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I didn’t think Mossad admitted its involvement in “Beepergate“: the dissemination among Hezbollah of pagers and walkie-talkies that exploded on a signal last September.  It was key in demoralizing Hezbollah as well as eroding its power, and was cleverly targeted to avoid collateral damage. Apparently now we know that Mossad did this, since two ex-Mossad agents admitted it, and their story was shown on “60 Minutes” this week. It’s also recounted in the Times of Israel.

Here’s the 60 Minutes episode. What’s new: the walkie-talkies were disseminated ten years ago, but weren’t triggered until a few months ago. Since walkie-talkies are used only in battle, Mossad began to weaponize pagers as well. A series of shell companies in Taiwan and Hungary were set up to sell the devices to Hezbollah (they had exploding batteries) while completely masking Israel’s involvement.Multiple tests were done by Mossad to ensure that only the carrier of the pager (a Hezbollah fighter) would be injured. A big internet campaign was mounted to tout the advantages of the exploding beepers, which were larger and thus more cumbersome than conventional beepers.

To get the pagers only into the hands of Hezbollah, Mossad hired the woman who usually sold pagers to the terrorists. In toto, 30 Lebanese died and 3,000 were injured, almost all of them fighters. Yes, a few civilians were hurt, including children. But the vast majority of those injured were terrorists. All in all, the targeted episode was quite successful. It didn’t single-handedly bring about the cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel, but Hezbollah and its controlling state, Iran, have been set back on their heels.

The Toi article pretty much replicates what’s in the video, but I’ll emphasize one bit:

the psychological effect the attack had on Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was a “tipping point of the war,” Gabriel said.

He asserted that the veteran Hezbollah leader saw pagers exploding and injuring people who were right next to him in his bunker. Asked how he knows that, Gabriel said, “It’s a strong rumor.”

Two days after the attack, Nasrallah gave a speech.

People watch the speech of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as they sit in a cafe in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

“If you look at his eyes, he was defeated,” Gabriel said. “He already lose the war. And his soldier look at him during that speech. And they saw a broken leader.”

In the days after the attack, Israel’s air force hit targets across Lebanon, killing thousands. Nasrallah was assassinated when Israel dropped bombs on his bunker.

By November, the war between Israel and Hezbollah, a byproduct of the deadly attack by Hamas-led terrorists in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, ended with a ceasefire.

Even given all the precautions, Leslie Stahl has the moxie to ask one of the ex Mossad agents whether this episode might make Israel worry about its “moral reputation.” Some question!

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Within nearly every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. The beast at the heart of our galaxy contains the mass of millions of suns, while some of the largest supermassive black holes can be more than a billion solar masses. For years, it was thought that these black holes grew in mass over time, only reaching their current size after a billion years or more. But observations from the Webb telescope show that even the youngest galaxies contain massive black holes. So how could supermassive black holes grow so large so quickly? The key to the answer could be the powerful jets black holes can produce.

Although it seems counterintuitive, it is difficult for a black hole to consume matter and grow. The gravitational pull of a black hole is immensely strong, but the surrounding matter is much more likely to be trapped in orbit around the gravitational well than to fall directly in. To enter a black hole, material needs to slow down enough to fall inward. When a black hole has a jet of material speeding away from its polar region, this high-velocity plasma can pull rotational motion from the surrounding material, thus allowing it to fall into the black hole. For this reason, black holes with powerful jets also undergo the most powerful growth.

We can see many fast-growing black holes in the distant Universe as quasars, or active galactic nuclei. We know, then, that in the middle age of the cosmos, many supermassive black holes were gaining mass rapidly. One idea is that the youngest supermassive black holes also had active jets, which would allow them to gain a million solar masses or more quite quickly. But proving this is difficult.

The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to observe jets from the earliest period of the cosmos. Light from that distant time is so redshifted that their once brilliant beacon has become dim radio light. Before this recent study, the most distant jet we observed had a redshift of z = 6.1, meaning it traveled for nearly 12.8 billion years to reach us. In this new study, the team discovered a blazar with a redshift of z = 7.0, meaning it comes from a time when the Universe was just 750 million years old.

A blazar occurs when the jet of a supermassive black hole is lined up to be pointed directly at us. Since we’re looking directly into the beam, we see the jet at its most powerful. Blazars normally allow us to calculate the true intensity of a jet, but in this case, the redshift is so strong that our conclusions must be a bit more subtle.

How distant jets could be Doppler magnified. Credit: Bañados, et al

One possibility is that the jet of this particular supermassive black hole really is pointed directly our way. Based on this, the black hole is growing so quickly that it would easily gain more than a million solar masses within the first billion years of time. But it would be extremely rare for a black hole jet to point directly at us from that distance. So statistically, that would mean there are many more early black holes that are just as active and growing just as quickly. They just aren’t aligned for us to observe.

