Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 99

The trouble so many brilliant people have gone to in order to refute the Big Bang

Overall, the anti-Big Bang quests tend to make one believe, if nothing else did, that there must be something in the Big Bang. A useful summary by Brian Miller:

Physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Laurence Krauss have asserted that the mathematics behind solving the wave function demonstrate how our universe did not necessarily have a beginning, and they argue that our universe could have appeared from “nothing.” Yet both of these claims are incorrect.

With regard to the first claim, Hawking solved the wave function using a mathematical trick where the time variable was replaced with imaginary time. The exact details are not crucial to understand. This substitution not only enabled him to solve the wave function, but it also eliminated the beginning of time in his analysis because the original time variable was replaced. In describing his work, Hawking declared that he had eliminated the need for God to explain the origin of the universe:

So long as the universe had a beginning, we would suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?5

In reality, Hawking’s mathematical trick altered the equations in such a way as to disassociate the new time variable from anything real6 in the physical universe. More importantly, at the end of his calculation, he transformed back into real time, at which point the beginning of the universe reemerged. Hawking even admitted this point…

Brian Miller, “Efforts to Resist the Big Bang and Its Implications for Cosmic Design” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 2, 2022)

When evidence is sought merely to refute something one must take that fact into account.

You may also wish to read: The Big Bang: Put simply,the facts are wrong.

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DEVELOPING: The US Truckers’ protest convoys converge at Hagerstown MD, head for the DC Beltway March 5th

According to Gateway Pundit (a handy source not an endorsement):

On Friday, the largest group, ‘The People’s Convoy,’ merged with another massive group when it arrived at its final rest stop in Hagerstown, Maryland, which is just 75 miles (90 minutes) away from the nation’s capital.

The convoy is now well over 10,000 vehicles long, including thousands of trucks. There are so many participants in the caravan that it has taken over three hours for them to get off the highway, and there is still no end in sight.

We will monitor, including watching out for a riot that can conveniently be made into a further Reichstag fire framing incident. DEVELOPING

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Macaque study casts doubt on early human tool use

It appears that macaques, which do not use tools, show a peculiar sort of wear on teeth that, when found in early humans, was assumed to indicate tool use:

“Unusual wear on our fossil ancestors’ teeth is thought to be unique to humans and demonstrates specific types of tool use. These types of wear have also been considered some of the earliest evidence of cultural habits for our ancestors,” Dr Towle says.

“However, our research suggests this idea may need reconsidering, since we describe identical tooth wear in a group of wild monkeys that do not use tools.

“This research raises questions for our understanding of cultural changes during human evolution and suggests we may need to reassess early evidence of cultural habits.”

The study, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, concluded the ‘toothpick’-like grooves on back teeth and large uniform scratches on the macaques’ front teeth were actually caused by something more mundane, yet still surprising — eating shellfish from rocks and accidentally chewing grit and sand with their food.

This macaque group is well-known for undertaking remarkable behaviours, including washing foods in water, and consuming fish. They have been studied for more than 70 years and have not been seen using tools or other items that could cause the unusual tooth wear observed.

Dr Towle has been studying tooth wear and pathologies in a wide variety of primate species and was “extremely surprised” to find this type of tooth wear in a group of wild monkeys.

“Up until now, the large scratches in the front teeth of fossil humans have been considered to be caused by a behaviour called ‘stuff and cut’, in which an item such as an animal hide is held between the front teeth and a stone tool is used for slicing. Similarly, ‘toothpick’ grooves are thought to be caused by tools being placed between back teeth to remove food debris or relieve pain.

“Although this does not mean hominins were not placing tools in their mouths, our study suggests the accidental ingestion of grit and/or normal food processing behaviours could also be responsible for these atypical wear patterns.”

University of Otago, “Tooth study prompts rethink of human evolution” at ScienceDaily (March 2, 2022)

A wise approach going forward would be to find the tools first before making assumptions.

Note the gratuitous slur at the end of the media release:

“We are so used to trying to prove that humans are unique, that similarities with other primates are often neglected. Studying living primates today may offer crucial clues that have been overlooked in the past.”

University of Otago, “Tooth study prompts rethink of human evolution” at ScienceDaily (March 2, 2022)

Sorry, bodkins. We don’t have to do anything to prove humans are unique. The fact that you are studying macaques for a journal while they wreck their teeth on sand and grit demonstrates that fact beyond reasonable doubt. And thoughtful people should be suspicious of unreasonable doubt.

The paper is closed access.

You may also wish to read: Humans Had Tools Before Opposable Thumbs? That implies that minds developed before opposable thumbs.

