Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 96

March 12, 2022

How the Doctrine of Original Sin Helped Spark the Scientific Revolution and Why Neo- Pelagianism Has Produced the Replication Crisis

Are the majority of new scientific publications false? There is very good evidence to believe that is the case. This short video is must viewing for anyone who wants to know why that is the case. As our News Desk has faithfully reported these last couple of years, science is beset with a replication crisis.

A passage in Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis got me to thinking about this crisis and perhaps the reason it arose. In an early chapter of his book, Meyer discussed why the scientific revolution occurred in Christian Europe and nowhere else. The reason, of course, is that far from being at war with science as some blinkered revisionist historians would have it, science was built on the foundation of a Christian worldview, as he demonstrates to the satisfaction of any reasonable observer. But for our present purposes, the part of Meyer’s discussion that caught my attention is his explanation of the role the Christian doctrine of original sin played in the development of the scientific method.

On the one hand, the entire scientific project is grounded on the Christian belief that the universe is rational and intelligible because it was created by a rational God. But belief in an underlying rationality, in isolation, did not spark the scientific revolution. After all, the Greeks believed in an underlying order, but the revolution did not occur there. Indeed, it could be argued (as Francis Bacon did argue) that science was stymied when, for over a thousand years, it was stuck in the cul-de-sac of sterile Aristotelian rationality divorced from empirical observation.

Here is the part that grabbed my attention. While belief in an underlying order was necessary, it was insufficient for the modern scientific method to arise. To escape Aristotle, scientists needed to understand the limitations on the project imposed by their own fallible human nature and the vital role of confirming empirical experiments. In other words, the doctrine of original sin was crucial to the development of science. This is how Meyer sums it up:

Such a nuanced view of human nature implied, on the one hand, that human beings could attain insight into the workings of the natural world, but that, on the other, they were vulnerable to self-deception, flights of fancy, and prematurely jumping to conclusions. This composite view of reason—one that affirmed both its capability and fallibility—inspired confidence that the design and order of nature could be understood if scientists carefully studied the natural world, but also engendered caution about trusting human intuition, conjectures, and hypotheses unless they were carefully tested by experiment and observation.
Meyer, Stephen C.. Return of the God Hypothesis (p. 38)

There is a heresy known as Pelagianism (see here for Wikipedia’s article on that heresy), which, in very brief summary, rejects the doctrine of original sin and holds that humans are born as infinitely perfectible blank slates.

So what does all of this have to do with the crisis in replication? Just this. While scientists talk a good game about skepticism and self-correction, it seems to me that the replicability crisis is a direct result of scientists retreating from the Christian doctrine of original sin and hewing to a variation of Pelagianism heresy. The default position with respect to every scientific finding should be “that is probably false and I won’t believe it until the finding is replicated.” This seems to be the exact opposite of what we see to be the case among most members of the scientific community. Scientific conclusions are often accepted uncritically on the basis of only one experiment. For obvious reasons, this should never be the case, especially when the finding is consonant with the zeitgeist.

Someone once said that the doctrine of original sin is the most empirically verifiable of all Christian doctrines. There is a lot to be said for that conclusion. And that means, given what we know about human nature, scientists (and the rest of us) should be far more skeptical and less willing to accept new findings than we have been. And this is especially the case if we want the conclusions of a study to be true, because that is when our susceptibility to confirmation bias is at its greatest.

PS: Here is an excellent video debunking the false “warfare” thesis.

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Published on March 12, 2022 12:19

Asked by science watchdog: Why is Lancet — famed medical journal — into anti-science advocacy?

Sure, “anti-science” is a loaded term. So often, it just means inconvenient science or “unacceptable views” or revelations of ties that should definitely be investigated. Or whatever.

In some cases, it can mean a preference for Wokeness over facts. We think that’s what American Council on Science and Health is referring to here:

As we’ll see in part two, the Lancet has argued “that medicine has a great deal to learn from [Karl] Marx,” endorsed the use of blatantly unscientific language—calling women “bodies with vaginas”—to assuage the concerns of social justice activists and, most significantly, called for a “Great Food Transformation.”

The journal has championed its EATLancet program as the means to achieve this transformation, which heavily overlaps with the EU’s Farm-to-Fork campaign in calling for severe restrictions on animal agriculture, pesticide use, and mandatory support for agroecology, the latest buzzword used to describe organic farming.

