On science,pseudoscience and 21st century cosmology.

In Nature, Two Cosmologists Chide Other Cosmologists for Lack of Testable Evidence

Evolution News & Views December 22, 2014 3:10 AM

 

We have frequently criticized some of the crazy ideas emerging from modern cosmology: notions like the multiverse, inflation, Everett's "many-worlds" scenario, and other concoctions that try to escape the overwhelming evidence for design in the universe (namely, cosmic fine-tuning and the stringent requirements for habitability). Now, two leading big-bang cosmologists are joining us in the criticism, in a very high level venue, but for quite different reasons. Here's what George Ellis and Joe Silk say in Nature ("Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics"):

This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue -- explicitly -- that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific. (Emphasis added.)

In particular, they chide the string theorists, multiverse advocates, inflation theorists, and purveyors of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Speaking of inflation, it's interesting that Science Magazine listed the downfall of the BICEP2 results on inflation as one of the leading "Breakdowns" (as opposed to "Breakthroughs") of the year.

Whether Ellis and Silk's definitions of science and the scientific method are adequate is beside the point (the definition of science is a vexed question, testability is vague, and falsifiability has its flaws). What worries them is something else:

The issue of testability has been lurking for a decade. String theory and multiverse theory have been criticized in popular books and articles, including some by one of us (G.E.). In March, theorist Paul Steinhardt wrote in this journal that the theory of inflationary cosmology is no longer scientific because it is so flexible that it can accommodate any observational result. Theorist and philosopher Richard Dawid and cosmologist Sean Carroll have countered those criticisms with a philosophical case to weaken the testability requirement for fundamental physics.

We applaud the fact that Dawid, Carroll and other physicists have brought the problem out into the open. But the drastic step that they are advocating needs careful debate. This battle for the heart and soul of physics is opening up at a time when scientific results -- in topics from climate change to the theory of evolution -- are being questioned by some politicians and religious fundamentalists. Potential damage to public confidence in science and to the nature of fundamental physics needs to be contained by deeper dialogue between scientists and philosophers.

Ah, it's those "religious fundamentalists" again. The label means, approximately, "anybody who is not a materialist." It's like what astronomers call metals: "anything that is not hydrogen or helium." If we let those "fundamentalists" use the same tactics Carroll and Dawid are advocating, people might come to question climate change or (God forbid!) the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Such a case must be made in formal philosophical terms. A conference should be convened next year to take the first steps. People from both sides of the testability debate must be involved....

The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable. Only then can we defend science from attack.

What's ironic is that their advice has all the trappings of a religious council. "Science" is under attack from heretics within and without. It needs to convene its college of cardinals. The council needs to apply more stringent guidelines for use of its imprimatur. It needs to stop issuing the imprimatur to lazy priests, or else the heretics will claim they deserve it, too.

Ellis and Silk do a great job of dismantling the pretensions of modern theoretical physicists and cosmologists who have loosened their grip on observational evidence. Readers will enjoy the critiques of string theory and multiverse notions, but may be surprised by their critique of Bayesian reasoning as a substitute for evidence:

Citing Bayesian analysis, a statistical method for inferring the likelihood that an explanation fits a set of facts, Dawid equates confirmation with the increase of the probability that a theory is true or viable. But that increase of probability can be purely theoretical. Because "no-one has found a good alternative" and "theories without alternatives tended to be viable in the past", he reasons that string theory should be taken to be valid.

In our opinion, this is moving the goalposts. Instead of belief in a scientific theory increasing when observational evidence arises to support it, he suggests that theoretical discoveries bolster belief. But conclusions arising logically from mathematics need not apply to the real world.... The idea that preconceived truths about the world can be inferred beyond established facts (inductivism) was overturned by Popper and other twentieth-century philosophers.

They don't name the "other twentieth-century philosophers," but to be sure, the world has moved beyond Popper, notable as his contributions were (some commenters at the end of the article point this out). We are even past Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault, van Fraasen, and numerous other philosophers who arose from the ashes of logical positivism.

