Theologian N. T. Wright on Deism, Darwin, and how Epicureanism influenced evolutionary theory:
Tuesday, October 18, 2011, 11:00 AM
Search
First Things
Loading
/ 
Masthead
Tristyn Bloom
Matthew Cantirino
Anthony Esolen
Gene Fant
Greg Forster
Matthew J. Franck
Collin Garbarino
Robert P. George
William J. Haun
Leroy Huizenga
Katherine Infantine
Joseph Knippenberg
David T. Koyzis
Robert T. Miller
Matthew Milliner
David Mills
Mark Movsesian
William Mumma
Nathaniel Peters
R.R. Reno
James R. Rogers
Russell E. Saltzman
Matthew Schmitz
Kevin Staley-Joyce
David Talcott
Anna Williams
First Thoughts
Archive
Archive
Monthly
October 18th, 2011 | 11:47 am
I think the book he is referring to is Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong by Conor Cunningham.
A one-hour BBC documentary called Did Darwin Kill God? featuring Conor Cunningham is available on Youtube. It’s worth watching. Cunningham’s answer is, of course, no. But within about the first two minutes, Cunningham makes it clear that he thinks Creationism and Intelligent Design are “nonsense.”
October 18th, 2011 | 12:24 pm
Wright is actually quite careful not to say that Darwin himself was necessarily influenced by Epicurean ideas. He may or may not have been but “On the Origin of Species” does not require a commitment to any particular worldview aside from a willingness to let one’s conclusions be dictated by evidence and the scientific method.
What Wright says is that society as a whole had been deeply influenced by Epicurean ideas and so they were particularly perceptive at the time Darwin was writing to a theory that cuts God out of the equation.
October 18th, 2011 | 1:54 pm
David Nickol, The book was Darwin and God by Nick Spencer, according to a message superimposed on the video — at least that’s what happened with the browser I am using.
For at least Christians anyway, the idea that God launched the Universe and then never tinkered with it again just doesn’t work because to even be a Christian one has to believe in the Incarnation and the Resurrection, both of which involved a dramatic supernatural intervention in the natural course of things, and a “tinkering” with the natural Universe by God after He launched it.
As for evolution, a Christian, I think, has to choose whether God fine-tuned the Universe such that human life evolving was purposeful and inevitable, or if there was one or more supernatural interventions after the Universe began that brought life as we know it about, and that life wouldn’t have come about otherwise (it’s not like God noticed the first life form and was surprised by its existence).
I don’t think which one of the above one chooses is all that important. What should matter, for a Christian anyway, is that the Universe and the life within it couldn’t have come about mindlessly and accidentally. God is outside of time. Past, present and future are always before Him with equal clarity. He holds the Universe, space and time in existence. In His providence He may tinker with things (which, to be a Christian, one has to believe He is willing to do) without concerning Himself with whether that supernatural intervention will be perceived by us as past, present or future. In other words, does it really matter all that much whether, from our perspective, it looks like life was pre-programmed into the Universe from the beginning, or if there was a supernatural intervention after it began? I don’t think so.
Again, what is important is that it isn’t all a big, mindless accident. I tend to think that, from our perspective anyway, that it looks like there were one or more interventions after the Universe began that resulted in life coming about. I think God might have intended on it looking that way from our perspective. Life is such a spectacular exception to what mindless, lifeless matter seems capable of assembling itself into on its own. God may have done it that way precisely so that we would have another affirmation that “God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” In His providence He may have decided that the discoveries of the fine-tuning of the Universe that made life possible and the astounding functional complexity of life would take place in the faithless age that would need it most.
And it is reasonable to see His power and deity in what has been made. We don’t expect to find anything like computers or television sets somewhere out there in the cosmos that weren’t intelligently designed, but were the lucky product of mindless chance. There is a good reason for that. There is a level of functional complexity (which I don’t think ever comes about accidentally) that if it were indeed to come about accidentally, would require an environment nearly as, if not at least as functionally complex as the functionality that was mindlessly and accidentally brought about. For example, one might think astounding functionally complex software just might somehow come about incrementally, mindlessly and accidentally, but a computer and operating system would be required for that to happen. To think the computer hardware and operating system came about accidentally as well is ridiculous.
Modern science has discovered that the nanotechnology of the most primitive, single-celled, reproducing life form is light years beyond anything it knows how to build itself. Yet due to atheism’s destruction of the relentless objectivity of science, it is determined to figure out how some completely naturally occurring environment came about, the complexity and precision of which would have to be proportional to the astounding functional complexity of that first primitive life form. That, too, is ridiculous. The simple fact is that some phenomena are best explained by the involvement of an intelligent agent in bringing them about. That fact is well known to modern science, but is disregarded when it comes to the origin of life, because of the atheistic bias that has perverted contemporary science.
October 18th, 2011 | 2:49 pm
harry,
You are right about the book. I didn’t see the superimposed title. Thanks for calling it to everyone’s attention.
As you note, we don’t conceive of God as being within time. We think of time as something that came into being with the universe. So it is hopeless to try to come up with the point in time when God gave evolution a push in this or that direction, or infused a soul into some distant, almost-human ancestors. Something can only happen at a point in time for us, not for God. So, for example, the Biblical story of Noah doesn’t make sense insofar as God is depicted as growing frustrated and angry with mankind and deciding to wipe out the population of the world. If we think of God as within time (and omniscient), he knew he was going to reach a point where he regretted his creation, so it wouldn’t make sense to go ahead with it in the first place. (And how can God regret something?) It makes these things very difficult to talk about intelligibly. It also, it seems to me, makes the Incarnation difficult to talk about intelligibly, since it makes little sense to say God the Son watched over human history waiting for the Annunciation and then took human form. If God exists outside of time, then there is no before and after for God, including God the Son. I don’t know exactly how to conceive of a God existing out of time could become man. (I am not denying the reality of it. I am just saying that it is next to impossible to speak about intelligibly.) We can’t think in terms of the Second Person of the Trinity saying goodbye to the Father, spending 33 years on Earth, and then returning to heaven.
