Wednesday 21 June 2023
On Reductionism and the meaning of life.
David Berlinski on the Immaterial, Alan Turing, and the Mystery of Life Itself
The recently published book Science After Babel is again in the spotlight at ID the Future, with its author, philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski, and host Andrew McDiarmid considering various elements of the work. In a new podcast, the pair discuss the puzzling relationship between purely immaterial mathematical concepts (the only kind) and the material world; World War II codebreaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing, depicted in the 2014 film The Imitation Game; and the sense that the field of physics, once seemingly on the cusp of a theory of everything, finds itself at an impasse. Then, too, Berlinski writes, there is the mystery of life itself. If scientists thought that its origin and nature would soon yield to scientific reductionism, they have been disappointed. Life’s “fantastic and controlled complexity, its brilliant inventiveness and diversity, its sheer difference from anything else in this or any other world” remain before us, suggesting, as Berlinski puts it, “a kind of intelligence evident nowhere else.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Sorry design denier that's my line.
We Can Say It, But You Can’t
Highly, Intricately, and Precisely Integrated Networks of Entities and Interactions
As Carl Woese explained in 2004:
The cells we know are not just loosely coupled arrangements of quasi-independent modules. They are highly, intricately, and precisely integrated networks of entities and interactions. … To think that a new cell design can be created more or less haphazardly from chunks of other modern cell designs is just another fallacy born of a mechanistic, reductionist view of the organism.
Mechanistic, reductionist view? It appears Woese put his finger on precisely what he believed in: evolution. Replace “cell” with just about any biological structure and Woese has, in a nutshell, summarized evolutionary theory, what little there is of it. As Richard Dawkins once explained:
The bombardier beetle’s ancestors simply pressed into different service chemicals that already happened to be lying around. That’s often how evolution works.
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