Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 89

From the Babylon Bee (still in Twitter jail)

This stuff is not our usual line of coverage. But in these strange times — when Woke American billionaires tell us all when we may and may not laugh — you might be missing the Bee’s sendup of some of the most asinine upperclassmen in Western world history. So here’s your fix:

Twitter Hires Will Smith To Slap Comedians Who Tell Jokes They Don’t Like “Here at Twitter, jokes are no laughing matter,” said Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. “We hate our precious ideology being made fun of more than we hate terrorists and concentration camps combined. We tried simple censorship, but last night we discovered what appears to be a much more fun and popular way to deal with offensive jokes—literal violence! Who knew you could be applauded for assault and battery, so long as it was in response to a tasteless joke? We are proud to bring Mr. Smith on board to begin a slapping rampage against our foes.”

Amy Schumer Horrified To Learn You Can Now Get Slapped For Bad Jokes “With the comedy world having been put on notice, many comedians are deciding to avoid telling jokes to roomfuls of mentally ill narcissists for the time being. ”

Gender Reveal Party Invalidated As Neither Parent Has Biology Degree “We were so excited. We thought we were having a boy,” said Shelley. “But now… who knows what it is. It might not even be a baby. I don’t know. I’m not a biologist.”

Note a joke, apparently: Elon Musk sits down with the Babylon Bee “RED ALERT: this is not a joke. Elon Musk sat down with Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, EIC Kyle Mann, and Creative Director Ethan Nicolle for an in-depth interview on wokeness, Elizabeth Warren, taxing the rich, the Metaverse, which superhero Elon would be, and how the left is killing comedy.”:

It would seem that Musk is a more thoughtful individual than he has sometimes appeared to be.

You may also wish to laugh your way through: The Babylon Bee is in Twitter Jail… For your Saturday evening amusement, here are some of their latest stories, including Adam Confused By New Creature God Put In Garden As He Is Not A Biologist.

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The more we study kinesin, the more remarkable it appears

Short film still remarkable after seven years:

Cells are inhabited by molecular motors and engines with precision parts operating under tight regulations. Now you can watch our video animation with a little more appreciation for what these amazing molecular machines do for all life, including your own.

David Coppedge, “Walking Wonder: More to Appreciate About Kinesin, the “Workhorse of the Cell”” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 28, 2022)

No one really thinks natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism) really explains this stuff, right? It’s a political position, really.

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Origin of life: But how do cells come to have “borders” at all?

Inanimate objects don’t have “borders” because they need not defend themselves against anything. Boulders don’t care if they end up as sand.

And yet:

Border control is very important to cells. Their membranes separate the inner and outer environments, which are quite different. To absorb useful compounds, such as nutrients, or to excrete waste, cells can use selective transport systems. However, some transport across the membrane takes place by passive diffusion. This is a non-selective process that will let some molecules go in or out, depending on their size and hydrophobicity, for example. Active transporters have been studied extensively; however, our knowledge of passive diffusion through the membrane is still very incomplete…

Poolman and his colleagues have, therefore, defined a number of variables that alter the permeability of membranes for different classes of compounds. This information can be used by companies that use yeasts or bacteria as cell factories. ‘However, our results cannot be directly applied to those cells,’ warns Poolman. ‘Real membranes contain hundreds of different lipids and the composition can vary between different locations in the membrane. In addition, these cell membranes contain all kinds of proteins. If you make changes in, for example, the lipid composition of the membrane, a lot can go wrong and the function of a membrane protein can be affected.’

University of Groningen, “How cells control their borders” at ScienceDaily (March 28, 2022)

Yes, it’s very complex. But having a membrane at all suggests that something is different about life that can’t be explained by the various “It all just happened” scenarios we often hear about how life got started. How did life forms decide they wanted to protect themselves?

It’s becoming easier all the time to see why many scientists who are not theists have become panpsychists.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: Why do many scientists see cells as intelligent? Bacteria appear to show intelligent behavior. But what about individual cells in our bodies?

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Shades of “junk DNA”? Tiny bubbles are NOT “cellular debris”

The team studied the familiar roundworm or C. elegans to see what the tiny bubbles do, good or bad, and guess what?:

Cells share good news and bad news with each other, and one way in which they do that is through tiny bubbles called extracellular vesicles (EVs). Once considered to be cellular debris, EVs carry beneficial or toxic cargo that promotes good health or disease. In the human brain, for example, EVs carry disease-causing proteins that may influence the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

“Although EVs are of profound medical importance, the field lacks a basic understanding of how EVs form, what cargo is packaged in different types of EVs originating from same or different cell types and how different cargos influence the range of EV targeting and bioactivities,” said lead author Inna Nikonorova, a postdoctoral researcher.

EVs, which are found in human fluids including urine and blood, may be used in liquid biopsies as biomarkers for disease because healthy and sick cells package different EV cargo.

