Fear dumb people not smart machines?

Bill Dembski on the AI Boogeyman, and the Real AI Danger
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

On a new episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid reads an excerpt from a speech prepared by philosopher, mathematician, and trailblazing design theorist William Dembski for the launch of the 

Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Dr. Dembski asks whether we need to worry about an AI takeover. He says no, there’s no evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) could reach that level, or achieve consciousness, while on the other hand there is mounting evidence from both philosophy and the field of artificial intelligence technology that it cannot and will not.

“The real worry,” Dembski says, “isn’t that we’ll raise machines to our level, but that we’ll lower humanity to the level of machines.”

Big tobacco:A prelude to big marijuana?

Philip Morris v. Uruguay: Will investor-State arbitration send restrictions on tobacco marketing up in smoke?

MATTHEW C. PORTERFIELD & CHRISTOPHER R. BYRNES – July 12, 2011

For nearly two decades, the tobacco industry has used international investment rules to challenge governmentrestrictions on cigarette marketing.  In 1994, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company threatened to bring a claim under the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) investment chapter as part of its successful lobbying campaign against Canada’s proposed “plain packaging” legislation, which would have required that all cigarettes be sold in standardized packaging without logos or trademarks. More recently, Philip Morris has brought an investor-state claim challenging Uruguay’s restrictions on cigarette packaging, and formally threatened the government of Australia with an arbitration claim in response to its packaging rules.[i]

Philip Morris’s challenge to Uruguay’s tobacco regulations raises a number of fascinating (although not entirely new) issues concerning international investment law, including the scope of fair and equitable treatment, the use of most favored nation (MFN) provisions to invoke more lenient procedural standards, and the availability of injunctive relief in investment arbitration. The legal basis of Philip Morris’s notice of claim against Australia has not yet been publicly disclosed, but the case promises to be closely watched in Australia and abroad.

Perhaps even more interesting, however, will be the response of governments to this use of investor-state arbitration in the politically sensitive context of tobacco regulation.  Philip Morris has lobbied the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to include strong investment protections for tobacco trademarks in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA).  Australia, in turn, has announced that it will oppose the inclusion of investor-state arbitration in its future free trade agreements, including the TPPA, due in part to the threat of challenges to its proposed plain packaging rules.  The reaction to Australia’s stance by the United States government, which is legally prohibited from promoting tobacco exports or seeking the removal of non-discriminatory tobacco regulations, will merit particular attention.

Threat of investment arbitration used against Canada’s plain packaging proposal 

Canadian parliamentarians first seriously considered plain packing as a regulatory option in early 1994.  The tobacco industry had just won a lengthy campaign to roll back high tobacco taxes, and Parliament sought to offset the health effects of lower taxes by implementing plain packaging regulations.[ii]

Given the widespread concern for tobacco’s negative health effects, the tobacco industry was wary of debating plain packaging as a health issue.  The industry saw trade and investment rules, especially those included in the recently enacted NAFTA, as an effective way to frame plain packaging as a legal issue divorced from health concerns.[iii]  Relying on NAFTA’s investment chapter, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company sent a memorandum to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health arguing that plain packaging would constitute an illegal expropriation of a legally protected trademark, requiring Canada to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.[iv]

The mere threat of investment arbitration had a powerful impact on Parliament’s deliberations on plain packaging.  Although it was the Canadian Supreme Court’s invalidation of Canada’s Tobacco Products Control Act in 1995 that ultimately put the plain packaging debate to rest, the NAFTA threat is widely believed to have deterred the government from taking legislative action on plain packaging prior to the Court’s ruling.[v]  

Philip Morris v. Uruguay 

On 19 February 2010, Philip Morris filed a request for arbitration against Uruguay with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).  Philip Morris alleges that recent tobacco regulations enacted by Uruguay violate several provisions of the Switzerland-Uruguay bilateral investment treaty (BIT).[vi]   Specifically, Philip Morris is challenging three provisions of Uruguay’s tobacco regulations: (1) a “single presentation” requirement that prohibits marketing more than one tobacco product under each brand,[vii] (2) a requirement that tobacco packages include “pictograms” with graphic images of the health consequences of smoking (such as cancerous lungs),[viii] and (3) a mandate that health warnings cover 80% of the front and back of cigarette packages.[ix]

All three measures, Philip Morris argues, violate Article 3(1) of the BIT, which prohibits subjecting investments to “unreasonable” measures, because they are overbroad and bear no rational relationship to their purported public health objectives.[x]  Philip Morris further alleges that the single presentation requirement constitutes an expropriation of Philip Morris’s trademarks by prohibiting their use on multiple brands.[xi]

The scope of fair and equitable treatment

Philip Morris’s most interesting claims implicate one of the more persistent areas of debate in international investment law:  the scope of the rights provided under the “fair and equitable treatment” provisions of investment treaties.  The most restrictive interpretation of this language (and the position that the United States has taken since 2002) is that it merely reflects the customary international law standard of protection that is already guaranteed to foreign investors under the right to the “minimum standard of treatment” under international law.

