Secrets of the Cell, Episode 4

In the latest episode of Secrets of the Cell, biochemist Michael Behe points out a fact about evolution that may surprise many viewers. We've been taught for the last hundred years or so that evolution is a process that creates more complex organisms from less complex ancestral forms.

The mechanism for this is genetic mutation coupled with natural selection, producing new genes with new functions.

Scientists over the last several decades, however, have made an awkward discovery. Most change that we see in organisms is a result of genes being broken or damaged. In other words, living things devolve rather than evolve. It appears that life devolves from greater complexity to less complexity, but if that's the case how did it come to be that there was greater complexity in the genome at the outset?

Behe leaves this question unanswered, and, in fact, chooses not to raise it, so the viewer will have to answer it for him or herself:

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 3

There's a tiny insect called a leafhopper which has an anatomical structure that's simply amazing. Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe talks about it in episode 3 of Secrets of the Cell.

As we watch this video we might find ourselves asking how something like this could come about through undirected, mindless evolutinary processes. It's a fair question, but not one for which the Darwinian has a good answer.

Watch the video and see what you think:

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 2

In episode 2 of Secrets of the Cell biochemist Michael Behe explains what he means by the term irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is one of the key indicators of the intelligent design of life, and on classical Darwinian terms it's very difficult to explain how it could've ever evolved.

Indeed, the only serious attempt to refute Behe has been to deny that irreducible complexity actually exists in living things, but this hasn't been very persuasive.

The episode is only 5 minutes long and has some beautiful animations:

Michael Behe and the Secrets of the Cell

One of the most well-known figures in the Intelligent Design movement is a Lehigh University biochemist named Michael Behe. Behe is famous for his books Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution and Darwin Devolves, all three of which have contributed powerful critiques of the naturalistic Darwinian orthodoxy that reigns in our universities and popular media.

Intelligent Design is the notion that however life and the universe came to be, they both show exceedingly strong indications that they were designed by an intelligent agent or mind.

His critics have tried with very little, if any, success to undermine his arguments, and, to their chagrin, time and advancing scientific discoveries keep confirming his ideas and those of a growing number of philosophers and scientists who agree with him.

Behe's focus has been on the evidence for intentional design found in the living cell, and he's featured in a series of five short videos on this topic, geared to the layperson, titled Secrets of the Cell.

The videos are very well done, and since I've been so impressed with Behe's work over the years, I thought it might be good to show the series here on Viewpoint.

The introductory episode is below. The others will follow over the next few days:

Alien Hands and Free Will

This will sound very weird, but there's a phenomenon called alien hand syndrome that bears on the question of free will and determinism. Neuroscientist Michael Egnor explains the condition in an article at Mind Matters:

This neurological condition occasionally afflicts patients who have had split-brain surgery or other procedures or injuries that disconnect regions of the brain. They experience involuntary movements of limbs.

Most commonly it is the left arm, which seems to have a mind of its own. The classic example...is a patient who intentionally buttons her shirt with her right hand while her left hand follows, unbuttoning her shirt, which she doesn’t intend!

In other words, the two halves of the brain seem to have conflicting wills which suggests that the will is neither unitary nor free. Here's another example quoted in Egnor's piece:

Another example [is] related to food, where the right hemisphere was not pleased with what the left hemisphere had been cooking and threw a vial of salt on the food, to render it useless. These examples do seem to imply that will and awareness are indeed split, and there is a struggle for power between the two hemispheres, and thus the two sides of the body.

These examples seem, at least at first glance, to support the materialist view that all of our willful decisions are really the product solely of our material brain, but Egnor disagrees:

[A]lien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t.

We have, broadly speaking, two kinds of volition. In common with animals, we have appetite. Appetite is volition that arises from material processes in the brain.

Appetite may or may not be entirely conscious, but it entails motor acts and perceptions linked to specifics of the environment—a keyboard, a button, a bowl of food, or a sexually attractive person. We, along with non-human animals, experience powerful appetites arising from brain processes (neurochemicals, action potentials, and the like) all of the time.

In fact, appetite is the only type of volition that non-human animals experience.

But human beings have another kind of volition as well. We have will, which, unlike appetite, does not arise from brain processes. Will follows from intellect, which is the human ability to think abstractly, without linking the thought to particular objects.

I may desire an extra slice of cake (appetite), but I think about how bad that would be for my nutritional health (intellect) and decide, based on my abstract concern for my health, to forgo the cake (will). My will can override my appetites.

Because will follows on intellect, which is an immaterial power of abstract thought, will is free, in the sense that it is not determined by physical processes such as brain chemicals.

Will is, of course, influenced by physical processes. If I’m really hungry and tired, I may decide to have that piece of cake anyway because my appetite has got the better of my compromised intellect. But I still chose to have the cake.

My choice was not determined by chemistry, although it was influenced by chemistry.

Egnor argues that alien hand syndrome is a phenomenon of appetitive volition rather than of the will:

All of the examples of alien hand syndrome involve particular acts—a hand unbuttoning a button or reaching for an object, and the like. This splitting of volition to do particular acts is splitting of the appetite, not splitting of the will.

