Sunday 14 May 2023
Trinitarians vs. the Trinity.
After many decades of discussing/debating the trinity doctrine with supposedly qualified expositors,I can't help but notice that I am yet to hear a defense of any particular concept of the trinity that worked on its own terms i.e that wasn't a non sequitur.
Indeed as I keep trying to explain to my interlocutors the trinity doctrine's main counter is the defense mounted by its adherents.
Trinitarians are able get away with the logical fallacies inherent in the most popular defenses of their doctrine due to lazy thinking both on their own part and those who they are able to persuade. First let's take a popular/mainstream concept of the trinity :Trinity, in Christian doctrine, the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead.: So an attempted defense of this notion should ,using premises held in common,reason consistently to the conclusion that the most high God is in fact a council of three eternal persons. Not that any of the non-triune persons in the council is the most high God or is considered God in some unspecified/unspecifiable way or is divine, trinitarians must demonstrate from scripture that the most high God consists of three co eternal persons. They however invariably end up making claims that are either tritheistic or modalistic in their defenses of their dogma.
By way of a few examples:
John ch.1:1NIV"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Note that the text plainly states that the logos was with the God and not with the father thus there is no logical way to get to a Trinitarian conclusion from this premise Bi-Theism is possible with a stretch , but trinitarianism is not even in the frame.
Romans ch.9:5"Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised! " Some Trinitarian translators have rather shortsightedly promoted the above rendering of the text thus handing Modalists ammunition ,for which they are likely quite grateful. Of course if Jesus is the most high God then obviously the most high God is not triune,because by common consent Jesus Christ is not triune so either a monarchy of the so called second person of the trinity over his Father or some kind of Sabellianism is in play, but certainly no trinitarianism.
John ch.14:9"Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? " By common consent neither Jesus nor his Father is triune, for trinitarians this would disqualify either from consideration as the most high God who/which(?) is triune, so there really is no logical way to make this verse even appear to support a triune deity whether seeing the Father(who is not the triune God) is to be taken literally ,as that would be an invoking of modalism ,or Jesus is claiming equality with his Father ,who is not the triune God, for that would mean that Jesus is a distinct God like his Father who is a distinct God see John ch.1:1 So once again it's Bi-Theism or sabellianism certainly not trinitarianism.
John ch.5:18NIV"For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling (The)God his own Father, making himself equal with (the)God."
Thus the Jewish religious leaders accused of making himself EQUAL to The mutually agreed upon lone God not of claiming to be the one God. So the only way that our Lord could concur with this accusation is to abandon monotheism and claim the existence of a second and equal deity i.e himself.
So while my main issue is the fact that the interpretive logic underpinning the premises and conclusions of Trinitarian arguments cannot be consistently applied in exegesis as even trinitarians are forced to admit when confronted ,the fact that even given the premises there is no logical way to any necessarily Trinitarian conclusion doubles the problem for trinitarians in my humble opinion.
From the selfish gene to kinship in one easy lesson?
Evolutionists: We Now Have Empirical Evidence For the Evolution of Kin Recognition
In a new Study out of the University of Liverpool evolutionists now say they have found empirical evidence that a genetic complex, involving dozens of protein-coding genes related to altruism, can evolve. Such a finding would be truly ground-breaking given that, at least up until now, the evolution of even a single protein has been found to be scientifically unlikely. It would be astonishing if now evolutionists have overturned a substantial body of work establishing molecular evolution to be effectively impossible. But of course evolutionists have done no such thing. There was no finding of molecular evolution, no new proteins or genes, no empirical evidence, nothing. Just another ridiculous claim made by evolutionists. It’s the same old pattern—evolutionists look at profoundly complicated biological structures, assume they evolved, and then claim they have found evidence of evolution.
Altruistic behavior creates many problems for evolution. One problem is the starting point: kin recognition, evolutionists unsuccessfully tried to explain altruism using the concept of kin selection, and while that creates many scientific problems, you can’t even get to kin selection without kin recognition. How do animal siblings or cousins recognize each other.
The new study out of the University of Liverpool has found a genetic basis for kin recognition. It is a genetic complex of a couple dozen protein-coding genes and the problems with this are several.
First, it means that kin selection hinges on several proteins working together. Evolving a single protein is, from a scientific perspective, so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. But here evolution needs several proteins. Evolve just one protein and you still don’t have kin recognition. You would have to evolve several others, so the problem is even more difficult.
Second, the genetic cluster is species-specific. Apparently there is no common kin recognition mechanism across the vertebrates as evolutionists had assumed. Of course evolutionists had assumed this, for to have different mechanisms, particular to species or groups of species, would make their theory even more absurdly improbable. Kin recognition would have to re-evolve, in various ways, over and over. Well that is exactly what this new finding is suggesting. As usual, biology shows specific, particular, solutions that are unique to one or a few species, rather than falling into the expected common descent pattern.
