Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 98

Yes, law schools have changed. Now here’s a key way media have changed

Barry Arrington wrote thoughtfully yesterday about how law schools have changed:

Law professor Ilya Shapiro was invited to speak at the U.C. Hastings Law School. The event had to be cancelled because every time Shapiro attempted to speak, fascist students banged the table and shouted him down. After enduring these Brownshirt tactics for an hour with no help from the university, Shapiro gave up and left. The fascists won. Read further here.

UC Hastings Dean Morris Ratner was present and did not lift a finger to stop the fascists. More shocking still – and this is the moment that brought clarity – UC Hastings Professor Rory Little actually encouraged the fascists. He is reported to have banged the table as they shouted and was caught on video saying, “I’m all for the protest here.” When a student asked him to repeat that, he doubled down and said, “I’m all for it.”

I went to law school in the 1980s. In those days the progressive rot was advancing, but it had not advanced to the point where progressives could risk letting their “liberal” cover slip and expose their true totalitarian colors. Those days are over. Progressives like Professor Little appear to believe they no longer need to pretend to be liberal, that encouraging fascist tactics is perfectly OK so long as the right people are being silenced.

A similar change can be observed in legacy mainstream media.

Journalists were never especially virtuous people so none of what I am about to say should be seen as pining for the good old days. They weren’t ever that good. Even so, when the rules change, it’s often not an improvement.

The traditional journalist tended to support free speech. Chances are, he worked for a family owned newspaper that earned its keep from local advertising and subscriptions. He knew lots about the misdeeds of pols, crats, and tycoons. His right to just say it sometimes — with impunity — was his protection. And their fear. He didn’t have to say it but if he did, some people wouldn’t be running for re-election, would be retiring early, or would be shuffled out in some corporate shake-up.

The new electronic media world was not kind to traditional media. For one thing, the old media didn’t understand the new media, were late adopters, and got into financial trouble as a result.

In Canada, the government essentially put the old establishment media all on welfare, converting them into little pravdas. That has become strikingly evident in recent years, and especially during the Convoys period.

In the United States, they became part of megacorps whose real interest might be the Chinese market. Or something.

One outcome is that media people today see freedom of speech in a much more hostile light. During the Convoy response to the COVID crazy here in Canada, we were explicitly given to understand that freedom of speech is a “right wing” value. That view is now widely shared.

It would certainly have surprised generations of liberal-minded journalists. But if we ponder the matter for a moment, we can see what drives the change of view. Media funded by the government via money coerced from taxpayers — taxpayers that those media may largely despise — simply don’t have the same needs as the older generations did. They certainly aren’t going to punch a hole in their own breadbasket. One senses the same thing with U.S. corporate media. They know that their market is not as important to their bosses as the Chinese market is.

One difference between establishment media and law schools, of course, is that people are tending to interact less and less with establishment media, so the way they must warp things matters less. One wishes one could say the same for law schools.

Anyway, keep up with the freedom convoys here. Find out who your independent media are and support them.

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Dr John Campbell, more on Ivermectin

Here is Dr John Campbell on Ivermectin (IVM):

Recall, here is a picture of the kit used in Uttar Pradesh, India where the sort of protocol illustrated helped break the Delta dominated wave:

Food for thought. END

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Frank Herbert’s Secular Prophecy

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles

Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

Last Tuesday I arrived at an inflection point in my view about the prospects of a negotiated solution to our national divisions.  It was one of those shocking moments that slashes through the haze and brings startling clarity. 

Law professor Ilya Shapiro was invited to speak at the U.C. Hastings Law School.  The event had to be cancelled because every time Shapiro attempted to speak, fascist students banged the table and shouted him down.  After enduring these Brownshirt tactics for an hour with no help from the university, Shapiro gave up and left.  The fascists won.  Read further here.

UC Hastings Dean Morris Ratner was present and did not lift a finger to stop the fascists.  More shocking still – and this is the moment that brought clarity – UC Hastings Professor Rory Little actually encouraged the fascists.  He is reported to have banged the table as they shouted and was caught on video saying, “I’m all for the protest here.”  When a student asked him to repeat that, he doubled down and said, “I’m all for it.”