Philip Morris, however, asserts some of the more expansive interpretations of fair and equitable treatment, including a right to a “stable and predictable regulatory framework.”  This right, Philip Morris argues, was violated by Uruguay’s single presentation and pictogram requirements, which frustrated its “legitimate expectations” concerning its investment in Uruguay.[xii]  Philip Morris also argues that Uruguay has denied it fair and equitable treatment by violating the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), implicitly adopting the controversial position that fair and equitable treatment includes rights under treaties in addition to customary international law.[xiii]

Philip Morris’s request for arbitration also raises interesting procedural questions concerning the use of MFN clauses to avoid procedural obligations and the availability of injunctive relief in investment arbitration.

Injunctive relief as a remedy in investor-state arbitration

In addition to monetary damages, Philip Morris is requesting that the tribunal order Uruguay to suspend the application of the challenged regulations.[xiv]   Investor-state tribunals typically provide relief in the form of monetary damages; there has been relatively little discussion of the availability of injunctive relief.  At least one prominent commentator, however, has concluded that “the [ICSID] Convention’s drafting history indicates that an ICSID tribunal has the power not only to award monetary damages, but also to order a party to perform a specific act or to desist from a particular course of action.”[xv]

Using MFN provisions to bypass procedural requirements

Prior to bringing an investor-state claim, Article 10 of the Switzerland-Uruguay BIT requires an investor to attempt to negotiate a resolution of a dispute with the host country for at least six months, and then to attempt to litigate the dispute through the domestic courts of the host state for at least eighteen months.  Philip Morris argues, however, that it need not comply with either requirement because the BIT contains an MFN provision that entitles it to the standard of treatment that Uruguay provides to investors from other countries under BITs that permit investors to proceed directly to arbitration.

A similar strategy was used in the well-known Maffezini v. Spain arbitration to bypass a provision in the Argentina-Spain BIT that requires an investor to pursue available domestic remedies for at least eighteen months before bringing an arbitration claim.[xvi]  Other tribunals have rejected attempts to use MFN clauses in investment treaties to gain access to more favorable dispute settlement provisions in other agreements.[xvii]

Tobacco regulations and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

The potential use of investment arbitration to challenge tobacco regulations has also become a source of controversy in the negotiations on the TPPA, a free trade agreement being negotiated by Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.   Philip Morris has moved aggressively to use the TPPA negotiations to limit restrictions on tobacco marketing.   In comments submitted to USTR, Philip Morris argued that Australia’s plain packaging regulations would be “tantamount to expropriation” of its intellectual property rights, and complained of the broad authority delegated to Singapore’s Minister of Health to restrict tobacco marketing.[xviii]  In order to address these “excessive legislative proposals,” Philip Morris urged USTR to pursue both strong protections for intellectual property and inclusion of the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism in the TPPA.

More recently, Philip Morris served the government of Australia with a notice of claim, setting in motion a three-month period of negotiation before arbitration proceedings can be commenced. Philip Morris is relying on the Australia-Hong Kong BIT, as its Australian operations are owned by the Hong Kong-based Philip Morris Asia Limited. Announcing the notice of claim on 27 June 2011, a spokesperson for the company said “damages may amount to billions of dollars”.

Australia renounces investor-state arbitration and greater rights for foreign investors

Even before its notice of claim was sent in June, Philip Morris’s aggressive use of investment law to challenge tobacco regulations may have backfired.   In April, Australia’s government announced that it would no longer support the inclusion of investor-state arbitration in its free trade agreements, explicitly linking its new position to the attempts to “limit [Australia’s] capacity to put health warnings or plain packaging requirements on tobacco products . . .”[xix]

Significantly, Australia also indicated that it would support equal treatment for foreign and domestic investors, but would oppose provisions in future agreements that would provide foreign investors with greater rights.  This stance echoes the Calvo Doctrine that many Latin American governments once espoused, as well as the United States Congress’s mandate that U.S. investment agreements should not provide foreign investors with greater substantive rights than those enjoyed by domestic investors.[xx]

Australia’s initiative on plain packaging is consistent with its status as a Party to the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the world’s first global public health treaty.  Article 11 of the FCTC requires all signatories to enact strong packaging and labeling regulations, consistent with those enacted in Uruguay and proposed in Australia.[xxi]  Another prospective member of the TPPA and signatory to the FCTC, New Zealand, has indicated that it may also impose plain packaging regulations on tobacco products,[xxii] further heightening tension over the issue in the TPPA negotiations.

Conflict between investment rules and U.S. law supporting tobacco regulations?