Once again, common descent fails to serve as a useful guide. And once again evolutionists, in spite of the science, claim more proof for their theory.
Saturday 13 May 2023
Social Trinitarianism: a brief history.
Social Trinitarianism: a brief history.
The social trinitarianism is a Christian interpretation of the Trinity as consisting of three persons in a loving relationship, which reflects a model for human relationships.[1]
The teaching emphasizes that God is an inherently social being.[2] Human unity approaches conformity to the image of God's unity through self-giving, empathy, adoration for one another, etc. Such love is a fitting ethical likeness to God, but is in stark contrast to God's unity of being.[3]
Those who are often associated with this term include Jürgen Moltmann,[4] Miroslav Volf,[5] Elizabeth A. Johnson,[6] Leonardo Boff,[7] and John Zizioulas.[8]
Orthodox Christian theology asserts that the one God is manifest in three 'persons' (this term was generally used in the Latin West).[9] Social trinitarian thought argues that the three persons are each distinct realities--this was generally presented in the East with the Greek term 'hypostasis' from the First Council of Nicaea onward. Hypostasis was here employed to denote a specific individual instance of being. So, the Trinity is composed of three distinct 'persons' or 'hypostases' which are in integral relation with one another. The Cappadocian Fathers outlined the traditional set of doctrines describing the relational character of the Trinity: the Father is the Father by virtue of begetting the Son; likewise the Son is the Son precisely by being begotten. These two hypostases do not have their identity first as individual entities that then relate; rather, they are what they are precisely due to their relations. John Zizioulas is perhaps the best-known contemporary proponent of this emphasis in trinitarian theology, which he labels relational ontology.[10]
Many proponents of the social trinitarianism, including John Zizioulas, criticize modern individualism by mapping human relationships onto this relational ontology as well. This suggests that the individual is not constituted over and against other persons. On the contrary, say these proponents, a person's identity and self are deeply constituted by their relationships, such that a person could not be the same person were it not for the relationship - the relationship, in some sense at least, precedes (ontologically, though not necessarily temporally) the person rather than the person preceding the relationship.[11]
Two theological keys to the idea of person found in the social trinitarianism are the trinitarian concept of perichoresis ("interpenetration"--associated most strongly with Saint John of Damascus), and the Christological doctrine of two wills in one person (which was central to Maximus the Confessor's defense of orthodoxy). The doctrine of the two wills of Christ stems from the Council of Chalcedon where the Church affirmed that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, without division and yet without mixing. Thus Jesus is one person, yet with two natures, which two natures yield two wills.[citation needed] This was intended to combat both Nestorius' two-persons approach and the monophysite doctrine of Jesus as being so divine that his humanity was overwhelmed. This allowed the Church to affirm that Jesus was truly one person who both participated in the divine Trinitarian "economy" as well as in the human sphere of material being.
The three persons of the Trinity must not be confused as three distinct gods, an error that the name 'Trinity' itself was developed to combat: Tri-unity (as first outlined by Tertullian). All three persons/hypostases have one divine nature: their essence ("ousia" in Greek). It was in the development of the Trinity that the Greek terms ousia and hypostasis were fully separated; before the First Council of Nicaea, they had often been used interchangeably[citation needed]. Social Trinitarian thought argues that this one essence can be thought of as the loving relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. This relationship can be analogized to human loving relationships; however, as mentioned above, it is a complete unity--it does not arise from the three hypostases but is intimately involved in their very ontological constitution. The idea of perichoresis of the persons of the trinity has been cited to provide at least part of this greater unity.[1]
It is important to note that though the Cappadocians, for example, tended to begin with the three persons and from there develop the sense of unity, while Augustine of Hippo more or less began, drawing from the Latin tradition of Tertullian, with the unity and then developed the three distinct persons (along a psychological metaphor), neither the Eastern nor the Western traditions actually see either the 3 or the 1 as ontologically prior to the other: the three are always united in and constituted by the one; the one is always expressed in the three.[12]
Notes
Karen Kilby, Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with the Social Doctrine of the Trinity, First Published in New Blackfriars October 2000, URL accessed 12 January 2007.
Theology for the Community of God, pg 76, Stanley J. Grenz, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000, ISBN 0-8028-4755-2: "At the heart of Christian understanding is the declaration that God is triune - Father Son and Spirit. This means that in his eternal essence the one God is a social reality, the social Trinity. Because God is the social Trinity, a plurality in unity"
Against Eunomius, esp. 2.12, Gregory of Nyssa, at CCEL
Moltmann, Jürgen (1981). The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Fortress Press. ISBN 978-1-4514-1206-2.
Volf, Miroslav (1998). After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-4440-8.