I went to law school in the 1980s.  In those days the progressive rot was advancing, but it had not advanced to the point where progressives could risk letting their “liberal” cover slip and expose their true totalitarian colors.  Those days are over.  Progressives like Professor Little appear to believe they no longer need to pretend to be liberal, that encouraging fascist tactics is perfectly OK so long as the right people are being silenced. 

It is now clear to me that we have come to the second clause of Herbert’s prophesy.  Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are among the most cherished freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of liberal democracies.  But at this point in their long march though our institutions, progressives see no need for upholding the pretense of respecting either.  Two years ago progressives shut down the churches.  Everyone seemed to understand at first, but when they opened up casinos while continuing to shutter churches, people began to wonder what was going on.  That case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Justice Roberts agreed with the other progressives that it was perfectly legal to shutter Calvary Chapel while letting Caeser’s Palace operate.  Now we have Brownshirts shutting down pure speech while being cheered by a state-paid law professor.  Your tax dollars at work.

How did we get here?  Critical theory is the central animating principle of progressivism, and critical theory boils down to one fundamental insight:  There is no such thing as right or wrong, and in a universe where transcendent moral principles do not exist, there is only power and those who wield it and those who submit to it.  Critical theory is applied Nietzschean philosophy.  And since Nietzsche took as the starting point of his philosophy the assumption that God is dead, critical theory is also applied metaphysical materialism. 

A materialist does not believe that freedom of speech is an abstract good (i.e., good in all circumstances no matter who benefits).  Following Nietzsche “beyond good and evil,” progressives assign new meaning to old terms.  Something is “good” when it is useful for advancing the interests of progressives.  Something is “evil” when it tends to thwart their goals.  It follows that progressives can be champions of freedom of speech one day and engage in Brownshirt tactics the next.  The thugs at UC Hastings see no contradiction between supporting freedom of speech for critical race theorists and shouting down a conservative speaker.  Both are “good,” in the Nietzschean sense of that word, because both advance the interests of progressives.

Which brings us back to the inflection point in my view about the prospects of a negotiated solution to our national divisions that I mentioned at the beginning.  Progressives have come to the place where they acknowledge no abstract check on their power.  Indeed, the Brownshirts who ran roughshod over Ilya Shapiro’s freedom of speech doubtless believe they did God’s work and are probably still basking in the warm glow of their limitless self-regard and perceived virtue.  We are not writing on a blank slate.  We know from recent experience that for fascists like the UC Hastings students, it is a very short trip from stamping out people’s right to speak to stamping out people’s right to life.

Professor Little taught his students that might makes right, that if they can silence their opponent then by all means do so.  Shouting an opponent down is one way to silence him.  Putting him in a camp or killing him are other, more effective, methods.  This episode reminds me of Whittaker Chamber’s review of one of Ayn Rand’s books.  He wrote that from almost any page of the book “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’”  I perceive a similar undercurrent in the shouts of the students.  And here is the rub.  Those students and their fellows who are being taught these lessons by Little and others like him (who overwhelmingly dominate the heights of our universities) will be running the government in a few years. 

As I said, my views have changed. I used to think we had a chance to resolve our differences without violence.  Now, I am all but certain that sooner or later (and probably sooner), the progressives are going to begin visiting violence on those of us who resist, who, for example, refuse to affirm that a man can become a woman.  And we need to get ready for that.

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At Creation-Evolution Headlines: Darwinian evolution as an endless tease

David Coppedge outlines the strategy:

There comes a time when one has to realize he or she is being taken for a ride. Most people learn quickly about simple scams like the Nigeria hoax, following parents’ advice that “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” But Darwinian evolution is more sophisticated. Darwinians don’t promise to make you rich; they promise that elusive treasure, “understanding.” Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, they tell us that some new bone or molecule or gene is “shedding light on evolution,” bringing the promised understanding closer and closer. It never comes. The mysteries remain.

It’s time for rational people to get out of the Darwin-mobile and walk on their own two feet. These scammers have abdicated all trust.

Not only that, the hopeful clues Darwinians once advertised keep getting overturned, leading to a major “rethink” with the infamous phrase, “than thought” — “the system is more complex than thought” or “this animal evolved earlier than thought,” etc. The promised understanding always stays out of reach, like a trophy at the top of the down escalator.

