Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 92

Never Fall into the Trap of Trying to Argue for the Self Evident

For two reasons, it is a mistake to argue for self-evident propositions.  First, it is impossible to argue for a self-evident proposition because the definition of a self-evident proposition is a proposition that is known to be true merely by understanding its meaning.  Consider the challenge “I deny 1+1=2.  Prove it.”  Don’t fall for it.  If a person denies the glaring truth of such an analytic statement (i.e., 1+1 actually means 2), they are a hopeless fool. Nothing you can say to them will reduce the proposition to more basic terms. 

Secondly, arguing for self-evident truths is rhetorically self-defeating, because the very act of trying to argue for them concedes the proposition that they are “arguable.”  And they are, again by definition, not arguable. 

This is not an academic matter.  We live in a time when self-evident truths are being denied by foolish and/or evil people.  The following Facebook exchange that I had last weekend brought this home to me.  Note especially my “king has no clothes” response at the end.

Barry opens the debate:

A date that will live in infamy. NCAA gives women’s swimming championship to man posing as a woman.  One thing makes this Texan’s heart nearly burst with pride though. The girl in burnt orange giving him the stink eye on the podium.  BTW, for the nearly braindead and progressives (categories that overlap considerably), I have added handy notes to identify the man and the women.

“Jessica” responds:

Here’s an idea: you could make your point respectfully. If you really care about changing hearts and minds (indeed, this a powerful photo) maybe you could avoid insulting those who disagree or remain undecided on this controversial issue. Our public discourse deserves better.

Barry replies:

Jessica chides me for not being respectful to the people who argue that men pretending to be women should be allowed to crush real women in athletic competitions.  To this I say there is certainly a time for respectful dialogue among people acting in good faith concerning matters about which people of good will can differ. This is not one of them.

Anyone who says a man is a woman is a liar. Anyone who says they are “undecided” about whether a man can be a woman is a liar. Anyone who says there is a “controversy” about whether a man can be a woman is a liar. Liars are murderers of the truth and worthy of nothing but contempt.

You err when you suggest that my purpose is to change hearts and minds. It is not. Everyone’s hearts and minds are already of one accord in that everyone already knows a man can never be a woman and men should not be allowed to crush women in athletic competitions.

When the king walked down the street with no clothes on, no one needed to be convinced that he was naked.  No one needed a thoughtful augment designed to change their hearts and minds about the obvious facts that they already knew. They needed to be reminded that they were cowards and liars for denying the obvious truth.

No, I am not trying to change anyone’s mind. I am holding evil people up for the contempt they richly deserve.

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Trust the Science! Instructive testimony from media efforts to squelch debate about the COVID panic

In the name of science, of course.

Subject-matter experts have been effectively silenced for disagreeing with “whatever was predetermined by the media to be right,” according to University of California Davis physician resident Tracy Beth Hoeg.

She said her interview with Nature promoting school reopening got her kicked out of a Facebook group for epidemiologists. Facebook hid her posts on post-vaccination myocarditis in young men, even though Hoeg was citing “the CDC’s own slides,” she said. Critics asked UC-Davis to rein in Hoeg, who is untenured.

Particularly galling was that NPR did a lengthy “preinterview” with Hoeg but replaced her with a pro-mask pediatrician in the broadcast segment. “I couldn’t listen to it, I was just so angry,” she said.

Though the CDC published her study finding minimal “in-school spread” of COVID, Hoeg speculated that the agency simply liked the original title, “Mask up,” and ignored the data.

Greg Piper, “‘Predetermined’: Mainstream scientists blame media, Big Tech for squelching COVID debate” at Just the News ( March 21, 2022)

There need to be Congressional hearings, studies, and books written about how “science” became a synonym for “what people do when they are in a panic” and how “disinformation” came to mean “casting doubt on panic-stricken responses.” But obviously, there is a larger message here about what science has become.

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At BMJ: Evidence based medicine running into many of the same problems as felled earlier reform movements

According to an op-ed in the British Medical Journal the culprits are “corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia”:

The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. 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.1234 Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion…

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.8 This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication.9 The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence.10

Jon Jureidini, Leemon B. McHenry, “The illusion of evidence based medicine” at the BMJ (March 16, 2022)

The COVID-19 “science-driven” public policy disaster is, of course, exhibit A in this area though the authors don’t bring it up. But sometimes things have to get really bad before they can even start to get better. In this case, a number of thoughtful people have gotten a massive dose of “Trust the Science!” (not!) and should be ready to insist on truthful answers to thoughtful questions.