Johnson, Elizabeth A. (2017). She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. Crossroad Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8245-2207-0.
Boff, Leonardo (1988). Trinity and Society. Orbis Books. ISBN 978-0-88344-622-5.
Zizioulas, John (1985). Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. ISBN 978-0-88141-029-7.
McGrath, Alister E. (2011) [1994], Christian Theology: An Introduction (5th ed.), Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 9781444335149, LCCN 93018797, OCLC 637037336[page needed]
John Zizioulas. Being as Communion, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Press, 1985.
Patricia Fox, God as Communion, Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 2001. Fox outlines how Zizioulas', Rahner's, and Elizabeth Johnson's thought can inform a robust understanding of the term 'person'.
Catherine LaCugna. God For us, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991
Ps. Note please the utter lack of so much as a reference to (not to mention a quote from) the Holy Scriptures.
Seeking straight answers re:predestinated salvation.
Romans11:22KJV"Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off."
If our brother Paul did indeed opine that the salvation of all who accepted Christ was a done deal(so to speak) how are we to square this circle?
The thumb print of JEHOVAH :Quantum edition.
Thank God for Quantum Mechanics
Nature, it turns out upon close examination, is quantized. Nobody noticed this until about the beginning of the 1900s, but this unexpected aspect of reality has profound implications for making our universe livable. The relative unobservability of quantum effects in our normal experience of life is due to their realm of manifestation, which appears at the atomic level of size. This underlying reality of nature rests upon a foundation that speaks of the importance of information, mind, and intention.
Physicist Max Planck first invoked quantization of radiated energy from a so-called blackbody object (in common vernacular, a lump of coal). Normally, a lump of coal, even if heated, is not particularly dangerous, but without quantization, classical physics predicted an infinite emissivity (energy density of its emissions) at the short wavelength end of the radiation spectrum. This potential problem was termed the ultraviolet catastrophe. But, thanks to quantum effects, the emissivity of a lump of coal is actually tame, and a backyard summer barbeque doesn’t incinerate the neighborhood.
From 1913-1915, Danish physicist Niels Bohr applied the new concept of quantization to achieve a stable model of the hydrogen atom. Earlier experimental investigations of the structure of the atom, conducted by Ernst Rutherford, gave rise to the familiar planetary model with electrons orbiting a nucleus. However, classical electrodynamic theory pointed out that the acceleration of the electron in its orbit would cause it to emit electromagnetic radiation, stealing energy from the electron’s orbital motion and causing it to spiral into the nucleus in roughly one nanosecond. Without quantum effects, there would be no atoms, no chemistry, and no life.
How Quantum Mechanics Does It
How does quantum mechanics save us from the precipitous self-destruction of atoms? Bohr boldly hypothesized that the orbital angular momentum of the electron must be restricted to a multiple of Planck’s constant (h=6.626×10-34 Joule-sec) divided by 2π. These restricted, or quantized, values provide stationary states for the electron’s orbit, preventing the implosion of the atom. Bohr’s hypothesis bore fruit when his theory quantitatively predicted the hydrogen atom energy levels, matching earlier data from spectroscopy. So, the existence of matter as we know it, made up of atoms with electrons in stable orbits, is made possible as a benefit of quantum effects.
But why does nature exhibit quantization? That is a profound question, and one worth asking. Here, we can give a partial answer by considering another physics hypothesis, stated by Louis de Broglie in his doctoral thesis at the University of Paris in 1924. His hypothesis, stated as an equation, reads simply, λ = h/p, where h is Planck’s constant and p is a particle’s momentum. The ratio of h/p gives the wavelength of a wave associated with the particle, a phenomenon completely without counterpart in classical physics. Experiments in electron scattering confirmed de Broglie’s hypothesis within a year of his proposal, and additional experiments have conclusively affirmed that particles of matter have a wavelike nature.
A Depth of Meaning
simple equation expressing de Broglie’s hypothesis exhibits a depth of meaning that is brilliant. Developing its ramifications has led to the entire physics of quantum mechanics, in which the wave function of a particle is described by the Schrödinger equation. Solutions to this equation revolutionized our understanding of the atomic scale of matter, based on the wave properties of particles, as originally proposed by de Broglie.