One thing I find fascinating is the idea of praying for something—say praying for rain in a drought. I don’t think it makes any sense to think of God up in heaven, hearing prayers for rain, and deciding to intervene to cause rain when there otherwise would have been no rain. This is not necessarily to say that it is futile to pray for rain, but rather, it makes no sense to think of persuading a being outside of time to enter history and do something he had no previous intention of doing. A being outside of time has no previous intentions because he has no “previous.”
October 18th, 2011 | 3:46 pm
Which is not what evolution claims, so you can relax. :)
Yes, some things are “thermodynamically likely” (rocks, etc.) and other things are “thermodynamically unlikely” (computers, bacteria, people, etc.)
But I don’t think you ever seriously addressed the distinction I made between reproducing things and non-reproducing things.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/10/04/fine-tuning-an-argument-and-a-universe/
You claim that “due to atheism’s destruction of the relentless objectivity of science, it is determined to figure out how some completely naturally occurring environment came about”. Abiogenesis is certainly an active area of inquiry, but let’s take you at your word.
If the evidence really supports your model – if it is really a better scientific theory – then what kind of predictions does it make that we can test?
October 18th, 2011 | 3:48 pm
Mark –
The noted Christian apologist C.S. Lewis coined a term for this kind of argument: Bulverism. As he put it, “You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong… Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is ‘wishful thinking.’ You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself… If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic…”
So, was Darwin’s arithmetic wrong?
October 18th, 2011 | 4:29 pm
He seems to be saying that the theory of evolution may very well be true, but the reason why people wanted to believe it was not because it was true, and because it had great explanatory power as a scientific theory, but because they wanted God out of the picture, or wanted an explanation of the world that allowed them to keep God out of the picture. But a very large number of naturalists in Darwin’s day were clergymen, and the concept an ancient earth and evolution were well known in Darwin’s day. It was more the mechanism of evolution that Darwin discovered, not the fact.
October 18th, 2011 | 7:14 pm
It was more the mechanism of evolution that Darwin discovered, not the fact.
Well, I would say “part” of the mechanism. For instance, Darwin really didn’t have much to say about what causes “variations” or how they are passed on to subsequent offspring. (And what he did say about the latter is generally considered wrong.) His real contribution—which is only part of the puzzle, albeit, a major part—was his defense and development of the principle of natural selection.
October 19th, 2011 | 12:40 am
“His real contribution—which is only part of the puzzle, albeit, a major part—was his defense and development of the principle of natural selection.”
He also reinforced the principle of inheritance and clearly even had some inkling that organisms do not just inherit characteristics from their parents but also their grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.
The other major piece of the puzzle was getting biologists to abandon the notion that species have fixed characteristics. Biologists were still under the sway of Plato and Aristotle in the 19th century and thought of species as being defined by ideal forms — such a model of the world makes evolution impossible by definition. Darwin showed such a view of the world cannot be sustained with all the variety we observe among subspecies and the frequent disagreements on how exactly to define a species.
October 19th, 2011 | 8:26 am
NTW identifies instinct (“He gives the ravens their food”) as God’s action in the world.
Can anything be predicted from this God-active-in-the-world model? Anything that has not yet been observed, which could be used to verify the God-hypothesis? For example, that ravens do not eat poisoned food because God has provided them with poison-detecting instinct?
Much can be predicted from the biochemical-mechanical model of raven brains. For example, how ravens will respond to human-induced changes in their environments and what anatomical structures will be found to be common to raven brains and hawk brains but absent from octopus brains. Nothing that is logically implied by the model has ever been found to be false.
So which is really the better theory? Which should a rational person adopt?
October 19th, 2011 | 8:37 am
“Life is such a spectacular exception to what mindless, lifeless matter seems capable of assembling itself into on its own.”
Is this the best twenty-first century Christian apologists can come up with? That life is so different from lifelessness that there must have been a Divine Intervention?
Gases are so different from what liquids can assemble themselves into on their own, it’s clear that gases could never come about by evaporation of liquids!
October 19th, 2011 | 9:12 am
Hi, Ray Ingles,
Let’s say that (using a silly scenario, but one that will make my point) in a million years some aliens from another galaxy discover planet Earth. Humanity is long gone. There is no trace of our previous existence, yet, inexplicably, the aliens come across a functioning hand held calculator. They want to determine if the calculator is a natural phenomenon that came about mindlessly and accidentally, or if it is the product of intelligent design.
They have long known that there is a level of functional complexity that is simply beyond that into which mindless matter and energy can accidentally assemble themselves. This is because, as I mentioned before, the required complexity and precision of an environment that would allow for massive functional complexity to come about is itself way beyond that of any environment into which mindless matter and energy might accidentally configure themselves.
Let’s go back to the analogy of astoundingly complex software that supposedly came about mindlessly and accidentally. That certainly isn’t going to happen if the environment in which it is supposed to take place is a pile of rocks. The complexity of the rock pile is insufficient for the assembly of functionally complex software. We need something like a computer with an operating system — we need a more complex environment with more possibilities. Consider this satirical piece I lifted from a panspermia web site regarding the “evolution” of hand held calculators:
It is funny because of the absurdity of its “assumptions.” There is just no way hand held calculators are going to be generated mindlessly and accidentally by an environment that is arrived at by mindless nature — the required environment is simply outside the range of those mindless nature provides.
As intricate as the first hand held calculators were, being comprised of complex hardware and software, they didn’t have built into them the ability to reproduce more hand held calculators. They didn’t have nearly the amount of “software” that is found in the DNA molecule. They didn’t have anywhere near as much complex functionality as life. Compared to life they were very crude technology indeed.