 The controversy over plain packaging regulations and investor-state arbitration puts the United States in an awkward position in the TPPA negotiations.   Since 1997, an amendment to the annual appropriations bill sponsored by Congressman Lloyd Doggett has prohibited USTR from using government funds—

to promote the sale or export of tobacco or tobacco products, or to seek the reduction or removal by any foreign country of restrictions on the marketing of tobacco or tobacco products, except for restrictions which are not applied equally to all tobacco or tobacco products of the same type.[xxiii]

Executive Order 13193, signed by President Clinton in 2001, similarly prohibits U.S. agencies from promoting the sale or export of tobacco or seeking to reduce or remove foreign governments’ advertising restrictions on tobacco products.[xxiv]

Arguably, USTR routinely violates these restrictions by negotiating provisions in U.S. trade agreements that potentially restrict the ability of governments to regulate the marketing of tobacco products.  U.S. FTAs typically include many of the same provisions that Philip Morris is currently invoking in its arbitration against Uruguay, including protection for intellectual property rights, investor-state dispute settlement, a prohibition on uncompensated expropriation, and a guarantee of “fair and equitable treatment.”  Nevertheless,   in light of the significant media coverage that Australia’s stance on plain packaging and investor-state arbitration has received, it appears likely that USTR’s compliance with the Doggett Amendment and Executive Order 13193 in the TPPA negotiations will attract substantial scrutiny.

Conclusion

The tobacco industry’s aggressive use of investment rules could prove to be an effective strategy for opposing restrictions on tobacco marketing.  Yet given the widespread support for tobacco regulations, it seems just as plausible that this strategy could result in a backlash against investor-state arbitration.   Accordingly, the growing tension between tobacco regulations and investor-state arbitration should be a subject of interest not only for tobacco companies and public health advocates, but also for anyone interested in the future of investor-state arbitration.

Authors

Matthew C. Porterfield is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Harrison Institute for Public Law.  Christopher R. Byrnes is a J.D. candidate, 2012, at Georgetown University.

How the consensus' gatekeepers got egg on their face.

James Tour on OOL science's circus.

On Origin of Life, Synthetic Chemist James Tour Delivers Chastisement to Jeremy England
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer  

As a postscript to Brian Miller’s  reply to MIT physicist Jeremy England, see this from the famed synthetic organic chemist James Tour, writing for the online journal Inference. In“An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Tour sets out this way:

Life should not exist. This much we know from chemistry. In contrast to the ubiquity of life on earth, the lifelessness of other planets makes far better chemical sense. Synthetic chemists know what it takes to build just one molecular compound. The compound must be designed, the stereochemistry controlled. Yield optimization, purification, and characterization are needed. An elaborate supply is required to control synthesis from start to finish. None of this is easy. Few researchers from other disciplines understand how molecules are synthesized.

His colleagues are fooling themselves if they imagine otherwise. He gets around to England, not naming him except in a footnote, at the end:

If one understands the second law of thermodynamics, according to some physicists,15 “You [can] start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.”16

The quote, remarkably, is from Jeremy England in an interview with Natalie Wolchover for Quanta. Tour also cites England’s article “Statistical Physics of Self-Replication,” in the Journal of Chemical Physics, and one of the most absurdly titled God-bashing articles we’ve come across, “God is on the Ropes: The Brilliant New Science That Has Creationists and the Christian Right Terrified,” by Paul Rosenberg writing for Salon. Rosenberg quotes England from the same Quanta article, “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.” Oh, really, does it?

Tour goes on, referring to the notion that random atoms will become a plant if given plenty of light and plenty of time:

The interactions of light with small molecules is well understood. The experiment has been performed. The outcome is known. Regardless of the wavelength of the light, no plant ever forms.

We synthetic chemists should state the obvious. The appearance of life on earth is a mystery. We are nowhere near solving this problem. The proposals offered thus far to explain life’s origin make no scientific sense.

Beyond our planet, all the others that have been probed are lifeless, a result in accord with our chemical expectations. The laws of physics and chemistry’s Periodic Table are universal, suggesting that life based upon amino acids, nucleotides, saccharides and lipids is an anomaly. Life should not exist anywhere in our universe. Life should not even exist on the surface of the earth.17

It’s somehow more satisfying that England isn’t identified in the body of the article, but only in a footnote. That is a memorable instance of a senior scientist quietly taking a junior colleague out behind the woodshed. For more on the general subject, see Tour’s slashing 2016 lecture,  “The Origin of Life: An Inside Story.”

Darwinism's quest for a free lunch hits yet another dead end?

Conservation of Information and Coevolution: New BIO-Complexity Article by Ewert and Marks
Brian Miller  

In a  previous article I described Winston Ewert, Robert Marks, and William Dembski’s book Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics which identifies the limitations of evolutionary algorithms to find solutions for complex problems. The book demonstrates that this class of programs is only capable of achieving non-trivial results unless information about desired outcomes is programmed into them. For instance, a program designed to find the best strategy for playing checkers must have detailed information about the game programmed into its search method. It could not develop a strategy to play chess without altering the underlying algorithm to include new chess-related information.