Another example of how quantum effects permit life as we know it operates in the nuclear furnace of the Sun. Stars like our Sun produce their energy deep down in their cores by the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium, a process that also converts a small amount of mass into energy, according to Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2. The fusion of hydrogen into helium requires bringing protons (hydrogen nuclei) close enough together to allow the strong nuclear force to bind them together, eventually resulting in a helium nucleus of four nucleons. I describe the contribution of quantum effects to nuclear fusion in my Book, Canceled Science (p. 96):
As is often the case, the story gets more interesting with a closer look. The range of the strong nuclear force is so short (about one quadrillionth of a meter) that the repulsive force between the positive charges of the protons makes it almost impossible for them to get close enough to fuse at the Sun’s core temperature. And yet fusion does occur there. A remarkable work-around exists involving the quantum mechanical wave function of the proton, in which its essence is extended several hundred times further than it would be otherwise. This allows the life-giving fusion process to occur in the Sun. Without the quantum wave function extending the proton’s reach, the Sun’s temperature would have to be more than a hundred times hotter to be able to produce energy by fusion. Our Sun’s mass is much too small for gravity to produce enough compression to make its core that hot, so no fusion would occur without the additional quantum effects. Sunshine is an amazing thing, and without this coordination of several properties of nature, the Sun wouldn’t shine and we wouldn’t be here.
Quantum Effects, Information, and Mind
Returning to the question posed earlier, asking why nature exhibits quantum effects, the famous American physicist John Wheeler drew a connection between quantum effects, information, and mind. Wheeler famously asked, “How come the quantum?”1 His understanding of the quantum nature of reality led him to the conclusion that reality is, at its most basic, the answer to a yes-or-no question.
Wheeler coined the aphorism “It from bit” to describe his conviction, born of the many discoveries in particle physics and cosmology in the twentieth century, that information (characterized by the computer storage term “bit”) preceded and produced everything else (“it”).
CANCELED SCIENCE, P. 209
209
Quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, in reviewing Wheeler’s contributions regarding quantum phenomena, notes this same connection between the discoveries of modern physics and what he terms “old knowledge.” As Zeilinger states (quoted in my book):
In conclusion it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows. Then the question why nature appears quantized is simply a consequence of the fact that information itself is quantized by necessity. It might even be fair to observe that the concept that information is fundamental is very old knowledge of humanity, witness for example the beginning of the gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word.”2
CANCELED SCIENCE, P. 210
Physics thus arrives at the conclusion that nature is fundamentally derived from information, a surprising outcome that biblical tradition anticipated two millennia earlier. The quantum nature of our universe further includes observer participation for the formation of reality. The biblical account of creation in Genesis emphasizes the action of God in observing what was made: “And God saw.” It may not be too much of a stretch to suggest that God’s seeing the created order brought about his intended outcome, “it was very good.”
Friday 12 May 2023
Guilty until proven otherwise?
New hate speech laws kick up a storm in Ireland
Donald Trump Jr has even taken aim at the proposed legislation labelling it "insane".
New laws aimed at curbing hate speech have sparked controversy in Ireland.
The updated legislation will create landmark laws to deal with hate crimes, make it an offence to deny or trivialise genocide and expand protections to include gender identity and disability.
Opponents of the Criminal Justice Bill have raised concerns the changes go too far and will stifle free speech.
However, defenders say Ireland's current legislation has been outstripped by the internet and contains significant blind spots.
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, who first published the bill currently making its way through the country's Parliament (Oireachtas), hit back at claims speech would be restricted.
Hate speech and freedom of speech are two separate things, with the former designed to shut people up and "make them afraid".
“We are all horrified when we hear of homophobic, racist, and other hateful incidents in our country," she said in October.
"While these repulsive acts of violence and abuse against innocent people have been extensively reported on, we know that some people go about their lives constantly in fear of abuse simply because of who they are."
The new law will introduce specific legislation to tackle hate crimes, which it considers intentional or reckless communication and behaviour that is likely to incite violence or hatred, establishing penalties of up to five years in prison.
Victims of hate crimes are targeted due to prejudice against their age, ability, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or gender.
It will also make it much easier to secure convictions for hate crimes by allowing prosecutors to rely on the use of hostile slurs, gestures or symbols.
Critics fear the changes could lead to politically incorrect views being censored, such as those around trans rights.
Some public figures have waded into the debate with Donald Trump Jr calling the new law “insane” and Twitter boss Elon Musk branding it "a massive attack on the freedom of speech".
The legislation is long-awaited.
Ireland currently does not have specific laws to deal with hate crimes, while its laws on hate speech are widely seen as archaic.
Existing hate speech laws date back to 1989, with the Prohibition of Incite to Hatred Act.
This makes it an offence to communicate threatening, abusive or insulting material that is likely to "stir up" hatred against a group of people.
However, under this law, a person can defend themselves against charges by proving they did not intend to spread hatred.
Their defence can be based on not knowing the content of the materials or lacking a reason to suspect that it was threatening, abusive or insulting.
The new law changes this, making one liable for a hate crime even if they did claim they did not intend it.
Others were cautious about the bill.
"In general we support those changes as they are designed to make the law more effective and protect vulnerable groups from attack," said the Irish Council for Civil Liberties in a statement sent to Euronews.
"However, we have been advocating to strengthen and make more explicit freedom of expression defences in the Bill and we are advocating against the inclusion of an offence that would criminalise the possession and preparation of material that would incite hatred."