This advocacy appears to be part of an even larger effort to construct a new sociopolitical framework to “avoid the catastrophic consequences of the exploitation of earth’s resources due to capitalism.” We’ll examine the consequences of these lobbying efforts in detail next time. What’s abundantly clear already, however, is that The Lancet long ago left the realm of science.

Cameron English, “Mainstream Misinformation: The Lancet’s Long History Of Anti-Science Advocacy” at American Council on Science and Health (March 7, 2022)

Well, folks, they can have Wokeness or facts. Publication patterns will indicate the choice.

That second part from American Council should be interesting.

Note: It would be good if a group started assigning a Wokeness quotient to rubbish in science journals.

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Published on March 12, 2022 07:54

How can spiders be so smart?

Even animal life forms don’t seem to obey materialist brain rules:

Recent research has shed light on the intriguing strategies that spiders use to deceive other spiders — and prey in general

But, as Mason goes on to report, jumping spiders, for example, can show very clever hunting behavior. One group of jumping spiders, Portia, lures female spiders of another species (Eurytattus) to their deaths by mimicking the way a courting male spider shakes her nest and then attacking. They also attack web-building spiders by mimicking the tug on the web of a trapped insect, adjusting its tug to the size of the spider it plans to devour. More remarkably,

Denyse O’Leary, “Spiders are smart; be glad they are small” at Mind Matters News

If these strategies don’t work on a particular web spider, another of Portia’s tricks is to shake the whole web so it moves as if a gust of wind had hit it. This acts as a smokescreen for the vibration Portia makes as it crawls into the target spider’s web. In laboratory experiments, Jackson found that Portia will try different plucking methods, speeds and patterns until it finds just the right combination to fool each individual web spider it hunts — essentially learning on the job.

Betsy Mason, “Spiders are much smarter than you think” at Knowable Magazine (October 28, 2021)

More.

Takehome: Invertebrates like spiders and octopuses can be smarter than we used to think and we are only beginning to discover their many strategies. But the information coming to light doesn’t coincide with what our theories about brain size and warm- vs. cold-bloodedness would have prompted us to think.

You may also wish to read: In what ways are spiders intelligent? The ability to perform simple cognitive functions does not appear to depend on the vertebrate brain as such.

and

How do insects use their very small brains to think clearly? How do they engage in complex behavior with only 100,000 to a million neurons? Researchers are finding that insects have a number of strategies for making the most of comparatively few neurons to enable complex behavior. (Denyse O’Leary)

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Published on March 12, 2022 06:45

March 11, 2022

China’s surveillance and control move, targeting esp. Christians

We see in current news:

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has activated measures to drastically restrict the availability of Christian content on the internet, Open Doors reported this week.

Last December, China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) announced its upcoming “Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services,” a series of regulations designed to eliminate any online religious message that fails to conform to the principles of the CCP.

Without express government permission, no organization or individual “shall preach on the Internet, carry out religious education and training, publish sermon content, forward or link to related content, organize and conduct religious activities on the Internet, or live broadcast or post recorded videos of religious rituals,” the CCP declared at the time.

The new measures went into force on March 1 and the effects are already being felt by Christians throughout China, reported Open Doors, which monitors Christian persecution around the globe.

Online Christian ministry has been restricted to CCP-approved groups with special permits, which are only issued to state-controlled religious institutions, such as the Three Self Patriotic Movement.

The CCP has approved the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and the Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China, for example, but not the underground Catholic Church faithful to Rome.

Along with the requirement of a special permit to post religious content, even on social media, the CCP has also asserted its right to review all content to make sure it reflects and supports China’s Communist Party.

Everything that is posted “has to fit within the social harmony, the progress of society. These things are pretty typical within the communist regime. It especially restricts the house churches,” stated Kurt Rovenstine of the Bibles for China group.

H’mm, sounds all too familiar:

Rev 13:11 Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. 12 It exercises all the authority of the first beast . . . 16 Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, 17 so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. 18 This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.

See where a surveillance and control, lawless oligarchy state ends up? We need to do serious rethinking. END

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Published on March 11, 2022 10:06

China’s surveillance and control move, targetting esp. Christians

We see in current news:

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has activated measures to drastically restrict the availability of Christian content on the internet, Open Doors reported this week.

Last December, China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) announced its upcoming “Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services,” a series of regulations designed to eliminate any online religious message that fails to conform to the principles of the CCP.

Without express government permission, no organization or individual “shall preach on the Internet, carry out religious education and training, publish sermon content, forward or link to related content, organize and conduct religious activities on the Internet, or live broadcast or post recorded videos of religious rituals,” the CCP declared at the time.