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A new, useful, description for (former) junk DNA… ?

Remember when junk DNA was a star exhibit for Darwinism as some sort of ageless truth? A promising new “definition” term is “the large proportion of our genome that does not instruct our cells to form proteins”:

While the large proportion of our genome that does not instruct our cells to form proteins has been harder to study than protein-coding genes, it has been shown to have vital physiological functions. Scientists have now developed new high-precision tools able to identify what these noncoding sequences do. The study may eventually contribute to the development of new, targeted drugs.

Karolinska Institutet, “New tool reveals function of enigmatic gene sequences” at ScienceDaily (March 3, 2022)

The phrase is a bit longish, of course, but concision is usually a product of usage. It’s better than “non-coding DNA” because it’s more specific and limited as a privative. That is, there is a specific thing that that vast mass of DNA does not do. The phrase does not come with the implication that it doesn’t do anything.

The researchers’ main point is the work being done on discovering what the genes that don’t code for proteins actually do:

For this study, the researchers combined single-cell sequencing with mathematical calculations to show that it is possible in this way to identify the function of noncoding RNA, something that has proved very difficult before. Using these tools, they were then able to identify an entirely new mechanism for how the RNA molecules regulate the activity of protein-coding genes in their vicinity.

“After many years of development, single-cell sequencing has now reached a stage where we can isolate individual cells and study regulating mechanisms with high precision,” says principal investigator Rickard Sandberg, professor at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Karolinska Institutet. “This is multidisciplinary research that we believe will contribute significantly to our basic understanding of cell biology and that, in the long run, can give us new insights into how cellular function can be influenced through the agency of small drug substances.”

Karolinska Institutet, “New tool reveals function of enigmatic gene sequences” at ScienceDaily (March 3, 2022)

Expect many more surprises.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read:

Junking more claims around junk DNA. Apparently, repeated sequences have a function: “Marshall explains that previous technology that was used to sequence the human genome made scientists “blind” to the fact that such sequences are, in fact, useful.”

and

At Scientific American: Salamander “junk DNA” challenges long-held view of evolution Douglas Fox at SciAm: The salamanders would be on death’s door if they were human. “Everything about having a large genome is costly,” Wake told me in 2020. Yet salamanders have survived for 200 million years. “So there must be some benefit,” he said. The hunt for those benefits has led to some heretical surprises, potentially turning our understanding of evolution on its head.

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Casey Luskin comments on the New Yorker article, Journey to the Center of Our Cells

It’s a sort of shift in perspective:

Image credit: David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank. doi: 10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-042.

When I first started writing for Evolution News back in 2005, we were overwhelmed with media outlets misreporting on intelligent design and evolution. This was in fact one of the original reasons for launching Evolution News — to fact-check and critique media coverage. Every once in a while, however, it’s nice to highlight media stories that do a good job of covering science.

A recent article in The New Yorker, “A Journey to the Center of our Cells,” says hardly anything about evolution and it says nothing about intelligent design. There’s no evidence that the article’s author or the scientists he interviews are sympathetic to ID. But it provides new insights into the complexity of the cell — insights that unwittingly pose a challenge to theories of a fully natural chemical origin of life.

The article explains that biologists are beginning to “grasp the strangeness of the zone [inside the cell], bigger than atoms but smaller than cells, in which the machinery of life exists,” further noting that “It’s proteins that run the cellular world, by sparking chemical reactions, sending signals, and self-assembling into biological machines.”

Casey Luskin, “The New Yorker Takes “A Journey to the Center of Our Cells”” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 2, 2022)

The very fact that no one is rushing in with a reductionist explanation points to the significance of the shift. Researchers are pausing to observe and reflect for once.

You may also wish to read: Remember when cells were random blobs? Now they are a tightly orchestrated dance. And if the researchers do create living cells, that’s intelligent design, not natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism).

and

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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Common sensor in bacteria and humans highlights reason for doubt re Darwinian tales

We are told that the common sensor could lead to improvements in drugs:

Scientists have discovered that a human receptor protein has the ability to detect individual amino acids in exactly the same way that bacteria do. The finding could lead to enhancements of drugs derived from the amino acid GABA.

The finding could lead to enhancements of drugs derived from the amino acid GABA, but also has evolutionary implications: It adds to the sparse evidence suggesting there are commonalities between bacteria and humans with respect to sensing the presence of essential components of life, such as oxygen and food.

Receptors on cell surfaces detect all kinds of nutrients — fats, sugars and vitamins, for example — but use different types of protein segments called sensors, and no common chemical detection mechanism is currently known.

In this work, scientists discovered a universal sensor present in many different receptors that detects amino acids by precisely interacting with the two groups of atoms that are shared by all amino acids.