If it is laughable to theorize about how a mindless, natural environment might have allowed hand held calculators to be arrived at mindlessly and accidentally, it is all the more laughable to theorize about how a mindless, natural environment would have allowed the astounding functional complexity found in the nanotechnology of life to come about accidentally. Mindless nature all by itself just isn’t capable of providing the necessary complex environment — it comes up with environments much closer to our pile of rocks than to a computer with an operating system. If it were to miraculously come up with such an environment, it would be an ongoing miracle if nature sustained and adjusted that environment as needed long enough for the massive functional complexity of that first life form to have been arrived at incrementally.
Back to our aliens who found the calculator and to your comment. Upon a study of the hand held calculator that led to an understanding of its functionality, based on the theory that there is a limit to the environments which mindless matter and energy can be reasonably expected to configure themselves, and that none of those configurations are of sufficient complexity and precision to enable the generation of significant functional complexity, the aliens can correctly predict that the hand held calculator, due to its functional complexity, was not mindlessly and accidentally brought about. They certainly can at least predict that that is far, far more likely than the calculator being a lucky, mindless accident. I don’t see how they can scientifically test that, but considering how unlikely the alternative is, they don’t need to test that, knowing that science, if it is to remain true science, must remain rational.
If science doesn’t have to remain rational, then the theory that the inscription on the Rosetta Stone is really a peculiar product of erosion, not that of an intelligent scribe, is “scientific.” One might suggest here that we know all about people inscribing information on stone tablets, and we don’t know all about how life came about. Well, we have much experience with significant functional complexity, and in every case it is intelligently designed — so what is reasonable about insisting that the most astounding example of functional complexity we are aware of — life — is a mindless accident?
What is reasonable about insisting that an environment that was of sufficient complexity and precision to sustain a mindless, incremental process that resulted in nanotechnology light years beyond any we know how to build – life – came about accidentally? Again, that is like suggesting that software of astounding functional complexity accidentally, incrementally and mindlessly came about, and so did the computer and operating system on which that took place.
Science has to remain rational to remain true science. Contemporary science has been perverted by an irrational atheism.
October 19th, 2011 | 10:52 am
harry –
I’ll happily concede you mentioned that. Supported it with an argument, though? Not so much. :)
Of course, those ‘assumptions’ don’t match what people actually hypothesize about abiogenesis; so whatever comedy value it might have, the passage is worthless as an argument.
As I’ve noted – many times – before, the models of abiogenesis that have been proposed suggest much simpler reproducing units than living cells at the start. The RNA world, or Carins-Smith’s clay crystals, for example. Things that can reproduce with occasional errors – and hence evolve – but are simple enough to arise without intelligent intervention. The highly-tuned mechanisms we see today were not there at the start – much simpler mechanisms were involved.
And that’s why the calculator analogy is so inapt. Calculators, however simple, don’t reproduce. Auto-catalytic chemical systems do.
If reproduction can occur in a system simple enough to arise ‘mindlessly’, then natural selection has something to work with – the reproduction can become more efficient, more effective, more complex over time. It’s not established – yet – that that’s possible, I’ll grant. But that’s the model you need to be addressing. Anything else is just missing the point.
October 19th, 2011 | 12:07 pm
harry
For at least Christians anyway, the idea that God launched the Universe and then never tinkered with it again just doesn’t work because to even be a Christian one has to believe in the Incarnation and the Resurrection, both of which involved a dramatic supernatural intervention in the natural course of things, and a “tinkering” with the natural Universe by God after He launched it.
well yea but in order for it to be dramatic it has to be somewhat unusual. If you leave it to the Intelligent Design crowd, God looks less like God IMO and more like Microsoft in the late 90′s and 00′s with constant ‘service patches’ being released to ‘tinker’ with numerous bugs in the OS. Less intelligent designer and more sloppy, rushed too soon into production, cutting corners and paying for it later designer.
Again, what is important is that it isn’t all a big, mindless accident.
I think this is an ill formed materialistic idea. After all, if nothing else a materialist can’t really assert the universe is mindless since, well people have minds and people are a very tiny part of the universe. If all it takes to get a mind is a person, then the universe has plenty of ‘spare mind capacity’ all by itself. And ‘accident’ adds a level of metaphysics to the discussion that’s really beyond a materialist’s paygrade. Dropping your coffee cup in the morning can be an accident, its hardly clear the Big Bang could be an accident. Those observations by themselves do not get you to a theistic God, but they do indicate that the materialistic view of things has to be a bit less simplistic than is often depicted for purposes of the creation of straw men.
Modern science has discovered that the nanotechnology of the most primitive, single-celled, reproducing life form is light years beyond anything it knows how to build itself. Yet due to atheism’s destruction of the relentless objectivity of science, it is determined to figure out how some completely naturally occurring environment came about, the complexity and precision of which would have to be proportional to the astounding functional complexity of that first primitive life form.
But then of course its going to be like this just like a man made mountain is going to be dwarfed by the entire earth. Why? A man made mountain is made out of earth, ergo the earth itself is going to trump the little mountain made out of bull dozers and earth movers. 13.7 Billion years of highly complex nuclear and chemical reactions aren’t going to be trumped easily by, what, 200 years maybe of tinkering with chemistry sets?
Ray
Yes, some things are “thermodynamically likely” (rocks, etc.) and other things are “thermodynamically unlikely” (computers, bacteria, people, etc.)
Technically speaking computers, bacteria, people etc. are ‘thermodynamically likely’ because such things cannot be created without drastically increasing entropy and since the pattern of the universe is for net entropy to generally increase with time all the examples you gave are quite likely from a thermodynamic perspective.
harry
Let’s say that (using a silly scenario, but one that will make my point) in a million years some aliens from another galaxy discover planet Earth. Humanity is long gone. There is no trace of our previous existence, yet, inexplicably, the aliens come across a functioning hand held calculator. They want to determine if the calculator is a natural phenomenon that came about mindlessly and accidentally, or if it is the product of intelligent design.