David F. Coppedge, “Evolution as an Endless Tease” at Creation-Evolution Headlines (March 5, 2022)

Good point. The phrases Coppedge cites usually function as “get out of any serious evaluation free” cards for the Darwinian establishment. Okay, but the people who don’t wise up either don’t want to or can’t afford to. Neil Thomas is a useful read here:

See, for example: Neil Thomas on why so many 19th century thinkers turned a blind eye to Darwinism’s problems. It’s a religion without the transcendent hitch. That’s the main reason that so many people today are impervious to the fact that illustrations of Darwinism are often just nonsense barked in Darwin’s name.

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Neil Thomas on why so many 19th century thinkers turned a blind eye to Darwinism’s problems

In a further reflection by Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), we look at the ferment in which many 19th-century Europeans found in Darwin a means to break free of (depending on how you understand it) oppressive religious traditions or a rational approach to evidence from science:

A growing number in the mid 19th century simply wished to close their account with the divine since they could not conceive of a God who allowed suffering in the world. It was because it appealed to the growing mindset of disaffection and uncertainty that people were tempted to try to understand the world by the use of exclusively secular criteria. This setting aside of a First Cause may help to explain why a theory such as Darwin’s, at first adjudged scientifically unviable, was nevertheless able to achieve that status of unquestionable shibboleth it later acquired. People began to look for some rallying cry in a closed world of science to explain the world to themselves in the way they wanted in their secularizing age. If this left out of account any final-cause thinking and so offended the strict logic of cause and effect, so be it. Many were in effect prepared to “cut off their nose to spite their face.”

Neil Thomas, “Darwin and the Swinging 1860s” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 5, 2022)

Yes. It’s a religion without the transcendent hitch. That’s the main reason that so many people today are impervious to the fact that illustrations of Darwinism are often just nonsense barked in Darwin’s name.

For example, How the Darwin mare causes her own miscarriage even though she is likely unable to understand that she is pregnant.

and

Birds are found to plan like humans for their offsprings’ future

You may also wish to read:

Neil Thomas on Darwinism’s place in the Victorian culture wars. Anyone familiar with popular science writing on evolution will see what Thomas means here. Darwinism is introduced as a hypothesis/theory but then treated as a dogma/article of faith — and (this is emotionally very important) a way of segregating the Smart People from the Yobs and Yayhoos. Appeals to science-based analysis fall on deaf ears because the dogma has become what “science” now means.

and

At Evolution News: Darwin and the ghost of Epicurus. 3 March 2022One way of looking at it: Darwinism enabled thinkers to retain the thought of Epicurus and Lucretius when, in general, the thinkers themselves were forgotten.

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Ant can create pain in mammals – “evolution” story assumed

But is it “evolution”?:

Australian bull ants have evolved a venom molecule perfectly tuned to target one of their predators — the echidna — that also could have implications for people with long-term pain, University of Queensland researchers say.

Dr Sam Robinson and David Eagles from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience found a bull ant venom component that exploits a pain pathway in mammals, which they believe evolved to stop echidnas attacking the ant’s nests.

“Venoms are complex cocktails and while bull ant venom contains molecules similar to those found in honey bee stings which cause immediate pain, we also found an intriguing new molecule that was different,” Dr Robinson said.

Whilst searching databases for similar amino-acid sequences, Dr Robinson found that the molecule matched the sequence of mammalian hormones related to Epidermal Growth Factor (EGF), and of these, was most closely related to that of the echidna.

“We tested the venom molecule on mammalian EGF receptors and it was very potent — this convinced us that the venom molecule was there to defend against mammals,” he said.

“We went on to show that while it didn’t cause direct pain, the molecule did cause long-lasting hypersensitivity.

“Many small carnivorous marsupials, like bandicoots, eat individual ants, but only the echidna is known to attack bull ant nests and target their young — we think that making the echidna sensitive to pain, in tandem with the immediate ‘bee-sting’ pain, may dissuade it from returning to the nests.

University of Queensland, “Bull ant evolves new way to target pain” at ScienceDaily (March 3, 2022)

Curiously, we actually don’t know that this extreme targeted pain defense “evolved.” No evolutionary pathway is indicated. It could have been natural selection or horizontal gene transfer. Which? Or maybe the ant was always like that.