Rutgers University, “Once called cellular debris, tiny bubbles may play key role in understanding, treating diseases” at ScienceDaily (March 24, 2022)

It’s getting harder all the time to find genuine junk in the human body. Just as well that Nathan Lents, author of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, probably isn’t listening.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: New use for “junk DNA”: Controlling fear Okay, why, until recently, did researchers think that “the majority of our genes were made up of junk DNA, which essentially didn’t do anything”? Because that vast sunken library of dead information (sheer randomness and waste) was a slam dunk for Darwinism, as politically powerful theistic evolutionist Francis Collins was quick to point out in The Language of God. (2007). If that’s not true, an argument for Darwinism is disconfirmed.

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How the COVID pandemic showed that evidence-based medicine is — at present — an illusion

Government largely bought into propaganda marketed as science:

There is a big flaw in the logic of evidence-based medicine as the basis for the practice of medicine as we know it, a practice based on science; one that determines care down to the level of the individual patient. This flaw is nestled in the heart and soul of evidence-based medicine, which (as we have seen over the last two years) is not free of politics. It is naive to think that data and the process of licensure of new drugs is free from bias and conflicts of interest. In fact, this couldn’t be any farther from the truth. The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 to 2022 has exposed for all to see how evidence based medicine has been corrupted by the governments, hospitalists, academia, big pharma, tech and social media. They have leveraged the processes and rationale of evidence-based medicine to corrupt the entire medical enterprise.

Evidence based medicine depends on data. For the most part, the data gathering and analysis process is conducted by and for the pharmaceutical industry, then reported by senior academics. The problem, as laid out in an editorial in the British Medical Journal is as follows:

“The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.”

Robert W. Malone, “The illusion of Evidence-based Medicine” at Substack (March 28, 2022)

Right, and hardly the only illusion. Dr. Malone proposes reforms but thorough enquiries would be needed to make the case for reform obvious — and we can expect massive stonewalling in the name of “science.”

Just for example, the cult of the mask is starting to be probed: “none of four RCTs performed in broader community settings found a significant difference between masking and remaining bare-faced. For influenza-like illnesses, the pooled data from five other RCTs as well showed a non-significant protective effect of mask wearing for avoiding either primary or secondary infection. These results appear substantial and would seem of some relevance to the current pandemic. But there is more.” Stay tuned.

You may also wish to read: At BMJ: Evidence based medicine running into many of the same problems as felled earlier reform movements. Op-ed: “Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs [key opinion leaders] appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers.”

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Why punctuated equilibrium did not rescue modern evolutionary theory

David Klinghoffer points to an explanation:

The theory of punctuated equilibrium — often abbreviated a bit too cutely as “punk eek” — was formulated by paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge to shore up traditional Darwinism with its glaring difficulty of the missing fossil transitions. The personable new ID explainer Lukas Ruegger has considered that difficulty and some proposed paleontological solutions to it in his excellent Khan Academy-like series Basics of Intelligent Design Biology.

In the third episode, “Evolution by Jerks,” out now from Discovery Institute, Ruegger turns to the three problems with punctuated equilibrium, problems so serious that they resulted in Gould’s backing away from his own theory. By the time of his death, he had come full circle, in effect, returning to traditional Darwinism.

David Klinghoffer, “Lukas Ruegger: Three Problems with Punctuated Equilibrium” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 28, 2022)

In the 1970s, paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed a model of evolution called punctuated equilibrium, intended to resolve the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. Can “Punk Eek,” as it’s often called, resolve the abrupt appearance of new animal phyla in the Cambrian explosion? This video explains why the answer is No—among many other problems, Punk Eek requires too much evolutionary change too quickly and lacks a biological mechanism to account for the rapid origin of anatomical novelty we see in the Cambrian period.

Note: Re Stephen Jay Gould returning to traditional Darwinism: Didn’t E. O. Wilson try escaping the vice grip of Darwinism with “group selection” and then dramatically returning to full orthodoxy, leaving many dozens of supporters stranded?

Complete academy acceptance is a powerful motivator…

You may also wish to read: Can the Cambrian Explosion be explained away by the earlier Ediacaran Explosion? David Klinghoffer: Lukas Ruegger is the personable new intelligent design “explainer” whose videos take an approach similar to Khan Academy’s. The latter’s offering on evolution is replete with junk science, as Casey Luskin has detailed. Ruegger’s treatment of the subject is much better, and I appreciate his clarity and brevity.