What if instead of a calculator its a Lady Gaga CD. Mindless now huh :)?
More seriously though:
They have long known that there is a level of functional complexity that is simply beyond that into which mindless matter and energy can accidentally assemble themselves.
Matter doesn’t ‘accidently’ assemble itself into anything. Matter only ‘assembles’ itself according to the various laws of physics and chemistry. In order to really know whether or not a crystal or rock or calculator could have ‘assembled itself’ one would have to derive every possible combination of potential matter combinations. Good luck with that. Its been said that computing every possible game of chess….which only entails 32 different pieces and much fewer and simplier rules than chemistry would require a computer the size of the universe running longer than the age of the universe.
Let’s go back to the analogy of astoundingly complex software that supposedly came about mindlessly and accidentally.
Let’s note these adjectives ‘mindless’ and ‘accidentally’. What exactly do you mean by them? What exactly can I see, objectively, in a rock that happens to be sitting outside my door that its there because of a ‘mindless accident’? How do I know this? Did it arrive from space thousands of years ago? Was it chucked out the window of a passing car? Did it migrate from some stonework purposefully laid down in my neighbor’s yard? The only reason it seems to refer to its position and existince as a ‘mindless accident’ is because the cause that caused it to be outside my door is deemed by me to be so trivial that its not worth the energy of me bothering to figure it out. But this isn’t an objective property of the rock but a subjective property of how I perceive its wise to allocate my limited time thinking about things.
That certainly isn’t going to happen if the environment in which it is supposed to take place is a pile of rocks
True but there are no ancient calculators hundreds of millions of years old in the fossil record. So what purpose is served by mocking a purported ‘theory’ explaining how billion year old calculators could have arisin on a lifeless earth? If such a theory was serious, we would seriously be asking where are the billion year old fossilized calculators. But single celled organisms are not calculators. Yes they are more ‘complex’ in some regards but they are also probably more likely to arise on a lifeless earth than handheld calculators.
October 19th, 2011 | 12:23 pm
Hi, Boonton,
LOL!
October 20th, 2011 | 8:39 am
Boonton –
We’re talking at cross-purposes. I was using the term ‘thermodynamically likely’ in the sense of ‘typical products of simple, non-recursive processes’. For example, silicon crystals are easily generated naturally. However, macroscopic, aligned crystals of pure silicon – such as are used to make computer chips – require somewhat more restrictive conditions.
Now, generation of such large single crystals doesn’t violate thermodynamics, since it takes a fair amount of energy to produce them, with associated increases in entropy – as you point out. But ‘not thermodynamically precluded‘ is different from ‘thermodynamically likely’ as I was using the term. Tools – and living things – really are different from a pile of weathered rocks.
Tools need to be made – Paley with his watchmaker argument wasn’t wrong, so far as the argument actually goes. It’s just that reproducing things don’t have to be made the way tools do – living things can evolve. Both manufacture and evolution increase entropy, as you note, so ‘second law’ arguments generally fail. But I can understand the impulse to resort to ‘maker’ explanations for life, even though I think it’s mistaken.
October 20th, 2011 | 9:20 am
Ray
Tools – and living things – really are different from a pile of weathered rocks.
I think we both agree here, I do want to focus on the phrase ‘pile of …rocks’ for a slightly different purpose.
This shorthand appears in harry’s comments as well as many others. The form is usually along the lines of something like ‘how can fancy machine X (calculator, watch, Gaga CD, or Gaga herself!) appear from ‘just a pile of rocks’.
1. On the periodic table, there is no element called ‘rock’.
2. At no point has the earth been nothing but ‘a pile of rocks’ if by that you mean a huge mass of some pure element not doing much of anything.
There is literally no such thing as ‘a pile of rocks’ in this case. A pile of rocks is just a short hand way of saying “I’m imagining something really, really boring and dull”. That’s fine as a subjective statement, but it doesn’t objectively describe the earth or any other planet.
‘Piles of rocks’ are highly varied entities going through all sorts of chemical processes, esp. if a large portion of these rocks are exposed to liquid water on a regular basis. Any given rock examined for a day or so is indeed quite boring and dull. A planet of rock given millions of years is not boring and dull.
This is a problem I have with a challenge to materialism that seems centered on the idea of ‘how can mere matter do this?’ What right does anyone have to say ‘mere matter’? What matter really is about both at the individual atomic level and at the grand scale of vast systems like ‘a planet that’s a pile of rocks’ is much more than meets the eye. There ‘mere matter’ line of thinking to me speaks a lot more to the presumption of the speaker than the actual facts the case.
October 20th, 2011 | 10:59 am
Hi, Ray,
We don’t know if “much simpler mechanisms were involved.” We don’t know if simpler, lifeless units, replicating themselves with occasional errors evolved into single-celled life forms with metabolic function and DNA based reproduction. One has to believe something like that happened if one has decided beforehand that it happened mindlessly due to their religious/philosophical beliefs. True science maintains its utter neutrality and relentless objectivity as it is supposed to do.
This is much easier for Christians who are scientists to do because they know that ultimately there can be no genuine conflict between true science and true religion, as the natural and the supernatural both have the same Author.
I think the maintenance of scientific neutrality and objectivity is more difficult for atheists. What if eventually the consensus among scientists is that the most likely explanation for life coming about, by far, is that an intelligent agent was involved in the process? (I think that is already evident.) That would be an utter catastrophe for atheists. They will either choke over that development or embrace panspermia — which they may choke on as well.
On the other hand, if science is one day demonstrating in the laboratory how it all could have happened, coming up with primitive, single-celled life forms from scratch, that won’t be a catastrophe for Christians. All the millions of man hours that went into bringing this about over the years, all of the high-tech equipment in the laboratory used to set up and test the results of various scenarios, all of the preparations that are required to set up those complex, precise, artificial scenarios used to demonstrate the various stages of the evolution of lifeless units of simple replication into truly alive single-celled, reproducing life forms with metabolic function — all of that would only be a huge demonstration of the necessity of the involvement of an intelligent agent in the process back when it happened “naturally.”