This constraint is a direct result of No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems and the related law of  Conservation of Information. Attempts have been make to overcome this challenge by appealing to what are termed coevolutionary searches. However, as Ewert and Marks demonstrate in a new article for the journal BIO-Complexity, these algorithms do not escape the NFL barrier, so they are no more efficient on average than random searches.

Evolutionary algorithms typically follow a standard set of steps. They generate trial solutions to a problem, and then assign each trial some “fitness” value. These values are then used to determine how the next iteration of trials is generated for testing. The process continues until a target is found.

Ewert and Marks use the illustration of generating recipes for making pancakes. In this example, a trial recipe represents a list of the specific amounts of each ingredient and details of the cooking, such as burner setting and times. The assigned value corresponds to the prepared pancake’s taste, and it determines how new recipes are generated. The process continues until a pancake is created that meets some taste standard. The set of values associated with all possible trials is described as a fitness landscape, and the search algorithm must navigate its terrain looking for targets. For standard algorithms, all information needed to assign a fitness value is known. In contrast, for coevolutionary algorithms information is not fully known, so incomplete or “subjacent” information must often be used. That’s because the fitness landscape continuously changes due to the presence of other organisms or other contingent factors.

This difference can be illustrated in terms of an examples from biological evolution. A standard evolutionary algorithm would correspond to an organism having a specific “fitness” which remains fairly constant in most situations. For instance, that of a desert plant might relate to such innate abilities as conserving water and processing sunlight. A computer program could model the plant’s fitness using related variables, such as the plant’s mass and the amount of chlorophyll produced in its leaves. These variables would fully determine the assigned fitness value. In contrast, a coevolutonary process would correspond to the fitness changing over time due to such factors as interactions with other species and details of the physical environment. For instance, chemicals in the skin could provide greater or lesser protection from different predators, and the shape of the plant could prove more or less helpful in different settings.

To model this increased complexity, the algorithms generate a query matrix where a row is assigned to each candidate solution, and each column corresponds to a different factor affecting fitness such as interactions with a particular species. Many cells in this matrix are often not known, whether due to computational or other practical limitations, so various methods are employed to assign each trial solution (row) an aggregate value based on the limited knowledge. The algorithm then proceeds as with traditional models. Many have claimed that coevolutionary programs can find solutions to a wide variety of problems more quickly on average than random searches, thus overcoming the restrictions of the NFL theorems. In other words, they eliminate the need for programmers to provide problem-specific “active information” to guide searches.

To test this claim, Ewert and Marks measured the performance of various coevolutionary algorithms for a variety of problems. They found that they could at best match the performance of traditional “full-search” methods, and they typically performed worse. Their article also describes how claims to the contrary were based on research that focused on solving very simple problems or that designed experiments in such a way as to provide hidden information to assist in finding targets. Therefore, coevolutionary processes cannot overcome NFL limitations, as they also require problem-specific information to perform properly.

These results have direct implications for Darwinian evolution. Biologists often claim that coevolutionary interactions between different species or species and the environment can alter the underlying fitness landscape in such a way as to drive evolutionary changes. A classic example is the proposed coevolution of bees and flowering plants. Many plants need insects as carriers for their pollen. As a result, the presence of insects places selective pressure on the plants to produce smells, colors, and nectar to attract them. In turn, the presence of the plants places selective pressures on the insects to move toward the plants’ signals to obtain the food supply. In addition, insects are selected for thicker hairs on their legs to capture more pollen. They can then fertilize more plants resulting in a greater food supply. Such scenarios may sound plausible, but they only result in trivial adjustments to preexisting structures.

In contrast, complex innovations, such as new body plans, radical innovations which, in turn, require large amounts of new information.The environment is often claimed to provide this new information, which is believed to be hidden in the fitness landscapes coupled to coevolutionary interactions. However, this research by Ewert and Marks directly challenges the claim. The search space corresponding to biological forms is vastly greater than what could be searched through random mutations in the offspring of any species. And natural selection cannot help without being provided large amounts of information on where new forms reside. For coevolutionary processes are no more efficient at solving problems than traditional evolutionary algorithms, and the latter are no more efficient on average than random searches.

Cashing in on the gospel?

Winged navigators v. Darwin (again).

Migrating Birds Can Find Their Flocks After Many Miles and Days Apart

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Carsten Egevang’s study of Arctic terns, highlighted in the Illustra Media documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds, stunned the ornithological world. It was the first time geolocators logged the exact routes of the world travelers, whose annual tour takes them from pole to pole. As geolocators (also called loggers) improve, more species can be studied, increasing our knowledge of migratory behavior. Now, for the first time, a new flight trace shows surprising social interactions en route for a bird that migrates between Europe and Africa.

The European bee-eater (Merops apiaster) is a flashy bird adorned in brilliant shades of rusty red, orange, yellow, and cyan with black highlights on the face. Males and females are similarly colored. Weighing just 2 ounces at a length of 10 to 11 inches, this gregarious bird with a cheerful song covers a lot of territory, looking for bees, wasps, dragonflies, and other insects to eat. Each bird can consume 250 bees a day, but this causes little impact on bee populations (less than 1 percent, according to Wikipedia). The birds catch their prey in flight, but remove the stingers first by banging the insects against hard surfaces before gulping them down. 