Another possibility is that the blazar isn’t quite aligned in our direction, but the cosmic expansion of space and time has focused its energy toward us over 12.9 billion years. In other words, the blazar may appear more energetic than it actually is, thanks to relativistic cosmology. But if that is the case, then the jet of this black hole is less energetic but still powerful. And statistically, that would mean most early black holes are equally powerful.

So this latest work tells us that either there was a fraction of early black holes that grew to beasts incredibly fast, or that most black holes grew quickly, beginning at a time even earlier than we can observe. In either case, it is clear that early black holes created jets, and these jets allowed the first supermassive black holes to appear early in cosmic time.

Reference: Bañados, Eduardo, et al. “A blazar in the epoch of reionization.” Nature Astronomy (2024): 1-9.

The post How Did Black Holes Grow So Quickly? The Jets appeared first on Universe Today.

It’s been called to my attention that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) is up to mischief again. I haven’t written about it for a long time, largely because I thought it had reformed. It had largely stopped giving the $1+ million Templeton Prize to theologians and clerics, and awarding it to scientists instead—albeit scientists friendly to religion.  Further, the science that JTF was funding didn’t seem that bad or that connected to religion.

On the other hand, you’ll never see an explicitly atheist scientist get a Templeton Prize. That’s because of the history of the Foundation: John Templeton intended the billions he earned from his mutual fund to to show that science gave evidence for God. Ergo, for most of the JTF’s lifetime, the science it funded had a numinous or supernatural aspects to it. As Wikipedia notes:

The John Templeton Foundation (Templeton Foundation) is a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton. Templeton became wealthy as a contrarian investor, and wanted to support progress in religious and spiritual knowledge, especially at the intersection of religion and science.

Well, the bad old days seem to be back again.  If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll see the areas that the JTF is funding in life sciences, which appear to be areas that involve infusions into biology and evolution of goal-directedness and purpose. If those things do exist in evolution, it would constitute (or so JTF thinks) evidence for God.

The JTF, as the site above stipulates, is accepting proposals in three areas of biology, so if you want a pile of dosh and are willing to sell your soul, go ahead and send in proposals on these things:

This year we would like to receive project ideas in the following topic areas:

1.) Science of purpose. We are looking for experimental and theoretical research projects that will provide insight into the purposive, goal-directed, or agential behaviors that characterize organisms and various components of living systems. Researchers who have familiarity with our ongoing work in this area are especially encouraged to apply.

2.) Epigenetic inheritance. We are interested in funding projects that elucidate fundamental genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate inter- and trans-generational transmittance of biological information and health outcomes. We are particularly interested in how early life choices and environmental exposures causally impact development and the early onset of disease, and diagnostic platforms that may predict generational disease susceptibility.

3.) Other areas of interest. We also remain open to innovative ideas in other areas of basic research in the biological sciences, such as also origins of life, complexity, emergence, evolution, human development, plant resilience, and ecological health and interventions.

This is the first of two posts on the area “the science of purpose”, an area that is, frankly, nuts.  Evolution does not produce adaptations that are purposive and goal-directed, save for the production in some organisms of mentation and consciousness that can, psychologically, enact deliberately purposive behavior. But that’s limited only to a few groups of organisms  And, as you’ll see, that’s not all the JTF or the biologists it funds are talking about. What they’re referring to is the recent drive to impute a kind of teleology to nature, as if the evolution of organisms was somehow driven externally to achieve adaptive ends, and driven not by natural selection but. . . . well, by various poorly explained mechanisms. A group of biologists dedicated to non-Darwinian adaptation, and a group that contains many of the people who purport to have deposed the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, can be seen at the site “The Third Way” (Its list of members, by invitation only, can be seen here). Not all of the researchers there have bought into the teleological aspects of evolutionary biology, but some have, and as a whole they haven’t contributed much to the advances of evolutionary biology.  Here’s what the Third Way is said to represent:

The vast majority of people believe that there are only two alternative ways to explain the origins of biological diversity. One way is Creationism that depends upon intervention by a divine Creator. That is clearly unscientific because it brings an arbitrary supernatural force into the evolution process. The commonly accepted alternative is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. [JAC: My response to the preceding sentence is “No it doesn’t!”] Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis. Many scientists today see the need for a deeper and more complete exploration of all aspects of the evolutionary process.

By funding these alternatives, Templeton hopes that people will, by thinking that modern evolutionary theory, or “neo-Darwinism” has been rejected, be more likely to see the hand of god in science. And although the Third Way also rejects “arbitrary supernatural forces”, many take the third way to be actions of the numinous (Intelligent Design advocates love it.)