Quite frankly, I don’t think science will ever be able to build life from scratch, much less be able demonstrate how it could have happened naturally, but if that ever does take place, it won’t be the end of the world for Christians. They won’t be filing lawsuits to keep that information from students.
That some phenomena are best explained as being the result of the work of an intelligent agent is entirely legitimate scientifically. We don’t consider forensic pathology unscientific because it often determines that a given phenomenon — a corpse — was not brought about mindlessly and naturally, but that its cause was an intelligent agent — a murderer.
Why are lawsuits filed in order to keep from students certain entirely legitimate scientific theories that propose that the involvement of an intelligent agent best explains a given phenomenon? It is because the phenomenon in question is life. Unlike forensic pathology, scientific consensus regarding the origin of life has huge implications for atheism. Atheists want to promote their religious/philosophical beliefs and avoid what they perceive to be a major catastrophe. (They have “religious” beliefs in the sense that it cannot be proven that God isn’t there — they have to take their belief about God on faith, even if its in His non-existence. Beliefs about God one takes on faith are “religious” beliefs.)
October 20th, 2011 | 1:41 pm
We don’t know if “much simpler mechanisms were involved.” We don’t know if simpler, lifeless units, replicating themselves with occasional errors evolved into single-celled life forms with metabolic function and DNA based reproduction.
Fair enough, its a hypothesis and not an unreasonable one. But it does raise an interesting question of ‘why not’? If we know simpler replicating processes can evolve naturally, why can’t they build complexity naturally? If not then it would seem logical there must be some mechanism that would prevent the accumulation of complexity past a certain point. But what mechanism at what point?
That would be an utter catastrophe for atheists. They will either choke over that development or embrace panspermia — which they may choke on as well.
Judge not least ye be judged. You mock panspermia yet if you’re really going to try to be objective and unbiased its no less a hypothesis than any other. You don’t get to toss it out just because you’re impatient for science to provide proof for your religious beliefs anymore than atheists get to assume abiogensis has been proven just because it will get them where they want to be sooner.
October 20th, 2011 | 2:23 pm
Why are lawsuits filed in order to keep from students certain entirely legitimate scientific theories that propose that the involvement of an intelligent agent best explains a given phenomenon?
No such theories have been presented.
October 20th, 2011 | 2:37 pm
harry –
And I’ve already stated that – explicitly. However, we do have suggestive evidence for things like the RNA world (e.g. DNA transcription to this day is carried out by a ribozyme). It’s not just “oh, no, it’s the only thing left to us!”
I’ve pointed out the fallacy in this notion before. The fact that humans can build tornado simulators doesn’t mean that tornadoes are individually crafted by intelligence – especially when we can demonstrate that the conditions in the simulators can also arise “mindlessly”. (Humid air, winds speed or direction varying with height, along with cold air that descends and forces the warm air up.)
Partly because, so far, no actual theory (in a scientific sense) has been advanced. A few people (e.g. Behe have put forth hypotheses about things like the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, or the immune system. Those hypotheses have failed testing.
As I’ve noted, abiogenesis is only a hypothesis right now. I would oppose it being taught in undergraduate classes, too.
No. “You can’t prove it doesn’t exist” doesn’t work for Sasquatch, leprechauns, trolls under bridges, or unicorns. Neither does it work for gods. Believing that the evidence doesn’t establish the existence of God is not a ‘faith position’.
October 20th, 2011 | 4:23 pm
No. “You can’t prove it doesn’t exist” doesn’t work for Sasquatch, leprechauns, trolls under bridges, or unicorns. Neither does it work for gods. Believing that the evidence doesn’t establish the existence of God is not a ‘faith position’.
You are the fish insisting that air doesn’t exist, because obviously water is all there is.
October 20th, 2011 | 5:13 pm
Hello Boonton, Ray,
Consider this excerpt from a University of California, San Diego web page. The late Stanley Miller, of the famous Miller-Urey experiment, taught there for years. UCSD is not exactly known for being a bastion of young earth creationism.
The entire web page can be seen here:
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/litu/02_3.shtml
Lifeless replication does not solve a problem that can be compared to the difficulty of mindlessly getting from variously shaped pieces of scrap metal to a modern automobile with a GPS and onboard computer.
The unlikely existence of a natural environment that actually allowed for lifeless replication would most likely end in one of two ways. Either the resources that each new replicated unit needed would be used up long before the environment sustaining the replication collapsed, or, the unlikely environment sustaining the replication would just collapse for one reason for another due to the required complexity and precision of such an environment being fragile, discontinuing the replication. Either way, the evolutionary project is terminated long before it is anywhere near producing a single-celled life form with metabolic functionality and DNA-based reproduction.
The evolutionary project then has to start from the very beginning, and await another unlikely environment to come about, which, if it ever does come about, will most likely end in the same way.
Environments that allow for replication in laboratories really don’t prove much, except the necessity of the involvement of an intelligent agent in setting up such environments. These environments can be maintained in laboratories only because intelligent agents take measures to counteract the pressure of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which is always working to bring matter into a more likely state, which is not one that allows for lifeless replication. If there are a vast number of examples out there of lifeless replication going on that are 1/4 or 1/2 or 3/4 of the way to becoming single-celled life forms with metabolic functionality and DNA-based reproduction, you need to let the world know about them.
Ray, if one believes there is no God and cannot prove it, one is taking that belief on faith.
October 20th, 2011 | 6:43 pm
Hello, Boonton,
Panspermia seems much more reasonable to me than abiogenesis, which appears to me to be much closer to alchemy than science.