There are no examples of splitting of the will— no examples of simultaneous distinct abstract intentions.

Now, I don’t mean that we don’t have times of indecision; of course we do. I mean that there are no examples of simultaneous distinct abstract decisions—say, to deliberately will justice and injustice at the same moment or to deliberately do differential calculus and integral calculus (one with the right hand, one with the left) at the same moment.

Will is metaphysically simple, in the sense that it has no parts that can separate completely from one another.

In fact, unity of will is more or less what we take to define an individual person. If there are two distinct wills, there are two distinct people. ‘Splitting of the will’ defies what we know to be true of human beings.

It is the abstract nature of will that distinguishes it from appetite and makes it free and metaphysically simple, incapable of being split. Alien hand syndrome is an example of splitting of appetite, which is a brain function driven wholly by material processes.

Thus, alien hand syndrome is not an exception to free will at all. In fact, a proper understanding of alien hand syndrome helps us understand what free will really is.

The fact that split brains can dictate conflicting unconscious behaviors does not seem to be a compelling argument against the existence of an immaterial will. After all, our brains dictate a lot of unconscious behaviors including heartbeats, digestion, the coordinated movements of a baseball player catching a fly ball, etc. All of these are "appetitive" volitions.

Egnor may well be correct in what he writes on alien hand syndrome, and what he says is important, but the most puzzling question of all is still unanswered and probably unanswerable: What, exactly, is the will?

Is Panpsychism the Solution to the "Hard" Problem?

Materialist scientists and philosophers have long sought to expel mind from science. Science, the argument goes, has no room for immaterial substances like mind that don't arise out of material substance like brains.

The problem these materialists have encountered, though, is that it's devilishly difficult to explain consciousness solely in terms of brain chemistry. The difficulty in explaining how feeling, sensation and meaning can be generated by electro-chemical reactions in a brain is called the "hard problem" of consciousness. Science writer Thomas Lewton explains:

It can seem as if there is an insurmountable gap between our subjective experience of the world and our attempts to objectively describe it. And yet our brains are made of matter – so, you might think, the states of mind they generate must be explicable in terms of states of matter.

The question is, how? And if we can’t explain consciousness in physical terms, how do we find a place for it in an all-embracing view of the universe?

How, indeed.

One option is to suggest that some form of consciousness, however fragmentary, is an intrinsic property of matter. At a fundamental level, this micro-consciousness is all that exists.

The idea, known as panpsychism, rips up the physicalist handbook to offer a simple solution to the hard problem of consciousness ... by plugging the gap between our inner experiences and our objective, scientific descriptions of the world.

If everything is to some extent conscious, we no longer have to account for our experience in terms of non-conscious components.

Panpsychism is growing increasingly attractive to philosophers who are mystified by the problem of explaining how matter can generate conscious experience. Few philosophers want to embrace the view called eliminative materialism that holds that consciousness is just an illusion, a view that strikes many as incoherent since even an illusion is hard to explain solely in terms of a material brain.

To the extent that panpsychism catches on it would mark the demise of materialism but not necessarily the demise of naturalism. If mind is a substance possessed by every particle of matter in the universe then consciousness can be explained by assuming that when matter reaches a certain level of complexity, as in a human brain, the quantity of mind it possesses gives rise to consciousness.

Even so, naturalism could still be preserved since the universe might still be a closed system which consists of two fundamental substances, mind and matter, rather than just matter. Thus naturalism could be saved even though materialism could not.

The problem for naturalism, though is this: it's but a short step from positing an all-pervasive mind filling the cosmos to embracing pantheism, and once the door is open to pantheism, naturalism is in trouble.

It'll find itself sliding down a slippery slope to full-blown monotheism.

Russia's Failure

No matter how it ultimately turns out, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been a military disaster for the Russians. They may ultimately prevail by sheer force of numbers and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of armor and planes, but the Ukrainians have humiliated them nonetheless.

Estimates of the cost to Russia of this adventure include, according to NATO sources, as many as 40,000 killed, captured or wounded Russian troops. Other losses as of March 29th are shown on this chart:

Rick Newman at Yahoo News offers some additional insights into Russia's logistical failures:

More stunning than numerical losses may be widespread evidence of incompetence and hollowness. Russian vehicles break down due to dry-rotted tires and poor maintenance. Units have abandoned dozens of multimillion-dollar tanks for lack of gas.

Russia seems to lack modern logistical tools such as cranes, pallets and fork lifts, crucial for moving materiel quickly and safely under stress, including combat. Camouflage efforts are primitive. Russian troops communicate over open radios, susceptible to interception, and loot Ukrainian homes and stores for basics such as food.

One unit of panicked Russian troops appears to have turned on its own leader, running him over with a tank. A top British intelligence official said Russia’s “command and control is in chaos.”