The new measures went into force on March 1 and the effects are already being felt by Christians throughout China, reported Open Doors, which monitors Christian persecution around the globe.

Online Christian ministry has been restricted to CCP-approved groups with special permits, which are only issued to state-controlled religious institutions, such as the Three Self Patriotic Movement.

The CCP has approved the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and the Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China, for example, but not the underground Catholic Church faithful to Rome.

Along with the requirement of a special permit to post religious content, even on social media, the CCP has also asserted its right to review all content to make sure it reflects and supports China’s Communist Party.

Everything that is posted “has to fit within the social harmony, the progress of society. These things are pretty typical within the communist regime. It especially restricts the house churches,” stated Kurt Rovenstine of the Bibles for China group.

H’mm, sounds all too familiar:

Rev 13:11 Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. 12 It exercises all the authority of the first beast . . . 16 Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, 17 so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. 18 This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.

See where a surveillance and control, lawless oligarchy state ends up? We need to do serious rethinking. END

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Published on March 11, 2022 10:06

The oldest cephalopods — much older than thought — had 10 working arms, not 8

Wouldn’t that mean that they had an even more complex nervous system?

New research led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and Yale shows that the oldest ancestors of the group of animals that includes octopuses and vampire squids had not eight but 10 arms. The study, which describes a new species of vampyropod based on a 328-million-year-old fossil that had not been previously described, pushes back the age of the group by nearly 82 million years…

“The arm count is one of the defining characteristics separating the 10-armed squid and cuttlefish line (Decabrachia) from the eight armed octopus and vampire squid line (Vampyropoda). We have long understood that octopuses achieve the eight arm count through elimination of the two filaments of vampire squid, and that these filaments are vestigial arms,” said Whalen. “However, all previously reported fossil vampyropods preserving the appendages only have 8 arms, so this fossil is arguably the first confirmation of the idea that all cephalopods ancestrally possessed ten arms.”

American Museum of Natural History, “New species of extinct vampire-squid-like cephalopod is the first of its kind with 10 functional arms” at ScienceDaily (March 8, 2022)

Note: Apparently, the fossil, Syllipsimopodi bideni, is U.S. prez Joe Biden.

According to the study, the oldest known definitive vampyropod was found in a fossil fragment that was 240 million years old, so the researchers mostly expected to find cephalopods that were evolutionary precursors to vampyropods. Instead, they discovered what they say is a relative of vampyropods and octopuses, which serves as evidence that these animals lived on Earth 82 million years earlier than previously thought. This would mean that octopuses were around before the era of dinosaurs, reports the Guardian.

Natalia Mesa, “” at The Scientist (March 10, 2022)

Question: If evolution is supposed to be the Darwinian claim: “daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life,” why do we hear about so much stasis and so little about evolution? The evolution must be happening very fast, punctuated by long periods of stasis.

Or it may in fact be devolution, as described in Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves.

The paper is open access.

Note: One reason given for the unusual intelligence for which the octopus is noted is the need to control so many limbs. Anyway, see

Octopuses get emotional about pain, research suggests. The smartest of invertebrates, the octopus, once again prompts us to rethink what we believe to be the origin of intelligence. The brainy cephalopods behaved about the same as lab rats under similar conditions, raising both neuroscience and ethical issues.

and

Is the octopus a “second genesis” of intelligence?

You may also wish to read: Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

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Published on March 11, 2022 08:01

In this version of the origin of life, peptides gave life its start

Everything old is new again:

Scientists have mostly looked for clues on Earth. Yet a new discovery suggests that the answer could be found beyond the sky, inside dark interstellar clouds.

Last month in Nature Astronomy, a group of astrobiologists showed that peptides, the molecular subunits of proteins, can spontaneously form on the solid, frozen particles of cosmic dust drifting through the universe. Those peptides could in theory have traveled inside comets and meteorites to the young Earth — and to other worlds — to become some of the starting materials for life.

Yasemin Saplakoglu, “Peptides on Stardust May Have Provided a Shortcut to Life” at Quanta (March 8, 2022)

The paper is open access.

One hears competitive cheerleading squads in the background: Proteins first! DNA first! Membrane first! RNA first! RNA + DNA first!

Now we are back to Proteins first!