“For the first time, we’ve found the universal way of detecting amino acids. Nearly every organism can do it through this mechanism,” said Igor Jouline, senior author of the study and a professor of microbiology at The Ohio State University.

“In our experience, it’s very rare when we can extrapolate a very specific sensory function with such precision from bacteria to humans, because these life forms are separated by such a long evolutionary time — about 3 billion years.”

Ohio State University, “The rare discovery of a protein function universal to bacteria and humans” at ScienceDaily (March 1, 2022)

The media release doesn’t bang on about common ancestry. It is suitably cautious: “Though there may never be a definitive answer to the age-old question of what exactly bacteria and humans have in common biologically, Jouline has begun a broader search for sensors that have a role in sustaining life.” In fact, the commonality is more likely due to horizontal gene transfer, as increasing numbers of instances are identified, especially between bacteria and other life forms.

But that raises an interesting point. Recently, I (O’Leary for News) asked an obvious question, “in a world where horizontal gene transfer is this extensive and significant, what becomes of all the carefully structured Darwinian tales of the gradual development of selective advantage? Aren’t they just evolutionary fiction, a form of historical fiction?”

Especially at Twitter (well, where else, for this type of thing?), Darwinians were quick to weigh in, claiming essentially that Darwinism can SO accommodate horizontal gene transfer!

Well, just a minute here. Horizontal gene transfer is much better demonstrated than Darwinism as a fact in nature. With HGT, we aren’t looking for long-sought “missing links,” for example. We don’t need to. We can read the genes. In short, Darwinism had better accommodate HGT.

Second, and one cannot expect a classical Darwinian to want to see this, HGT obviates Darwinian just-so stories according to which things happened by a long slow process of natural selection acting on random mutation. In such cases, we now know how they happened and it wasn’t according to Darwinian theory as classically set out.

What we don’t know is, how many other mutations in nature are better explained by HGT than Darwinism? We are only beginning to find out.

Here’s a simple illustration: Suppose Jane composes a song, both score and lyrics. She copyrights and performs it. Jane is the origin of the song.

Alternatively, Jane buys the sheet music, lyrics, and performance rights, and performs the song. That’s like horizontal gene transfer.

Suppose someone writes a long harangue in an arts journal about what inwardly motivated Jane to compose the song — and then discovers that she in fact bought it off the internet?

The long harangue in the journal is like the Darwinian just-so story. It assumes an origin that may not be true. And we don’t know in how many cases it is — vs. isn’t — true.

At this point, claims that Darwinism can “accommodate” HGT should be seen for what they are special pleading in the face of challenging new findings in evolution.

The paper is open access.

You may also wish to read:

You may also wish to read: Animal DNA modifier captured from bacteria 60 million years ago The obvious question this raises is, what about all the detailed Darwinian narratives that a horizontal gene transfer could obviate?

and

Researchers: Bacteria provided plants with genes to colonize land. Again, we ask, if so, in a world where horizontal gene transfer is this extensive and significant, what becomes of all the carefully structured Darwinian tales of the gradual development of selective advantage? Aren’t they just evolutionary fiction, a form of historical fiction?

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Neil Thomas on Darwinism’s place in the Victorian culture wars

As part of a new series, Neil Thomas, author of Taking Leave of Darwin (2021), offers a look at the culture wars inDarwin’s sday.It wasn’t all lace doilies and tea and crumpets:

In order to explain Charles Darwin’s curious rehabilitation, it is necessary to be clear about the fact that we are not dealing with a scientific adjudication here. The scientists had already pronounced on the Origin in resoundingly negative reviews — which inevitably leads to the conclusion that something else must have been going on here.

In this regard, a useful memoir has been left us by the acclaimed female author who by both birth and marriage was plugged into the 19th-century zeitgeist like few others, namely Mrs. Humphry Ward (born into intellectual aristocracy as Mary Augusta Arnold), the author of a particularly moving novel about loss of faith, Robert Elsmere (1888). In looking back at her experiences of Oxford in the 1860s and 70s, Ward noted that “the men of science entered but little into the struggle of ideas that was going on […] It was in literature, history and theology that evolutionary conceptions were most visibly and dramatically at work.”1 This judgment inevitably points us away from science proper in the direction of sundry Victorian debates and culture wars in our search of answers to the question of why Darwinism was able to triumph (and still is able to triumph) against the ascertainable scientific facts.