With all the effort Putin ostensibly put into creating a 21st century military why is there so much dysfunction? Newman continues:

Russia has...become a kleptocracy with endemic graft and plodding state agencies that make America’s federal bureaucracy look like a whiz-bang startup. In Ukraine, those shortcomings may have metastasized into disaster.

“Corruption is part of the political and economic system in Russia, and what we are seeing in Ukraine is part of the explanation,” Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, tells Yahoo Finance.

“The problem is there’s no accountability. We assume this continues to be part of the problem in the Russian military.”

Russia’s annual defense budget is around $62 billion—less than one-tenth what the United States spends. Even then, secret bidding for military contracts and an overcomplicated military bureaucracy leave ample room for graft. In a couple of rare admissions, Russian military leaders have estimated that 20% to 40% of Russia’s military budget is stolen.

Former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who now lives in the United States, said on Twitter on March 6, “the Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus.”

Newman has more at the link, but there are important lessons we ourselves need to draw from this, and one of them is that morality matters. A nation run by dishonest, avaricious people is like an oak tree diseased and rotted at it's core. It may look impressive, but its looks are no measure of its strength.

John Adams famously insisted that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” and his fellow Founding Father James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”

The health of a nation is determined by the health of its moral culture. A culture which tolerates corruption among its elected leaders, their families and friends, will, like the dying oak, not fare well under stress.

Thought Control

In a column on his Substack page, Mike Mitchell argues that the current transgender obsession is a vehicle being used by the left to gain social control by controlling how we think. His whole column is worth reading but the crux of his argument draws a parallel with George Orwell's classic novel 1984.

Mitchell writes:

To demand that I refer to someone as a male who is self-evidently female is to demand that I deny my most fundamental capacity of perception and cognition. This is quite literally mind control—and all the more so when the willingness to use “preferred pronouns” is posed as a test of one’s moral character.

[It] brings to mind a passage toward the end of 1984 after Winston has been imprisoned and tortured for thoughtcrime and is trying to re-educate himself:

He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought…

He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered...How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed.

It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it...Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense.

There's much else in his essay worth taking the time to read, but here's one other important point:

Language is the most basic way of expressing rational thought, and the very nature of language requires that people acknowledge shared, fixed definitions. When I say the word “house” I am not referring to something that has four wheels and a transmission.

And when I, and the entire mass of English-speaking people throughout history, say the word “woman” I am not talking about a human being who was born with male anatomy.

If I can choose my own unique definition of “house” or “woman” then these words are useless as words. I cannot use them to communicate with other people.

In this case I would be isolated to a world that exists only in my own mind, a world where my understanding of reality is purely a projection of my own imagination.

Among those for whom English functions as a common language, the word for this state of mind is “delusional.”

To make another literary reference, we're like the crowd in Hans Christian Anderson's famous tale watching the emperor strut by stark naked. Our senses tell us he wears no clothes, his senses tell him he's wearing no clothes, but all of us are expected to speak and act as if he's wearing the finest robes in the kingdom.

Peer pressure and intimidation produce in us a wish to conform to what we can plainly see is false.

As Mitchell asserts, this is the dictionary definition of "delusional."

Sociological Misperceptions

A recent You Gov survey uncovered some interesting misperceptions that Americans have about their fellow countrymen. It found, for example that we tend to vastly overestimate the actual size of some population groups and vastly underestimate the size of others.

For example, what is the proportion of the population that is gay or lesbian? The survey found that respondents tended to put the number at 30% when, in fact, the actual number is 3%. Respondents also thought that 21% of the population is transgender when the actual number is 0.6%.

It's not just sexual minorities. We also seem to have a distorted picture of the numbers of religious and racial minorities in our country.

• Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%)
• Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%)
• Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%)
• Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%)
• Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%)

Interestingly, a similar pattern exists in estimates of majority groups:

People tend to underestimate rather than overestimate their size relative to their actual share of the adult population. For instance, we find that people underestimate the proportion of American adults who are Christian (estimate: 58%, true: 70%) and the proportion who have at least a high school degree (estimate: 65%, true: 89%).

The most accurate estimates involved groups whose real proportion fell right around 50%, including the percentage of American adults who are married (estimate: 55%, true: 51%) and have at least one child (estimate: 58%, true: 57%).

One question that this raises is why our estimates are so skewed. You Gov offered some possible explanations:

Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media.

Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.

If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to.

Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39%, closer to the real figure of 12%. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40% of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31%, closer to the actual figure of 14%.

Personally, I suspect that our entertainment media play an out-sized role in creating these misperceptions. Television commercials and programming, for instance, commonly feature a high percentage of minorities, both racial and sexual, and rarely feature religious individuals or families of any denomination.

That exposure surely must influence Americans' perception of reality, at least among those who imbibe a lot of television programming.

There's much more data from this survey at the link.

What if Putin Actually Knows What he's Doing?

An article at a site called DNYUZ gives us some disturbing food for thought. It asks the question whether despite the appearance of serious blunders and incompetence, Vladimir Putin really in fact knows what he's doing in Ukraine.

Here's the lede:

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.”