Currently, there exists a nebulous consensus called "scientific realism," wherein Big Science insiders help themselves to notions of unobservable reality and testability. In this new consensus, academia, like a church council, dictates what gets the "science" imprimatur. It's an internecine dispute within this consensus that Ellis and Silk are describing. Only those blessed by the cardinals (or mandarins, as Phillip Johnson calls them) are allowed to speak in the officially approved missives, the journals.

The current situation is not friendly to mavericks; thus the epithets "religious fundamentalists," "politicians" and "pseudoscientists" aimed at outsiders. It is, however, interesting to listen in. Look what they say about multiverse theory:

The multiverse is motivated by a puzzle: why fundamental constants of nature, such as the fine-structure constant that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions between particles and the cosmological constant associated with the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, have values that lie in the small range that allows life to exist. Multiverse theory claims that there are billions of unobservable sister universes out there in which all possible values of these constants can occur. So somewhere there will be a bio-friendly universe like ours, however improbable that is.

That sounds like a lead-up to The Privileged Planet, or to Privileged Species. Ellis and Silk go on to describe how one of the constants, the cosmological constant, is 120 orders of magnitude off from the predicted theoretical value. So are they ready to consider scientific theories that embrace this evidence, like intelligent design? No, but one thing they do know: multiverse theory is not scientific.

Billions of universes -- and of galaxies and copies of each of us -- accumulate with no possibility of communication between them or of testing their reality. But if a duplicate self exists in every multiverse domain and there are infinitely many, which is the real 'me' that I experience now? Is any version of oneself preferred over any other? How could 'I' ever know what the 'true' nature of reality is if one self favours the multiverse and another does not?

That's a logical statement, not an observational one. By this, we see that they are not against using logical inference to eliminate unworthy theories. Isn't that what Meyer does in his books, using "inference to the best explanation"? Isn't that what Dembski does to eliminate the chance hypothesis?

In the end, Ellis and Silk never explain cosmic fine-tuning. They just preach that science needs to stick to the old-time religion: respect for observable, testable evidence.

The consequences of overclaiming the significance of certain theories are profound -- the scientific method is at stake (see go.nature.com/hh7mm6 [a link to Alan Sokal's critique of postmodernism]). To state that a theory is so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing in our opinion risks misleading students and the public as to how science should be done and could open the door for pseudoscientists to claim that their ideas meet similar requirements.

What to do about it? Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics. In our view, the issue boils down to clarifying one question: what potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandoning it? If there is none, it is not a scientific theory.

But if peers with equal credentials but without the imprimatur (say, a Dembski, Meyer, or Berlinski) can ask that question of materialism, why shouldn't they get a hearing? Ask the materialists: "What potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandoning it?"

ID advocates have proposed ways to falsify intelligent design (for example, see here and in Dembski's book The Design Revolution, p. 282). Now it's the materialists' turn. If they don't have an answer, then by Ellis and Silk's own standards, it is not a scientific position.

More hocus pocus from Darwinian spinsmiths

Darwinian Magic: Another Question-Begging Darwinian Explanation of the Cambrian Explosion

Evolution News & Views 

Why did 20 or more separate animal phyla suddenly appear in the geological blink of an eye? Because "Clades reach highest morphological disparity early in their evolution," answer Martin Hughes, Sylvain Gerber, and Matthew Albion Wills, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That's all, folks. The Cambrian animals exploded onto the scene because evolution works fast sometimes. It seems to be a pattern that high disparity occurs early on. Must be a law of nature. What, you've got a problem with that?

These three biologists from the University of Bath took a bath in their own assumptions. They don't deny that the animals appear suddenly. They just believe that when opportunity arises, evolution works fast to fill up the landscape with endless forms most beautiful. Under the section, "Why Do Clades Have Early High Disparity?" they say:

What might explain the prevailing pattern of early high disparity in clade evolution? Both ecological anddevelopmental explanations have been proposed, and our results remain consistent with both. The "empty ecospace" model predicts that clades will radiate and diversify more rapidly when colonizing a new environment. This colonizationmay occur because ecospace has been vacated by other occupants (e.g., in the wake of some other extinction, typically the result of external, physical factors) or because ahitherto inaccessible environment or other resource has been rendered viable by the acquisition of some novel, "key" adaptation or series of characters (an intrinsic, biological trigger). Morphological change under these circumstancesmay be rapid either because transitions are unusually largeor because rates of cladogenesis are unusually high (even with "normal" step sizes at each splitting event). (Emphasis added, reference numbers omitted.)

