How evangelists of the new gods(Chance,necessity and matter.) are distorting science.

Mock at Your Peril! Naturalism Is a Jealous Fraud
Denyse O'Leary

The scientific discoveries that might have supported the naturalist view of the universe, life, and the human mind have never actually occurred. Stubborn problems, old and new, make such discoveries less likely than ever. New technology in neuroscience, for example, has enabled unexpected new findings that point unambiguously in a non-naturalist direction, raising the suspicion of more such findings to come.

Naturalists are not taking it well; fighting superstition is easier than fighting magnetic resonance imaging. For some decades, we have simply been informed that “science would find the answer” to stubborn problems. But what happens if “stubborn problems” are signals that our ideas are incomplete and new insights are needed?

Today, “science” means naturalism. Whether current directions are fruitful or not, no non-naturalist approach may be entertained in principle. Karl Popper called this stance promissory materialism. It is the basic editorial position of most popular science magazines. It is less open to doubt than the laws of mathematics. Much popular culture passionately agrees. In 2005, a Darwin-in-the-schools activist advised her lobbyists to portray ID sympathizers “‘in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.” The strategy may have backfired in recent years due to a number of conflicts with evidence. But many naturalists seem to see themselves as she did, fighting an existential evil. To entertain doubt about such a cause is a sin.

Popular science literature offers the pious naturalist a steady stream of lessons and tales in the form of articles in support of key doctrinal positions, only occasionally challenged by informed skepticism arising from decades of failure. Here are three common themes:

Artificial Intelligence: If HAL or Colossus Really Existed, Why Would They Want to Do Anything in Particular?

We have no idea what consciousness is but naturalism’s  only possible model is: an evolved natural phenomenon. That’s a dogma, not a finding. As dogmas are prone to do, it generates assumptions. One assumption is that human beings can create conscious machines.

Stephen Hawking has taken, in recent years, to warning that artificial intelligence can destroy society: “Computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence, and exceed it,” he said. “Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it.” There Hawking reprises the theme of Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) in which immensely powerful American and Soviet defense computers (Colossus and Guardian) merge to run the world as the ultimate total state.

The plot illustrates a longstanding confusion between consciousness (which we don’t really understand) and intelligence (whose operations we can incorporate into machines as extensions of ourselves). A powerful computer cannot have more insight or different intentions from its programmer’s ability for the same reasons as characters in a novel cannot have more insight or different intentions from the author’s conception. And, in the absence of consciousness, why would computers wish for power or anything else? If they lack wishes of their own, massive computers add nothing to the risks already posed by proliferating nuclear weapons.

Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, hints at the confusion:

I am told that I do not understand how powerful AGI [artificial general intelligence] will be. That is not an argument. We have no idea whether it can even exist. I would like it to exist — this has always been my own motivation for working in robotics and AI. But modern-day AGI research is not doing well at all on either being general or supporting an independent entity with an ongoing existence. It mostly seems stuck on the same issues in reasoning and common sense that AI has had problems with for at least 50 years.

In a recent edition of Technology Review, we hear the worry,“Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony? Just about every AI advance you’ve heard of depends on a breakthrough that’s three decades old. Keeping up the pace of progress will require confronting AI’s serious limitations.”

Some keep the faith and add to it. Dan Brown of Da Vinci Code fame tells audiences that AI-induced collective consciousness will replace God: “Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us…will diminish and eventually disappear.” Given that naturalism considers consciousness as such an illusion, God will be a collective illusion. An organized religious enterprise, “Way of the Future” (WOTF), founded by Silicon Valley lightning rod Anthony Levandowski, is currently seeking non-profit status as a religion of technology “to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead [to] contribute to the betterment of society.” Way of the Future’s site  explains, “While biology has evolved one type of intelligence, there is nothing inherently specific about biology that causes intelligence. Eventually, we will be able to recreate it without using biology and its limitations.”

Sarah Jones asks at The New Republic, Does Silicon Valley religion show that “The final end of science is the revelation of the absurd,” as John Gray suggests in The Immortalization Commission (2012)? One wants to ask, absurd in relation to what, exactly? Naturalists dismiss consciousness, reason, free will , and any ethics that arise from a non-natural source. Absurdity is a meaningless category if there is no truth to defy.

ET Must Exist if Only as a Perpetual Act of Faith

Traditional religions are sometimes defaced by faked or debunked miracles. But they also feature many events that cannot be disproven, only denied in principle as violations of  naturalism.

Naturalism is different. It tends to encourage a belief in extraterrestrial intelligences when we have no shred of evidence for any non-terrestrial life forms at present, not even of the simplest possible type.

Carl Sagan, of enduring Contact and Cosmos fame, was an ardent believer. Longtime Sagan fan Robert Tracinski has mixed feelings about the naturalist trend to which his hero contributed so much: Fact gets dwarfed by narrative. “As the decades pass, Sagan’s imitators become less thoughtful and more propagandistic, less interested in conveying the actual scientific method and more concerned with just telling the public what to think.” That is a familiar trajectory for the popular expression of any state religion. Ironically, the paranormal that Sagan opposed, now freed from the restraints posed by demands for evidence and reason, has  gone mainstream.