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

Yikes! What if..?

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

Well, maybe, but Putin already had control of much of eastern Ukraine and all of Crimea so why bother with Kyiv? Why not save himself a lot of blood and treasure and just begin extracting the minerals and petroleum in the areas he already controls, and if he wants that southern land bridge to Odessa, why squander so many military assets in the north?

The article goes on to speculate that,

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality.

The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below.

Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

But all of this could've been accomplished, couldn't it, without losing 15,000 soldiers. There's no doubt that Putin wants all that the article says he does, but he certainly appears to have wanted a lot more that it looks like he's not going to get. The question now is whether the West will pressure Zelenskyy to grant Putin in a peace deal what he couldn't win on the battlefield.

If that's what happens it would be a disgrace even worse than our ignominious withdrawl from Afghanistan.

What Are They Afraid of?

Materialists deny that there's anything that cannot be explained in terms of material substance and the laws of physics. The incredibly complex, information-laden biological world, they argue, as well as the astonishingly fine-tuned cosmos which life inhabits are both the unintended product of chance and physics.

Their metaphysics allows for no mind or intelligence behind it all nor, they insist, is there any reason or evidence for supposing that any such non-material, non-natural intelligence exists.

William J. Murray offers a dissenting view in a comment at Uncommon Descent. He poses an interesting thought experiment.

Suppose we landed on a planet in a different star system, and on an otherwise barren planet we found a massive, self-sustaining and self-replicating metallic machine comprised mainly of alloyed materials found nowhere else on the planet other than as a material manufactured by the machine for it’s own duplication and repair, what would be the materialist’s reaction?

Further, what if the machine was run by a library of code and a code-processing system?

Would they accept the machine as evidence of non-human intelligent design? If they found no archaeological evidence on the planet supporting the idea that an intelligent race of beings at any time in history constructed that machine, would they turn to naturalistic explanations? Would they insist that somehow humans had been there before and left the machine without any other trace of their presence?

Or, would they come to the conclusion that an intelligent agency of some sort designed and built the machine, even though they didn’t know what that intelligent agency was?

At the very least anyone in this situation would have good reason for supposing that some non-human intelligence had been at work on that planet. But we ourselves are in an analogous situation on this planet since we are surrounded by much the same sort of machines, albeit biological machines, as Murray describes.

Or consider the fine-tuning of the universe:

[W]hat if we were exploring space in distance areas of the galaxy and came across a habitat floating in space, perfectly balanced to be self-supporting for a rich and diverse spectrum of life. Let’s say this habitat is enclosed by some form of unknown energy with no apparent source. Everything in the habitat is finely tuned for the flourishing and preservation of that life.

Would the materialist conclude that there must be countless other such habitats floating around, produced by some as yet unknown unintelligent process, each tuned differently and most not capable of supporting life? Or, would they conclude that some intelligent agency must have designed and built the habitat for the purpose of sustaining life? Would they insist other humans must have built it? Would they ever even imagine that a non-human intelligence might be responsible?

Of course they would unless they were so obsessively determined to avoid that conclusion, unless they found that conclusion so repugnant that they'd refuse to accept it no matter how much evidence were available to them. But then, of course, they would be behaving irrationally, perhaps even insanely.

One might conclude that the materialist's refusal to accept the evidence that Murray describes is motivated by fear of what that evidence points to.

Murray again:

[M]aterialists contort themselves as if they are headed toward some horrible, painful experience simply by admitting this [that the universe appears to be intelligently designed].

They do similar such contortions when confronted by the hard problem of consciousness and the problem of subjective morality, when admitting that objective morality must exist, and admitting that consciousness exists beyond the material, commits them to no [particular] spiritual or religious doctrine whatsoever. It’s just admitting what evidence indicates and what is logically necessary....

Why fight it tooth and nail? Why contort, obfuscate, and run from these things? Why deny the obvious and the logical to the point of saying such foolish things like “consciousness is an illusion” or “morality is subjective”, when they cannot even act or speak as if such things are true?

Good questions. What are they afraid of?

The Fine Structure Constant

There are a lot of mysteries in our universe. Two that are especially puzzling are the nature of time and the origin and nature of human consciousness, but there are others, of course. One such is something physicists call the fine structure constant.

Astrophysicist Paul Sutter explains that this constant is "a measure of the strength of the interaction between charged particles and the electromagnetic force. The current estimate of the fine-structure constant is 0.007 297 352 5693, with an uncertainty of 11 on the last two digits. The number is easier to remember by its inverse, approximately 1/137."

There are several peculiarities about this number.

First of all, no one knows why it has the value it does or where it comes from. It's value seems awkward and ungainly and is completely unexplained. No current theory predicts it.

Sutter states that,

We have no explanation for the origins of this constant. Indeed, we have no theoretical explanation for its existence at all. We simply measure it in experiments and then plug the measured value into our equations to make other predictions.

Second, unlike other constants in nature this one has no units. It's not measured in any dimensions or units like meters/second or miles/hour.