I pointed the following out to Ray previously:
P.T. Mora, a senior research biologist at the National Institutes of Health, seemed to realize this when he wrote an article published in Nature in 1963 (cited in Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell):
The intervention of an intelligent agent is the only reasonable explanation we currently have. If the probability is so low that for all practical purposes infinite time must elapse for the occurrence of that first reproducing life form to take place then it is virtually impossible for it to have happened mindlessly and accidentally in the limited time available.
Or, as Stephen Meyer puts it:
October 21st, 2011 | 6:56 am
There is no experiment that produces anything resembling living things…
No experiment? The set of all possible experiments have been done including ones that require millions of years of time? When did that research project get funded?
If not then what the writer means to say is “No exeriment to date”, which is all well and true but says nothing conclusive about much of anything.
Lifeless replication does not solve a problem that can be compared to the difficulty of mindlessly getting from variously shaped pieces of scrap metal to a modern automobile with a GPS and onboard computer.
False it does solve ‘a’ problem in the sense that if it was impossible you’d have a hard time getting from just having a ‘junk yard’ to a functioning machine. Again to show its impossible one must demonstrate why….what would prevent matter going from X to Y? At this point you have to leave behind reasoning by analogy and actually start touching science. Reasoning by analogy is fine for explaining already established science but only can take you so far in doing it.
These environments can be maintained in laboratories only because intelligent agents take measures to counteract the pressure of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which is always working to bring matter into a more likely state, which is not one that allows for lifeless replication
False, life forms are indeed quite consistent with entropy since they increase rather than decrease entropy. You, being intelligent, are no more countering entropy than your basement furnance is.
If the probability is so low that for all practical purposes infinite time must elapse for the occurrence of that first reproducing life form to take place then it is virtually impossible for it to have happened mindlessly and accidentally in the limited time available.
Probability is the set of all things that fit a condition divided by the set of all possible things. Since neither can be calculated by anything you’ve shown me, you’ve presented no probabilities. You’re presenting ‘subjective probabilities’ which, at the end, are just guesses.
For example:
Recall that the probability of producing a single 150-amino-acid functional protein by chance stands at about 1 in 10^164.
Who says it needs to have been 150? Just suppose it was more like 10 originally. Today such a chain would be so dysfunctional that it would be immediately gobbled up by our slick modern life forms but back then it was the coolest thing on the block with no competition. Then the question isn’t what are the odds of 150 appearing ‘by chance’ but what are the chances of a population of 10′s competiting with each other and upping the length to about 150? To use an analogy, what are the chances of a programmer sitting down and writing Windows 7 from scratch? Very slim. But what if you didn’t start from Windows 7 but DOS, then the step from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is very slim and actualy highly likely but likely because the initial step wasn’t from a ‘junk yard’ to Windows but much more basic programs the competeted with each other to up the complexity. (And please don’t try to nit pick the analogy by noting programmers are intelligent, its not about programmers but about the nature of probability).
October 21st, 2011 | 9:27 am
Harry –
From the same website you linked to:
How is this different from what I’ve been saying?
One other amusing bit from your source:
October 21st, 2011 | 9:33 am
Harry –
Meyer fudges definitions quite a bit. He picks a specific function and estimates about sequences performing that specific function. He ignores the possibility of other sequences performing different functions,as if every other conceivable sequence is of no utility whatsoever
See, for example, here for a more accurate model of protein evolution.
October 21st, 2011 | 9:55 am
Another factor getting slided here:
Abiogenesis has to either be a very, very rare event or the type of event that alters the environment in such a way that that makes it impossible for it to happen again.
Why?
Well we don’t see abiogensis happening every day under our microscopes. Furthermore, one of the main assumptions of evolution is common descent, all present life forms can trace their parents back to a common ancestor. If new life forms were getting created from scratch, from just the ‘right chemicals’ accidently mixing together in the pool, the pond or the ocean then common descent would get knocked out as a working assumption.
So to say that this or that aspect of abiogensis is highly unlikely or that “we mixed together these various chemicals in a jar and didn’t find any single celled organisms forming!” kind of misses a point. Either abiogensis has to be a very rare event so that it only happened once or so in earth’s history (so would be very unlikely to happen randomly in your jar by just giving it a few days) or the first life forms had to have altered the environment in such a way so as to make future abiogensis impossible or very difficult.
Another possibility, I suppose, is that abiogensis is not rare but the ‘life forms’ it creates are so tiny that they exist on a scale that so far eludes us and these ‘super-micro’ life forms don’t mix it up with the life forms we know about because the ‘big boys’ (aka single celled things, bacteria, viruses etc.) just have too many advantages. The only time the super-micro life forms had any chance was at the beginning of the game when there were no larger life forms to compete with them.
October 21st, 2011 | 10:10 am
Hi, Ray, Boonton,
As for Ray’s citations from the same UCSD web site mine was from, I must admit that when I stumbled across the text I had cited, my first thought was that I had discovered something very rare indeed: the result of a sudden and inexplicable fit of clear thinking on the part of the abiogenesis gang. ;o)
This discussion has been quite fun for me. I hope you guys are enjoying it, too. More later today.
Thanks
October 21st, 2011 | 2:34 pm
Hi, Ray,
Regarding the article you provided a link to, How to examine the evolution of proteins:
So, “real scientists,” as the article’s author puts it later, unlike “silly creationists,” as he refers to scientists who quite unsurprisingly see that intelligence agency is always a causal factor in phenomena displaying significant functional complexity – life being an astounding exception to this if it did indeed mindlessly come about, since it displays vastly more functional complexity than any phenomena of which we are currently aware – do not assert that existing proteins can evolve into other existing proteins. That is very interesting. So, “real scientists” don’t think evolution at that level is taking place. OK. I’ll keep that in mind, and wonder if “real scientists” think it ever did.