More on the bull ant here: “These ants can deliver painful stings and are aggressive. An ice pack or commercially available spray may be used to relieve the pain of the sting. If there is evidence of an allergic reaction, medical attention should be sought.”

The paper is closed access.

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What bats learn from echolocation: “much more complex than previously thought”

In an article on various ways that life forms thrive in the dark, Brian Handwerk notes, re echolocation in bats:

scientists have recently learned that echolocation also plays an important role in bat social life. The calls bats use contain information including sex, age or even individual identity.

Using behavior experiments Jenna Kohles and colleagues recently demonstrated that some bats can even use this identity information while they’re flying and searching for prey.

“They can tell their group members apart from one another using just the “individual signatures” contained in the echolocation calls they use to search for insects,” says Kohles, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. “So the social lives of bats flying around at night are likely to be much more complex than previously thought.”

Brian Handwerk, “Five Amazing Adaptations That Help Animals Thrive in the Dark” at Smithsonian Magazine (March 1, 2022)

This raises an issue: Social intelligence seems to imply an underlying intelligence in the universe. It’s not at all clear that it is merely a matter of natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism).

For one thing, if there were no intelligence, there would be no need for social intelligence. Social intelligence is a response to existing intelligence. And no one knows how it arose.

That is why, wisely or other, the science world has been drifting toward panpsychism.

You may also wish to read: Why panpsychism is starting to push out naturalism. A key goal of naturalism/materialism has been to explain human consciousness away as “nothing but a pack of neurons.” That can’t work. Panpsychism is not dualism. By including consciousness — including human consciousness — as a bedrock fact of nature, it avoids naturalism’s dead end.

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At Mind Matters News: The future evolution of humans? Anyone’s guess

Despite much learned, expert, and conflicting talk, based on solid Darwinian principles, we don’t know very much. So much has changed in the past few thousand years that the past may not be a reliable guide to the future:

—

At National Geographic, back in 2009, the views of scientists surveyed ranged from nothing much will happen through transhumanism will change everything:

Nothing much will happen:

“Since the advent of settled life, human populations have expanded enormously. Homo sapiens is densely packed across the Earth, and individuals are unprecedentedly mobile.

“In this situation, the fixation of any meaningful evolutionary novelties in the human population is highly improbable.” [anthropologist Ian] Tattersall said. “Human beings are just going to have to learn to live with themselves as they are.”

James Owen, “Future Humans: Four Ways We May, or May Not, Evolve” at National Geographic (November 24, 2009)

Alternatively, transhumanism will change everything, according to Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute:

Transhumanism raises a spectacular array of possibilities, from supersoldiers and new breeds of athletes to immortal beings who, having had their brains scanned atom by atom, transfer their minds to computers.

In addition to living forever, “uploaded” beings would be able to “travel at the speed of light as an information pattern,” download themselves into robots for the occasional stroll through the real world, think faster when running on advanced operating systems, and cut their food budget down to zero, Bostrom imagines in his paper “The Transhumanist FAQ.” If that were to happen, a new type of evolution would emerge, Bostrom said.

James Owen, “Future Humans: Four Ways We May, or May Not, Evolve” at National Geographic (November 24, 2009)

Some suggestions sound rather strange but there is a logic to them…

News, “Experts guess: How might humans change over the next 10,000 years?” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Informed opinion ranges from “Changes have largely stopped” to “We will have webbed feet,” and all experts have some science basis for their views.

You may also wish to read: Researchers still puzzled: Why did human brains shrink? Human brain volumes decreased by 10% in the last 40,000 years, coinciding with spectacular intellectual achievements. Examples of brain shrinkage among animals are fascinating but have not provided much insight. But perhaps we should ask, how much does brain size even matter?

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Has anyone else noticed the blatant political flavor of many sciencey mags these days?

