curious thesis from an evolutionary biologist as to what underlies it:

When individuals send signals to try to convince others that they are better than average, the result is often what signalling theorists call a ‘runaway’: an arms race toward more and more extreme signals. If peahens want to mate with the peacocks whose tails are more extravagant than the average peacock, natural selection favours peacocks with increasingly more extravagant tails over successive generations. If everyone has a high-school diploma, students need to start getting bachelor’s degrees in order to become distinctive in the eyes of employers. Students in the next generation will, of course, pursue a master’s to distinguish themselves from the mass of mere college graduates.

In the moral domain, runaway signalling happens when people try to elevate their moral status by doing and believing things that not everyone else does. For example, everyone is opposed to killing humans: saying that you think people should not kill each other does not set you apart from others. But not everyone is opposed to eating animals, so being vegetarian or vegan can effectively increase your moral standing.

Tadeg Quillien, “Is virtue signalling a vice?” at Aeon (April 4, 2022)

Quillien got that right but most of the rest of the essay is Darwinian nonsense about peacocks.* However, he should be given credit for daring to raise this point.

*It is not clear that peahens even care much about the peacock’s tail. They seem to be attracted to the screams.

You may also wish to read: As the Babylon Bee still awaits rescue from Twitter jail… Not To Be Outdone, Bill Gates Buys 9.2% Of MySpace “Gates confirmed he will be making some much-needed changes to the site—adding helpful information on the latest vaccines and boosters, a “Clippy” virtual assistant, and handy information on the benefits of subdermal microchip technology.”

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Published on April 09, 2022 18:40

April 8, 2022

People who doubt “evolution” are more likely to be racist?

So academic elite types claim in a recent study:

A disbelief in human evolution was associated with higher levels of prejudice, racist attitudes and support of discriminatory behavior against Blacks, immigrants and the LGBTQ community in the U.S., according to University of Massachusetts Amherst research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Similarly, across the globe — in 19 Eastern European countries, 25 Muslim countries and in Israel — low belief in evolution was linked to higher biases within a person’s group, prejudicial attitudes toward people in different groups and less support for conflict resolution…

“People who perceive themselves as more similar to animals are also people who tend to have more pro-social or positive attitudes toward outgroup members or people from stigmatized and marginalized backgrounds,” Syropoulos explains. “In this investigation, we were interested in examining whether belief in evolution would also act in a similar way, because it would reinforce this belief that we are more similar to animals.”

University of Massachusetts Amherst, “Disbelief in human evolution linked to greater prejudice and racism” at ScienceDaily (April 4, 2022)

The paper requires a fee or subscription.

A friend who has read the paper kindly writes to say,

I think this study is a prime example of the temptation to make the correlation equals causation fallacy. What this paper is measuring has nothing to do with evolution or belief in it. It is measuring parochial attitudes among people in insulated groups who don’t have much contact with the outside world. These people tend to be prejudiced against other races and also have little contact with evolution so they are skeptical. It just shows that isolation breeds prejudice against the other.

The principle that isolation breeds prejudice against the “other” is a truism. And you could find evidence supporting this truism from very different groups. If you surveyed attitudes of ivory tower types you’d find similar prejudice against conservative religious groups, you’d find similar discriminatory attitudes. Why? Because those evolutionary secular academic types who accept human evolution have very little contact with conservative religious people.

So what’s interesting isn’t the finding of this paper. What’s interesting is why they chose to study isolated people who happen to be religious and defined prejudice as attitudes towards certain privileged groups in society (eg LGBTQ). Why not study prejudice of secular types who accept human evolution towards religious consevatives? You’d find analogous prejudices. But the researchers weren’t interested in studying that…because they are evolutionary secularists with an agenda to make religious conservatives look bad.

Come to think of it, if you are here anyway, you may also wish to read: E. O. Wilson and racism: The smoking gun is found. Some have dismissed the findings but others say they fit a pattern. From Schulson’s story: “I don’t really care that Wilson had racist ideas, because I know pretty much all of the people that I dealt with, when I was coming up through the science system, had racist ideas,” said [evolutionary biologist Joseph] Graves, who in 1988 became the first Black American to receive a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. “Wilson was just one of many.” Oh.

And remember, Wilson was supposed to be the second Darwin. Funny no one talks about that now.

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Published on April 08, 2022 20:26

Has Bill Nye sold out to… Coca Cola?

Remember Bill Nye the Science Guy?

That’s the claim at Gizmodo, where you’d think Nye would be one of the good guys:

Bad news for everyone who loved watching Bill Nye the Science Guy during middle school science class: your fave is problematic. This week, Coca-Cola, one of the world’s biggest plastic polluters, teamed up with TV’s favorite scientist for a campaign to create a “world without waste,” a joke of a corporate greenwashing campaign.

In a video innocuously titled “The Coca-Cola Company and Bill Nye Demystify Recycling,” an animated version of Nye—with a head made out of a plastic bottle and his signature bow tie fashioned from a Coke label—walks viewers through the ways “the good people at the Coca-Cola company are dedicating themselves to addressing our global plastic waste problem.” Coke, Nye explains, wants to use predominantly recycled materials to create bottles for its beverages; he then describes the process of recycling a plastic bottle, from a user throwing it into a recycling bin to being sorted and shredded into new material.