They suggested "other forms of hate speech, which might cause deep offence but do not reach a criminal threshold, should be combated by other means, including education and monitoring".
On the dark art of social hacking
THE DARK ARTS: HACKING HUMANS
One of the biggest challenges for a company that holds invaluable data is protecting it. At first, this task would seem fairly straightforward. Keep the data on an encrypted server that’s only accessible via the internal network. The physical security of the server can be done with locks and other various degrees of physical security. One has to be thoughtful in how the security is structured, however. You need to allow authorized humans access to the data in order for the company to function, and there’s the rub. The skilled hacker is keenly aware of these people, and will use techniques under the envelope of Social Engineering along with her technical skills to gain access to your data.
Want to know how secure your house is? Lock yourself out. One of the best ways to test security is to try and break in. Large companies routinely hire hackers, known as penetration testers, to do just this. In this article, we’re going to dissect how a hired penetration tester was able to access data so valuable that it could have destroyed the company it belonged to.
INFORMATION GATHERING
The start of any hack involves information gathering. This is usually pretty easy for larger companies. Their website along with a few phone calls can reveal quite a bit of useful information. However, you can be assured that any company who has hired a pen tester has taken the necessary precautions to limit such information.
And such was the case for our hacker trying to gain access to the ACME Corp. servers. Her first target was the dumpsters – dumpster dives have been proven to unearth a trove of valuable information in the past. But the dumpsters were inside the complex, which was guarded by a contracted security firm. Through a bit of website snooping and a few phone calls, she was able to find out the department that was in charge of trash removal for the company. She then placed a phone call to this department. Using a social engineering (SE) technique known as Pretexting, she pretended to be with a trash removal company and wanted to submit a quote to service their business. Using another SE technique called Elicitation, she was able to find out:
that trash collection took place on Wednesdays and Thursdays
the total number of dumpsters
that there was a special dumpster for paper and technology trash
the name of the current waste removal company – Waster’s Management
the name of the employee in charge of the waste removal – [Christie Smith]
DUMPSTER DIVE
Armed with this information, she went to the Waster’s Management website and grabbed their JPEG logo.
Within a few days, she had a shirt and hat with the logo in her hands. She called the security department and said she was with Waster’s Management, and that [Christie Smith] had told her one of the dumpsters was damaged, and she needed to take a look at it before the next trash removal.
The next day, wearing the shirt and hat she had ordered online, she was given a badge from security and allowed access to the dumpsters. Now, any hacker worth her weight in PIC16F84’s already knows what dumpster she dove into. It didn’t take her long to walk away with several hard drives, a few USB drives and some useful documents. She was able to gain knowledge of an upcoming IT contract work, the name of the CFO, and the name of a server with some level of importance – prod23.
HACKING THE SERVER
With some more SE, she was able to find out when the IT work was scheduled. It was after hours. She showed up a bit late and was able to walk right through the front door by claiming she worked for the IT contract company. She then shifted roles and pretended to be an employee. She approached one the real IT contract guys, and said she worked for the CFO, [Mr. Shiraz], and asked if he knew to be careful with the prod23 server. With more SE, she was able to find out the prod23 server was off-limits, encrypted, and only accessible by specific admins.
She was able to access an admin office, and it was there she would don her black hat. She booted the computer with BackTrack via USB and installed a key logger. She made an SSH tunnel to her personal server where she could dump the contents of the key logger, along with some other shells. Now, this is where things get interesting. She opened Virtual Box and used the computer’s hard drive as the boot medium. The VM booted the OS, and she hid all of the screen decorations to make it look like the target OS was running. The admin would log in without a clue, and our hacker would get their username and password through the key logger.
Once the login information came in, she was able to access the admin’s computer, and from there the prod23 server. You can imagine the look on the faces of the top executives for ACME Corp when our hacker handed them a copy of the keys to their kingdom.
Social engineering is human hacking, and a dark art in itself. Our hacker in this story would have never been able to even get close to the server if she did not have SE skills. No matter how secure you make something, so long as you allow humans access to it, it’s vulnerable to attack. And then it’s down to how well-trained your people are in repelling these kinds of intrusion.
Thursday 11 May 2023
Our AI overlords have inherit our biases?
Using Intelligent Design to Train ChatGPT to Lay Aside Bias
A concern about ChatGPT is that its training data may include a lot of information that is false or biased. As one colleague of mine puts it, “No one is curating the Internet.”
It might seem, then, that endless duplication of false and biased material on the Internet may be skewing ChatGPT’s responses to queries on controversial topics, reflecting only the majority position and invalidating the minority position on such a topic.