You may also wish to read: At last someone is asking: Why Are Science Reporters So Credulous? Another way of putting it is that too many people are — at best — naive about government-led and government-funded science. And science writers can make a living out of avoiding realities and catering to their illusions while retaining a sense of impeccable righteousness.

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New genealogical network dates humanity back 100,000 years

Researchers came up with 27 million ancestors, using modern and ancient genomes:

Per Will Dunham of Reuters, the research study helps show the scope of human genetic diversity and establishes how people around the world are related to each other. Researchers have confirmed that the human species started in Africa before migrating to other parts of the globe.

“The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan,” Wohn tells Reuters. “These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago. So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans.”

David Kindy, “Largest Human Family Tree Identifies Nearly 27 Million Ancestors” at Smithsonian Magazine (March 22, 2022)

But wait. According to the usual evolution story, didn’t all of our genome come from individuals we would not recognize as humans? Moving on here…

One curious find, if it holds up (much appears to be guesswork), is that humans were in the Americas much earlier than thought:

“Our method estimated that there were ancestors in the Americas by 56,000 years ago,” Wohn tells Times Live. “We also estimated significant numbers of human ancestors in Oceania—specifically Papua New Guinea—by 140,000 years ago. But this is not firm evidence like a radiocarbon-dated tool or fossil.”

David Kindy, “Largest Human Family Tree Identifies Nearly 27 Million Ancestors” at Smithsonian Magazine (March 22, 2022)

There should now be renewed interest in finding very early tools and fossils in North America.

You may also wish to read: What? Paper on human mutation admits to “fundamentally challenging” neo-Darwinism. But Darwinism about human beings is the bread and butter of pop science media! If that’s under threat now, what will become of, for example, evolutionary psychology?

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Rob Sheldon: Maybe black holes don’t really exist. Consider the possibilities.

The other day, we were talking about the “quantum hair” solution to the black hole paradox (if information truly gets lost, then that violates 2 Thermo, right? … ). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to offer some thoughts on the holes in black hole thinking (so to speak)

Speaking naively as a simple-minded experimental physicist, this news blurb and abstract make no sense to me.

Now mind you, I don’t believe that Black Holes are a thing, but rather that the equations of General Relativity have been mangled in order to define “the horizon” or the “Schwarzschild radius” that makes a black hole. If the horizon does not exist, then we don’t have a Black Hole, we have something else. The Yilmaz metric allows a smooth transition from the dense object out to infinity with no horizon at the Schwarzschild radius. I’m relying on papers from Stan Robertson, but others have done this same calculation. But for the sake of argument, we’ll use the standard “vacuum” metric that predicts weird behavior at the horizon and therefore the existence of a surface which lets light and matter fall in, but neither light nor matter escape. That’s why it is called “a Black Hole”, because we can’t see it. It does distort light in its vicinity, so we see light from behind it curving around, and this is the reason you see artist’s depictions of “saturn like” objects they claim are what a black hole looks like. Mind you, these are all artists depictions. (The Radio Telescope photograph of M87 done 3 years ago had a one-pixel resolution three times larger than the Schwarzschild radius, so it was artist’s liberty that called it a photograph of a black hole.)

Okay, so what does it mean that “Black Holes have no hair?” That means that when something falls into a black hole, it is compressed down to a point. So whatever color, shape, texture, chemical composition, etc. that it had is now gone. From the outside, what sort of properties can a point have? Mass, charge, and angular momentum. Mass, because we don’t know how the Higgs field works. Charge, because to the best of our ability, an electron or charged lepton has no size. And angular momentum is weird, because a point doesn’t have extension, so how do we know it is spinning? In field theory, angular momentum only requires mass and rotational symmetry, so perhaps a spinning massive point still has angular momentum. Those are the three things that a point can own, and everything else is gone.

What about magnetic field? A spinning charge has a current, I would think, and currents produce magnetic fields?

Ah, said John Wheeler, but magnetic fields are transmitted by photons, and photons can’t cross the horizon. So whatever magnetic fields the point has, they never escape the inside of the Black Hole, and to all intents and purposes, we can’t see the magnetic field from outside. If we think of magnetic field lines as “hair” erupting from a bowling ball, then his name for this, –the “no-hair” theorem–makes sense.

So what is this recent paper suggesting?

That something DOES cross the horizon, and that is gravity waves, or gravitons.