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Eric Holloway on Dawkins’s dubious weasel

Dawkins has successfully reduced a combinatorial explosion to a manageable problem…or has he?:

In Richard Dawkins’ book, The Blind Watchmaker, he proposed a famous (and infamous) computer program to demonstrate the power of cumulative selection, known as the “Weasel program.” The program demonstrates that by varying a single letter at a time, it is possible to rapidly evolve a coherent English sentence from a string of gibberish…

Many have latched onto this program to defend (see here, here, and here) and debunk (see here and here) Darwinian evolution. On the other hand, Dawkins claims he only meant the program to show how natural selection can speed up evolution, and nothing further.

I think Dawkins’ program can indeed show something further, which is that natural selection can also make evolution impossible. What’s that again? That’s right: Dawkins’ weasel program shows natural selection prevents evolution from happening…

Multiplying the independent probabilities together, we end up with the probability of 2/27 * 2^-25 of hitting the target phrase, requiring more than 2^25 queries. This puts us right back into the combinatorial explosion Dawkins sought to avoid with piecewise selection. All I did was add a second target.

Eric Holloway, “Dawkins’ Dubious Double Weasel and the Combinatorial Cataclysm” at Mind Matters News

There was always something funny about Dawkins’s Weasel program. Did anyone ever really find the code?

Takehome: Eric Holloway shows that, far from demonstrating evolution, Dawkins’ weasel program shows that natural selection prevents evolution from happening.

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Dr Zelenko challenges officialdom for over-reaching

He speaks to “sociopathic oligarchs.” Here:

Food for thought. END

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So now there are two brains in our bodies that “just somehow evolved”

The gut nervous system has come to be called a “second brain”:

How the ‘second brain’ — the enteric nervous system in our gut — communicates with our first brain has been one of the most challenging questions faced by enteric neuroscientists, until now.

New research from Flinders University has discovered how specialised cells within the gut can communicate with both the brain and spinal cord, which up until now had remained a major mystery.

“The gut-brain axis consists of bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut, which links emotional and cognitive centres of the brain with peripheral intestinal functions,” says study author Professor Nick Spencer from the College of Medicine and Public Health.

Flinders University, “How the gut communicates with the brain” at ScienceDaily (March 23, 2022)

It’s not clear why it should not all be thought of as one brain system:

“Within the gut wall lie specialised cells called enterochromaffin (EC) cells that produce and release hormones and neurotransmitters in response to particular stimuli that are ingested when we eat,” says Professor Spencer.

“These EC cells release the vast majority of serotonin into the body, so our study has uncovered a major clue into how the food we eat stimulates the release of serotonin, which then acts on the nerves to communicate with the brain.

“There is a direct connection between serotonin levels in our body and depression and how we feel. So, understanding how the gut EC cells communicate with the brain is of major importance.”

The team made the discovery using a neuronal tracing technique developed in their lab, not used anywhere else in the world, allowing them to see the sensory nerve endings with clarity, for the first time, in the gut wall.

“This has not been possible, until now, because there were so many other types of nerves also present in the gut — it’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” says Professor Spencer.

Flinders University, “How the gut communicates with the brain” at ScienceDaily (March 23, 2022)

But we’re not here just to quibble. No wonder that, in order to account for all this specified complexity, evolutionary biologists must elevate natural selection into some form of magic, then persecute non-believers.

The paper requires a fee or subscription.

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How did theistic Darwinism get started?

Today, we would think in terms of, say, Francis Collins and The Language of God. (2007). But who started it?

Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), offers:

Some, like author Charles Kingsley and future Archbishop Frederick Temple actually professed to find their religious faith strengthened by Darwinism since it appeared to them as a form of progressive revelation — science coming through for humanity by illuminating what had previously been hidden. Kingsley even seems to have viewed biological evolution as a branch of what German theologians call Heilsgeschichte, that is, salvation history, according to which God constantly works behind the scenes to promote the human potentialities and ultimate salvation of His subjects.

Indeed, for Kingsley this hidden hand approach seemed more satisfactory than the deist position which postulated a God who had made a once-and-for-all effort of creation but had since that time supposedly retired from his exertions with little more care for his Creation. For Kingsley, by contrast, evolution took on the spiritually reassuring aspect of underscoring God’s tutelary and pastoral role as the unwavering guardian and promoter of his Creation. Surprising as it may seem today, Darwin was seen by Kingsley and others as making a contribution to theological understanding every bit as important as his contribution to biology.

Neil Thomas, “The Rise of Theistic Darwinism” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 21, 2022)

The modern theistic evolutionists are more cautious. They wouldn’t have seen Darwin as “making a contribution to theological understanding every bit as important as his contribution to biology. ”

By the way, speaking of theistic Darwinism, does anyone remember Karl Giberson or Darrel Falk? Would such a movement be likely to even get started today?

You may also wish to read: Neil Thomas: Early Darwinists had more freedom to stray from the orthodoxy. Imagine any of that being tolerated today. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, co-theorist of natural selection was eventually sidelined for doubts about atheist materialism. But why did he even have them?

Here’s Thomas’s full current series.

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