So, he knows with certainty what was going on at the level of proteins responding to “mineralocorticoid and/or glucocorticoid hormones” 450 million years ago. There’s no way that is a “silly” assertion. A “silly” assertion is something like asserting that David might have actually existed due to biblical accounts of events which purportedly took place thousands of years ago. ;o)
So, as noted above, “real scientists” don’t think that existing proteins can evolve into other existing proteins, yet useless protein mutations “spread freely through a population.” Hmmm …..
For some reason that article, despite its incredibly detailed explanation of what was and wasn’t going on 450 million years ago at the level of protein evolution, has left me unconvinced. Do you suppose it could be – use the wildest stretches of your imagination – that the article was, in some sense, just maybe, a bit of propaganda? That just maybe it is claiming much more certainty about things than is really justifiable? Give it a thought.
In the past I have worked on the development of technology that was being written about in trade magazines. I had a good grip on the real state of its development. I was often amazed by the unjustified assertions of those who seemed to know more about writing than they knew about the subject they were writing about. I am no molecular biologist, but the article you linked to had that same “smell.”
October 21st, 2011 | 3:44 pm
A couple of corrections to my previous post:
“intelligence agency is always a causal” should of course, been “intelligent agency …”
and
If existing proteins cannot evolve into other existing proteins, yet useless protein mutations “spread freely through a population,” why wouldn’t advantageous mutations also spread freely though the population, bringing about evolution?</b? Hmmm…
It doesn't matter so much to me whether or not biological evolution actually took place once life got started, as I have explained before. What I wanted to point out with that comment was a contradiction in the assertions made in the article.
October 21st, 2011 | 3:54 pm
Oops. Let me try that again.
A couple of corrections to my previous post:
should, of course, been “intelligent agency …”
and
It doesn’t matter so much to me whether or not biological evolution actually took place once life got started, as I have explained before. What I wanted to point out with that comment was a contradiction in the assertions made in the article.
October 21st, 2011 | 4:02 pm
Harry – So, “real scientists,” …do not assert that existing proteins can evolve into other existing proteins.
[Heavy sigh.]
Let’s look at the actual quote. I’m going to highlight a couple important words. Critical words, in fact:
ex·tant/ˈekstənt/ Adjective: (esp. of a document) Still in existence; surviving.
In other words – no one argues that two modern proteins existing today evolved into each other. Let’s produce another quote from a related article:
(Hey, there’s that ‘extant’ word again!)
In other words, proteins that exist today evolved from other proteins that existed in the past. (Well, technically, DNA sequences that specify proteins, but… you get the idea.) In the same way that humans didn’t evolve from modern-day chimps, or vice-versa. Both evolved from an ancestral population that differed from both chimps and humans.
I note you didn’t actually point out a identifiable problem… you just talked about “smell”. I’m afraid I’m unable address the odor of technical articles.
Let’s try another hypothesis. “In the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
If I may diffidently submit… the whole bit about ‘extant proteins’ seemed awfully clear to me. I wonder if you misinterpreted it because, at some level, you wanted to misinterpret it?
But that’s all the Bulverism I have time for. I promise not to speculate about motives, and just stick to facts. I hope you’ll do the same.
October 21st, 2011 | 4:34 pm
Come on Ray, give me a break. The author makes a big deal out of that, beginning the article with his point about extant proteins, using that to discredit those who disagree with him. Then, later on in his piece, he makes a statement that contradicts the original, main assertion he used to start things off. Not too impressive. And certainly not very credible. Yeah, it had a bad “smell.” ;o)
October 21st, 2011 | 8:08 pm
Hi, Boonton,
I thought your post beginning with “Another factor getting slided here,” which suggested several possible reasons why we don’t see abiogenesis taking place, made some good points.
Let me add one more possible reason why we don’t see it taking place. It could be that we don’t see it happening because it is virtually impossible for it to happen — and always been.
If by abiogenesis we mean an entirely mindless, accidental process that by sheer luck and against all odds came about in an environment that, in spite of the inherent fragility of the delicate, precise and complex requirements it would have to meet in order to allow for such a complex process to “execute” within it, also came about by sheer luck and against all odds, and not only did that but overcame the pressure of the 2LT which was always working at collapsing it into something much simpler, then, yeah, it is a virtual impossibility.
On the other hand, something like abiogenesis might indeed have taken place due to an environment that met the necessary requirements because it was set up by an intelligent agent, who also took measures to counteract the relentless pressure of the 2LT, similar to what happens in modern laboratories where someone’s guess at what a prebiotic environment might have been like is simulated and maintained.
That, currently, is the best scientific explanation, and is based on the entirely legitimate, repeatedly demonstrated fact that significant functional complexity can only come about due to an intelligent agent. It explains every other example of a phenomenon that exhibits significant functional complexity. That some refuse to consider that in regard to the most astounding example of functional complexity we are aware of — life — is due to those people being unduly influenced by their atheistic “religious” beliefs.
Their notion that life and everything else came about mindlessly and accidentally is their religion’s far fetched creation myth, and is no more rational than the notion that the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings are really the result of a mindless, accidental process.
We know all about how paintings come about, so we don’t insist they came about mindlessly and accidentally on the walls of the Lascaux cave — that would be irrational.
We know all about how inscriptions on stone tables come about, so we don’t insist the meaningful inscription on the Rosetta Stone came about mindlessly and accidentally — that would be irrational.
We know how significant functional complexity comes about, so, when we observe it, we do the rational thing and seriously consider the possibility that it did not come about mindlessly and accidentally — unless one is an adherent of religious atheism and embraces its irrational yet dogmatically proclaimed creation myth.
October 21st, 2011 | 9:57 pm
harry –
Explain, in numbered steps if necessary, where the contradiction you see is. I’ve explained in a couple different ways why the statement simply doesn’t mean what you thought it meant.
October 21st, 2011 | 10:01 pm
harry –
It’s not like we haven’t been around that merry-go-round before either.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/10/04/fine-tuning-an-argument-and-a-universe/
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/05/20/nature-and-the-philosophers/
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/07/18/so-you-think-you-understand-the-cosmological-argument/
October 22nd, 2011 | 12:51 am
Hi, Ray,
Another thought.