This is where I’m lost. If the horizon is determined as the boundary for photons, and nothing travels faster than light, how can gravitons cross the boundary? And if we say, “they don’t, but they skim past and sense the inside field” then what are we saying, that information has no mass? If information has no mass, then there goes Langmuire’s limit on computation and the solution to Maxwell’s demon and thermodynamics. So are we willing to trash thermodynamics to resolve the black hole paradox? Aren’t we just digging the hole deeper?

I would answer that the correct resolution to the paradox is to say that the Black Hole horizon doesn’t exist. That what all these paradoxes reveal is the essential nonsense of a Black Hole horizon. For indeed, every astrophysical object thought to be a black hole has a strong magnetic field, something that Wheeler says should not exist. The astrophysicists argue that the matter falling into a BH or “accretion disk” manufactures the magnetic field external to the hole, but actual models of this mechanism are, shall we say, less than convincing. (Astrophysicists are allergic to magnetic fields, actually, it gives them hives.) But if we reject horizons, we can have as much magnetic field as we want, and a helping of gravity too.

Once again, I’m no theorist, and perhaps they have perfectly valid arguments, but what I sense is that false premises and bad assumptions have been coloring the entire field of Black Holes (and Big Bangs and quasars ) for decades now. Perhaps we should stop patching the creaking model and consider a new one. And if we can’t abandon the hoary model, then ask “Why? Is the reason philosophical or perhaps avarice?”

Some of us can’t help wondering if the sheer philosophical pizzazz of the black hole keeps it going in its present state. A glamorous theory is bound to have a long run.

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

You may also wish to read: A new solution for Hawking’s black hole paradox? “Quantum hair” Let’s wait and see re “quantum hair.” But where, oh, where have we heard the signature tune “more complex than originally thought”? NEVER happens in biology? Funny how the universe in general is not devolving down into a few simple nothing principles …

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At Mind Matters News: Consciousness experiments confirm each research group’s theories

And that’s frustrating because science advances by disconfirming some theories:

Human consciousness is by far the biggest mystery in the universe. We can be pretty sure that a researcher bold enough to claim to have found simple answer is mistaken. A recent study out of Tel Aviv University dramatically illustrates the problems we face. The researchers, focusing on the methods of study (methodological choices) that consciousness researchers belonging to various schools of thought chose, a computer program could predict with 80% accuracy what they would find.

That wasn’t supposed to happen …

The research analyzed 412 studies developed to test the four leading theories — Global Workspace Theory (GWT), Higher Order Thought Theory, Recurrent Processing Theory, and Integrated Information Theory (IIT).

“Each of these theories offers convincing experiments to support them, so the field is polarized, with no agreed-upon neuroscientific account of consciousness,” says Prof. Mudrik. – Tel-Aviv University, “The nature of consciousness experiments found to largely determine their results” at Medical Xpress(March 16, 2022)

News, “Consciousness experiments confirm each research group’s theories” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: In a study of studies, a computer program predicted the support each group would find based on the method of research it had chosen.

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At last someone is asking: Why are science reporters so credulous?

Most people don’t seriously consider the effects of the nonsense that is wafted at the public in the guise of instructing us all about “evolution,” regardless of its social effect. But every so often, something comes along that should smarten them up.. The origin of COVID-19 was one such thing and science writer Nicholas Wade tackles it at City Journal. If you don’t care, wake up. If people you know doesn’t care, wake them up. Next time it could be worse.

Anyway, Wade writes,

Unlike most journalists, science writers seldom consider the motives of their sources. Few or none remarked on Andersen’s deep personal interest in the result he was trying to prove. He and his colleagues concluded on January 31, 2020, that the Covid virus did not have a natural origin. But Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, immediately decreed this view to be a conspiracy theory that will do “great potential harm to science and international harmony.” Not to mention to his own reputation and that of his lieutenant Anthony Fauci. Both have long advocated for gain-of-function research—enhancing the infectivity of natural viruses—and they funded such research involving bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Technology.

No scientist wishes to get on the wrong side of NIH administrators, the major funders of biomedical research. If Collins said the lab leak was a conspiracy theory, why then, so it must be. A mere four days later, Andersen changed his mind and derided lab leak as a conspiracy theory. No one in his group has provided a convincing explanation for this 180-degree reversal. Andersen’s new paper, if true, would go a long way to justifying his otherwise unsupported second take on the issue.