It’s comforting to spend time in an environment where nothing much changes. Peptide world, for example, is just SO 2013…

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Published on March 11, 2022 07:40

Would you believe? Science ghostwriting factories in China

If they are mostly located in China, that might explain why it is difficult to do much about them:

An official Chinese state media outlet recently revealed how illegal paper mills in China are operating to get fake manuscripts published, including in top international journals.

In China, a very high metric for publishing academic papers is required for individuals to get promoted in certain professions or academic fields; but for many people, this indicator is almost out of reach. Thus, a gray industry of scientific ghostwriters has evolved offering a “one-stop service” where submissions and publications are done in the name of the client.

By typing in keywords on Chinese search engines, you can easily find a large number of essay factories.

A reporter from Xinhua Viewpoint, a column of official media Xinhua, posing as a cardiovascular and cerebrovascular physician contacted numerous paper factories and was told that all levels of dissertation could be written and published for him as long as the delivery time was not too short, according to Xinhua in a Jan. 11 report.

Shawn Lin, “Scientific Ghostwriting Factories Booming in China” at Epoch Times (January 23, 2022)

Totalitarianism and science have never been a good mix but if China is the new ruling power, it is the mix we now have.

You may also wish to read: Research Fraud In China: The Weak Spot Of Totalitarianism? (2019)

and

Huge Science Frauds Uncovered In China (2017)

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Published on March 11, 2022 06:50

Researchers: CRISPR is not the big answer to de-extinction

Lost genes, like lost documents, may be lost for good:

With the advent of gene-editing technology such as CRISPR, scientists have shifted from cloning to genetic engineering as the most promising method for “de-extinction,” or the resurrection of species that have died out (SN: 10/7/20). But unlike cloning, genetic engineering wouldn’t create an exact replica of an extinct species. Instead, the technique would edit an existing animal’s genome so that it resembles that of the desired extinct animal. The challenge is making that proxy as similar to the extinct species as possible.

To explore the limits of this method, researchers attempted to recover the genome of the Christmas Island rat. By comparing fragments of the extinct rat’s genetic instruction book with the genome of a living relative, the Norway brown rat, the team was able to recover about 95 percent of the extinct genome. That sounds like a lot, but it means that 5 percent of the genes were still missing, including some important to smell and the immune system, scientists report in the April 11 Current Biology.

Anna Gibbs, “An extinct rat shows CRISPR’s limits for resurrecting species” at Science News (March 9, 2022)

A separate question, with genes as with documents, is how much do the lost ones matter? If the recreated passenger pigeon was pretty much like the old one, what difference would it make? Shouldn’t the main question be, is this a good ecological idea overall?

What if we brought back the mammoth or the mastodon? What would be the implications for the current ecology?

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read: Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne says they’ll never clone a herd of mammoths. Coyne: What they’d get would be a genetic chimera, an almost entirely Asian elephant but one that is hairier, chunkier, and more tolerant of cold. That is NOT a woolly mammoth, nor would it behave like a woolly mammoth, for they’re not inserting behavior genes. But wait. Are we splitting hairs here?

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Published on March 11, 2022 06:18

March 10, 2022

Why physicists adhere to quantum theory despite bafflement

In a telling anecdote:

Quantum field theory, which describes physics at subatomic scales, makes many mathematicians cringe because of its “algebraic shenanigans,” says Dorota Grabowska, a fellow in the CERN Theory Group. “If I had a conversation with a mathematician about quantum field theory, they would let out a sigh of exasperation. It’s like when your mom tells you to clean your room, so you shove everything in the closet. It looks fine, but please don’t open the closet.”

Quantum field theory is rife with something mathematicians can’t stand: unresolved infinities. In a 1977 essay, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg wrote that “[Quantum field theory’s] reputation among physicists suffered frequent fluctuations… at times dropping so low that quantum field theory came close to be[ing] abandoned altogether.”

But quantum field theory survives because at the end of the day, it still makes predictions that check out with experiments, such as those at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

“The LHC is like our mother, and when she opens the closet, everything is magically organized,” Grabowska says.

Sarah Charley, “How to break a theory” at Symmetry Magazine (March 8, 2022)

Fair enough but then what do we make of the way the LHC experiments indicate that the universe is not random? See, for example,

“Nothing but… ” is now creating a crisis in science When science writers (and scientists) start using words like “miraculously,” it’s a clue that they are really stumped. As science writer Natalie Wolchover explains, nature appears embarrassingly fine-tuned and resists being reduced to little bits of nothing.

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Published on March 10, 2022 08:45

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