Third, it has to have the precise value it has for the universe to be able to sustain life. As Sutter explains,

If it had any other value, life as we know it would be impossible. And yet we have no idea where it comes from....Change that number, change the universe. If the fine-structure constant had a different value, then atoms would have different sizes, chemistry would completely change and nuclear reactions would be altered.

Life as we know it would be outright impossible if the fine-structure constant had even a slightly different value.

It's truly remarkable that such a finely-tuned parameter would exist, and indeed there are dozens, if not hundreds of similarly fine-tuned values to the forces and constants in the universe. This chart shows the exactitude with which two such forces, the strong nuclear force and the strength of electromagnetism (i.e. the fine-structure constant), must be calibrated in order for a life sustaining universe like ours to exist:

Note that the axes on the above chart are logarithmic, every increment represents an increase by a power of ten. To plot these parameters on a standard scale the chart would have to be enormous.

It also compares just two of the hundreds of parameters that must be set with exquisite precision in order for the universe to be the kind of place in which life could exist.

Such precision could just be a lucky accident, of course, or it could be the consequence of intentional engineering. If we were to be guided by experience and nothing else, I think it safe to say that we'd dismiss the first alternative as quite literally incredible.

Sutter has more on this at the link or if you prefer you can watch him discuss the fine-structure constant on this 16 minute YouTube video:

Infinity Is Weird

The following is excerpted from the book Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng. In this very interesting excerpt Cheng, who is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield, U.K., and is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, explains why infinity is not a number in the ordinary sense and why we have to be careful in how we talk about it.

The passage begins with Cheng asking us to think about what we mean when we talk about infinity:

Mathematics is all about using logic to understand things, and we’ll find that if we’re not careful about exactly what we mean by “infinity,” then logic will take us to some very strange places that we didn’t intend to go....

Infinity goes on forever.

Does this mean infinity is a type of time, or space? A length?

Infinity is bigger than the biggest number.

Infinity is bigger than anything we can think of.

Now infinity seems to be a type of size. Or is it something more abstract: a number, which we can then use to measure time, space, length, size, and indeed anything we want? Our next thoughts seem to treat infinity as if it is in fact a number.

But if we treat infinity like a normal number we get contradictions:

If you add one to infinity it’s still infinity. This is saying

∞ + 1 = ∞

which might seem like a very basic principle about infinity. If infinity is the biggest thing there is, then adding one can’t make it any bigger. Or can it? What if we then subtract infinity from both sides? If we use some familiar rules of cancellation, this will just get rid of the infinity on each side, leaving

1 = 0

which is a disaster. Something has evidently gone wrong. The next thought makes more things go wrong:

If you add infinity to infinity it’s still infinity. This seems to be saying

∞ + ∞ = ∞

that is,

2∞ = ∞

and now if we divide both sides by infinity this might look like we can just cancel out the infinity on each side, leaving

2 = 1

which is another disaster. Maybe you can now guess that something terrible will happen if we think too hard about the last idea:

If you multiply infinity by infinity it’s still infinity. If we write this out we get

∞ x ∞ = ∞

and if we divide both sides by infinity, canceling out one infinity on each side, we get

∞ = 1

which is possibly the worst, most wrong outcome of them all. Infinity is supposed to be the biggest thing there is; it is definitely not supposed to be equal to something as small as 1.

What has gone wrong? The problem is that we have manipulated equations as if infinity were an ordinary number, without knowing if it is or not. One of the first things we’re going to see in this book is what infinity isn’t, and it definitely isn’t an ordinary number. We are gradually going to work our way toward finding what type of “thing” it makes sense for infinity to be.

You can read more of Cheng's thoughts on infinity here.

Sometimes scientists trying to avoid the cosmic fine-tuning problem or an initial origin event of the cosmos say things like, "There's an infinite number of universes in the multiverse," or that "The cosmos is infinitely old." Cheng shows that we have to be very careful about such uses of "infinite."

In fact, one argument against the universe being infinitely old is that if it is infinitely old then there must have been an infinity of moments of time. But if so, then there was no first moment, because if time is infinite in the past, whichever moment one designates as "first" will always have been preceded by an earlier moment, and, if there was no first moment, there could have been no second, or third moment, etc.

The consequence of this is that if there were no first, second, third etc. moments then we could never have arrived at the present moment. But, of course, we have arrived at the present moment, which means that the universe must not be infinitely old. It must have had a beginning, a first moment.

This, then, provokes the question, "If the universe had a beginning, what caused it?" Whatever the cause, it must have been outside of space and time (because these are components of the universe), very powerful and very intelligent.

In other words, the cause must have been something like God.

Love Thy Neighbor

I'm currently reading a book on the war in Bosnia in the early 90s. The book is titled Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass. Maass was a war correspondent for the Washington Post who witnessed unimaginable atrocities perpetrated by Serbs upon Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics in the Balkans.

As Maass recounts the cruelties these people inflicted on their neighbors, co-workers, even family members, the reader is benumbed by the horrors.