Naturalism, as expressed in popular culture, turns away from the facts about life beyond Earth for good reason. Hoped-for water flow on Mars appears, from a recent report, to be  sand and dust. Dashed hopes for life on nearby Mars probably diminish the chances for similar exoplanets in galactic habitable zones. Exoplanet experts, who have much to gain from optimism, don’t think extraterrestrial life of any sort will be found  by 2040.

Over the years, pop ET science coverage has begun to sound stale, unreal. Astrobiology tells us that Darwinian evolution can reveal how alien life forms ought to look, as if there were evidence that they exist. Some brood over the ethics of colonizing other planets, disrupting a “natural” environment, when we know of no other genuinely reachable and habitable planet. Others wonder how traditional religion would survive a space alien landing, though no pressing theological problem has surfaced among adherents. We are told at Live Science that  famous people believe in space aliens, including space entrepreneur  Robert Bigelow who is “absolutely convinced” as if strong belief made the aliens’ existence surer. It’s unclear whether popular naturalist culture can grapple with the idea that might not be out there,  possibly because if he doesn’t exist, it is more difficult to maintain that humans are not special.

The 98 Percent Chimpanzee Reflects on the 100 Percent Chimpanzee and Concludes Humans Are Not Special

A third naturalist doctrine advanced non-stop in pop science writing today is more ominous, that humans are just another animal in nature and an especially destructive one. Claims about AI and ET are usually addressed to non-experts, so we are not asked to violate our own everyday knowledge in accepting them. But we must dismiss the most unambiguous everyday evidence in order to see humans as mere evolved animals. Our acceptance of the doctrine in defiance of evidence establishes our commitment to naturalism.

Faithful readers are not expected to ask obvious questions, make obvious inferences, or reflect on everyday experiences in order to assess claims.

Don’t ask obvious questions? We are told by the BBC that apes are entering the Stone Age, which would be historic if true. But no one expects a thorough examination of the claims, lest the naturalist miracle be openly debunked instead of, as usual, quietly ignored.

Don’t make obvious inferences? We are told that intelligence tests are unfair to apes (NPR) because they never seem to be done right: “All direct ape-human comparisons that have reported human superiority in cognitive function have universally failed to match the groups on testing environment, test preparation, sampling protocols, and test procedures.” We must not suspect that the apes are just not up to the task. Similarly, we are told at Aeon that Homo naledi buried their dead, which “disrupts the whole conventional thinking about the distinction between modern humans and earlier species and, by extension, the distinction between us and the rest of nature.” We are not to suspect that the find casts doubt on current efforts to see naledi as the long-sought Darwinian missing link (half-human), now that floriensis and neanderthalensis have not answered that need.

Don’t reflect on everyday experiences in order to assess claims? Bonobos, we are told, help “without being asked” (“long thought to be unique to humans”). In reality, helping is well-known even among non-primates, and that includes helping other species when there is no apparent risk. Turtles will right upended turtles, though they cannot easily right themselves.

Most of what we hear about human beings does not check out but we risk being thought  “anti-science” if we say so. We hear that romantic love evolved because it improves reproduction rates even though, as Australian philosopher David Stove noted in Darwinian Fairytales (2007), human experience generally shows that passionate romance is not especially likely to result in large families. And how did loneliness? “Like thirst, hunger or pain, loneliness is an aversive state that animals seek to resolve, improving their long-term survival.” It has nothing to do with explicitly human concerns or emotions.  Meanwhile, carefully planned human activity, carried out over  tens of thousands of years can be portrayed as a natural happenstance, “putting us on a par with the natural world, where we have species like ants that have domesticated fungi, for instance.” At times, we may need to remind ourselves that ignoring what we know from experience is an act of naturalist faith.

The claims we hear are often ridiculous but then the believer is not a critic. Gender theory, we hear, is harmful for dogs, as if dogs could care about such things. Sheep recognize images of human faces (BBC), which “shows that sheep possess similar face recognition abilities to primates.” One is tempted to break with propriety and observe that sheep would probably learn to recognize any part of human anatomy if fodder was the familiar reward. If anything, this finding should cast doubt on the significance of facial recognition in primate apes but we are not supposed to infer that, are we?

Mock at your peril! Naturalism is a jealous fraud; its believers build their world around its tenets. And it is becoming a more dangerous world. British philosopher Roger Scruton asks, why do we think it a crime to kill an innocent human but not an innocent tapeworm? “These questions lie at the center of philosophical inquiry today, as they have since the ancient Greeks. In a thousand ways we distinguish people from the rest of nature, and build our life accordingly.”

Well, we used to. As Wesley Smith often documents in these pages, that distinction is beginning to blur. Humans can be seen in polite circles as infections like tapeworms. Along those lines, we might want to keep an eye on the trajectory of “critical plant studies,”which “challenges the privileged place of the human in relation to plant life and examines this through a series of lenses: ethical, political, historical, cultural, textual, and philosophical.”

It’s not just that media-darling disciplines ruled by naturalism tend to fail the facts. They fail the facts at precisely the points where they should succeed if naturalism were true. Einstein’s modernist theory passes stringent tests while naturalist cosmology flirts with abandoning them. Amputees can control increasingly sophisticated prostheses using only their thoughts but consciousness is an illusion? In the midst of a flurry of pop science claims that  free will  does not exist, Google’s truthbots prove  no match for humans who lack confidence in what Google employees think is fake news

It doesn’t help that science journalism is uniquely bad. One problem is that, relative to news writers in other fields, science journalists tend to adopt the role of “defenders” of science. I call it pom-pom waving. To see the difference pom-pom waving makes, consider how you would feel if your local sports columnist was a defender of “sports” in general and too driven by ideology to be a reliable source of stat and play analysis. You’d do best to go elsewhere for eye-openers and for the bigger picture.

Others have noticed a problem with science journalism. From a March editorial in Nature.

There has been much gnashing of teeth in the science-journalism community this week, with the release of an infographic that claims to rate the best and worst sites for scientific news. According to the American Council on Science and Health, which helped to prepare the ranking, the field is in a shoddy state. “If journalism as a whole is bad (and it is),” says the council, “science journalism is even worse. Not only is it susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it is uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism.”

But the “sensationalism” to which the editors refer is hyped-up monochromatic naturalism. If, due to historic commitments, Nature’s editors simply cannot address the underlying weaknesses of naturalism, as demonstrated by growing distaste for evidence and reason their attempt to  gloss over the bad news on procedural grounds will quite properly be seen as an admission of helplessness. In that case, it is not clear how public respect for science can come out a winner here.

Seems all's not well OOL science's RNA world front.

Prominent Retraction Vindicates Stephen Meyer and Signature in the Cell
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Ann Gauger struck the right note here yesterday with the news of a major retraction of a 2016 paper by Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, of Harvard Medical School, in Nature Chemistry. He and his postdoc Tivoli Olsen, who showed that his results couldn’t be duplicated, deserve kudos for candor and self-correction.

Of interest, too, is that the retraction serves to vindicate an argument Stephen Meyer made back in 2009 with  Signature in the Cell. See, especially, Chapter 14 (“The RNA World”) which discusses Szostak’s work. The 2016 paper, obviously, isn’t covered by Meyer there. But at the time, criticism suggested that Szostak and others were fast closing in on a solution to the origin-of-life problem with the “principle of RNA self-replication,” touted by Szostak in, for example, a 2009 Scientific American article. Following the publication of Meyer’s book, Szostak himself criticized “anti-evolution ID” for science “denial.” He observed, “this kind of denial is a dangerous thing; denial of reality is extremely bad for the future of our country (and our world).”

So we’ve heard. Yet his own preferred solution to life’s origin, “non-enzymatic replication of RNA,” exists on what appears to be an ever-receding horizon. Szostak and his colleagues wrote:

The non-enzymatic replication of RNA is thought to have been a critical process required for the origin of life. One unsolved difficulty with non-enzymatic RNA replication is that template-directed copying of RNA results in a double-stranded product. After strand separation, rapid strand reannealing outcompetes slow non-enzymatic template copying, which renders multiple rounds of RNA replication impossible. Here we show that oligoarginine peptides slow the annealing of complementary oligoribonucleotides by up to several thousand-fold; however, short primers and activated monomers can still bind to template strands, and template-directed primer extension can still occur, all within a phase-separated condensed state, or coacervate. Furthermore, we show that within this phase, partial template copying occurs even in the presence of full-length complementary strands. This method to enable further rounds of replication suggests one mechanism by which short non-coded peptides could have enhanced early cellular fitness, and potentially explains how longer coded peptides, that is, proteins, came to prominence in modern biology.

That’s the result that has now been retracted.

Meyer wrote in Signature in the Cell, following an analysis of Szostak’s research:

As I have investigated various models that combined chance and necessity, I have noted an increasing sense of futility and frustration arising amongst scientists who work on the origin of life. As I surveyed the literature, it became clear that this frustration had been building for many years.

…

I began to reflect on the failure of these simulations to explain the DNA enigma apart from the guidance of intelligent scientists. I wondered if they hadn’t inadvertently provided evidence for a radically different approach to the problem of biological information. This lead me back to where I had stated — to the idea of intelligent design and to a consideration of the scientific case in its favor.

That is exactly what happened with the retraction story. Szostak by his own admission was “incredibly excited” by the outcome of his work. But as Retraction Watch puts it, “the team had misinterpreted the initial data.” It was “definitely embarrassing,” as Szostak concedes. “In retrospect, we were totally blinded by our belief.” Again, as Dr. Gauger notes, his honesty is to be praised.

But what is that about being “blinded” by “belief”? I hear an echo of his remarks on intelligent design and its peril, in which he added the comment, “I think that belief systems based on faith are inherently dangerous, as they leave the believer susceptible to manipulation when skepticism and inquiry are discouraged.”

As he now admits, though, it was his own team that was led astray by “belief.”

Meanwhile in the origin-of-life community, the sense of what Meyer called “futility and frustration” persists. And Signature in the Cell remains the preeminent guide for explaining OOL scientists’ perplexity, while proposing an alternative approach. One wishes, as Brian Miller says today, that they would put aside materialist bias, embrace genuine “skepticism and inquiry,” and seriously consider that alternative.

Are Zionism and liberal democracy reconcilable?:Pros and Cons.

Earth,a privileged planet after all?

Maybe Life in the Cosmos Is Rare After All
By Paul Davies

When I was a student in the 1960s almost all scientists believed we are alone in the universe. The search for intelligent life beyond Earth was ridiculed; one might as well have professed an interest in looking for fairies. The focus of skepticism concerned the origin of life, which was widely assumed to have been a chemical fluke of such incredibly low probability it would never have happened twice. “The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle,” was the way Francis Crick described it, “so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” Jacques Monod concurred; in his 1976 book Chance and Necessity he wrote, “Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance.”
Today the pendulum has swung decisively the other way. Many distinguished scientists proclaim that the universe is teeming with life, at least some of it intelligent. The biologist Christian de Duve went so far as to call life “a cosmic imperative.” Yet the science has hardly changed. We are almost as much in the dark today about the pathway from non-life to life as Darwin was when he wrote, “It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.”
There is no doubt that SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – has received a huge fillip from the recent discovery of hundreds of extra-solar planets. Astronomers think there could be billions of earthlike planets in our galaxy alone. Clearly there is no lack of habitable real estate out there. But habitable implies inhabited only if life actually arises.
I am often asked how likely it is that we will find intelligent life beyond Earth. The question is meaningless. Because we don’t know the process that transformed a mish-mash of chemicals into a living cell, with all its staggering complexity, it is impossible to calculate the probability that it will happen. You can’t estimate the odds of an unknown process. Astrobiologists, however, seem more preoccupied with the chances that microbial life will eventually evolve intelligence. Although biologists can’t do the math on that either, at least they understand the process; it is Darwinian evolution. But this is to put the cart before the horse. The biggest uncertainty surrounds the first step—getting the microbes in the first place.
Carl Sagan once remarked that the origin of life can’t be that hard or it would not have popped up so quickly once Earth became hospitable. It’s true that we can trace the presence of life on Earth back 3.5 billion years. But Sagan’s argument ignores the fact that we are a product of the very terrestrial biology being studied. Unless life on Earth had started quickly, humans would not have evolved before the sun became too hot and fried our planet to a crisp. Because of this unavoidable selection bias, we can’t draw any statistical significance from a sample of one.
Another common argument is that the universe is so vast there just has to be life out there somewhere. But what does that statement mean? If we restrict attention to the observable universe there are probably 1023 planets. Yes, that’s a big number. But it is dwarfed by the odds against forming even simple organic molecules by random chance alone. If the pathway from chemistry to biology is long and complicated, it may well be that less than one in a trillion trillion planets ever spawns life.
Affirmations that life is widespread are founded on a tacit assumption that biology is not the upshot of random chemical reactions, but the product of some sort of directional self-organization that favors the living state over others—a sort of life principle at work in nature. There may be such a principle, but if so we have found no evidence for it yet.
Maybe we don’t need to look far. If life really does pop up readily, as Sagan suggested, then it should have started many times on our home planet. If there were multiple origins of life on Earth, the microbial descendants of another genesis could be all around us, forming a sort of shadow biosphere. Nobody has seriously looked under our noses for life as we do not know it. It would take the discovery of just a single “alien” microbe to settle the matter.

Brexit?:Pros and cons.

Buying out the competition?

Helpful Survey of the Best ID Literature Illuminates Distortions of the Evolution Debate
David Klinghoffer

Marvin Olasky of World Magazine has a very helpful survey of recent literature challenging Darwinism and offering alternatives, including a variety of books from authors arguing for intelligent design -- most recently Doug Axe's Undeniable. "Axe," he summarizes, "shows how Darwinists who want us to suppress our intuition avoid looking at the gaping hole in their theory."

Olasky does a great job in presenting a comprehensive picture of the books that are out there. He also includes creationist works in his omnibus review, none of which I've read so I leave it to others to judge their merits.

He offers two additional notes as well that I found illuminating. Regarding the evolution debate and how it is distorted by Darwin advocates:

On one side sits a science Goliath, using evidence for proven evolution (animals getting bigger or changing color) to sell the unproven doctrine of macroevolution (one kind of animal turning into another). On the other side roam Davids skeptical about such claims. Prestigious groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science attack them for exposing what the AAAS dubs "so-called 'flaws' in the theory of evolution or 'disagreements' within the scientific community."

The debate seems even more uneven this summer, as the scientific establishment turns up the heat. One example: Fueled by $9 million from the Templeton Foundation, the AAAS this summer is inviting seminary professors to "faculty enrichment retreats" at historic seaside inns and mountain lodges. For example, from July 18 to 21 "evangelical/conservative Protestant" professors will have "positive dialogue" on evolution at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, where they can enjoy "deluxe accommodations. ... Ranger-led walk on Mt. Hood (easy trail). Guided stargazing and astronomy tour. Stellar dining.... Hot tub...."

Well, July 18-21 is just days away, isn't it. The historic Timberline Lodge looks great (pictured above; it's one of those wonderful old WPA projects). It's just down the road in the gorgeous Mount Hood National Forest. I would like to think seminary faculty members cannot have their views swayed by such blandishments, even the "Stellar dining" and "Hot tub." But note the insult from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS evidently thinks those religious scholars can be bought off with luxuries. Otherwise why offer them? That is scandalous, quite honestly.

Olasky goes on:

Meanwhile, judging from press coverage, the only significant response from "evolution deniers" is a 510-foot-long replica of Noah's Ark to be unveiled in Williamstown, Ky., on July 7. The popular Wonkette website earlier this year complained about this product of a purportedly "meth-addled creationist lame brain ... literal interpretation of the Noah's Ark Bible." Americans would never know from the press generally that a great intellectual ferment among creationists and intelligent design proponents is under way, one that is producing many challenging books.

Yes. At least as far as ID goes, evolutionary apologists carefully conceal the "great intellectual ferment" from view.

Stuff like the Ark Park is the perfect dodge for Darwinists who want to avoid a real debate about substantive issues of science and faith. Indeed, this month, Dr. Axe's book is out, as you know, which is in part a shot across the bow directed at "Science Guy" Bill Nye. Both Mr. Nye and Dr. Axe have written books called Undeniable -- borrowing the title was a witty move of authorial appropriation on Axe's part. Axe, as you know already, presents a serious yet accessible argument that our near universal intuition about Darwinism -- that it can't explain biological innovations, while intelligence can -- has scientific merit.

And as Axe's book was headed to the marketplace of ideas, what do you think Bill Nye was doing? Do I have to tell you? Can't you guess? Yes, accompanied by much hoopla and trailed by a video camera crew for an upcoming documentary, he was visiting the Ark Park.

On the God is love hence God is three argument

Darwinism as secular myth.

Marcel-Paul Schützenberger:
The Miracles of Darwinism

Marcel-Paul Schützenberger

Introduction

Until his death, the mathematician and doctor of medicine Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920-1996) was Professor of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Paris and a member of the Academy of Sciences. [See "From the Editors" for additional biographical information.] In 1966, Schützenberger participated in the Wistar Symposium on mathematical objections to neo-Darwinism. His arguments were subtle and often misunderstood by biologists. Darwin's theory, he observed, and the interpretation of biological systems as formal objects, were at odds insofar as randomness is known to degrade meaning in formal contexts. But Schützenberger also argued that Darwin's theory logically required some active principle of coordination between the typographic space of the informational macromolecules (DNA and RNA) and the organic space of living creatures themselves -- which Darwin's theory does not provide. In this January 1996 interview with the French science monthly La Recherche, here published in English for the first time, he pursued these themes anew, finding inspiration for his ideas both in the mathematical ideas that he had pioneered and in the speculative tradition of French biological thought that stretched from Georges Cuvier to Lucien Cuenot. M.P. Schützenberger was a man of universal curiosity and great wit; throughout his life, he was both joyful and unafraid. The culture that he so brilliantly represented disappears with him, of course. It was his finest invention and it now belongs to the inventory of remembered things.

---

Q: What is your definition of Darwinism?

S: The most current, of course, a position generically embodied, for example, by Richard Dawkins. The essential idea is well-known. Evolution, Darwinists argue, is explained by the double action of chance mutations and natural selection. The general doctrine embodies two mutually contradictory schools -- gradualists, on the one hand, saltationists, on the other. Gradualists insist that evolution proceeds by means of small successive changes; saltationists that it proceeds by jumps. Richard Dawkins has come to champion radical gradualism; Stephen Jay Gould, a no less radical version of saltationism.

Q: You are known as a mathematician rather than a specialist in evolutionary biology...

S: Biology is, of course, not my specialty. The participation of mathemeticians in the overall assessment of evolutionary thought has been encouraged by the biologists themselves, if only because they presented such an irresistible target. Richard Dawkins, for example, has been fatally attracted to arguments that would appear to hinge on concepts drawn from mathematics and from the computer sciences, the technical stuff imposed on innocent readers with all of his comic authority. Mathematicians are, in any case, epistemological zealots. It is normal for them to bring their critical scruples to the foundations of other disciplines. And finally, it is worth observing that the great turbid wave of cybernetics has carried mathematicians from their normal mid-ocean haunts to the far shores of evolutionary biology. There up ahead, Rene Thom and Ilya Prigogine may be observed paddling sedately toward dry land, members of the Santa Fe Institute thrashing in their wake. Stuart Kauffman is among them. An interesting case, a physician half in love with mathematical logic, burdened now and forever by having received a Papal Kiss from Murray Gell-Mann. This ecumenical movement has endeavored to apply the concepts of mathematics to the fundamental problems of evolution -- the interpretation of functional complexity, for example.

Q: What do you mean by functional complexity?

S: It is impossible to grasp the phenomenon of life without that concept, the two words each expressing a crucial and essential idea. The laboratory biologists' normal and unforced vernacular is almost always couched in functional terms: the function of an eye, the function of an enzyme, or a ribosome, or the fruit fly's antennae -- their function; the concept by which such language is animated is one perfectly adapted to reality. Physiologists see this better than anyone else. Within their world, everything is a matter of function, the various systems that they study -- circulatory, digestive, excretory, and the like -- all characterized in simple, ineliminable functional terms. At the level of molecular biology, functionality may seem to pose certain conceptual problems, perhaps because the very notion of an organ has disappeared when biological relationships are specified in biochemical terms; but appearances are misleading, certain functions remaining even in the absence of an organ or organ systems. Complexity is also a crucial concept. Even among unicellular organisms, the mechanisms involved in the separation and fusion of chromosomes during mitosis and meiosis are processes of unbelieveable complexity and subtlety. Organisms present themselves to us as a complex ensemble of functional interrelationships. If one is going to explain their evolution, one must at the same time explain their functionality and their complexity.

Q: What is it that makes functional complexity so difficult to comprehend?

S: The evolution of living creatures appears to require an essential ingredient, a specific form of organization. Whatever it is, it lies beyond anything that our present knowledge of physics or chemistry might suggest; it is a property upon which formal logic sheds absolutely no light. Whether gradualists or saltationists, Darwinians have too simple a conception of biology, rather like a locksmith improbably convinced that his handful of keys will open any lock. Darwinians, for example, tend to think of the gene rather as if it were the expression of a simple command: do this, get that done, drop that side chain. Walter Gehring's work on the regulatory genes controlling the development of the insect eye reflects this conception. The relevant genes may well function this way, but the story on this level is surely incomplete, and Darwinian theory is not apt to fill in the pieces.

Q: You claim that biologists think of a gene as a command. Could you be more specific?

S: Schematically, a gene is like a unit of information. It has simple binary properties. When active, it is an elementary information-theoretic unit, the cascade of gene instructions resembling the cascade involved in specifying a recipe. Now let us return to the example of the eye. Darwinists imagine that it requires what? A thousand or two thousand genes to assemble an eye, the specification of the organ thus requiring one or two thousand units of information? This is absurd! Suppose that a European firm proposes to manufacture an entirely new household appliance in a Southeast Asian factory. And suppose that for commercial reasons, the firm does not wish to communicate to the factory any details of the appliance's function -- how it works, what purposes it will serve. With only a few thousand bits of information, the factory is not going to proceed very far or very fast. A few thousand bits of information, after all, yields only a single paragraph of text. The appliance in question is bound to be vastly simpler than the eye; charged with its manufacture, the factory will yet need to know the significance of the operations to which they have committed themselves in engaging their machinery. This can be achieved only if they already have some sense of the object's nature before they undertake to manufacture it. A considerable body of knowledge, held in common between the European firm and its Asian factory, is necessary before manufacturing instructions may be executed.

Q: Would you argue that the genome does not contain the requisite information for explaining organisms?

S:Not according to the understanding of the genome we now possess. The biological properties invoked by biologists are in this respect quite insufficient; while biologists may understand that a gene triggers the production of a particular protein, that knowledge -- that kind of knowledge -- does not allow them to comprehend how one or two thousand genes suffice to direct the course of embryonic development.

Q: You are going to be accused of preformationism...

S: And of many other crimes. My position is nevertheless strictly a rational one. I've formulated a problem that appears significant to me: how is it that with so few elementary instructions, the materials of life can fabricate objects that are so marvelously complicated and efficient? This property with which they are endowed -- just what is its nature? Nothing within our actual knowledge of physics and chemistry allows us intellectually to grasp it. If one starts from an evolutionary point of view, it must be acknowledged that in one manner or another, the earliest fish contained the capacity, and the appropriate neural wiring, to bring into existence organs which they did not possess or even need, but which would be the common property of their successors when they left the water for the firm ground, or for the air.

Q: You assert that, in fact, Darwinism doesn't explain much.

S: It seems to me that the union of chance mutation and selection has a certain descriptive value; in no case does the description count as an explanation. Darwinism relates ecological data to the  relative abundance of species and environments. In any case, the descriptive value of Darwinian models is pretty limited. Besides, as saltationists have indicated, the gradualist thesis seems completely demented in light of the growth of paleontological knowledge. The miracles of saltationism, on the other hand, cannot discharge the mystery I have described.

Q: Let's return to natural selection. Isn't it the case that despite everything the idea has a certain explanatory value?

S: No one could possibly deny the general thesis that stability is a necessary condition for existence -- the real content of the doctrine of natural selection. The outstanding application of this general principle is Berthollet's laws in elementary chemistry. In a desert, the species that die rapidly are those that require water the most; yet that does not explain the appearance among the survivors of those structures whose particular features permits them to resist aridity. The thesis of natural selection is not very powerful. Except for certain artificial cases, we are yet unable to predict whether this or that species or this or that variety will be favored or not as the result of changes in the environment. What we can do is establish after the fact the effects of natural selection -- to show, for, example that certain birds are disposed to eat this species of snails less often than other species, perhaps because their shell is not as visible. That's ecology: very interesting. To put it another way, natural selection is a weak instrument of proof because the phenomena subsumed by natural selection are obvious and yet they establish nothing from the point of view of the theory.

Q: Isn't the significant explanatory feature of Darwinian theory the connection established between chance mutations and natural selection?

S:With the discovery of coding, we have come to understand that a gene is like a word composed in the DNA alphabet; such words form the genomic text. It is that word that tells the cell to make this or that protein. Either a given protein is structural, or a protein itself works in combination with other signals given by the genome to fabricate yet another protein. All the experimental results we know fall within this scheme. The following scenario then becomes standard. A gene undergoes a mutation, one that may facilitate the reproduction of those individuals carrying it; over time, and with respect to a specific environment, mutants come to be statistically favored, replacing individuals lacking the requisite mutation. Evolution could not be an accumulation of such typographical errors. Population geneticists can study the speed with which a favorable mutation propagates itself under these circumstances. They do this with a lot of skill, but these are academic exercises if only because none of the parameters that they use can be empirically determined. In addition, there are the obstacles I have already mentioned. We know the number of genes in an organism. There are about one hundred thousand for a higher vertebrate. This we know fairly well. But this seems grossly insufficient to explain the incredible quantity of information needed to accomplish evolution within a given line of species.

Q: A concrete example?

S: Darwinists say that horses, which were once mammals as large as rabbits, increased their size to escape more quickly from predators. Within the gradualist model, one might isolate a specific trait -- increase in body size -- and consider it to be the result of a series of typographic changes. The explanatory effect achieved is rhetorical, imposed entirely by trick of insisting that what counts for a herbivore is the speed of its flight when faced by a predator. Now this may even be partially true, but there are no biological grounds that permit us to determine that this is in fact the decisive consideration. After all, increase in body size may well have a negative effect. Darwinists seem to me to have preserved a mechanic vision of evolution, one that prompts them to observe merely a linear succession of causes and effects. The idea that causes may interact with one another is now standard in mathematical physics; it is a point that has had difficulty in penetrating the carapace of biological thought. In fact, within the quasi-totality of observable phenomena, local changes interact in a dramatic fashion; after all, there is hardly an issue of La Recherche that does not contain an allusion to the Butterfly Effect. Information theory is precisely the domain that sharpens our intuitions about these phenomena. A typographical change in a computer program does not change it just a little. It wipes the program out, purely and simply. It is the same with a telephone number. If I intend to call a correspondent by telephone, it doesn't much matter if I am fooled by one, two, three or eight figures in his number.

Q: You accept the idea that biological mutations genuinely have the character of typographical errors?

S: Yes, in the sense that one base is a template for another, one codon for another, but at the level of biochemical activity, one is no longer able properly to speak of typography. There is an entire grammar for the formation of proteins in three dimensions, one that we understand poorly. We do not have at our disposal physical or chemical rules permitting us to construct a mapping from typographical mutations or modifications to biologically effective structures. To return to the example of the eye: a few thousand genes are needed for its fabrication, but each in isolation signifies nothing. What is significant is the combination of their interactions. These cascading interactions, with their feedback loops, express an organization whose complexity we do not know how to analyze (See Figure 1). It is possible we may be able to do so in the future, but there is no doubt that we are unable to do so now. Gehring has recently discovered a segment of DNA which is both involved in the development of the vertebrate eye and which can induce the development of an eye in the wing of a butterfly. His work comprises a demonstration of something utterly astonishing, but not an explanation.

Q:But Dawkins, for example, believes in the possibility of a cumulative process.

S: Dawkins believes in an effect that he calls "the cumulative selection of beneficial mutations." To support his thesis, he resorts to a metaphor introduced by the mathematician Emile Borel -- that of a monkey typing by chance and in the end producing a work of literature. It is a metaphor, I regret to say, embraced by Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helix. Dawkins has his computer write a series of thirty letters, these corresponding to the number of letters in a verse by Shakespeare. He then proceeds to simulate the Darwinian mechanism of chance mutations and selection. His imaginary monkey types and retypes the same letters, the computer successively choosing the phrase that most resembles the target verse. By means of cumulative selection, the monkey reaches its target in forty or sixty generations.

Q: But you don't believe that a monkey typing on a typewriter, even aided by a computer...

S:This demonstration is a trompe-l'oeil, and what is more, Dawkins doesn't describe precisely how it proceeds. At the beginning of the exercise, randomly generated phrases appear rapidly to approach the target; the closer the approach, the more the process begins to slow. It is the action of mutations in the wrong direction that pulls things backward. In fact, a simple argument shows that unless the numerical parameters are chosen deliberately, the progression begins to bog down completely.

Q:You would say that the model of cumulative selection, imagined by Dawkins, is out of touch with palpable biological  realities?

S: Exactly. Dawkins's model lays entirely to the side the triple problems of complexity, functionality, and their interaction.

Q: You are a mathematician. Suppose that you try, despite your reservations, to formalize the concept of functional complexity...

S: I would appeal to a notion banned by the scientific community, but one understood perfectly by everyone else -- that of a goal. As a computer scientist, I could express this in the following way. One constructs a space within which one of the coordinates serves in effect as the thread of Ariane, guiding the trajectory toward the goal. Once the space is constructed, the system evolves in a mechanical way toward its goal. But look, the construction of the relevant space cannot proceed until a preliminary analysis has been carried out, one in which the set of all possible trajectories is assessed, this together with an estimation of their average distance from the specified goal. The preliminary analysis is beyond the reach of empirical study. It presupposes -- the same word that seems to recur in theoretical biology -- that the biologist (or computer scientist) know the totality of the situation, the properties of the ensemble of trajectories. In terms of mathematical logic, the nature of this space is entirely enigmatic. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the conceptual problems we face, life has entirely solved; the systems embodied in living creatures are entirely successful in reaching their goals. The trick involved in Dawkin's somewhat sheepish example proceeds via the surreptitious introduction of a relevant space. His computer program calculates from a random phrase to a target, a calculation corresponding to nothing in biological reality. The function that he employs flatters the imagination, however, because it has that property of apparent simplicity that elicits naïve approval. In biological reality, the space of even the simplest function has a complexity that defies understanding, and indeed, defies any and all calculations.

Q: Even when they dissent from Darwin, the saltationists are more moderate: they don't pretend to hold the key that would permit them to explain evolution...

S: Before we discuss the saltationists, however, I must say a word about the Japanese biologist Mooto Kimura. He has shown that the majority of mutations are neutral, without any selective effect. For Darwinians upholding the central Darwinian thesis, this is embarrassing... The saltationist view, revived by Stephen Jay Gould, in the end represents an idea due to Richard Goldschmidt. In 1940 or so, he postulated the existence of very intense mutations, no doubt involving hundreds of genes, and taking place rapidly, in less than one thousand generations, thus below the threshold of resolution of paleontology. Curiously enough, Gould does not seem concerned to preserve the union of chance mutations and selection. The saltationists run afoul of two types of criticism. On the one hand, the functionality of their supposed macromutations is inexplicable within the framework of molecular biology. On the other hand, Gould ignores in silence the great trends in biology, such as the increasing complexity of the nervous system. He imagines that the success of new, more sophisticated species, such as the mammals, is a contingent phenomenon. He is not in a position to offer an account of the essential movement of evolution, or at the least, an account of its main trajectories. The saltationists are thus reduced to invoking two types of miracles: macromutations, and the great trajectories of evolution.

Q: In what sense are you employing the word 'miracle'?

S:A miracle is an event that should appear impossible to a Darwinian in view of its ultra-cosmological improbability within the framework of his own theory. Now speaking of macromutations, let me observe that to generate a proper elephant, it will not suffice suddenly to endow it with a full-grown trunk. As the trunk is being organized, a different but complementary system -- the cerebellum -- must be modified in order to establish a place for the ensemble of wiring that the elephant will require to use his trunk. These macromutations must be coordinated by a system of genes in embryogenesis. If one considers the history of evolution, we must postulate thousands of miracles; miracles, in fact, without end. No more than the gradualists, the saltationists are unable to provide an account of those miracles. The second category of miracles are directional, offering instruction to the great evolutionary progressions and trends -- the elaboration of the nervous system, of course, but the internalization of the reproductive process as well, and the appearance of bone, the emergence of ears, the enrichment of various functional relationships, and so on. Each is a series of miracles, whose accumulation has the effect of increasing the complexity and efficiency of various organisms. From this point of view, the notion of bricolage [tinkering], introduced by Francois Jacob, involves a fine turn of phrase, but one concealing an utter absence of explanation.

Q: The appearance of human beings -- is that a miracle, in the sense you mean?

S: Naturally. And here it does seem that there are voices among contemporary biologists -- I mean voices other than mine -- who might cast doubt on the Darwinian paradigm that has dominated discussion for the past twenty years. Gradualists and saltationists alike are completely incapable of giving a convincing explanation of the quasi-simultaneous emergence of a number of biological systems that distinguish human beings from the higher primates: bipedalism, with the concomitant modification of the pelvis, and, without a doubt, the cerebellum, a much more dexterous hand, with fingerprints conferring an especially fine tactile sense; the modifications of the pharynx which permits phonation; the modification of the central nervous system, notably at the level of the temporal lobes, permitting the specific recognition of speech. From the point of view of embryogenesis, these anatomical systems are completely different from one another. Each modification constitutes a gift, a bequest from a primate family to its descendants. It is astonishing that these gifts should have developed simultaneously. Some biologists speak of a predisposition of the genome. Can anyone actually recover the predisposition, supposing that it actually existed? Was it present in the first of the fish? The reality is that we are confronted with total conceptual bankruptcy.

Q:You mentioned the Santa Fe school earlier in our discussion. Do appeals to such notions as chaos...

S:I should have alluded to a succession of highly competent people who have discovered a number of poetic but essentially hollow forms of expression. I am referring here to the noisy crowd collected under the rubric of cybernetics; and beyond, there lie the dissipative structures of Prigogine, or the systems of Varela, or, moving to the present, Stuart Kauffman's edge of chaos -- an organized form of inanity that is certain soon to make its way to France. The Santa Fe school takes complexity to apply to absolutely everything. They draw their representative examples from certain chemical reactions, the pattern of the sea coast, atmosphere turbulence, or the structure of a chain of mountains. The complexity of these structures is certainly considerable, but in comparison with the living world, they exhibit in every case an impoverished form of organization, one that is strictly non-functional. No algorithm allows us to understand the complexity of living creatures, this despite these examples, which owe their initial plausibility to the assumption that the physico-chemical world exhibits functional properties that in reality it does not possess.

Q: Should one take your position as a statement of resignation, an appeal to have greater modesty, or something else altogether?


S: Speaking ironically, I might say that all we can hear at the present time is the great anthropic hymnal, with even a number of mathematically sophisticated scholars keeping time as the great hymn is intoned by tapping their feet. The rest of us should, of course, practice a certain suspension of judgment.