From Germany to Angola

The migration of M. apiaster takes it between Germany in summer and Angola in winter, a distance of 14,000 km (8,700 miles). This species migrates in small flocks usually ranging from 5 to 39 individuals. But without being able to follow a flock with ultralight aircraft, it is “it has previously been impossible to monitor spatiotemporal group dynamics in small migrating birds.”

Researchers from the Swiss Ornithological Institute, reporting in Current Biology, outfitted 77 Merops birds in 2015, and 92 more in 2016 with loggers. The instruments recorded ambient light for geolocation and atmospheric pressure for altitude. Ten birds were recovered in 2016, and 19 in 2017. The scientists wanted to investigate the following question:

From zebras to monarch butterflies, migratory species undertake some of the most extreme feats of endurance known in the animal kingdom. With the advent of novel tracking technologies, we are gradually completing the picture of where and when they travel. However, without being able to directly observe migration, we have very little knowledge of who might migrate with whom.

From the data, the scientists were able to piece together the routes of each individual, and infer social interactions within the flock. To the researchers’ surprise, some birds could separate from the main flock in small groups, fly thousands of miles apart on another route, and then re-join the main flock up to 5 days later, even though the sub-flocks probably encountered different environmental conditions along the way.

We present the first evidence of a migratory bird flying together with non-kin of different ages and sexes at all stages of the life cycle. In fact, 49% stay together throughout the annual cycle, never separating longer than 5 days at a time despite the ∼14,000-km journey. Of those that separated for longer, 89% reunited within less than a month with individuals they had previously spent time with, having flown up to 5,000 km apart. These birds were not only using the same non-breeding sites, but also displayed coordinated foraging behaviors — these are unlikely to result from chance encounters in response to the same environmental conditions alone. Better understanding of migratory group dynamics, using the presented methods, could help improve our understanding of collective decision making during large-scale movements.

Functional Advantages

The authors speculated about functional advantages for this divide-and-conquer strategy that they call “fission-fusion” events, but did not expect to see unrelated birds cooperating so well.

In conclusion, we find that birds from the same colony do not always follow the same migratory routes but will in fact join with birds from nearby colonies post-breeding to form groups that migrate together. Groups are generally stable during migration. However, if groups separate, they can reunite in the non-breeding grounds to form dynamic groups that repeatedly forage together, sometimes separating for 1–5 days at a time before migrating back to the breeding grounds together. Most surprisingly, these groups showed no age or sex structure and consisted of non-kin. Our research is the first to show such behavior between migratory non-breeding non-kin bird groups, displaying rare spatiotemporal group dynamics more often observed in mammals.

The wonder of this behavior can be appreciated by reversing roles. Imagine the birds running an experiment on humans. They remove all smartphones and electronic devices, outfit them with loggers the people can’t read, and send them through uncharted territory in Africa in small groups of mixed sex and age who don’t know each other, telling them to meet in Germany. Wouldn’t the birds be flabbergasted to watch small groups split off from the main group, hike for a thousand miles on a different route without communication, and then re-join the main group a week later? Even if the humans used ultralight aircraft, it would be astonishing to see them find one another. 

It’s not like the terrain has some bottleneck that forces the birds toward a particular narrow flight corridor. Somehow, these birds show a degree of social coordination only previously seen in mammals.

Fission-fusion can occur without individuals being able to “recognize” each other per se. The same individuals could encounter each other again and again at the same site as a result of migratory connectivity, simply because it is the only one available to them at a particular period. Under such circumstances, resource bottlenecks are likely driving group fusion, not social relationships. On the other hand, where resources occur broadly over a large area, animals must coordinate decisions to fuse into a long-term group — especially if they regularly fissure and must find each other again. Only species with high social cognition, such as elephants, dolphins, and bats, have been found to form long-term social bonds by coordinating decisions, despite separations imposed by migration. In birds, long-term social bonds, despite fission-fusion dynamics, have been observed between non-migratory non-kin, migratory kin, or migratory bonded pairs. Long-term social bonds, despite fission-fusion dynamics, are poorly understood in non-kin migratory birds.

Group Formation

What they’re saying is that unrelated birds that don’t migrate are known to form social bonds, and mating pairs can be expected to cooperate during migration. But why would unrelated birds of mixed sex and age do this? There are advantages to cooperation: “Group formation is pivotal in allowing individuals to interact, transfer information, and adapt to changing conditions,” they say. But it also comes with risks:

Migratory species are notable for their propensity to aggregate in large numbers. The stability of migratory groups over time can be important in determining survival, navigational accuracy, migratory speed, transfer of information, and new migratory behaviors. However, migrating with others is not without risk, as it can increase both disease prevalence and resource competition. Group size typically fluctuates over time and space, with individuals coming together and separating; hereafter termed “fission-fusion dynamics”) as they trade off the different benefits and costs of cooperation. Indeed, resource patches are distant, seasonal, and often unpredictable. One slow individual could, for instance, force the entire group to slow down and miss peaks in resource availability, creating conflict. Groups can therefore either compromise to remain together or spilt into subgroups, for example, of different migratory speeds.