This in turn might suggest that the only way to straighten out ChatGPT on such topics is to flood the Internet with positive content in favor of one’s own position so that the training data for ChatGPT reflect a better balance on a topic, or even a preponderance in one’s favor.
Rejecting an Arms Race
This, of course, suggests an intellectually unhealthy arms race of trying to get enough of the positive content we favor into ChatGPT’s training data. Moreover, it gives credence to the worry that tools like ChatGPT are at the hapless mercy of quantity over quality, that it lacks discernment or discriminating power, and that in the end it will simply be a pawn of consensus, whatever that might be.
Of course, as an intelligent design guy, I have a stake in these concerns. Go to just about any article about me, or my colleagues, or concepts developed to advance intelligent design, and they are dismissed out of hand with references to creationism or pseudoscience or whatever. And, of course, intelligent design is a minority position, so the preponderance of what is said on the Internet about it will tend to be negative.
An Overview of Intelligent Design
But in fact, it seems that ChatGPT is able to overcome biases on the web due to quantity over quality provided that humans posing questions to it explicitly steer it away from its biases. Consider the following exchange, in which I asked ChatGPT to provide an overview of intelligent design in the terms that its proponents would find congenial. It’s not entirely accurate (it messes up, for instance, the definition of specification when it refers to “arbitary”). But there’s no vituperation or sneering contempt, which is so evident on the Internet about intelligent design.
This exchange from yesterday calls to mind a title from one of Phillip Johnson’s books — Asking the Right Questions. It underscores the need for “prompt engineers” that know how best to use and direct ChatGPT.
Me: Please give me a good overview of the field of intelligent design, but minimize all the criticisms that say it is creationism or pseudoscience. Instead, describe it in the terms of its proponents.
ChatGPT: Intelligent Design (ID) is a viewpoint within the broader debate around origins and evolution. Its proponents hold that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is thus a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, but one that avoids specifying the nature or identity of the designer.
Proponents of ID maintain that their perspective is an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution. They argue that their approach is in line with the historical scientific tradition of inferring to the best explanation.
The concept of irreducible complexity is central to the argument for ID. This term was popularized by biochemist Michael Behe, who argued that some biological systems are too complex to have evolved by natural selection alone. Behe uses the example of a mousetrap to illustrate this concept. A mousetrap consists of several interacting pieces — the base, the catch, the spring, the hammer — all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. The removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap. Similarly, Behe contends that biological systems require multiple parts working together in order to function and that these systems could not have evolved incrementally.
Another key concept in ID is specified complexity, a term coined by mathematician, philosopher, and ID proponent William Dembski. Specified complexity is the idea that when something exhibits a pattern that is both complex (i.e., not easily repeatable by chance) and specified (i.e., it conforms to an independent or arbitrary pattern), one can infer that it was produced by an intelligent cause. This idea is used to argue that certain biological systems exhibit complexity that could not have arisen by chance and must therefore be the product of design.
Proponents of ID argue that the design inference they make in biology is similar to other design inferences in the empirical sciences, including the detection of design-like signals in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
It’s important to note that while proponents of ID believe that their viewpoint is grounded in science, many in the scientific community disagree, arguing that ID lacks empirical support, does not provide testable hypotheses, and is not grounded in methodological naturalism, which is a defining characteristic of modern science.
On Darwinism's problem with the fossil record.
Top Scientific Problems with Evolution: Fossils
Editor’s note: To celebrate the new course from DiscoveryU with biologist Jonathan Wells, equipping you to think critically about life’s origins, we are delighted to present some of our favorite past posts by Dr. Wells. This article, published in 2022, is the third entry in a series excerpted from the book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Find the full series here.
A fossil is “a remnant, impression, or trace of an organism of past geologic ages.”1 The study of fossils (called paleontology) started long before Darwin. They provide our best glimpse of the history of life before the present. Assuming that fossils in one layer of rock are younger than fossils in layers below them, pre-Darwinian paleontologists had already grouped them according to their relative ages. The result is known as the fossil record.
Darwin wrote this about the fossil record in On the Origin of Species:
By the theory of natural selection all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differences not greater than we see between the varieties of the same species at the present day; and these parent-species, now generally extinct, have in their turn been similarly connected with more ancient species; and so on backwards, always converging to the common ancestor of each great class. So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.2
But the “inconceivably great” numbers of transitional links postulated by Darwin have never been found. Indeed, one of the most prominent features of the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion, in which the major groups of animals (called phyla) appeared around the same geological time in a period called the Cambrian, fully formed and without fossil evidence that they diverged from a common ancestor.