Neil Thomas, “Darwin and the Victorian Culture Wars” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 2, 2022)

Thomas goes on to talk about the main circumstances that made Darwinism a suitable origin story for a new era — none of which were particularly scientific:

As Alec Ryrie aptly pointed out in his recent “emotional” history of Doubt, “intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it,”3 and the more decisive forces in the eventual acceptance of Darwinism may have issued from works of imaginative literature with a more universal outreach.

Neil Thomas, “Darwin and the Victorian Culture Wars” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 2, 2022)

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 mean.

You may also wish to read: 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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At Mind Matters News: Ants use algorithms similar to those of the internet

Optimization algorithms enable the ant colony to decide how many ants to send to a given food source and when to drastically reduce the number:

Researchers are beginning to understand how, without much in the way of individual decision-making power, ants can make complex decisions. It’s best understood, they say, as something like an optimization algorithm:

Scientists found that ants and other natural systems use optimization algorithms similar to those used by engineered systems, including the Internet. These algorithms invest incrementally more resources as long as signs are encouraging but pull back quickly at the first sign of trouble. The systems are designed to be robust, allowing for portions to fail without harming the entire system. Understanding how these algorithms work in the real world may help solve engineering problems, whereas engineered systems may offer clues to understanding the behavior of ants, cells, and other natural systems.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, “Deciphering algorithms used by ants and the Internet” at ScienceDaily The paper is open access.

The researchers explain in more detail:

The same algorithm used by Internet engineers is used by ants when they forage for food. At first, the colony may send out a single ant. When the ant returns, it provides information about how much food it got and how long it took to get it. The colony would then send out two ants. If they return with food, the colony may send out three, then four, five, and so on. But if ten ants are sent out and most do not return, then the colony does not decrease the number it sends to nine. Instead, it cuts the number by a large amount, a multiple (say half) of what it sent before: only five ants. In other words, the number of ants slowly adds up when the signals are positive, but is cut dramatically lower when the information is negative. Navlakha and Suen note that the system works even if individual ants get lost and parallels a particular type of “additive-increase/multiplicative-decrease algorithm” used on the Internet.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, “Deciphering algorithms used by ants and the Internet” at ScienceDaily The paper is open access.

In some cases, computer programmers have learned better solutions to problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem from ants…

News, “Ants use algorithms similar to those of the internet ” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Discovering that ants follow the same principles as computer systems raises the question of the ultimate source of intelligence in nature; it’s not the ant.

You may also wish to read:

For ants, building a bridge is no “simple” task. Richard Stevens: There is nothing “simple” about designing neural systems and the computer systems to receive and interpret neural sensory inputs. The Quanta piece promotes a notion that software algorithms are “simple.” To the contrary, it would take an army of engineers to do what ants do instinctually.

and

How do insects use their very small brains to think clearly? How do they engage in complex behaviour 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.

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Deepening crisis in particle physics — Rob Sheldon responds

At least it is being discussed frankly. Always a start:

The crisis became undeniable in 2016, when, despite a major upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva still hadn’t conjured up any of the new elementary particles that theorists had been expecting for decades. The swarm of additional particles would have solved a major puzzle about an already known one, the famed Higgs boson. The hierarchy problem, as the puzzle is called, asks why the Higgs boson is so lightweight — a hundred million billion times less massive than the highest energy scales that exist in nature. The Higgs mass seems unnaturally dialed down relative to these higher energies, as if huge numbers in the underlying equation that determines its value all miraculously cancel out.

Natalie Wolchover, “A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws” at Quanta (March 1, 2022)

When science writers (and scientists) start using words like “miraculously,” it’s a clue that they are really stumped.

Some of those who remained set to work scrutinizing decades-old assumptions. They started thinking anew about the striking features of nature that seem unnaturally fine-tuned — both the Higgs boson’s small mass, and a seemingly unrelated case, one that concerns the unnaturally low energy of space itself. “The really fundamental problems are problems of naturalness,” Garcia Garcia said.

Their introspection is bearing fruit. Researchers are increasingly zeroing in on what they see as a weakness in the conventional reasoning about naturalness. It rests on a seemingly benign assumption, one that has been baked into scientific outlooks since ancient Greece: Big stuff consists of smaller, more fundamental stuff — an idea known as reductionism. “The reductionist paradigm … is hard-wired into the naturalness problems,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Natalie Wolchover, “A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws” at Quanta (March 1, 2022)

But when theoretical physicists start messing with reductionism, they are messing with the core assumptions of the meaningless universe. Many attempts are in progress to revalidate those assumptions, of course but…

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon weighs in:

This is an excellent paper. Wolchover does a great job with distilling physics ideas. Permit me to comment on the article.