These birds appear to have reached an optimal trade-off between benefits and risks. How could such complex behavior arise by mutation and selection? It seems a challenge too daunting for neo-Darwinism. Maybe that’s why the researchers don’t speculate about evolution. 

As wonderful as the observed group dynamics have been shown to be, there are other wonders even greater. Try to build a robot that can fly and power itself by capturing and consuming bees. While you’re at it, make it beautiful to look at and able to sing a beautiful song. Fit all that capability into two ounces, and give it software to find a target 9,000 miles away employing optimal group dynamics. Then endow it with the ability to make copies of itself. If you succeeded at all this, would you not be offended to hear some people say it “emerged” by chance?

On Darwinists' shifting of the goalposts.

A clash of titans. LXXV

Partisan politics is balkanising the U.S.?:Pros and cons.

On the law of noncontradiction.

re to Think About

IV. The Law of Excluded Middle

       One logical law that is easy to accept is the law of non-contradiction. This law can be expressed by the propositional formula ¬(p^¬p). Breaking the sentence down a little makes it easier to understand. p^¬p means that p is both true and false, which is a contradiction. So, negating this statement means that there can be no contradictions (hence, the name of the law). In other words, the law of non-contradiction tells us that a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time. This law is relatively uncontroversial, though there have been those who believe that it may fail in certain special cases. However, it does lead us to a logical principle that has historically been more controversial: the law of excluded middle.  

       The law of excluded middle can be expressed by the propositional formula p_¬p. It means that a statement is either true or false. Think of it as claiming that there is no middle ground between being true and being false. Every statement has to be one or the other. That’s why it’s called the law of excluded middle, because it excludes a middle ground between truth and falsity. So while the law of non-contradiction tells us that no statement can be both true and false, the law of excluded middle tells us that they must all be one or the other. Now, we can get to this law by considering what it means for the law of non-contradiction to be true. For the law of noncontradiction to be true, ¬(p^¬p) must be true. This means p^¬p must be false. Now, we must refer back the truth table definition for a conjunction. What does it take for p ^ ¬p to be false? It means that at least one of the conjuncts must be false. So, either p is false, or ¬p is false. Well, if p is false, then ¬p must be true. And if ¬p is false, then p must be true. So we are left with the disjunction p _ ¬p, which is exactly the formulation I gave of the law of excluded middle. So we have just derived the law of excluded middle from the law of non-contradiction.  

       What we just did was convert the negation of a conjunction into a disjunction,

by considering what it means for the conjunction to fail. The rule that lets us do this is known as De Morgan’s rule, after Augustus De Morgan. Formally speaking, it tells us that statements of the following two forms are equivalent: ¬(p^q) and ¬p_¬q. If you substitute ¬p for q in the first formula, you will have the law of non-contradiction. So you might want to try doing the derivation yourself. You will, however, need the rule that tells us that p is equivalent to ¬¬p. The point of this exercise, however, was to show that it is possible to derive the law of excluded middle from the law of non-contradiction. However, it is also possible to convince yourself of the truth of the law of excluded middle without the law of non-contradiction.  

       We can show using the method of truth tables that the disjunctive statement

p _ ¬p is always true. As a point of terminology, a statement that is always true, irrespective of the truth values of its components, is called a tautology. p _ ¬p is a tautology, since no matter what the truth value of p is, p_¬p is always true. We can see this illustrated in the truth table belowp    ¬p    p _ ¬p

T     F     T

F     T     T  

       You can try constructing a similar truth table to show that the law of non-contradiction is also a tautology. Its truth table is a bit more complicated, though. However, since the law of excluded middle is a tautology, it should hold no matter what the truth value of p is. In fact, it should be true no matter what statement we decide p should represent. So the law of excluded middle tells us that every statement whatsoever must be either true or false. At first, this might not seem like a very problematic claim. But before getting too comfortable with this idea, we might want to consider Bertrand Russell’s famous example: “The present King of France is bald.” Since the law of excluded middle tells us that every statement is either true or false, the sentence “The present King of France is bald” must be either true or false. Which is it?  

       Since there is no present King of France, it would seem quite unusual to claim that this sentence is true. But if we accept the law of excluded middle, this leaves us only one option - namely, to claim that it is false. Now, at this point, we might choose to reject the law of excluded middle altogether, or contend that it simply does not hold in some cases. This is an interesting option toconsider, but then we might need to consider why the method of constructing truth tables tells us that the law of excluded middle holds, if it actually doesn’t. We would also have to consider why it is derivable from the principle of non-contradiction. After all, this sentence doesn’t pose a problem for the law of non-contradiction, since it’s not both true and false. So we’ll ignore this option for now.    