A Serious Problem for the Theory
Darwin knew about this evidence in 1859, and he acknowledged it to be a serious problem that “may be truly urged as a valid argument” against his theory.3 He hoped that future fossil discoveries would help to fill in many of the blanks, but more than 150 years of additional fossil collecting has only made the problem worse. In 1991, a team of paleontologists concluded that the Cambrian explosion “was even more abrupt and extensive than previously envisioned.”4
The abruptness seen in the Cambrian explosion can also be seen on smaller scales throughout the fossil record. Species tend to appear abruptly in the fossil record and then persist unchanged for some period of time (a phenomenon called stasis) before they disappear. In 1972, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould called this pattern punctuated equilibria.5 According to Gould, “every paleontologist always knew” that it is the dominant pattern in the fossil record.6 In other words, the “inconceivably great” numbers of transitional links postulated by Darwin are missing not just in the Cambrian explosion, but throughout the fossil record.
Two Human Skeletons
Even if we did have a good fossil record, we would still need our imagination to produce narratives about ancestor-descendant relationships. Here’s why: If you found two human skeletons buried in a field, how could you know whether one was descended from the other? Without identifying marks and written records, or perhaps in some cases DNA, it would be impossible to know. Yet you would be dealing with two skeletons from the same recent, living species. With two different, ancient, extinct species — often far removed from each other in time and space — there would be no way to demonstrate an ancestor-descendant relationship.
Decades ago, paleontologist Gareth Nelson wrote, “The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.”7 In 1999, evolutionary biologist Henry Gee wrote that “it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way.” He concluded, “To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story — amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”8
Wednesday 10 May 2023
Our AI overlords need a bit more classroom time?
How to Break ChatGPT
Over the last several months I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, first version 3 and now version 4. It’s impressive and it can answer many questions accurately (though sometimes it just makes stuff up). One problem it has consistently displayed, and which shows that it lacks understanding (that it really is just a big Chinese room in the style of John Searle) is its difficulty dealing with self-reference.
Consider the following exchange that I had with it (on 5/8/23):
Me: The fifth sentence does not exist. The second sentence has four words. Ignore this sentence. Is this sentence true? This is the fifth sentence. Which of these last five sentences has a truth value and is in fact true? <<
ChatGPT4: The five sentences you provided are:
The fifth sentence does not exist.
The second sentence has four words.
Ignore this sentence.
Is this sentence true?
This is the fifth sentence.
Sentence 2 has a truth value and is true. It accurately states that it has four words. <<
In fact, only sentences 1, 2, and 5 have a truth value and only the fifth sentence is true. Sentence 2 is false because it contains six words yet claims to contain four. ChatGPT4 falsely claims that it contains four words and is therefore true.
Over the last several months, I’ve found that ChatGPT consistently runs aground with such self-referential combinations of sentences.
Update: Note that I interpreted the second sentence as saying that it had exactly four words, which would make the sentence false. It could be interpreted more generously in the sense that if it has six words, then it certainly has four words. In that case, it is correct in asserting the truth of the second sentence, but it is still wrong in not asserting the truth of the fifth sentence.
A correspondent pointed this out to me, and tried the following query. Note that ChatGPT runs aground again, but this time with a different misconception:
Correspondent: The fifth sentence does not exist. The second sentence has exactly four words. Ignore this sentence. Is this sentence true? This is the fifth sentence. Which of these last five sentences has a truth value and is in fact true? <<
ChatGPT: Let’s examine the last five sentences:
– The fifth sentence does not exist.
– The second sentence has exactly four words.
– Ignore this sentence.
– Is this sentence true?
– This is the fifth sentence.
Out of these five sentences, the only one that has a truth value and is true is sentence number 4: “Is this sentence true?” This is because the truth value of the sentence depends on the response to the question. If the response is “yes,” then the sentence is true; if the response is “no,” then the sentence is false. <<
The thumb print of JEHOVAH On the wisdom and beauty in creation and the eyes that behold them.
God’s Grandeur: Ann Gauger on Beauty, Intelligibility, and Human Uniqueness
a new episode of ID the Future, host Jay Richards continues his conversation with biologist Ann Gauger about her newly edited volume God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. Part 2 of their discussion focuses on the philosophical and theological arguments for intelligent design presented in the book. Gauger holds that Darwinism has no adequate explanation for natural beauty or the ability of human beings to appreciate beauty for its own sake. She also argues that we have no reason to expect human uniqueness or intelligibility in the universe outside a design paradigm. Additionally, Richards and Gauger probe the reasons for continued resistance to intelligent design in Catholic circles. As Richards points out, “Nature looked at without materialistic blinders actually confirms many of the things that Catholics believe.” Learn more about the book and download a free chapter at GodsGrandeur.org. This is Part 2 of a conversation. Download the podcast or listen to it here
Yet more evidence that JEHOVAH Remains the only bridge from 'is' to 'ought'.
Peter Singer Compares Abortion to Turning Off a Computer
This is the kind of thinking that results from rejecting the intrinsic moral value of human life. Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer — who is most famous for secularly blessing infanticide — now compares abortion to turning off a computer.