Yes, it was always there but recently, as the editors become ever more self-righteous (= Us vs. the Unwashed), it has become more open and that sure isn’t an improvement. Two items noted in passing:

Big Climate:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an important organization with a primary purpose to assess the scientific literature on climate in order to inform policy…

Regrettably, the IPCC WG2 has strayed far from its purpose to assess and evaluate the scientific literature, and has positioned itself much more as a cheerleader for emissions reductions and produced a report that supports such advocacy. The IPCC exhorts: “impacts will continue to increase if drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are further delayed – affecting the lives of today’s children tomorrow and those of their children much more than ours … Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

The focus on emissions reductions is a major new orientation for WG2, which previously was focused exclusively on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The new focus on mitigation is explicit, with the IPCC WG2 noting (1-31) that its focus “expands significantly from previous reports” and now includes “the benefits of climate change mitigation and emissions reductions.” This new emphasis on mitigation colors the entire report, which in places reads as if adaptation is secondary to mitigation or even impossible. The IPCC oddly presents non-sequiturs tethering adaptation to mitigation, “Successful adaptation requires urgent, more ambitious and accelerated action and, at the same time, rapid and deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.”

Roger Pielke, Jr., “A Rapidly Closing Window to Secure a Liveable Future” at The Honest Broker Newsletter/Substack (March 2, 2022)

The relentless drum-banging will probably have the opposite effect of the one desired, especially when (as is sure to happen) some emission reduction strategies do much more harm than good and the boosters are running for cover, misrepresenting those outcomes in the name of “Trust the Science.”

And then there are the ridiculous efforts in popular science media to snuff out any awareness of the possibility that the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab doing research on making viruses more powerful. How awful of any of us to suggest such a thing! Here’s an intro to a podcast on the topic:

We have featured the work of science writer Matt Ridley on several occasions over the years. Now he is the author (with Alina Chan) of the new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. Brendan O’Neill has recorded a podcast with Ridley to discuss how the Covid-19 virus might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan and how scientists tried to suppress the lab-leak origin theory. Spiked has posted the podcast here. I have embedded it below.

The New York Times continues to flog the alleged natural origin of the plague. Most recently, the Times has promoted “new research” pointing to the live animal market in Wuhan as the origin: “Analyzing a wide range of data, including virus genes, maps of market stalls and the social media activity of early Covid-19 patients across Wuhan, the scientists concluded that the coronavirus was very likely present in live mammals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019 and suggested that the virus spilled over into people working or shopping there on two separate occasions.” However, “some gaps” in the evidence still remain. “The new [unpublished] papers did not, for example, identify an animal at the market that spread the virus to humans.”

Scott Johnson, “The case for the lab-leak theory” at Powerline Blog (March 4, 2022)

More re Viral

Science writer Matt Ridley thinks science is reverting to a cult. Maybe his next book should be about that.

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At Mind Matters News: Will AI chemistry robots finally discover the origin of life?

Chemist Lee Cronin hopes for a breakthrough by getting robots to motor through millions of chemical combinations, looking for self-replicating systems:

Cronin posits an assembly index of 15–20 as the cut-off, which would mean that one molecule formed by chance in a mole of a substance. The simplest amino acid, glycine, has an index of 4, but the energy currency of the cell, ATP has an index of 21, which implies that it was not the product of chance processes. His paper on the topic is open access.

[He also hopes to find proto-life developing on Venus:]

While many researchers believe that natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism) could cause life to form, it’s worth noting that, prior to the existence of life, there is nothing doing the selecting and nothing to select.

It’s not clear how the robots, themselves entirely a product of design, can help with that one.

News, “Will AI chemistry robots finally discover the origin of life?” at Mind Matters News (March 4, 2022)

Takehome: One problem: Before life exists, there is nothing for purely natural selection to select. How the robots, themselves a product of design, can help is unclear.

You may also wish to read:

Elon Musk tweet shows why many doubt origin of life studies. Musk was talking about the origin of machines, not life, but the principle is, perhaps surprisingly, the same. Creating a machine that manufactures or a cell that reproduces is much harder than creating a prototype of either. It’s a search for a search. (Jonathan Bartlett)

and

Is life from outer space a viable science hypothesis? Currently, panspermia has been rated as “plausible but not convincing.” Marks, Hössjer, and Diaz discuss the issues. Famous atheist scientists have favored panspermia because there is no plausible purely natural explanation for life on Earth that would make it unnecessary.

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