Molly Taft, “Bill Nye, the Sellout Guy” at Gizmodo (April 7, 2022)

The writer at Gizmodo is not convinced that “the good people at Coca Cola” are making anything like the difference Nye says they are but interested readers can read the article and watch the vid:

You may also wish to read: Bill Nye is a terrible spokesman for science: “In the book,* which [Alex] Berezow says was entirely lacking in references, Nye apparently made anti-GMO statements. And he has since found his way into the GMO camp — a move that Berezow thinks is not authentic. Berezow adds, “Ultimately, it seems that Bill Nye just panders to whatever he thinks the audience wants to hear. He thought (incorrectly) that they wanted to hear why GMOs were bad, so he altered his message when he got pushback. He won’t get pushback for exaggerating climate change, so it’s likely he’ll keep this up for a while.””

Hmmm.

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Published on April 08, 2022 20:09

New find might “upend the Standard Model” in physics? Really? Rob Sheldon has the story

Yesterday, readers may have seen hedders like “Particle’s surprise mass threatens to upend the standard model.” (Nature) and “Particle physics could be rewritten after shock W boson measurement” (New Scientist) We asked our phyusicscolor commentator Rob Sheldon what was really going on with the Standard Model and here is his take:

As usual, the journo article is breathless, “if it holds true, it could lead to entirely new theories of physics.” but the actual results are pretty boring. The standard model (SM) reports 80.357 +/- 0.008 GeV for the mass of the W-boson, the experimental result is 80.433 +/- 0.009 GeV. Yes, I reported that correctly, a 0.1% difference. Now there’s no shortage of theories to replace the SM, they’ve been coming out at 1000/yr since 1980 when the SM was formulated. But 42 years is a mighty long run for a theory, and 3 generations of particle physicists have been champing at the bit to provide the next updated theory. They invested some 30 years of that time on a failed program called “Supersymmetry” or SUSY for short, and are grasping at straws.

One of those straws is “dark matter”, which wasn’t even on their radar until President Clinton cancelled the Texas Supercollider and the Tevatron in Illinois closed and 1000 particle physicists went unemployed. At that point, they moved to astrophysics with the dubious claim that the “dark matter” of galaxies wasn’t black comets or black holes, but exotic particles not predicted by the Standard Model. This required particle physicists to build detectors and put them in abandoned gold mines, etc, to search for these elusive particles. That kept them employed for 20 years, but the effort never paid off, and now most of those experiments are winding down. Hence the panic to find something wrong with the SM that requires a new experiment. As for gravity, it isn’t so much a problem with the SM per se as with Quantum Mechanics, of which SM is a subset. And the anti-matter problem really is a problem for the “evolution” of the universe, not the SM, because something happened in the past that cannot be duplicated in our atom-smashers today. The SM was built to explain the data from atom-smashers, and while it is integrated into the Big Bang model, it has practically no say in the initial conditions and time-evolution of the universe. Anti-matter is a problem for the cosmologists, not the particle physicists.

But note the circularity. First they defined Dark Matter as something not in the SM, and then used that definition to prove there is something wrong with the SM. In actuality, Dark Matter might be exactly what Franz Zwicky said it was in 1937–matter that is not emitting light and cannot be seen with telescopes. I’m sure if Zwicky were alive today, he would scoff at the idea that it was an exotic particle, when gravel-sized dust, comets, small asteroids and even small black holes all can explain the astronomical data with no change to particle physics.

So what is the significance of this W-boson measurement?

It is interesting, in the sense that large discrepancies from theory drive the field to take ever better measurements, but it is not unusual or even earth-shattering. A figure in the scientific paper shows 9 measurements of the W-boson mass, 3 are higher than this, 5 are lower than this. What is different are the error bars assigned to this measurement, which are much narrower than everyone else’s. So this measurement falls in the middle of the pack, but claims to be highly accurate. This will undoubtedly drive the field to fund 10 more measurements and see if they really are as accurate as they say. Again, if experience is a guide, they probably have underestimated their error bars, but there is no theory waiting in the wings for this data. And in fact, the theory is in not much better shape than the data–having only a perturbative model of “effective mean field”, they sum up series expansions to 100’s and 1000’s of terms to get their accuracy. The theorists may still get their theory to agree with experiment if they do another 10,000 terms in their sum using up 3 more years of expensive supercomputer time. That would be the most likely outcome of this experiment, assuming of course, that there are not errors in their analysis.

But what this paper and journo piece reveals is the desperation felt in the particle physics community. They so desperately need the Standard Model to fail.

The paper is open access.

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

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Published on April 08, 2022 19:28

Steve Meyer on the logic of design detection

This is another excerpt from Steve Meyer’s chapter in The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021). He is discussing design theorist William Dembski’s Design Inference:

Dembski notes that complex sequences exhibit an irregular and improbable arrangement that defies expression by a simple rule or algorithm, whereas specification involves a match or correspondence between a physical system or sequence and an independently recognizable pattern or set of functional requirements.

By way of illustration, consider the following three sets of symbols: “nehya53nslbyw1`jejns7eopslanm46/J”

“TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR NO MAN”

“ABABABABABABABABABABAB”

The first two sequences are complex because both defy reduction to a simple rule. Each represents a highly irregular, aperiodic, improbable sequence. The third sequence is not complex, but is instead highly ordered and repetitive. Of the two complex sequences, only the second, however, exemplifies a set of independent functional requirements — i.e., it is specified.

Steve Meyer, “The Logic of Design Detection” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 25, 2022)

That first string could possibly be a code but if we don’t know what it is a code for, it is not communication.

A great deal has been invested in not understanding something as simple and obvious as the design inference. That’s powerful evidence that it is an important insight.

The whole series here.

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Published on April 08, 2022 19:04

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