       Returning to the problem at hand, we must now consider the question of what it means for the sentence “The present King of France is bald” to be false. Perhaps it means “The present King of France is not bald.” But that would imply that there is a present King of France, and he is not bald. This is not a conclusion we want to reach. Russell, in his 1905 paper “On Denoting” presented his own solution to this problem, which comes in the form of a theory of definite descriptions. Under this theory, we can think of there being a hidden conjunctive structure in the sentence “The present King of France is bald.” What the sentence really says is that there is a present King of France, and he is bald. So the fact that there is no present King of France implies that this sentence is false, and we have the solution we need.    

       Russell’s solution clearly suggests that we can’t just extract the logical structure of a sentence from its grammatical structure. We have to take other things into account. If you’re interested in issues about the relationship between logic and language, you might want to take a class in philosophy of language. The other essay in this section, entitled “Logic and Natural Language”, covers some other issues in this area.    

       One method of proof that comes naturally from the law of excluded middle is a proof by contradiction, or reductio ad absurdum. In a proof by contradiction, we assume the negation of a statement and proceed to prove that the assumption leads us to a contradiction. A reductio ad absurdum sometimes shows that the assumption leads to an absurd conclusion which is not necessarily a contradiction. In both cases, the unsatisfactory result of negating our statement leads us to conclude that our statement is, in fact, true. How does this follow from the law of excluded middle? The law of excluded middle tells us that there are only two possibilities with respect to a statement p. Either p is true, or ¬p is true. In showing that the assumption of ¬p leads us to a contradictory conclusion, we eliminate the possibility that ¬p is true. So we are then forced to conclude that p is true, since the law of excluded middle is supposed to hold for any statement whatsoever.    

       Now, I’ve been a bit flippant in talking about statements. Statements can be about a lot of different things. The above discussion illustrated a problem with statements about things that don’t actually exist. I’m sure most people would agree that the designation “the present King of France” refers to something that doesn’t exist. But what about situations where it’s not so certain? One of the main metaphysical questions in the philosophy of mathematics is the question of whether or not mathematical objects actually exist. Think about the question of whether numbers exist. If they do exist, then what are they? After all, they’re not concrete things that we can reach out and touch. But if they don’t exist, then what’s going on in math?    

       Metaphysical worries have motivated certain people to argue that proofs by contradiction are not legitimate proofs in mathematics. Proponents of intuitionism and constructivism in mathematics place a significant emphasis on the construction of mathematical objects. One way to characterize this position is that in order to show that a mathematical object exists, it is necessary to construct it, or at the very least, provide a method for its construction. This is their answer to the metaphysical question. Suppose we had a mathematical proof in which we assumed an object did not exist, and proved that our assumption lead us to a contradiction. For an intuitionist or a constructivist, this proof would not be a sufficient demonstration that the object does exist. A sufficient demonstration would have to involve the construction of the object.    

       Even if questions about existence get too complicated, we can still ask the question “What mathematical objects can we legitimately talk about?” The intuitionist answer is that we can talk about those mathematical objects which we know can be constructed.    

       Simply speaking, intuitionistic logic is logic without the law of excluded middle. I have outlined some small part of the motivation behind developing such a system, but more details can be found in the work of L.E.J. Brouwer and Arend Heyting.

Safe spaces:A danger to intellectual development?:Pros and cons.

The amazing Randi on the academic mindset.

It's design all the way down/up?

From Micro to Macro Scales, Intelligent Design Is in the Details
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

From the molecular nanomachines within a tiny cell to the large-scale structure of the universe, design is everywhere to be found. Sometimes the best defense of intelligent design is just to ponder the details. Here are some new illustrations:

Fastest Creature Is a Cell

If you were asked what the fastest creature on earth is, would you guess a cheetah or a peregrine falcon? There’s an even faster critter you would probably never guess. It’s called Spirostomum ambiguum, and it’s just 4mm in size. This protozoan, Live Science says, can shorten its body by 60 percent in just milliseconds. How does it do it? Scientists “have no idea how the single-celled organism can move this fast without the muscle cells of larger creatures,” the article says. “And scientists have no clue how, regardless of how the contraction works, the little critter moves like this without wrecking all of its internal structures.” Saad Bhamla, a researcher at Georgia Tech, wants to find out. And in the process, he will gain design information that can be applied in human engineering:

“As engineers, we like to look at how nature has handled important challenges,” Bhamla said in the release. “We are always thinking about how to make these tiny things that we see zipping around in nature. If we can understand how they work, maybe the information can cross over to fill the gap for small robots that can move fast with little energy use.” 