Why are science writers so little able to report objectively on the origin of the virus? Innocent of most journalists’ skepticism about human motives, science writers regard scientists, their authoritative sources, as too Olympian ever to be moved by trivial matters of self-interest.

Nicholas Wade, “Journalists, or PR Agents?” at City Journal (March 20, 2022)

Another way of putting it is that too many people are — at best — naive about government-led and government-funded science. And science writers can make a living out of avoiding realities and catering to their illusions while retaining a sense of impeccable righteousness.

How many science bureaucrats would be comfortable with the reasonable interpretation that the COVID-19 virus originated as a result of gain-of-function research supported in part by American funding at the Level 4 virus lab in Wuhan? Wouldn’t there be a demand for Congressional hearings in the United States and Royal Commissions in Canada?

The science journalist is much better off as a happy little daisy burbling about employment equity in physics than as a beat reporter tracking down ‘crats who do not want to be questioned.

At Evolution News and Science Today, David Klinghoffer comments:

The credulousness of science journalists is remarkable. Their reporting, almost as a rule, seems more like they are crafting a press release than objectively probing the claims of their subjects, namely scientists. Although mainstream journalism as a whole has come increasingly to resemble state propaganda, there is at least, sometimes, a semblance of skepticism. What is it, then, with science reporters?

David Klinghoffer, “Why Are Science Reporters So Credulous?” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 21, 2022)

Meanwhile, from the world of non-press releases:

Alcohol-related deaths in the US spiked more than 25% in the first year of the pandemic, study shows If true, that wouldn’t be a surprise. And most of those people may not even have been at much risk.

Think tank wins lawsuit to review U. Michigan scientists’ COVID advice to Gov. Whitmer ““It’s been two years since the state shut down and we still don’t have answers on what exact science and data were used when determining policies that impacted the lives and livelihoods of ten million people,” Wetzel told The Fix.” Right now, the healthiest thing going would be serious enquiries as to who exactly started all the panics — based on what information, exactly?

And these are the people who might be making decisions for the rest of us in a few years — if we let it happen:

“Just because we’re tired doesn’t mean it’s over. Mandate masks, that’s our ask” — @safeschoolsny parents on tweed courthouse steps this afternoon

(To the tune of frere jacques ) pic.twitter.com/UjTYTwbGth

— Asher Lehrer-Small (@small_asher) March 2, 2022

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A friend reminds us of what philosopher Michael Polanyi had to say about Darwinian evolution

Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was the author of Personal Knowledge (1958).

Our philosopher (and photographer) friend Laszlo Bencze is reading it and kindly writes to say, “The quote below shows that critiques of evolution long predate the rise of the Intelligent Design movement and are generally based on sound logical principles.”

This [distinguishing patterns from randomness] bears on the theory that the different living species have come into existence by accidental mutations. This can be affirmed only if, first you accredit the distinctive pattern of living beings as exhibiting a peculiar orderliness which you trust yourself to appraise, and second you accept at the same time the belief that evolution has taken place by a vastly improbable coincidence of random events combining to an orderly shape of a highly distinctive character. However, if we are to identify—as I am about to suggest—the presence of significant order with the operation of an ordering principle, no highly significant order can ever be said to be solely due to an accidental collocation of atoms, and we must conclude therefore that the assumption of an accidental formation of the living species is a logical muddle. It appears to be a piece of equivocation, unconsciously prompted by the urge to avoid facing the problem set to us by the fact that the universe has given birth to these curious beings, including people like ourselves. To say that this result was achieved by natural selection is entirely beside the point. Natural selection tells us only why the unfit failed to survive and not why any living beings, either fit or unfit, ever came into existence. —

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 35

Some have wondered why Polanyi’s critiques have not cut more ice.

Couple things: Timing might have been an issue because the very next year, 1959, featured a huge Darwin hooplah. American intellectual Gertrude Himmelfarb was allowed to critique it in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) but maybe no one took her seriously.

Friends have also been known to suggest that the Oxford establishment was uncomfortable with the brilliant and self-taught Polanyi who added to these vices by not participating in the Darwin cult.

Himmelfarb?