How could people who socialized with each other, went to school with each other, worked cordially side by side with each other, suddenly turn on them en masse, torturing, raping, and murdering them?

Then we turn on the evening news and watch stupefied as the reporters recount the terrors the Russian forces are deliberately visiting upon civilians in Ukraine, bombing a theater, for instance, in which hundreds of children were taking shelter, crushing some 300 of them under the rubble.

We thought that the cruelties of al Qaeda and ISIS were horrific, that the brutalities of Africans against their fellow Africans are appalling, but the Arabs and the Africans were savages from whom such behavior was to be expected. Yet their crimes were and are no less odious than the crimes wreaked by Europeans upon each other. ISIS and Boko Haram are no more savage than were the Germans in the early 40s, the Serbs in the early 90s or the Russians today.

I mention this because there's a conceit among many of our secular friends that man is basically good and if only he could be placed in an Edenic environment of equity and equality there'd be no crime, no inhumanity, no injustice.

This belief goes back to the French thinker Rousseau, and it's one superstition that moderns hold that is massively contradicted by the empirical evidence.

Much of our own experience tells us that human beings are certainly not inherently good, we are in fact just the opposite. As the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah wrote some 2600 years ago, "The heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can understand it?"

The Jewish journalist Dennis Prager takes issue with the rosy, Roussean view of human nature. He writes:

In the 20th century alone, more than a hundred million people — civilians, not soldiers — were murdered by vile regimes and their vile followers.

These include the approximately 20 million killed in the Gulag Archipelago; the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda; the genocidal murder of Armenians; the deliberate starvation of about 60 million Chinese; the Japanese mass rape of Korean “comfort women” and hideous medical experiments on Chinese civilians; and the torture and murder of approximately one out of four Cambodians.

And that is only a partial list.

Virtually every serious thinker in history knew people were not basically good. They knew about the universality of slavery and the tortures and rapes that accompanied slavery. They knew how men behaved in wartime.

Were all the people who engaged in these evils aberrations? In fact, most were quite normal. The aberrations in history have been the truly good individuals.

To cite the Holocaust, the Germans, French, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians and others who aided the Holocaust, let alone those who did nothing, were normal people. The handful who aided Jews were the aberrations.

And what about childhood bullying? Are fat, or slow, or unattractive boys and girls generally treated with kindness and empathy? The question is rhetorical.

And what about child sexual abuse? The WHO in 2002 estimated that 73 million boys and 150 million girls under the age of 18 years had experienced various forms of sexual violence.

Quite remarkable for a world of basically good people.

If experience teaches us anything about human nature it is that we are, as a race, inherently hateful and vicious. Despite the claims of some that humanity is "every day in every way getting better and better" we're not much better now than we were a thousand or two thousand years ago.

Our civilization is just a thin veneer over the heart of a brute, and all one need do to verify this claim is to read history and today's newspapers.

Mr. Putin's Doom

A column by Douglas London in The Wall Street Journal (Subscription required) argues that Vladimir Putin will be undone by people in his own government who will be vulnerable to Western intelligence services seeking to "turn" them.

London, who spent 34 years in the CIA's clandestine service, writes:

Espionage is a predatory business, and there’s blood in the water. Mr. Putin’s self-inflicted damage has done more to turn his own people against him than anything the West could have done.

Mr. Putin’s disastrous choices are causing military strategists to reconsider which tactics could be used against Russia’s overrated and underperforming armed forces. Political experts and economists are rethinking tools for punishing malign behavior. Other potential aggressors—namely China—must take notice. If your job is cultivating spies, I suspect that recruiting must be good....

Resurrecting the Soviet empire, as Mr. Putin wants to do, brings with it the same forces that prompted most of the Warsaw Pact’s best CIA agents to turn against the Kremlin. Agents across the Soviet bloc often shared the same desire: to inflict whatever harm they could.

They took up the fight not for money, but to undermine a toxic system that enriched a corrupt elite, wrought suffering and economic stagnation, and occasionally brought the world to the brink.

Mr. London goes on to tell us about Russians in the old Soviet Union who spied for the West because they were embittered at how their families had suffered under Kremlin corruption or because they were disgusted with Soviet aggression in places like Czechoslavakia.

He then continues:

Mr. Putin has delivered a rival intelligence officer a great gift: a precipitating crisis. The desire to take control over their own destiny amid crisis drives people to spy. Intelligence officers take advantage of that desire to secure an agent’s cooperation through inspiration, trust and means to make a difference.

Mr. Putin’s bumbling has provided the crisis, Ukrainian courage the inspiration, and the response of the U.S. and its allies the trust and tools for Russians to strike back.

Some of the CIA’s best agents have been volunteers who finally are pushed over the edge by a life-altering event and offer their services to an intelligence service....Thanks to Mr. Putin’s deplorable behavior, I expect an increase in Russian volunteers who have toyed with the idea of doing something to better Russia’s future and might now be receptive to an encouraging nudge.