Jaws should drop at that "explanation." If Hughes, Gerber and Wills were simply describing what is found in the fossil record -- the sudden appearance of complex animals -- it would be one thing. But they attempted to explain how these complex animals appeared, so suddenly as Jonathan Wells described in the film Darwin's Dilemma, that it's comparable to less than two minutes on a twenty-four-hour clock.

Syntactic Miracles

Look carefully at the wording above. The authors are very careful to hide their faith in Darwinian evolution by using indirect language. What is "the acquisition of some novel, 'key' adaptation or series of characters" but a cover for some unexplained, one might say miraculously improbable innovation? Was it a trilobite eye? Was it a jointed appendage? Was it a digestive tract? And pray tell, what is "cladogenesis" if not a hand-waving dodge, magic word for the evolutionary "creation" of a whole new body plan, like a phylum? They provide an example of what they mean: birds --

...birds are defined in the manner they are because they acquired a distinctive suite of apomorphies pertaining to the evolution of flight; key innovations, in this case, that also enabled them to exploit a new environment.

Time to watch Flight: The Genius of Birds again.

Ecological Miracles

If evolution rushes in to fill an "ecospace [that] has been vacated" with "key innovations" that "enable them to exploit a new environment," then why don't we see Mars filled with life? Mars is a whole planet waiting to be filled. The "Vacancy" sign has been up for billions of years. What's evolution waiting for?

It's absurd to assume that opportunity necessarily leads to fulfillment. As humans we sometimes say, "If you build it, they will come," but Darwinian evolution has no motivation to come. It is aimless, blind and purposeless. You can wait till the cows come home and nothing will happen unless beneficial mutations arise out of sheer dumb luck (perhaps by cosmic rays), in the right order, each one contributing to survival with no supervising intention steering them to work together.

To see the absurdity of expecting evolution to fill an ecospace with cladogenesis, run the experiment Jonathan Wells proposed: rupture a living cell in a sealed test tube and wait. Rupture a million different kinds of cells, if you prefer. The tube has the perfect environment, because all the ingredients are present -- they were once part of living cells. Does anyone really believe "cladogenesis" will occur, to fill in the vacated ecospace? The late triple-PhD organic chemist A. E. Wilder-Smith use to give another pithy example: a sardine can. It's another perfect environment for the emergence of life, because the sardines were once alive, and all their parts are intact. There are millions of sardine cans around the world. If anyone thought for a minute that a new life form would emerge inside a sardine can (absent any living spores), the food industry would panic.

Hughes, Gerber and Wills might respond that they are not assuming the origin of life, but the adaptation of existing life. Natural selection is available with existing life where it is not in chemical evolution. That would be a weak defense. Available ecospace existed in the Precambrian seas, filled with life, for over a billion years. The authors do not mention any plausible trigger that made complex multicellular animals appear simultaneously when they did. They speculate about ocean chemistry, sea level and climate change, but those things presumably varied throughout Precambrian times.

As Stephen Meyer shows in Darwin's Doubt, prior to the Cambrian explosion there were only microbes, sponges and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna that most paleontologists do not consider related to the Cambrian animals. There were no jointed appendages, eyes, guts, nervous systems or any of the other organs, tissue types and body plans that characterize Cambrian phyla. What kind of Darwinian "miracle" would it take to get all those complex traits in blink of an eye? Calling it "cladogenesis" is like calling the simultaneous chance appearance of cars, boats, and airplanes "vehicle-o-genesis."

The model has striking similarities to the old notion of Punctuated Equilibrium discussed in Chapter 7 of Darwin's Doubt. In fact, the PNASpaper was edited by Steven Stanley, "an early advocate of the punctuated equilibrium model" according to Meyer (p. 137). As such, this new model is really a throwback to the old "punk eek," and suffers from the same drawbacks: it's an attempt to explain away the absence of evidence for evolution by claiming, without any mechanism better than old-fashioned neo-Darwinism, why the fossil record shows a discontinuous pattern, not a record of a gradually branching tree.