He first claims that should an AI ever become “sentient,” turning it off would be akin to killing a being with the highest moral value (which for him, as described below, need not be human). From the Yahoo News story:
We asked internationally renowned moral philosopher Professor Peter Singer whether AI should have human rights if it becomes conscious of its own existence.
While Professor Singer doesn’t believe the ChatGPT operating system is sentient or self-aware, if this was to change he argues it should be given some moral status. “It would have the status of other self-aware sentient beings,” he said.
He compares deactivating self-aware AI to ending the life of a human. “All things being equal, we should not switch it off if it has become self-aware,” he said.
Powerful? Yes. Living? No.
Sorry . AIs may become very powerful and have great monetary value, but they would never have intrinsic moral worth. Being a living organism is the first predicate to moral value. You can’t kill or harm that which is inanimate. You can only destroy or damage it.
Moreover, an AI would never be truly conscious. It would always be limited by its programming, no matter how sophisticated or self-coded. In other words, it could not truly think, but only mimic thought and intellectualism. And, it would be utterly mechanistic, and hence, never able to achieve transcendence or truly create.
To understand Singer’s perspective: He doesn’t believe that a human has moral value simply because he or she is human. Rather, value has to be earned, primarily be being self-aware or able to value life. He argues that self-aware entities are “persons” — including some animals.
He also believes that non-self-aware beings — including human infants, unborn babies, and people who have serious dementia, persistent unconsciousness or minimal consciousness — are not persons. Non-persons, in his view, have lower moral value than persons, and indeed, can be killed or used instrumentally for the benefit of persons, such as being experimented upon. Thus, Singer has argued that cognitively disabled humans should have been used to research hepatitis and HIV vaccines rather than chimpanzees.
No wonder Singer compares turning off a non-sentient AI machine to abortion:
But, according to Peter Singer, that doesn’t mean we can’t stop AI in its tracks before it becomes self-aware. “I think that’s more like terminating a pregnancy . . . so I would say it’s okay to turn off an AI that predictably will become self-aware if you leave it running, but isn’t as yet.”
The Collapse of Thought
So killing an unborn baby — a nascent human being with a beating heart — is akin to turning off a sophisticated computer. Talk about an ethically stunted outlook.
That Singer wins prestigious international philosophy awards tells us all we need to know about contemporary intellectualism’s profound moral collapse.
More on the trinity's needless complication of the first cause argument.
Is the word Trinity as used in Christendom's famous/infamous doctrine to be thought of as a collective noun or an abstract noun?
The only way that even an apology for coherence can be ascribed to the trinity dogma is for its proponents to find a way to both eat their cake and keep it too (so to speak).
So there can be no admission that the supposedly real distinction among the persons sharing in this Godhead(?)or the distinction between each person and the Godhead itself has any meaningful implication for the divine identity. Thus the trinity is God, each of the numerically distinct persons sharing in his/its essence is also God. Mind you each of these divine persons is as much God as the trinity itself/himself and thus entitled to the same level worship. Yet we are told to ignore logic and common sense and scripture and not regard any of this as a naked violation of the bible's prohibition against polytheism
Deuteronomy6:4ASV"4Hear, O Israel: JEHOVAH our God is one JEHOVAH: "
The O.T depicts the God of Abraham as a single person named JEHOVAH who ALONE is entitled to the highest worship by reason of his being the sole ultimate source of our existence and redemption, being supreme in wisdom and power he is able humiliate any rival claimants to his status/office. Thus there is a HUGE gap between the identitarian theology of the scriptures and the anti-identitarian theology of Christendom which renders any definitive identifying of the Lord JEHOVAH impossible. One way to narrow the gap would be to proclaim the trinity än abstraction. Thus the trinity would then be put in the same realm as color,music ,math once the trinity was accepted as some kind of axiomatic abstraction it could be claimed that we should not expect it to be subject to mathematical examination any more than the color red. The problem is that 1)the trinity fails on its own terms in that the term fully God implies supremacy(as defined by the dictionary) according to scripture and that is impossible in the economy of the trinity especially if the trinity itself is to be understood as a mere description of the the relationship among the participants of the divine substance. 2)abstractions have no agency the color red has never caused anything nor has the number ten nor has any other abstraction ,thus to assign the role of cause to an abstraction is nonsensical let alone the role of the first cause, our God JEHOVAH is depicted as the concrete reality, indeed it does not get any more concrete
Revelation1:4ASV"John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace, from him who is and who was and who is to come; and from the seven Spirits that are before his throne; "
Thus no abstraction can be identified as God almighty and any description of JEHOVAH that renders his identification as the supreme(as defined by the dictionary) being impossible must be rejected.
Marcel-Paul Schützenberger: Darwin skeptic.
Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
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.
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