Cells Do “The Wave”

Speaking of speed, most cells have another faster-than-physics trick. When a cell needs to commit hari-kari, it performs an act something like “The Wave” in a baseball stadium. Researchers from Stanford Medicine, investigating programmed cell death or apoptosis, noticed wave-fronts of specialized destroying enzymes, called caspases, spreading throughout the cell faster than diffusion could explain. 

Publishing in Science, they hypothesized that “trigger waves” accelerate the process of apoptosis, similar to how a “wave” of moving arms can travel rapidly around a stadium even though each person’s arms are not moving that fast. Another example is how one domino falling can trigger whole chains of dominoes across a gym floor. The mechanism presupposes that the elements, like the dominoes, are already set up in a finely-tuned way to respond appropriately. This may not be the only example of a new design principle. It may explain how the immune system can respond quickly.

“We have all this information on proteins and genes in all sorts of organisms, and we’re trying to understand what the recurring themes are,” Ferrell said. “We show that long-range communication can be accomplished by trigger waves, which depend on things like positive feedback loops, thresholds and spatial coupling mechanisms. These ingredients are present all over the place in biological regulation. Now we want to know where else trigger waves are found.”

The Complicated Ballet

Just organizing a chromosome is a mind-boggling wonder. But what do enzymes do when they need to find a spot on DNA that is constantly in motion? It’s enough to make your head spin. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin describe it in familiar terms:

Thirumalai suggests thinking of DNA like a book with a recipe for a human, where the piece of information you need is on page 264. Reading the code is easy. But we now understand that the book is moving through time and space. That can make it harder to find page 264.

Yes, and the reader might be at a distant part of the nucleus, too. The challenge is not just academic. Things can go terribly wrong if the reader and book don’t meet up properly. They call it a “complicated ballet” going on.

“Rather than the structure, we chose to look at the dynamics to figure out not only how this huge amount of genetic information is packaged, but also how the various loci move,” said Dave Thirumalai, chair of UT Austin’s chemistry department. “We learned it is not just the genetic code you have to worry about. If the timing of the movement is off, you could end up with functional aberrations.”

Strong Succulent Seeds

The seed coats of some plants, like succulents and grasses, have an odd architecture at the microscopic level. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire, “inspired by elements found in nature,” noticed the wavy-like zigzags in the seed coats and dreamed of applications that need lightweight materials that are strong but not brittle.

The results, published in the journal Advanced Materials, show that the waviness of the mosaic-like tiled structures of the seed coat, called sutural tessellations, plays a key role in determining the mechanical response. Generally, the wavier it is, the more an applied loads [sic] can effectively transit from the soft wavy interface to the hard phase, and therefore both overall strength and toughness can simultaneously be increased.

Researchers say that the design principles described show a promising approach for increasing the mechanical performance of tiled composites of man-made materials. Since the overall mechanical properties of the prototypes could be tuned over a very large range by simply varying the waviness of the mosaic-like structures, they believe it can provide a roadmap for the development of new functionally graded composites that could be used in protection, as well as energy absorption and dissipation.

Small High Flyers

You may remember the episode in Flight about Arctic terns, whose epic flights were tracked by loggers. Another study at Lund University found that even smaller birds fly up to 4,000 meters (over 13,000 feet) high on their migrations to Africa. Only two individuals from two species were tracked, but the researchers believe some of the birds fly even higher on the return flight to Sweden. It’s a mystery how they can adjust their metabolism to such extreme altitude, thin air, low pressure, and low temperature conditions.

Don’t Look for Habitable Planets Here

The centers of galaxies, we learned from The Privileged Planet, are not good places to look for life. Cross off another type of location now: the centers of globular clusters. An astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, studied the large Omega Centauri cluster hopefully, but concluded that “Close encounters between stars in the Milky Way’s largest globular cluster leave little room for habitable planetary systems.” The core of the cluster has mostly red dwarfs, which have their own habitability issues to begin with. Then, Stephen Cane calculated that interactions between the closely-associated stars in the cluster would occur too frequently for comfort. His colleague Sarah Deveny says, “The rate at which stars gravitationally interact with each other would be too high to harbor stable habitable planets.”

Solar Probe Launches

The only habitable planet we know about so far is the earth. Surprisingly, there is still a lot about our own star, the sun, that astronomers do not understand. A new mission is going to fly to the sun to solve some of its mysteries, Space.com reports, but like the old joke says, don’t worry: it’s going at night. Named the Parker Solar Probe after 91-year-old Eugene Parker, who discovered the solar wind in 1958, the spacecraft carries a specially designed heat shield to protect its instruments. The probe will taste some of the material in the solar corona to try to figure out why the corona is much hotter than the surface, the photosphere. See Phys.org to read about some of the mission’s goals.

Speaking of the solar wind, charged particles from the sun would fry any life on the earth were it not for our magnetic field that captures the charged particles and funnels them toward the poles. Word has it that Illustra Media is working on a beautiful new short film about this, explaining how the charged particles collide with the upper atmosphere, producing the beautiful northern and southern lights — giving us an aesthetic natural wonder as well as planetary protection.