Developmental Miracles

In addition to cladogenesis, the authors entertain the idea that developmental changes (like mutations in Hox genes) can lead to innovations:

We stress that ecological and developmental explanations for early high disparity are not mutually exclusive; neither do our results allow us to distinguish between them. The hypothesisof increasing developmental constraint predicts that theincreasing complexity and interdependence of ontogenetic processes with evolutionary time effectively lock down the potential for subsequent morphological innovation. Such mechanisms purportedly explain why body plans become invariant and inflexible with time, although mechanisms by which these constraints may be lifted have been posited.

This is off topic for the Cambrian explosion. It's the origin of the body plans, not their subsequent invariance, that is the issue. Besides, the authors leave it off, saying, "Testing this hypothesis would require detailed ontogenetic data far beyond the scope of this study."

Explosion as a Law of Nature

Basically, the authors try to present "high disparity" not just as a pattern, but a rule -- a way that evolution works. For support of their evolutionary "rule" they point to other instances in the fossil record of rapid ecospace filling after mass extinctions, concluding:

Overall, there is no clear temporal trend in disparity profile shapes from the Cambrian to the Recent, and early high disparity is the predominant pattern throughout the Phanerozoic.

One appreciates the concession. Adding miracles to miracles doesn't help Darwinian evolution. Furthermore, assuming Darwinism was responsible is known as begging the question. Their statement also avoids the fact that nearly all animal phyla -- the highest taxonomic level of disparity -- appeared in the Cambrian, not in subsequent epochs of the fossil record.

Hughes, Gerber and Wills begin their paper with this damaging admission for a theory that still rules biology 154 years after it was proposed:

There are few putative macroevolutionary trends or rules that withstand scrutiny.

The authors of this paper did not want scrutiny. They were under the spell of seduction:

Evolution is usually characterized as an essentially contingent and unpredictable process. This makes it very difficult to identify general rules comparable to those that typify the other natural sciences. Nonetheless, the prospectof formulating and testing macroevolutionary generalities isextremely seductive, because they seem to offer fundamentalinsights into the manner in which evolutionary processes operate throughout Earth's history.

Critical Analysis

You want to be charitable to these authors, but it's challenging. They know full well that they were using Darwinian evolution as filler in the absence of data:

Early high patterns inevitably imply an unsampled period of cladogenesis (or the existence of ghost ranges) at the base of the clade, but this either occurs too fast for the available stratigraphic resolution or is not fossilized.

They also know full well what they were up against:

Among the first questions to be addressed using disparity indices was the perceived magnitude of the Cambrian "explosion." From Charles Darwin onward, evolutionary biologists have been perplexed by the apparently instantaneous first appearances of numerous phyla (a highly disparate sample of species) in the Cambrian fossil record. The subsequent discovery of hitherto unknown fossil groups from the Cambrian Burgess Shale and similar localitiesadded to the enigma, prompting the radical hypothesis that the disparity of metazoans peaked in the Cambrian and subsequent extinctions winnowed this down to much more modest levels soon thereafter. Surprisingly, a relatively small number of studies have tested this hypothesis directly in focal clades. These predominantly conclude that Cambrian animal groups had a disparity comparable to that of their modern counterparts. This nonetheless suggests that metazoans reached high levels of disparity relatively early in their history, the phenomenon of early high disparity. Unfortunately, such analyses are limited for two reasons. First, they discount the intervening trajectory of clade evolution. Second, the clade history is truncated both by the present and by a Precambrian fossil record that is enigmatic at best. As a result, the focus of disparity studies has increasingly turned to clades that both originate and go extinct within the Phanerozoic. Once again, there is a purported tendency for clades to evolve their most disparate forms relatively early in their histories. However, the validity of this early high disparity model has never been tested systematically.

So they tested it and could only come up with "cladogenesis" to fill "vacant ecospace" with "key innovations." That, it seems, is another way of saying Darwinian magic.