Mr. Putin will use intimidation, violence, repression and bribery to combat counterintelligence risk and will reward blind loyalty from the incompetent and opportunistic sycophants who lord over his system. But these measures will only create incentives for the brave to act — and it takes only a few to make an extraordinary difference.

It is tragic what Mr. Putin has wrought in Russia. As London notes, he has in a few weeks undone 30 years of progress for the Russian people.

There was a growing middle class in Russia whose members were enjoying a standard of living much improved over what they had suffered through during the Soviet era. Now their money is worthless, their sons are dying by the thousands in a war that few understand, Russia's vaunted military has been humiliated and reduced to slaughtering civilians, and soon food, medicine, and all manner of consumer goods will be scarce in Russia.

In conditions like these disillusioned generals and government bureaucrats will be thick on the ground, and not a few of them, perhaps, will be eager to be recruited by Western agents. When they are Mr. Putin's reign of terror, and possibly Mr. Putin himself, will be nearing an end.

Russian Morale

Hot Air's Allahpundit has a summary of the effects that the war in Ukraine is having on Russian morale. He mentions a story in the N.Y. Times (paywall) which cites a video interview posted online on Monday by Igor Girkin, a former Russian F.S.B. intelligence officer and head of the Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.

Igor Girkin, a former colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence agency and the former “defense minister” of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in a video interview posted online on Monday that Russia had made a “catastrophically incorrect assessment” of Ukraine’s forces.

“The enemy was underestimated in every aspect,” Mr. Girkin said…

“We can definitively say that nothing is going to plan,” countered Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst. “It has been decades since the Soviet and Russian armies have seen such great losses in such a short period of time.”…

The failures in Ukraine have started to create fissures within Russian leadership, according to Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert on Russia’s military and security services.

The top Russian intelligence official in charge of overseeing the recruitment of spies and diversionary operations in Ukraine has been put under house arrest along with his deputy, Mr. Soldatov said.

Even Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, who vacations with Mr. Putin and has been spoken of as a potential presidential successor, has suffered a loss of standing, according to Mr. Soldatov’s sources.

Allahpundit adds this:

Another retired Russian general who leads a group of retired and current service members issued a statement in January, before the war, claiming that an invasion would be “pointless,” would alienate Ukraine forever, and conceivably would even threaten Russia’s existence. When the Times caught up to him this week, he said curtly, “I do not disavow what I said.”

For former Russian military leaders, the fiasco in Ukraine must be personal to some degree. After all, it’s not just conscripts who are dying under Ukrainian fire. At least 15 officers with the rank of captain or higher have reportedly been killed in less than a month.

Western military experts have puzzled over that, concluding that it would be impossible absent a serious breakdown in Russian capabilities.

There must be a failure of operational security — i.e. western penetration of Russian battlefield communications — on top of a failure of organization at the front lines. Top commanders are putting themselves in harm’s way to try to restore order in the ranks and some are paying for it with their lives.

With Russia deprived of some of its most skilled commanders, the military’s morale problem will get worse.

Yes, and one wonders what those surrounding Mr. Putin in the Kremlin are thinking about all this.

Ukrainian intelligence intercepted a Russian communication that indicates morale aamong the troops is very low:

Fascinating, claimed intercepted call from Russian officer near Mykolaiv to superiors in Russia. He says:
- This is worse than Chechnya
- 50% of troops have frostbite
- They can’t evacuate the dead
- Don’t have enough tents
- RU plane dropped a bomb on their own position 🧵 pic.twitter.com/3KjGrqD5jZ

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) March 23, 2022

- Troops don’t have body armor. When one complained to commander was told “son, be strong”
- This special operation is a “madhouse”
- Being told not to destroy buildings - it’s insanity. Unless we destroy everything and turn into dirt along with the civilians, nothing can happen

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) March 23, 2022

Ukrainian commander in Mykolaiv tells us Russians are abandoning many vehicles near the city. "They have no will to fight. They don't even have food. It's -10 with snow here, they don't want to be here."

— Neil Hauer (@NeilPHauer) March 11, 2022

How long will these Russian troops put up with this before they all just decide to leave, regardless of what their officers tell them?

Near Death Experiences

In my class yesterday we talked a bit about NDEs (Near death Experiences) so I thought it'd be helpful to rerun a post from a couple of years ago on that topic:

A discussion at Mind Matters between Robert Marks and Walter Bradley, both of whom are scientists, focuses on the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and contains some interesting insights into these events.

The term "Near Death" seems to be misleading. Scientists have documented over 3500 cases over the past several decades in which people have been not just near to death but completely, clinically dead - no heartbeat or brain waves - but from which they returned to life.

More astonishing, upon regaining their life they were able to relate to their medical staff what had happened while they were dead.

In the past, these sorts of accounts were dismissed as hallucinations, wishful thinking or even fabrications, but so much evidence in support of their veridicality has accumulated over the last thirty years that they're being taken much more seriously today. The question contemporary researchers are trying to answer is not whether the experience is genuine but rather what exactly is going on when someone has one of these.