In fact, a lot of the speculation of “Third Way” theories borders on the teleological, though religion doesn’t play an explicit role. Or, rather, the “religion” involved is to depose a neo-Darwinism seen as dogmatic and constricting. To see how close some of the “Third Way” biology comes to invoking teleology, see this short take by Larry Moran on the ideas of a Third Way member, James Shapiro (Moran had a longer review of Shapiro’s ideas in a book review, but it’s no longer online.) One excerpt from the shorter Moran:

James Shapiro is one of those scientist who think that evolutionary theory is due for a “paradigm shift.” His schtick is that mutations often involve genome rearrangements and that reorganization of the genome may be a sort of “natural genetic engineering” that cells use to direct evolution. It’s hard to figure out what Shapiro actually means and even harder to figure out his motives. I posted an earlier comment from him that suggests he is looking for a middle ground between science and Intelligent Design Creationism. Here’s part of that earlier post: The Mind of James Shapiro.

“Natural genetic engineering” is in fact teleological.

Why Templeton loves the “science of purpose,” and throws a ton of money at research in this area, is because it supposedly shows that there is more to the origin of adaptations than mutation and natural selection, and a lot more more to evolutionary change than just change in genes or regulatory sequences of DNA (ergo the emphasis on “epigenetic inheritance” above).  And that feeds into the JTF’s original aim of showing that science points to God, renamed by them as “agency” or “purpose” in the new proposals.

In fact, meet the old proposals: same as the new proposals. Below is a grant given to a group of scientists for three years by the JTF, ending in August of this year. Click to read, though I give a summary below. Note that the grant awarded amounted to $14.5 million, a huge amount of money.  JTF is rich because John Templeton was a very wealthy manager of a mutual fund, and his eponymous Foundation has plenty of money (an endowment of over $3.3 billion in 2015) to fund his desire to find purpose and God in nature. Sadly, there are too many scientists eager to glom onto this money. After all, NSF and NIH grants are hard to get these days, and so what’s the issue if, by getting JTF money, you become just another prize stallion in the Templeton stable?

Here is that grant (click to go to it):

Here’s what, according to the JTF, the $14.6 million went for. Bolding is mine:

Although biologists often use descriptive language that imputes purposiveness to living systems, many have argued that these conceptions are at best heuristic, and at worst egregious errors. However, there is a growing recognition that biological phenomena which suggest agency, directionality, or goal-directedness demand new conceptual frameworks that can translate into rigorous theoretical models and discriminating empirical tests. This project addresses the demand through a novel, interdisciplinary, large-scale program that combines philosophers, theoreticians, and experimentalists to: (i) articulate more precise concepts related to function and purpose, (ii) develop innovative formal models of agency, (iii) operationalize notions of goal-directedness for accurate measurement, and (iv) trial and implement methods and platforms to detect and manipulate directionality in living systems. Seven clusters composed of multiple distinct research groups under the leadership of a coordinator will undertake collaborative activities that include within-team investigative tasks (e.g., conceptual analysis, formal modeling, and experimental inquiry), within-cluster workshops and briefings, and across-project conferences with strategic writing enterprises and outside commentators. These collaborative activities leverage the fact that each cluster is organized around key concepts (e.g., function and goal-directedness), modeling practices, and distinctive phenomena at diverse temporal and spatial scales—behavior, development, ecology, genomics, and macroevolution—and will result in conceptual, theoretical, and empirical outputs comprising foundations for a multidisciplinary science of purpose. These foundations will foster new lines of scientific research based on an increased array of conceptual possibilities, distinctive formal modeling strategies, and next-generation experimental platforms for the discovery, observation, and manipulation of purposive phenomena.

Note that, contra the Templetonian mishgass, there is no “purpose” or “goal” of evolution, whether it be by natural selection or other mechanisms like meiotic drive or genetic drift. If natural selection operates (and that’s the only process we know that can create adaptations), then there is no ultimate goal because natural selection has no foresight. Rather, mutations that leave more copies of themselves—often by improving the ability of their carriers to thrive in their environments—outcompete other gene forms that aren’t so prolific. Evolution by natural selection is a step-by-step process that has no ultimate goal, even if a well-adapted organism, like a woodpecker, looks as if was designed. That’s why evolution can go backwards, as it did several times when land animals, which evolved from fish, returned to the seas as whales and seals.

It was in fact Darwin’s great achievement to explain the illusion of design by a Creator as the results of a materialistic step-by-step process that had no ultimate goal. Given the way selection works, how could there be a “goal”? How could there be a “purpose”?

But, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades: purpose and goals are back again. Templeton has funded their study, and apparently intends to continue to funding their study.

In the next post, which will be either today or tomorrow depending on how much other work I get done, I’ll call your attention to a new paper that highlights why injecting “purpose” and “goal directedness” into evolution is intellectually vacuous and empirically unproductive.  Although I’m not surprised that Templeton is pushing this area, I am surprised at the number of scientists who are willing to jump on the purpose bus. I can explain this only by observing that one of the best ways you can get noticed in science is to depose an existing paradigm.

Here’s the header of the JTF’s homepage. Are those praying hands I see? And is that the robe of a Buddhist monk?

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