You may also wish to read: Himmelfarb On Darwin: An Enduring Perspective After 50 Years, Part 1 (science historian Michael Flannery, December 14, 2009)

A few months ago The Panda’s Thumb used the occasion of Irving Kristol’s death on September 18th to denigrate Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 50 year-old Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution as a “terrible book . . . demonstrating a lack of understanding of biology and a warped view of Darwin’s influence.” The article, written by Jeffrey Shallit, glibly casts aspersions on the late Kristol’s ethic for reviewing Gertrude Himmelfarb (aka Bea Kristol) in Encounter and failing to disclose that he was the author’s husband (though this writer could find no evidence of that at least with her Darwin), this without once reflecting on the questionable propriety of turning what should have been either a respectful obituary or complete silence into an opportunity to insult both the deceased and his widow. If that isn’t unethical, it is at least indecent. Shallit’s one-sided, high-toned moralizing aside, as the “Darwin year” draws to a close and given the fact that Himmelfarb’s biography of Darwin itself has just marked its golden anniversary, perhaps a careful reflection upon that effort is in order. What can be said of Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution in the dusk of 2009? Is it a terrible book?

And here’s Part 2.

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William Lane Craig defends theistic evolution at Peaceful Science

On theological but not necessarily scientific grounds. He’s defending it against Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, pointing to a defense by Michael J. Murray and John Ross Churchill:

One of the things I appreciate about Michael J. Murray and John Ross Churchill’s paper is their candid embrace of the label, “theistic evolution,” for their view.1 This strikes me as much more accurate and straightforward a label than the euphemistic appellation, “evolutionary creationism,” recently adopted by some theistic evolutionists, which seems clearly an attempt to coopt the label, “creationism,” in order to make their view more palatable to evangelical Christians.

It will be helpful at the outset to note the very limited scope of Murray and Churchill’s response to the volume, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (SPTC). They state that the volume as a whole conveys “the message that for Christians with traditional doctrinal commitments, no version of theistic evolution that adheres largely to consensus views in biology will be a plausible option.”2 They maintain to the contrary that it is “incontrovertible” that there are versions of theistic evolution that are “immune to many of the key criticisms advanced” in the book.3 More specifically, they argue that “there are versions of theistic evolution … that are consistent with traditional doctrinal commitments” concerning divine providence, miracles, evidence for theism, and nonphysical souls. It is evident, then, that their concern is with doctrinal criticisms of theistic evolution.4

Now immediately I felt myself rather left out of the conversation. For I am a Christian with traditional doctrinal commitments, but any reservations I have about the viability of theistic evolution have nothing to do with such doctrinal commitments. My reservations are not theological but scientific in nature.

William Lane Craig, “Response to “Mere Theistic Evolution”” at Peaceful Science (March 7, 2022)

Some of us would think that if theistic evolution fails a science test, one needn’t bother with the theology. But maybe we misunderstand.

You may also wish to read: Casey Luskin: The mytho-history of Adam, Eve, and William Lane Craig. Long a defender of orthodoxy, Craig seems to want to prune the orthodoxies he is expected to defend. But the pruning process in which he is engaged can never really stop. The “sensible God” is most likely the one looking back at us from our medicine cabinet mirrors.

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Noted at Hillfaith: Atheists’ books show that God must exist

Put another way, books don’t just happen, they require authors, coherence and communication. If the author is absent, the book doesn’t come into existence. Yes, this is at one level a variation on the Paley Watchmaker argument that design requires a designer.

But I would contend the argument by analogy — just as a book requires an author, so the universe requires a designer — is an expression, not merely of common sense, but of a recognition of a fundamental characteristic of reality

“THINK ABOUT THIS: Why Atheists’ Books Are Evidence God Must Exist” at Hillfaith

There’s been quite the shelf of such books in recent years, as the Congress blog notes, but it also notes that Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis seems to be giving the Darwinian materialist atheists some serious competition:

For his part, Meyer, who is the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and who earned his PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge University, argues three main points in making the case for Intelligent Design (ID) of the universe:

“(1) Evidence from cosmology suggesting that the material universe had a beginning; (2) evidence from physics showing that from the beginning the universe has been ‘finely tuned’ to allow for the possibility of life, and (3) evidence from biology establishing that since the beginning large amounts of new functional genetic information have arisen in our biosphere to make new forms of life possible,” all of which, he contends, implies “the activity of a designing intelligence.”

“THINK ABOUT THIS: Why Atheists’ Books Are Evidence God Must Exist” at Hillfaith

Yer News hack can testify to the impact of Meyer’s book. Last Christmas, two quite unrelated people — of whom I had no reason to expect any special interest in the topic — asked me what I thought of Meyer’s book.

[Me: You’ve heard of Meyer’s book? Wow. Guess I better finally get round to reading it… ]

Well, it was bound to happen that someone would answer all those blowhards.

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