This UV-IR mixing that destroys reductionism, “naturalness” (Sabine Hossenfelder’s nemesis) and Effective Field Theories (EFT) is another face to “fractals” that remain the same despite changes of scale. They are saying that big scales and little scales are connected. Like biology, chemistry and physics.

Here’s few more examples: the Coulomb force of electricity decreases with 1/r^2 but never goes to zero. The sun emits charged particles called the solar wind and therefore generates a potential or Coulomb force stretching out to infinity. Changes in the heliopause–where the solar wind encounters the extra-solar or interplanetary medium and suddenly brakes out past the orbit of Pluto–sets up a change in the Coulomb force that regulates how the surface of the sun emits solar-wind. A potato, crammed into a car exhaust pipe, will keep the car from running. This feedback operates from 100 AU astronomical units down to 0.01 AU, or over four orders of magnitude in scale.

Magnetic fields, constrain and direct charge particle flows, so that a NdFeB kitchen magnet placed in a Bell Jar and pumped down to 100mTorr can produce jets. A neutron star, with a field 10,000 stronger than my kitchen magnet produces astrophysical jets the size of the solar system. A galaxy with a field not even 100 times stronger than my kitchen magnet, produces jets that are Megaparsecs long. The same magnetic field scales plasma over 21 orders of magnitude from my bell jar to active galactic nuclei.

The distribution of neurons in my brain is fractal, with density increasing as a power of D^2.decimal, much like Natalie’s description of Area^.75 power. It turns out that this is the optimal density to maintain connectivity between brain cells. Galaxies are spread out in the universe with a fractal density D^2.decimal. No one knows why. But over 30 orders of magnitude separate those observations of nearly identical density distributions.

As Natalie points out, these observations suggest that there is a law connecting UV-IR, connecting big and little scales; there is a fractal that describes the information content of the universe, proving that we do not live in a random universe. Rather than backing into this discovery like Garcia-Garcia, we need to embrace it. Because we know the Designer, and therefore we already have a leg up on the competition. ID is not handicapped in this race, it is the scent of the roses.

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

You may also wish to read: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

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A pharma science prof explains how to “confront anti-science”

For dim, self-satisfied self-righteousness, this item at The Scientist is definitely in the running:

The knee-jerk response to people who doubt established science or medicine is to dismiss their concerns as absurd: trusting in expertise is common sense. If your computer isn’t booting up, you don’t call the fire department. If your house is on fire, you don’t call a computer technician. Logic dictates that matters of science and health are best addressed by scientists and physicians.

But as Voltaire observed, “Common sense is not so common.” The abundance of quackery and pseudoscience currently succeeding in the marketplace of ideas demonstrates the human proclivity to reject the scientific method in favor of unestablished, or even disreputable, goods and services. The widespread resistance to vaccination against COVID-19 or other infectious diseases, in some cases resulting in threats and attacks on doctors, is testament to this flagrant rejection of expertise. It also underscores the urgency of addressing rather than ignoring this problem.

The solution lies in recognizing that people do not develop suspicions about scientists and medical experts in a vacuum. Some may have had horrible experiences with the healthcare system. Perhaps their health concerns were rudely scoffed at by contemptuous doctors. Some people reject what today’s experts say because yesterday’s experts said the opposite—a normal occurrence in the process of science but one that nonetheless can come across as inconsistent to people unfamiliar with such dynamics. And then there are issues concerning pharmaceutical companies and governments the world over that have made serious blunders in the past, from scandalously precipitating the opioid epidemic to sending confusing messages about the COVID-19 pandemic. While these reasons do not justify dismissal of entire professions or of the biomedical enterprise, acknowledging them should engender the empathy you need to have a constructive dialogue with skeptics.

Bill Sullivan, “Opinion: How to Confront Anti-Science Sentiment” at The Scientist (March 1, 2022)

No. Let’s go back to the beginning.

The ruinous COVID Crazy is the backdrop for this screed in defense of the medical/science establishment.

Two years of very costly hell, largely manufactured by corrupt “science” entities and enforced — as so famously in Canada — by authoritarian/totalitarian crackdowns, have caused many people to quite justifiably lose faith in Trust the Science!

The question isn’t whether science is a good thing but whether the current establishment is in fact focused on science or on maintaining/regaining control through pronouncements about “science” and edicts stemming from those pronouncements. One needn’t look far to see examples of the latter.

And what to do about that is the discussion we need to have.

You may also wish to read: Royal Society: Don’t censor misinformation; it makes things worse. While others demand crackdowns on “fake news,” the Society reminds us that the history of science is one of error correction. It’s a fact that much COVID news later thought to need correction was in fact purveyed by official sources, not blogs or Facebook or Twitter accounts.

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