So far any natural, physical explanation has proven elusive. NDEs remain a mystery.

To the extent that NDEs are indeed genuine, they constitute a powerful argument for two claims that are incompatible with materialism.

First, if someone is having an experience which includes thoughts, sensations and recall while his or her brain is completely shut down - dead - it strongly suggests that more than the brain is involved in thinking, sensing and remembering. NDEs are an emphatic pointer to the existence of an immaterial mind or soul.

Second, NDEs offer a compelling reason to believe that physical death is not the end of our existence, that there's more beyond this life and that death is a bridge to that further existence, much, perhaps, like childbirth is a bridge between two separate existences.

This short video offers a fascinating example of an NDE. A woman born blind lost her life, temporarily, in an accident and recounts what happened in the hospital. If she's telling the truth then it certainly detracts from the credibility of materialism's claim to be an adequate account of what it is to be a human being:

Plot to Poison Putin

There've been a number of stories in the media of late discussing what's claimed to be a plot to poison Vladimir Putin. According to one of the articles, the plot was discovered by Ukrainian intelligence.

However the plot was discovered, and by whomever, I can't imagine that if there were such a plot it would be leaked to the world. Why would the Ukrainians want to alert Putin to an attempt on his life by publicizing the plot if it were indeed genuine?

In any case, here are some excerpts from the article:

The Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine has said that "a group of influential" Kremlin insiders have been plotting to oust Putin. The goal of the "Russian elite" is to supposedly remove the president from power as soon as possible before restoring economic ties with the West.

According to the brief, the Ukrainian intelligence service also claims that a successor to Putin has already been lined up in the shape of FSB director Oleksandr Bortnikov, reports The Mirror. Powerful insiders are allegedly dismayed at the ramifications of the war and the sanctions imposed on the Russian economy.

The Chief Directorate of Intelligence said: "It is known that Bortnikov and some other influential representatives of the Russian elite are considering various options to remove Putin from power. "In particular, poisoning, sudden disease, or any other 'coincidence' is not excluded."

There's more at the link, including links to other sources. As I indicated above, I'm skeptical about this report which appears to be tabloid sensationalism, but it could nevertheless have the effect of stoking a lot of suspicion and paranoia among Putin's inner circle.

It has been reported previously that Putin already uses food tasters to make sure his food isn't tainted, so suspicion of his colleagues is apparently already well-advanced.

But whether the plot is genuine or not, I have a question for my pacifist friends who believe that killing someone is always wrong. If the story were true, and the plot succeeds, would the plotters have been wrong to murder Mr. Putin?

In other words, is it wrong to murder in order to save the lives of innocent people? If the reader of this post is a pacifist or knows someone who is, this question might lead to an interesting ethical conversation.

The Gorgeous Peacock Spider

There's a fascinating article at Evolution News about a taxon of spiders endemic to Australia called the Peacock spider. There are some 60 species of Peacock spider, and they're gorgeously patterned.

The colors are produced not by pigments but by tiny scales with microscopic curves and gratings that refract and diffract light to separate and reflect various wavelengths. This works somewhat in the same way that a film of oil on a surface produces an array of iridescent hues.

Studying the color-producing structures in these arachnids has given scientists ideas for new color technologies.

Here's a video of the mating displays of several species of these spiders set to music. It's astonishing to consider that these spiders are less than 5 millimeters in size and that the information that directs their displays, plus all the other behaviors in which the spider engages, as well as the production of the vari-colored abdomens is all packed into a brain that's smaller than a pinhead:

Here are a few more interesting questions and points raised in the article:

The artistic patterns on the males’ abdomens seem gratuitously beyond anything necessary for mating. Drab animals get by just fine; why the excessive color and beauty? And why the dozens of variations among different species? We could be forgiven for imagining a designing intelligence with an artist’s eye.

Aesthetic considerations, furthermore, lead us to ask why human beings are the only ones who get excited about the mating dances of an unrelated species. Does that speak to human exceptionalism? We don’t see any other animals, except the female spider, watching the performances, but people by the millions are fascinated by these tiny animals that have nothing to do with their own “fitness.”

What is the evolutionary explanation for the quality of charm? Of humor? Or enchantment? We don’t eat them or train them to do our work. How did our curiosity, sense of humor, and love for beauty “evolve”?

“Who knew that such a small critter would create such an intense iridescence using extremely sophisticated mechanisms that will inspire optical engineers,” said Dimitri Deheyn, Hsuing’s advisor at Scripps Oceanography and a coauthor of the study.

“As an engineer, what I found fascinating about these spider structural colors is how these long evolved complex structures can still outperform human engineering,” said Radwanul Hasan Siddique, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and study coauthor. “Even with high-end fabrication techniques, we could not replicate the exact structures. I wonder how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place!”

We might all wonder this as well. Especially might we wonder "how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place" if we limit ourselves to thinking that this amazing creature must have evolved these gaudy patterns and complex behaviors through an unguided, random process like Darwinism.

Our Amazing World

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-blowing.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically: