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.
Tuesday, 20 June 2023
Monday, 19 June 2023
On Darwin's natural selector.
Darwinian Natural Selection: A Covert Theology of Nature?
“What is life?” legendary father of quantum physics Erwin Schrödinger asked in 1943, arguing that the essence of life might best be defined as a force and form of agency. The contention appeared to imply an approving nod in the direction of the Lamarckian postulation of an invisible “pouvoir de la vie” (life power); and it is noteworthy that in 1956 Schrödinger went on to express the opinion that “it is difficult to believe that […] all resulted from Darwinian ‘accumulation by chance.’”1 He appeared to be steering a path in his thinking between Darwinian and Lamarckian paradigms, as was noted by Nobel Prize-winner Paul Nurse in his recent, identically titled analysis, What Is Life?2
Conflicting Paradigms
Observing distinct hints of Lamarckism in Schrödinger’s expositions, Nurse even went so far as to suggest that the veteran German scientist had come close to advancing a form of vitalism3 — a conception of animate nature long since banished from scientific discourse for being a residue of prescientific thinking. So for instance In the very early decades of the 17th century Shakespeare could portray an active external nature issuing portents of future misfortune as warnings to humanity. In the dramatist’s imagination Nature was active to such an extent as to be capable of “staging” such meteorological warning signs as thunderstorms and sundry other “horrid sights seen by the watch.” But such stage evocations are interpreted by today’s audiences only as dramatic devices (referred to technically under the name of pathetic fallacy). For hard on Shakespeare’s heels chronologically had come a finger-wagging brigade of mid to late 17th-century natural philosophers exhorting the bard’s intellectual heirs to view nature in considerably less responsive terms as an entirely passive phenomenon. No will or agency should henceforth be attached to natural phenomena, these early scientists insisted, and it was their understanding which was to become an informing axiom of post-Enlightenment science. Lamarck’s ideas of a spirited, self-making, and transforming Nature now seemed out of step with respectable science. Or were they?
Darwin, although he would officially retreat behind the safe and accredited confines of the new nature-as-passive axiom, was also known to flirt with Lamarckian ideas, most conspicuously in his attempt to postulate a link between ape and Homo sapiens. By 1871 Darwin no longer appeared to repose the same absolute faith in natural selection, as a mechanism capable of delivering limitless boons, as he did in the period preceding the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859. In order to put together a tolerably coherent explanation for the ape-to humankind transition, for instance, we find him appealing to what he had once bluntly denounced as the Lamarckian heresy. Hence in his Descent of Man he could write,
The mental powers of some earlier progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use; but we may confidently believe that the continued use and advancement of this power would have reacted on the mind itself, by enabling and encouraging it to carry on long trains of thought.4
The officially frowned-on Lamarckian idea of the use/disuse of organs is here quite conspicuously pressed into service as a helping or even — faute de mieux — necessary adjunct to his own theory of natural selection.
What Makes Us Tick?
It was in fact only in the era of neo-Darwinism that Darwin’s intellectual legatees would take it upon themselves to excise any last traces of Darwinian equivocation on this issue. Yet as Stanford history professor Jessica Riskin has pointed out in her The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Old Argument Over What Makes Us Tick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), to which I am much indebted for what follows, the issue can hardly be said to be fully resolved even today. Riskin documents the many ways in which the matter of internal versus external agency has remained a live issue up to the present day. Hence even post-Enlightenment accounts of living phenomena can be observed being permeated by officially disallowed appeals to agency (as in Darwin’s case, cited above). The ostensibly losing opinion associated with the name of Lamarck has not been irretrievably lost to modern science.
The crux of the historical issue has been this: Do the order and action which we can all plainly observe in the natural world originate inside or outside of nature itself? Lamarck’s “inside” theory presupposed an immanent force driving plants and animals to form themselves and to “complexify” their structures over time to produce that plethora of different animal species we witness today. Harking back to ideas originally proposed by Denis Diderot and like-minded philosophes in the mid 18th-century, Lamarck proposed that creatures might be able to alter their own internal physiology and, by an act of will, develop such new organs as might be requisite to their purposes in life. His most (in)famous illustration of this claimed ability was the much-cited example of the giraffe over time possessing the ability to elongate its neck to be able to reach leaves at the tops of trees.
Consistently with the tenets of his own theory of an immanent power in nature, Lamarck was to look askance at the famous watch-on-the heath analogy formulated by William Paley, insisting that the essential motor of the living being was integral to it rather than something coming from an external source. Paley’s watch on a notional Lamarckian heath would not presumably have needed to be periodically wound up by a divine Horologist. In that particular sense, as Riskin observes, Lamarck’s was the more “dangerous” idea since Lamarck posited self-evolving entities without apparent need of an external director. In Lamarck’s vision of things, as Schrödinger put it, “efforts at improvement are not lost in the biological sense but form a small but integrating part of the striving of the species towards higher and ever higher perfection.”5 In short, Lamarck had ostensibly replaced an external God with an inner force.
Difficulties with History
Riskin makes the further point that Darwin may have been drawn to Lamarck not only pragmatically because Lamarckian ideas could plug cognitive gaps in his own argumentation (as in the example from his Descent of Man cited above) but also on ideological grounds. For despite its associations with antiquated animism, if one reframes the Lamarckian idea in the manner suggested by Riskin one can then see that “Lamarckism represented its era’s most naturalist, nontheological account of species-change.”6 It is a point she develops further by claiming,
The biologists and philosophers of biology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have categorically excluded Lamarckian explanations and all nonrandom variation as beyond the bounds of legitimate science have believed they were expressing a commitment to an ongoing naturalism. But history places them in the opposite camp. In fact, they are the heirs to the tradition with which they meant to do battle: the argument from design.7
Both Darwin and more modern evolutionists essentially hitched their wagons to a tradition that from its early inception denied agency in Nature precisely in order to ascribe it to a designer God. The argument to which Darwin expressed his official allegiance was ab initio and by the express wish of its originators an argument to and from design since “a material world lacking agency assumed, indeed required, a supernatural god.”8 The 17th-century banishment of agency, perception, consciousness, and will from nature and natural science gave a monopoly on all those attributes to an external god: the paradigm simply could not function without “an accompanying theology.”9
Climbing Mount Improbable
Because the devisers of modern science after circa 1650 banished mysterious agencies to within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Christian God, they left a more atheistically inclined posterity with a considerable dilemma. For the new, mechanistic science was adamant that one could not procure a lens instrument without an instrument maker. By the same token one could not have an eye without a divine Optician (hence Darwin’s famous shudder when he asked himself rather disconsolately how anything of such supreme intricacy as the eye could have been fashioned by natural selection). Darwin, to use the old cricketing cliché, had come out to bat on a decidedly sticky wicket in the larger arena of science. By which I mean that the problem for Darwin appeared to be logically insurmountable given that his quest was to find a purely secular mechanism for evolution without the “accompanying theology” obligatory to the theory as it had been established by its founding fathers in the century immediately preceding the Enlightenment.
If, as science had come to insist, nature was like a clock, a passive mechanism, it must needs be wound up by an external agent. The only vera causa of evolution would on this view have to be a divine one. No wonder that Sir Charles Lyell and others at the time were prompted to ask of Darwin, What agency was he proposing, precisely (if not a divine one)? In what did the creative power in Darwin’s theory consist and what was the driving force (vera causa) of his evolutionary ideas? Darwin’s famous answer was of course “natural selection” but it has perhaps been insufficiently acknowledged (either by Darwin or by his posterity) that this confident answer was to lose much of its force once Darwin had been compelled to confess that his theory of natural selection did not in reality select at all but merely preserved. Belatedly capitulating to colleagues’ numerous objections that natural selection was entirely unlike the “intelligent selection” practised by professional animal breeders, Darwin at that point had to throw in the towel, conceding in a letter to Lyell in 1860,
Talking of “Natural Selection,” if I had to commence de novo, I would have used natural preservation.10
The truly insurmountable obstacle confronting Darwin after that concession was that the term in which he had acquiesced, natural preservation, could by definition be only passive rather than active, so that the formation of new body parts (let alone new species) now became out of the question. As Michael Ruse recently pointed out, natural selection is better understood as a score-recording statistic than as a “true cause” of anything:
Natural selection is simply keeping score, as does the Dow Jones [Industrial] Average. The Dow Jones does not make things (cause things to) happen. It is just statistics about what did happen.11
The trouble with Darwin’s being forced to eat his own words and so revise his original theory so drastically was that notions of evolutionary innovation in terms of new body parts/species seemed now to be logically indefensible since mere preservation, by definition, cannot produce the kind of physiological innovation which could lead from a microbe to a whale (or even to a mouse). So redefined, natural selection cannot create anything at all. Darwin would have had to conclude that, by making this concession, he was being obliged to abandon what he had always thought of as the limitlessly creative force of his own theory. At some level of apprehension, he must have felt forced to accept that natural selection might have little or no motive force at all — a devastating conclusion entirely subversive of his theory (hence his later flirtation with Lamarckism).
Darwin Versus Modern Biological Science
What makes matters worse for Darwin posthumously is that a number of modern researchers have come forward to reinforce the sombre conclusion that (neo-)Darwinism simply has no theory of the generative to commend it since nothing in Darwin’s theory can account for anything bar trivial micromutations.12 The author’s semantic retreat was fatal to any more substantial, macromutational claims. As Professor Nick Lane has more recently explained on the basis of precise observations,
It is generally assumed that once simple life has emerged, it gradually evolves into more complex forms, given the right conditions. But that’s not what happens on Earth […] If simple cells had evolved slowly into more complex ones over billions of years, all kinds of intermediate forms would have existed and some still should. But there are none [….] This means that there is no inevitable trajectory from simple to complex life. Never-ending natural selection, operating on infinite populations of bacteria over millions of years, may never give rise to complexity. Bacteria simply do not have the right [physiological] architecture.13
Darwin’s espousal of the “outside” argument (as opposed to the Lamarckian interior force) makes it unsurprising that he had the gravest difficulty in trying to make his argument entirely secular and free of theistic implications. His aspiration to free his theory from the entangling toils of theology never really came off. His key metaphor of natural selection was in fact recently unmasked as little more than “an anthropomorphic but superhuman agency, ‘daily and hourly scrutinizing’ all variation, and making intelligent and benevolent decisions like a Paleyan Designer.”14 Indeed, according to Darwin’s somewhat hyperbolic evocations, the powers of natural selection transcended human intelligence to such a degree that he appeared to impute to it the capacity for intelligent design. He proposed that Nature, with limitless millennia at her disposal, could do a more comprehensive job of bringing about major physiological changes (and eventually new species) than could any human breeder, however resourceful and intelligent. He gave lyrical, arguably even mystical expression to that conviction in a famous passage in his Origin of Species:
It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation. Even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.15
The tone of the above passage makes it unsurprising that Bishop Samuel Wilberforce became convinced that Darwin was implicitly ascribing to Nature the same ontological status as his fellow theists customarily ascribed to the Christian God. Darwin’s apparent raising of external nature to crypto-divine status was, concluded Wilberforce, just as much an article of faith as any of the more conventional forms of theistic allegiance available to him. Wilberforce (who was not alone in coming to this conclusion) surely had a point. Dov Ospovat ascertained in a foundational study some four decades ago that Darwin was often influenced by theological ideas without always recognizing them as theological ideas.16 Darwin did not for instance seem to have questioned why a process he insisted was blind should somehow be automatically in favor of progress. The fact that natural selection was effectively a theory of progressive (arguably even providential) development as much as of ad hoc or merely opportunistic adaptation appears to have been a matter of unquestioned faith for him. As Michael Ruse recently observed,
Darwin’s theory, like Christianity, takes final cause very seriously. Organisms are not just thrown together; they show purpose — the eye for seeing, the hand for grasping. For the Christian, this was the work of God; for Darwin, of natural selection. This shared perspective is not accidental. Remember how Darwin started with Paley [author of Natural Theology, 1802].17
Squaring the Circle?
It is well enough known that Darwin maintained to the end of his days a significant residue of his earlier Christian faith and that in later years was apt to call himself a Theist (Darwin’s capitalization). There seems, then, to have been an unacknowledged providential dimension lying at the heart of Darwin’s thinking. For in later years he came to harbor the suspicion that there might be, in Thomas Huxley’s phrase, a “wider teleology” in nature’s processes which far exceeded the bounds of natural selection.
Hence it might even be claimed that Darwin’s theory was in an unwitting sense more a special form of Nature mysticism than an empirically demonstrable theory in line with modern demands for testability. Precisely this point was urged more than a century ago by the eminent botanist responsible for pioneering the then new science of Mendelian genetics in Cambridge at the beginning of the twentieth century, F. W. Bateson. Bateson expressed himself entirely dissatisfied with the lack of detail surrounding the term natural selection. He objected that the vagueness of Darwin’s description of natural selection as occurring by insensible and imperceptible stages could not possibly give the slightest hint as to what the precise operative mechanism might consist in. It was, he felt, wholly inadequate to talk in Delphic terms of organisms having “evolved” from simpler systems without supplying any detailed descriptors of what precise physiological modalities may have occasioned such changes.18
Darwin was plainly no doctrinaire atheist in the mold of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and the famous instances of Angst he experienced in grappling with his faith may provide some indication that a “still small voice” was apt to whisper to him that his life’s work might rest on an insecure foundation of questionable assumptions. This would certainly account for some of his more tormented animadversions in the decade preceding his death concerning his riven attitude to the Christian faith. At that later point in his life Darwin appears to have been seriously tempted to return to the Christian fold, at least with one foot. For although he set his face against a once-and-for-all Creation of the Biblical sort, he nevertheless saw in the evolutionary process a force which could bring about the same net result as Divine creation. The prime difference was that this became a series of gradualistic movements in multiple creative phases requiring eons for its completion. Creation for Darwin was simply a continuous process rather than a “one-off.” Those in Britain and America in the latter half of the 19th century who interpreted the essence of Darwinism as being an explanation of evolution in (covertly) theistic terms appear to have had a point.19
Notes
What Is Life? With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches, with Foreword by Roger Penrose (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), p. 109.
Paul Nurse, What Is Life? (Oxford: Fickling, 2021)
Nurse, What Is Life? p. 189.
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, edited by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 110, emphasis added.
Schrödinger, p. 107.
Riskin, p. 363.
Riskin, p. 363
Riskin, p. 4.
Riskin, p. 4
Letter to Charles Lyell, September 1860. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-2935.xml
Michael Ruse, Understanding Natural Selection (Cambridge: CUP, 2023), p.133.
Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, Your Designed Body (Seattle: Discovery, 2022), p. 370.
Nick Lane, “Lucky to Be There,” in Michael Brooks (editor), Chance: The Science and Secrets of Luck, Randomness, and Probability (London: Profile/New Scientist, 2015), pp. 22-33, citations pp. 28, 32.
Sander Gliboff, H.G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel and the Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), p. 136.
Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 66.
Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology and Natural Selection 1839-1859, 2nd edition (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), especially pp. 207-12.
Michael Ruse, Evolution and Christianity (Cambridge: CUP, 2022), p. 60.
Bateson’s objection has been taken up by Neil Broom, How Blind is the Watchmaker? Nature’s Design and the Limits of Naturalistic Science(Downers Grove and Leicester: Intervarsity Press, 2001) p. 39, note.
See James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 1981).
Once more we turn to Gods of our own making?
At the Altar of that Hideous Strength
C. S. Lewis’s 1946 science fiction novel That Hideous Strength is almost eighty years old now. Written during the throes of World War II, the novel is the culmination of Lewis’s cosmic trilogy, preceded by Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. There are hosts of other articles attending to the prescience of Lewis’s terrifying novel, and for good reason; That Hideous Strength is a warning against using technology to dehumanize people and ultimately cripple the world into submission. It’s a great book as a novel, but it seems especially appropriate to revisit in lieu of the growing interest in transhumanism and the rapid acceleration of AI development.
It feels like much of the talk on AI in recent months involves its surface-level manifestations or consequences. It might take away jobs in journalism and help college kids cheat on exams. These are real concerns. The other dangers involving AI scams, disinformation, and deepfakes are formidable, too. And yet a novel like The Hideous Strength shows the danger behind the danger: the temptation to reject being merely human.
A N.I.C.E. Organization
The novelist’s protagonist, Mark Studdock, must decide whether he’ll opt into a scheme to destroy humanity via machine intelligence. Mark, a sociologist in training, gets caught up in a secret society known as N.I.C.E., which stands for the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments. N.I.C.E. is the perfect symbol of today’s benevolent-sounding yet bloated and banal administrative state, carrying out power initiatives that impact everyday people. While it’s unclear exactly what the overall goals of the Institute are, one thing is clear: it’s time to throw off the limits of being human and transcend into the world of pure intelligence.
Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane, both have a lot to learn in the book. Mark is eager to find acceptance among elites at N.I.C.E., while Jane, who is a lapsed academic struggling to finish her dissertation on John Donne, longs for a kind of freedom and independence that her married life fails to afford her. Through their own journeys, both learn that accepting their limits and choosing to commit to each other is the real path to freedom. In the end, domestic family life, which includes birth, growth, and death, is envisioned as a kind of antidote to the mad quest for human immortality and domination.
That Didn’t Take Long
Okay, so that was 1946. It’s 2023. OpenAI, ChatGPT, Altos Labs, bio-longevity; is any of that relevant to C. S. Lewis’s great book? Paul Kingsnorth thinks so. Kingsnorth writes often on the state of our tech-intoxicated culture. He doesn’t own a smartphone. He apologetically writes on Substack while decrying all the bad things the Internet has done to us. But, his voice is among the few out there pointing out how “merging ourselves with the Machine” will compromise our humanity. In a recent piece, “The Abbey of Misrule,” Kingsnorth asks what we gain by developing these new AI tools. He writes,
Nearly sixty years back, the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan offered a theory of technology which hinted at an answer. He saw each new invention as an extension of an existing human capability. In this understanding, a club extends what we can do with our fist, and a wheel extends what we can do with our legs. Some technologies then extend the capacity of previous ones: a hand loom is replaced by a steam loom; a horse and cart is replaced by a motor car, and so on.
What human capacity, then, is digital technology extending? The answer, said McLuhan, was our very consciousness itself.
Paul KINGSNORTH, THE UNIVERSAL – BY PAUL KINGSNORTH – THE ABBEY OF MISRULE (SUBSTACK.COM)
While technologies made life more convenient, faster, or efficient, artificial intelligence is about extending human consciousness. Do we want that? What would that mean to our ability to think, understand, and reason on our own? Beyond that, AI at its worst will be a kind of divinity, a man-made God. At least, that’s what our friends over in the transhumanist camp would like. Kingsnorth continues,
Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt says that by building AI systems ‘we are making God.’ Transhumanist Elise Bohan says ‘we are building God.’ Kevin Kelly believes that ‘we can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog.’ ‘Does God exist?’ asks transhumanist and Google maven Ray Kurzweil. ‘I would say, “Not yet.”’ These people are doing more than trying to steal fire from the gods. They are trying to steal the gods themselves — or to build their own versions.
For the last two years, I have found myself writing a lot here about God; more than I had intended. I have claimed several times that there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and that someone is always going to sit on it. Humans are fundamentally religious animals. We are drawn towards transcendence whether we like it or not. But here in the West, we have dethroned our old god, and now we can barely look at him.
We Should All Keep Our Heads
Kingsnorth’s article is worth reading in full, and his Substack is consistently interesting and compelling.
We don’t like to try and predict the future here at Mind Matters, since it seems so difficult to do. Nonetheless, C. S. Lewis’s novel and Kingsnorth’s warning rightly point out the dangers of depending too much on the machines we create. They might make us feel powerful, but in reality, they leave us weak.
Peter Kreeft, a philosopher at Boston College, wrote about this idea in his great book The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings. As the title indicates, the book goes into depth on Tolkien’s intricate worldview, conception of ethics, and the battle between good and evil. Kreeft writes,
We have done exactly what Sauron did in forging the Ring. We have put our power into things in order to increase our power. And the result is, as everyone knows but no one admits, that we are now weak little wimps, unable to survive a blow to the great spider of our technological network. We tremble before a nationwide electrical blackout or a global computer virus. Only hillbillies and Boy Scouts would survive a nuclear war. In our drive for power we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we have become more powerful when all the time we have been becoming less.
PETER KREEFT, THE PHILOSOPHY OF TOLKIEN: THE WORLDVIEW BEHIND THE LORD OF THE RINGS
This is why it probably wouldn’t be so great an idea to force everyone to get electric stoves. Power goes out, and everyone’s basically doomed. I appreciate the technology of a lighter, but if I’m ever trapped in the Colorado wilderness and need to keep warm, I’d probably need a how-to manual for making fire from friction. Technology shows the remarkable ingenuity of human beings, but the more sophisticated it gets, the more tempting it will be to compromise the creativity that makes us unique and live as makeshift drones.
In short, we create technology, but we seem to be at a point where it’s compromising the very things that allowed us to develop it in the first place: innovation, creativity, hard work. If it’s ever stripped away, will we have the skills, stamina, and discipline to recover? If I upload my memories, consciousness, and relationships into the Machine, will I have laid myself at the altar of that hideous strength?
Simian exceptionalism?
Good as Gould? Ask a Chimp
Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome Science After Babel, the latest book from mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski. This article is adapted from Chapter 13.
Among other things, medieval thinkers believed that human beings were unique in ways that were absolute and inviolable. This doctrine many modern biologists have emphatically rejected. “The Western world,” Stephen Jay Gould remarks, “has yet to make its peace with Darwin.”1 The great impediment to this reconciliation, he goes on to add in his mad way (the sense strong that he is urging a difficult truth on a dogmatic public), “lies in our unwillingness to accept continuity between ourselves and nature, our ardent search for a criterion to assert our uniqueness.” He continues:
Chimps and gorillas have long been the battleground of our search of uniqueness; for if we could establish an unambiguous distinction — of kind, rather than degree — between ourselves and our closest relatives, we might gain the justification long sought for our cosmic arrogance. The battle shifted long ago from a simple debate about evolution: educated people now accept the evolutionary continuity between human and apes. But we are so tied to our philosophical and religious heritage that we still seek a criterion for a strict division between our abilities and those of chimpanzees.2
Now I quote all this not merely because Gould [held] a chair at Harvard and I do not, although this made the target all the more tempting, but because Gould represents a charming intelligence corrupted by a shallow system of belief.
No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: The chimpanzees invariably are the ones behind the bars of their cages. There they sit, solemnly munching bananas, searching for lice, aimlessly loping around, baring their gums, waiting for the experiments to begin. No distinction? Chimpanzees cannot read or write; they do not paint, or compose music, or do mathematics; they form no real communities, only loose-knit wandering tribes; they do not dine and cannot cook; there is no record anywhere of their achievements; beyond the superficial, they show little curiosity; they are born, they live, they suffer, and they die.
No Distinction?
No species in the animal world organizes itself in the complex, dense, difficult fashion that is typical of human societies. There is no such thing as animal culture; animals do not compromise and cannot count; there is not a trace in the animal world of virtually any of the powerful and poorly understood powers and properties of the human mind; in all of history, no animal has stood staring at the night sky in baffled and respectful amazement. The chimpanzees are static creatures, solemnly poking for grubs with their sticks, inspecting one another for fleas. No doubt, they are peaceable enough if fed, and looking into their warm brown eyes one can see the signs of a universal biological shriek (a nice maneuver that involves hearing what one sees), but what of it?
One may insist, of course, that all this represents a difference merely of degree. Very well. Only a difference of degree separates man from the Canadian goose. Individuals of both species are capable of entering the air unaided and landing some distance from where they started.
Notes
Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections on Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), 26.
Gould, Ever Since Darwin, 27
Saturday, 17 June 2023
It's official "Neanderthal" is now a compliment.
Researchers: Neanderthals Invented Process to Produce Birch Tar
Many of us grew up with “Neanderthal!” used as a term of abuse for a stupid person. A 2021 study from the University of Tübingen and others, dusted off at ScienceAlert, paints quite a different picture,in connection with Neanderthals’ manufacture of birch tar. The tar from burnt birch wood can be used as glue, insect repellent, and antiseptic. It can be scraped from a fire naturally or it can be produced in a controlled way. Which method Neanderthals used says something about the development of their culture.
The study authors, Patrick Schmidt et al., went to a lot of potentially messy trouble to try to answer the question:
Some think of black tar as a happy accident that Neanderthals simply scraped from surrounding rocks after burning birch bark. Others think the sticky, water-resistant material was carefully crafted in an underground oven long before our species learned the trick.
This might seem like a pedantic squabble, but intentionally distilling useful substances from raw materials is commonly assumed to be another activity that sets human intelligence apart from other species.
Based on the analysis of two pieces of birch tar found at an archaeological site in Germany, this latest study argues that “birch tar may document advanced technology, forward planning, and cultural capacity in Neanderthals.”
SCIENCEALERT, JUNE 4, 2023.
Specifically, the authors say, “they distilled tar in an intentionally created underground environment that restricted oxygen flow and remained invisible during the process. This degree of complexity is unlikely to have been invented spontaneously. Our results suggest that Neanderthals invented or developed this process based on previous simpler methods and constitute one of the clearest indicators of cumulative cultural evolution in the European Middle Palaeolithic.” Stop Underestimating Neanderthal intelligence!
If Neanderthals really were making tar as far back as 200,000 years, that beats any evidence of Homo sapiens making tar by 100,000 years.
"Thus,” [the] researchers write, “what we show here for the first time is that Neanderthals invented and refined a transformative technique, most likely independently of the influence from Homo sapiens.”
Previous discoveries have shown that Neanderthals had complex diets involving multiple food preparation steps. Their use of fire, however, may not have been confined to heating or cooking.
The intelligence of our earlier cousins should not be underestimated any longer.
SCIENCEALERT, JUNE 4, 2023.
Note that the authors recommended that we stop underestimating the intelligence of Neanderthals after they tried to do their job themselves, using only tools available back then.
But underestimating the intelligence of Neanderthals has not been merely an academic sport. There is a hard practical reason for it: The nearly impossible question of the evolution of the human mind would be rendered much easier if paleontologists could demonstrate a long, slow succession of not-quite-humans gradually becoming more like humans until… And Neanderthal man has been a complete, utter flop in that regard.
He certainly came well recommended for the role. For example, in 2011, ex-evangelical and unidirectional skeptic Michael Shermer told us,
… there is almost no evidence that Neanderthals would have ever ‘advanced’ beyond where they were when they disappeared 30,000 years ago. Even though paleoanthropologists disagree about a great many things, there is near total agreement in the literature that Neanderthals were not on their way to becoming “us.”
IN BRUCE L. GORDON AND WILLIAM A. DEMBSKI, THE NATURE OF NATURE (WILMINGTON, DE: ISI BOOKS, 2011), P. 452).
Okay, but a steady stream of new finds from Neanderthal culture in relation to speech, burying the dead, and producing art, has resulted in comments like that of Clive Finlayson, Director of the Gibraltar Museum, “The historical downgrading of our Neanderthal cousins has gone well beyond the scientific.”
And now here’s a sign of the times for you: Although Neanderthals no longer exist as a separate group, it turns out that many moderns have at least some Neanderthal DNA. That is surely the reason that do-it-yourself DNA analysis firm 23andMe now celebrates “Neanderthal Nerds.” (Ah yes. First rule of business, ignored by some high-profile firms in recent months: Don’t act like you think your loyal customer is the class dunce!)
The Big, Obvious Question…
If Neanderthals were so smart, why didn’t they advance much faster technologically before they merged with the rest of us or died out? Ah, that’s one of the harsh facts about technology: Technological progress is not a simple stepladder.
The more technologies we already have, the faster the progress. For example, most progress awaited the development — much, much later — of mining and metallurgy. If we stopped using metals today, most current technology would just disappear. Creativity, without the right tools and materials, doesn’t suffice.
Also, there never were very many Neanderthals at any given time and they were widely scattered. The steady growth and increasing density of the human population means many more people working together on problems now, rapidly developing and communicating solutions. That likely means a continued rapid pace of innovation without the need for any corresponding increase in average human intelligence.
On the whole, that last fact should be good news for most of us. Meanwhile, where is that missing link?
Rhinos trample gradualism underfoot?
What Do We Know about the Origin of Rhinos?
Editor’s note: We are delighted to direct readers to a new paper by geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, “Origin and Evolution of the Rhinos (Family Rhinocerotidae): What Do We Really Know?” What follows is the paper’s Abstract:
Some rhinoceroses, including the square-lipped Ceratotherium simum of the African savanna, weigh more than three tons and thus represent the largest land mammals after the African elephant. After an extensive revision of the family Rhinocerotidae, presently some 21 genera have been found to be valid. Most of those, however, do not exist anymore. Just four genera are still extant.
Although they are not the handsomest or most graceful creatures in the animal kingdom, the Rhinocerotoidea (superfamily) are a fascinating group for research due not only to an extraordinarily rich fossil record1 but also to many striking anatomical and physiological characteristics.
Intriguingly, according the geological time table, many of the past and present forms have lived contemporaneously for millions of years. Also, all families and genera of the rhinocerotoids appear abruptly in the fossil record. Contrary to Darwinian expectations, none of them is linked to any other by a series of “infinitesimally small changes,” “infinitesimally slight variations,” “insensibly fine steps,” etc. Hence, the fossil record is in full agreement with the statement of the eminent evolutionary biologist Donald R. Prothero, paleontologist and leading rhino researcher, that “the most striking thing about the overall pattern of rhinocerotid evolution is that of stasis.” Even at the species level he notes that “although some limited examples of gradual change can be documented in the rhinocerotids, the overwhelming pattern is one of stable species which show no measurable change over long periods of time, consistent with the predictions of Eldredge and Gould (1972).”2
So, what do we really know about their origin and evolution? The entire fossil series of the family of the rhinos starts with a rhinoceros (Teletaceras) and ends with rhinoceroses. The viewpoint of natural selection of random or accidental or haphazard DNA mutations can be — except for microevolution — excluded for many scientific reasons, as will be shown below. Intelligent design is definitely the scientifically superior explanation.
Notes
According to the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) (2023) for the superfamily: “Collections (2419 total)” and for the family Rhinocerotidae alone “Collections (1892 total)”. Let’s take for a comparison the family Elephantidae, showing an “excellent”, “very complete” fossil record, displaying an “enormous quantity of fossil bones”: “Collections (1316 total).” (Numbers of PBDB all retrieved 10 June 2023.) For the fossil record of the elephants, see also: http://www.weloennig.de/ElephantEvolution.Critique.pdf.
Emphasis added.
Friday, 16 June 2023
Tampering with the record?
Fossil Friday: The Supposed Oldest Cheetah Was Yet Another Fraud
In 2008 two scientists from the Shanghai Science Museum and the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen described a new mammalian species, Acinonyx kurteni, from a supposedly 2.2-2.5 million year old skull, as the oldest known fossil cheetah (Christiansen & Mazák 2009). This discovery allegedly also proved an Old World origin for these feline carnivores (Carroll 2008), contrary to earlier beliefs that placed the origin in the New World together with the American cougar.
Even before the publication, the Chinese scientists Deng Tao and Qiu Zhanxiang had revealed the skull to be a crude forgery (Stone 2010, Wang 2013) and said that just from photos of the specimen one could easily recognize that parts of the skull had been concocted from plaster. The journal PNAS, which happens to be one of the top ten high-impact journals in science, was informed in advance but dismissed the protest and published the paper anyway. The responsible editor was nobody less than famous Darwinist Francisco Ayala (who died this year). Only one year after the original describers had still defended their work in the prestigious journal Science (Mazák & Christiansen 2011), the lead author finally retracted the paper in 2012 with the lukewarm explanation that it was based on “a composite specimen from the late Miocene laterite and not from the early Pleistocene loess” (Mazák 2012, Anonymous 2012).
Among the Worst
This example certainly ranks among the worst kinds of fraudulent fossils, as it received widespread global media attention just like the “Piltdown bird,” Archaeoraptor. Contrary to the claims of some science popularizers and the Darwinist thought police, forged fossils from countries like China and Russia do indeed represent a significant problem (Stone 2010, Wang 2013) and have repeatedly led to junk science published in peer-reviewed journals. This case also demonstrates that such frauds can be driven by the desire to present and support evolutionary scenarios, which may also suppress any doubts among reviewers and editors as the shocking example of Ayala shows.
References
Anonymous 2012. Author retracts PNAS paper about alleged Pliocene cheetah fossil that critics said was a fake. Retraction Watch August 20, 2012. https://retractionwatch.com/2012/08/20/author-retracts-pnas-about-alleged-pliocine-cheetah-fossil-that-had-been-questioned/
Carroll R 2008. Ancient Cheetah Fossil Points to Old World Roots? National Geographic News December 29, 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20090221125349/http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/12/081229-cheetah-skull.html
Christiansen P & Mazák JH 2009. A primitive Late Pliocene cheetah, and evolution of the cheetah lineage. PNAS 106(2), 512–515. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0810435106
Mazák JH 2012. Retraction for Christiansen and Mazák, A primitive Late Pliocene cheetah, and evolution of the cheetah lineage. PNAS 109(37), 15072. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211510109
Mazák JH & Christiansen P 2011. A defense of the primitive cheetah skull. Science 331(6021), 1136–1137. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.331.6021.1136-bStone R 2010. Altering the Past: China’s Faked Fossils Problem. Science 330(6012), 1740–1741. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.330.6012.1740
Wang X 2013. Mortgaging the future of chinese paleontology. PNAS 110(9), 3201. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301429110
Commonsense gets a jab in?
England’s National Health Service Bans Most Puberty-Blocking
Following up on an earlier advisory recommending against providing puberty blockers to adolescents who feel they are a different sex, the National Health Service in England has now banned their administration except in the context of a formally approved clinical trial. Moreover, social gender-affirmation will not be the automatic approach taken for children presenting with “gender incongruence.” From the NHS England advisory :
The clinical management approach should be open to exploring all developmentally and psychosocially appropriate options for children and young people who are experiencing gender incongruence. The clinical approach should be mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for pre-pubertal children, and that there will be a range of pathways to support these children and young people and a range of outcomes . . . .
A significant proportion of children and young people who are concerned about, or distressed by, issues of gender incongruence experience co-existing mental health, neuro-developmental and/or personal, family or social complexities in their lives. The relationship between these presentations and gender incongruence may not be readily apparent and will often require careful exploration.
Treating each patient as an individual instead of a category to be checked off, one approach fits all: what a concept!
Non-scientific and Ideologically Driven
Please note that this guidance is the precise opposite of immediate gender-affirmation in all cases regardless of the particular circumstances of the patient — a non-scientific, ideologically driven policy pushed by woke medical associations, and the laws and pending legislative proposals in our most progressive states (such as California’s A.B. 957).
The new approach will ban puberty-blocking except in the structured circumstance of a clinical trial. From another NHS England advisory:
The new approach will ban puberty-blocking except in the structured circumstance of a clinical trial. From another NHS England advisory:
We have previously made clear, including the draft interim service specification we consulted on, the intention that the NHS will only commission puberty suppressing hormones as part of clinical research. This approach follows advice from Dr Hilary Cass’ Independent Review highlighting the significant uncertainties surrounding the use of hormone treatments.
We are now going out to targeted stakeholder testing on an interim clinical commissioning policy proposing that, outside of a research setting, puberty suppressing hormones should not be routinely commissioned for children and adolescents who have gender incongruence/dysphoria.
Let us not forget that Norway, France, Sweden, and Finland — not exactly part of the Bible Belt — are also pursuing this more rational approach to gender incongruence. The approach, it is worth noting, is far more similar to the laws of Florida, Tennessee, and some other states than to those of California, Washington, and the rest of the gender-affirmation cartel.
The science is not settled. Gender-affirming care is not necessarily in the best interests of children presenting with gender incongruence. The time is long past for the American media and policymakers to recognize this fact, so that a truly science-based discourse can be launched about how best to care for these children.
Thursday, 15 June 2023
Seeking straight answers from atheists.
1)If the existence of moral evil and suffering in the world means there is no intelligent design any where in the universe.What does the existence of altruism and moral good in the very same universe mean?2)By what objective criterion/criteria is significance attributed only to the moral negative?3)If we are all the product of mindless/purposeless processes by what OBJECTIVE criteria can moral good or evil be determined?4)Many atheists argue against human consciousness for these:Could you name one thing more axiomatic than your own existence as a unique individual?5)If you don't consider your own existence as an individual axiomatic What about the rest of us?
6)If law enforcement officers in the course of conducting an investigation were to discover a corpse bound and gagged in the trunk of your car would you consider the following a knockout argument against your being considered a murder suspect:Why officer, there are over two billion car trunks on this planet it is well within the realm of possibility that a bound and gagged corpse would end up in one of these by a combination of purely random/co incidental occurrences lets not have any unwarranted invoking of agent causation.
7)Why do atheists insists that atheism is a natural font of civil liberty a)when NO society characterised by widespread civil liberty has ever been founded/administred by self-declared atheists b)EVERY society/government ever founded by self-declared atheists has been a repressive thugocracy?
8)What evidence would persuade you that intelligent causation is the best explanation for the origin of an object?
One more thing: in as much as some claim that the multiverse can produce men (and depending on whom one ask ubermen) via chance and necessity,can it also in like manner produce Gods? If not, why not?
Yet another dead end in the quest for a plausible human origins Narrative?
What Are They Teaching at Washington University? S. Joshua Swamidass and the Chimp-Human Divergence
I once had a rare and valuable baseball card I wanted to sell. I placed an ad and was shortly contacted by a collector. But to my dismay he wasn’t interested. He had probably looked at hundreds of baseball cards and it only required one look for him to know that my treasured card held no value for him. He did not attempt any negotiating tricks, just a polite “thank you” and off he went. I would have felt better about the encounter if he had tried to haggle down the price. For I would have had the comfort of knowing my card held at least some value. Instead, there was no price discovery—apparently the card was worthless.
I too am a collector of sorts. And like that baseball card collector I have looked at hundreds of specimens. No matter how unlikely the source or the venue, I will go there and have a look. And in short order, I will know exactly what I am looking at, and if there is any value there. But unlike the baseball card collector, my subject is not something you can touch. What I am interested in are the arguments and evidences for evolution. Ever since Darwin, evolutionists have insisted that their idea is undeniable—beyond all reasonable doubt. I find that complete certainty to be fascinating. So I search, find, analyze and categorize every justification and explanation for that conclusion that I can find.
My goal is to find the strongest, most powerful, such arguments and evidences, and to understand how we can have such certainty. This brings us to S. Joshua Swamidass’s recent article, Evidence and Evolution where Swamidass explains, in typical fashion, that the evidence for evolution is powerful and compelling. Swamidass describes the evidence as stunning. As a professor in the Genomic Medicine Division at Washington University, Swamidass deserves to be listened to. This is definitely a specimen I want to have a look at.
In his article, Swamidass’ focus is human evolution. Evolutionists believe that we humans evolved from a small ape-like creature and that our closest relative on the evolutionary tree is the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee must be our closest relative, they reason, because the chimp’s genome is closest to ours, and according to evolution, genetic mutations are the fuel behind evolutionary change.
The problem with this reasoning is that the chimpanzee is not very similar to humans according to many other measures. There are enormous differences between the two species. Simply put, from an evolutionary perspective the genetic data are not congruent with the other data. Swamidass’ evidence will need to overcome this obvious problem.
But that’s not all.
The basic idea of humans arising via a long series of genetic mutations is, itself, not indicated by the science and unlikely to say the least. Remember, the mutations have to be random. According to evolution, you can’t have mutations occurring for some purpose, such as creating a design. And natural selection doesn’t help—it cannot induce or coax the right mutations to occur. This makes the evolution of even a single protein, let alone humans, statistically impossible. So this is another enormous problem Swamidass’ evidence will need to overcome.
But that’s not all.
The incredible designs in the human body are not the only thing those random mutations have to create—they will also have to create human consciousness. Evolutionists may try to explain consciousness as an “emergent” property that just luckily arose when our brain somehow evolved. Or they may try to explain that consciousness is really no more than an illusion. But these are just more demonstrations of anti realism in evolutionary thought. Evolutionary theory constructs mechanisms and explanations that do not correspond to the real world. So this is another problem Swamidass will need to overcome.
But that’s not all.
In recent decades the genomes of humans and chimps have been determined, and they make no sense on evolution. One of the main problems is that the genes of the two species are almost identical. They are only about 1-2% different and, if you’re an evolutionist, this means you have to believe that the evolution of humans from a small, primitive, ape-like creature was caused by only a tiny modification of the genome.
This goes against everything we have learned about genetics. You can insert far greater genetic changes with far less change arising as a consequence. It makes little sense that tiny genetic changes could cause such enormous design changes to occur. This is yet another problem for Swamidass to overcome.
But that’s not all.
Not only is evolution limited to tiny genetic modifications to create the human, but the majority of those modifications would have had to be of little or no consequence. Here is how a 2005 paper on the chimpanzee-human genome comparisons put it:
In particular, we find that the patterns of evolution in human and chimpanzee protein-coding genes are highly correlated and dominated by the fixation of neutral and slightly deleterious alleles.
The paper is written from an evolutionary perspective, assuming that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. Given that a priori assumption, they were forced to conclude that most of the mutations affecting protein-coding genes led to “neutral and slightly deleterious alleles.” So not only are evolution’s random mutation resources meager, in terms of both quality and quantity as explained above, but even worse, those mutations mostly led to “neutral and slightly deleterious alleles.” This is no way to evolve the most complex designs in the world and it is yet another problem for Swamidass to overcome.
But that’s not all.
The supposed divergence rate between chimps and humans also has an unexplainable variation towards the ends of most chromosomes. This is another problem that seems to make no sense on evolution, which Swamidass must explain.
But that’s not all.
This supposed divergence rate between chimps and humans also has an unexplainable variation that correlates with chromosomal banding. Again, this makes no sense on evolution. Why should the chimp-human divergence vary with the banding pattern? Evolutionists have only just-so stories to imagine why this would have happened, and it is another problem for Swamidass to address.
But that’s not all.
This supposed divergence rate between chimps and humans is not consistent with the supposed divergence rate between the mouse and rat. The mouse-rat divergence is about an order of magnitude greater than the chimp-human divergence. And yet the mouse and rat are much more similar than the chimp and human. It makes no sense on evolution. In fact, before the rat genome was determined, evolutionists predicted it would be highly similar to the mouse genome. As one paper explained:
Before the launch of the Rat Genome Sequencing Project (RGSP), there was much debate about the overall value of the rat genome sequence and its contribution to the utility of the rat as a model organism. The debate was fuelled by the naive belief that the rat and mouse were so similar morphologically and evolutionarily that the rat sequence would be redundant.
The prediction that the mouse and rat genomes would be highly similar made sense according to evolution. But it was dramatically wrong.
Another approach is to ignore the morphological similarities and reason from the number of generations available to produce the genomic differences between the mouse and rat. The mouse-rat divergence date is estimated by evolutionists to be older than the chimp-human divergence date. Furthermore, the lifespan and generation time for mice and rats are much shorter than for chimps and humans. From this perspective, and given these two effects, one would conclude that the mouse-rat genetic divergence should be much greater—at least two orders of magnitude greater—than the chimp-human genetic divergence. But it isn’t. It is only about one order of magnitude greater.
So either way the mouse-rat comparison does not help to explain things and is another problem for Swamidass to explain.
Swamidass arguments and evidences
The science makes no sense on evolution. If we begin by assuming chimps and humans share a common ancestor, we end up with all kinds of contradictions and failures. So what exactly are Swamidass’ arguments and evidences? How is it that he is so certain? What is it in the data that he finds to be so stunning? And most importantly, how does he resolve the above problems?
Well, he doesn’t.
Astonishingly, Swamidass doesn’t even mention the above problems. It is as though they don’t exist. After some stories and high claims of certainty, here is what Swamidass says:
As predicted by common ancestry, human and chimpanzee genomes are extremely similar (greater than 98% similarity in coding regions), much more similar than we would expect without common descent. Remarkably, just as predicted by the fossil record, humans are about 10 times more genetically similar to chimpanzees than mice are to rats.
First, the high chimp-human genomic similarity was not predicted by common ancestry. No such prediction was made and no such prediction is required by common ancestry. Common ancestry would be just fine with very different levels of similarity than 98-99%. In fact, this high similarity makes no sense on evolution, for several of the reasons given above.
Swamidass’ claim that this evidence is a stunning confirmation of common ancestry is utterly at odds with the science. It is in stark contrast to the scientific facts.
Second, Swamidass’ claim that mouse-rat divergence, compared with the chimp-human divergence, is “just as predicted by the fossil record” is also blatantly false. While evolutionists can always combine various explanatory mechanisms to rationalize just about any comparison, that does not make for stunning evidence that is “just as predicted.”
Finally, the real strength of Swamidass’ argument lies in its metaphysics. The professor states that the chimp-human genome comparison is “much more similar than we would expect without common descent.”
Without common descent?
The evolutionist has just made an unbeatable (and unfalsifiable) argument.
This is not science. Swamidass’ claim about what is and isn’t likely “without common descent” is not open to scientific scrutiny.
Scientists, qua scientists, do not have knowledge of all possible explanations for the origin of life. This is why scientists, qua scientists, make statements about theories, not about the complement of a theory. A scientist cannot know that something is unlikely “without” his theory. That implies knowledge of all other possible theories. And that knowledge does not come from science.
This is the strength of Swamidass’ argument. Notice that with this metaphysical knowledge, all of the scientific problems melt away. No wonder he does not address them. They are inconsequential. At worst, they are simply interesting puzzles. The truth of the matter is already known.
If Swamidass is correct then, yes, of course, the genomic data must be strong evidence for common ancestry. But it all hinges on his metaphysics. This is not about science. It never was.
Cosmic fine-tuning necessary but not sufficient for the Origin of Life?
Theistic Cosmology and Theistic Evolution — Understanding the Difference
Astronomers have convincingly shown that the laws of nature are sufficient to account for the formation of stars and planetary systems throughout the universe. Given the initial conditions of our universe, as determined from big bang cosmology, and given the values of the fundamental physical parameters and the strengths of the four fundamental forces of nature, scientists can make predictions of the subsequent state of the cosmos that match the essential macroscopic structure found in our universe today. This predictive ability based on nature’s laws lends credence to the validity of our understanding of those laws and the initial conditions that manifested in the beginning. This achievement attests to the remarkable comprehensibility of the universe — how the discoverability of its laws and properties is commensurate with our mental ability to comprehend them.1
Many scientists have written about the remarkable fine-tuning of the laws and initial conditions of our universe that must exist within narrowly defined limits to allow life‘s existence.2,3 Additional research into the particular properties of our galaxy, star, solar system, Earth, and its moon have revealed a comprehensive suite of specific conditions that must have come together for Earth to be able to support life in its various forms over the long course of its history.4
In my book Canceled Science, after discussing many of the finely tuned conditions for life, I ask whether the culmination of fine-tuning that resulted in the existence of Earth could have come about naturally, or would some behind-the-scenes purposeful intervention be necessary? I suggest that the skill and foresight necessary to orchestrate the cosmic beginning so that the Earth eventually formed as part of our solar system seems “compatible with the traditional understanding of God’s attributes of great wisdom and power. Beyond that, we cannot say.”5
Far from Common
The uniqueness of planet Earth is becoming more apparent (see here) as the inventory of extrasolar planets continues to grow without revealing any other planets that could substitute for our home. Estimates of the low probability of obtaining all the features of the Earth-moon-Sun system required for maintaining livable conditions over the years do not necessarily point to any violations of the laws of physics in its formation, but all we are learning suggests that our congenial environment is far from common.
The concept of theistic cosmology does not seem necessary to explain Earth and its solar environment, since the outcome in view is not physically impossible, albeit unlikely. How is this different from the concept of theistic evolution? The difference is that the outcome needed to be explained by evolution — life with all its millions of species culminating in humans — is not known to be compatible with the established laws of physics.6
One argument in support of this contention deals with predictability. Starting with the initial conditions of our universe and the specific values of the forces of nature, the laws of physics would not lead to a prediction of the origin of life as we know it.7 This argument grows even stronger when we consider that our uniform and repeated experience with the laws of nature demands that on the whole, entropy will increase and specified complexity will decrease with the passage of time. Neither of these universal principles of nature is consistent with a natural origin of life.
Theistic evolution or evolutionary creationism8 maintains that evolution is a done deal but that God’s behind the scenes influence was necessary to bring about the full panoply of life, including humans, that we have today. If, however, God’s guiding hand worked throughout history in the development of every species of life, as scientific observers, we would perceive not the hand of God, but a law of nature at work. The concept of the evolution of all life from a common ancestor, if attributed either to a law of nature or a natural process guided by God, is at odds with our most fundamental understanding of how nature works.9 In our study of science, we have found that the laws of nature do not contradict one another. We don’t have laws of nature that only apply piecemeal.
Deep Levels of Design
What alternative view could explain the deep levels of design that appear in all life on Earth? If God didn’t redirect a law of nature to act contrary to nature, how should we explain the historically increasing complexity and diversity of life on Earth? My respect as a physicist for the laws of nature doesn’t preclude my acceptance of intelligent beings like us manipulating matter and energy to bring about outcomes that would never occur naturally. In like manner, extrapolating this everyday experience, neither science nor theology precludes us from accepting that God manipulated nature as often as desired to introduce various species of life and to maintain Earth’s habitability.
Neither does the frequency of intervention disparage the source of the agency. We admire an architectural and construction firm that designs and builds a beautiful home for us to live in. Would it be reasonable for someone to criticize the firm because the house didn’t also prepare dinner for its occupants every night? I suppose a house could be built that did so, but would it be desirable? Choosing a menu, selecting ingredients, and working to prepare dinner is something my wife and I enjoy doing together (although sometimes, when we’re tired after a long day of work, a “home-cooked” meal might be nice!).
Perhaps in a similar manner, the laws of physics that limit what outcomes can occur naturally in our universe provide us with the pleasure and discipline of creative work. As I mentioned in an earlier article, “Is Life an Information Ratchet?,” gravity may cause a landslide to build up a pile of rocks at the bottom of a hill, but it will never make a castle. The laws that limit natural outcomes not only provide opportunities for us to manipulate material for our purposes, but their limitations also required God’s interventions to produce life by manipulating atoms into living organisms (however exactly that may have been accomplished).
Science and Experience
A reason for advocating this view is that it fully comports with our science and experience. It’s a juggler’s nightmare to assert that a law of nature is only valid except when it’s not valid. Rearrangements of physical matter into forms that would never occur naturally (such as the arrangement of the atoms that form my car) don’t constitute a violation of any law of nature if we acknowledge the immaterial intelligence and will of the human agent. The same principle applies when acknowledging God as the intelligent, non-contingent being who intervenes in nature to bring about the unnatural outcome of life in all its myriad forms.
NOTES
Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, A Meaningful World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006).
Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe (New York: HarperCollins, 2021).
Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2016).
Eric Hedin, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021), 139.
The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos, William A. Dembski, Casey Luskin, Joseph M. Holden, Editors (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2021).
Gerald L. Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 58.
https://biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-evolutionary-creation .
Jay Richards, “Is Theistic Evolution a Viable Option for Christians?”, Ch. 39 in The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos, William A. Dembski, Casey Luskin, Joseph M. Holden, Editors (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2021).
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