If Myers meant what you say he meant, which would be obvious to those “silly creationists” too, then he was really mocking a straw man. The use of such a rhetorical device is another indication that the article was good — a good propaganda piece, and is a device that is commonly used when one doesn’t have a substantive argument to use against one’s opponent.
I googled up PZ Meyers, its author, and it became abundantly clear he is just another atheistic religious zealot spewing forth propaganda. Here is an example of his passionate preaching on the hard line Darwinists should take against their opponents:
He’s the St. Paul of the First Church of Atheistic Darwinism.
October 22nd, 2011 | 9:15 am
harry –
Except it wasn’t. Read the creationists’ paper, and see how silly they were. That’s the exact mistake they made.
Let’s assume you’re right. He’s also a professor of developmental biology. I can see I’m going to have to quote C.S. Lewis in some depth, not just link to his words as I did before:
If there’s a problem with Myers’ arguments, let’s hear about it. Right now, all I’ve heard amounts to ‘I don’t agree with his conclusions, and don’t like his rhetorical style, so he must be wrong somewhere.’
October 22nd, 2011 | 4:26 pm
Hi, Ray,
Since you don’t seem to find any reason to doubt Myers’ utter neutrality and relentless objectivity as a scientist even though he makes passionate statements like the one cited above, forgive me if I wait on what seems to me to be a more neutral expert assessment of the work of Axe and Gauger than
yours. ;o)
It’s been fun. I probably won’t be able to add anything to the discussion for a day or two. If you can find a link to Axe and Gauger’s work, if you don’t mind, post it here and I will take a look at it when I get the chance to so.
Thanks, Ray, Boonton for an interesting exchange of ideas.
October 23rd, 2011 | 9:06 am
A couple of quick thoughts.
PZ Meyer is putting his spin on something he is admitting they got right, turning it into an “error” — propaganda.
And, where is this work by Axe and Gauger that cites Carrol, Ortlund and Thornton?
October 23rd, 2011 | 11:26 am
Harry –
Bulverism. If Myers is wrong, point out where he is wrong. If I wanted to blather on about motives, for example, I could expressly wonder how you made the following mistake:
It’s linked to from the articles you say you read. The text “recent publication disproving Darwinism” is… a link.
October 23rd, 2011 | 1:55 pm
Right. But where in The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway, by Axe and Gauger are Carrol, Ortlund and Thornton cited?
October 24th, 2011 | 10:12 am
Hi, Ray,
Modern technology has become something too vast for any one person to know all about. Modern biology has become to a significant extent a study of nanotechnology, so what I have observed regarding man-made technology I am convinced now applies to biology as well.
Since it is impossible for one to know all about every area of technology, technological experts tend to have an understanding of their own area of expertise that is, so to speak, a few feet wide and a mile deep, while their understanding of everything else tends to be a few feet deep and a mile wide. It is impossible to have an understanding of modern technology that is a mile wide and a mile deep.
In a meeting about technical issues, technical experts firmly and confidently defend their opinions about how to resolve the issues when the subject is one in which their understanding is a mile deep, much less so when the subject is one in which their understanding is only a few feet deep.
Human nature being what it is, sometimes one who wants the meeting to go his way for some ulterior motive, will make authoritative sounding declarations based on his “mile deep” understanding of some area of technology — an area that he knows nobody else at the meeting is all that familiar with. It is a “no brainer,” according to him anyway, that the company, or the department or whatever should pursue whatever course of action he is proposing, based on his authoritatively declared — but unjustifiable — assertions. I think anybody who has worked with technology development, especially in larger companies, will know exactly what I am talking about. This is so common it is joked about in Dilbert cartoons, where the use of this technique backfires on Dilbert because, as he explains to his co-conspirators, “If I could lie I would be marketing.” He just isn’t that good at blowing smoke. Some world class smoke blowers base their careers on this ability.
With the above in mind, again, using the wildest stretches of your imagination, consider the possibility that PZ Myers is a world class smoke blower. Can he really be certain about what was or wasn’t going on 450 million years ago in that much detail? Is there the remotest possibility that he is making unjustifiable assertions? As I said before, I am no molecular biologist — but I smell smoke.
I think he has a HUGE ulterior motive — his deepest religious convictions as a devout and zealous atheist are being challenged. It is impossible for him to approach the subject with the utter neutrality and relentless objectivity that is required by true science. He doesn’t have the conviction that ultimately there can be no genuine conflict between true science and true atheism — and he is desperate.
October 24th, 2011 | 2:07 pm
Let me add one more possible reason why we don’t see it taking place. It could be that we don’t see it happening because it is virtually impossible for it to happen — and always been.
Key emphasis there on ‘virtually impossible’ as opposed to impossible.
Aside from the possibility that abiogensis is happening all the time, we just haven’t looked for it in the right place, the fact is abiogensis has to be somewhat ‘virtually impossible’ or else you will end up breaking the common descent assumption.
We are then left with the fundamental problem with probabilities, they are only good if you can really calculate them…i.e. the sum combination of ‘random atoms’ that contain living life forms divided by the sum of all possible combinations of ‘random atoms’. We cannot calculate that hence all probabilies you are seeing are so-called ‘subjective probabilities’….essentially ‘educated guesses’.
If by abiogenesis we mean an entirely mindless, accidental process that by sheer luck and against all odds came about in an environment that, in spite of the inherent fragility of the delicate, precise and complex requirements it would have to meet in order to allow for such a complex process to “execute” within it, also came about by sheer luck and against all odds, and not only did that but overcame the pressure of the 2LT which was always working at collapsing it into something much simpler, then, yeah, it is a virtual impossibility.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is a friend here because once you get a living thing, you have a neat little entropy machine. A living cell sucks up relatively low entropy matter and turns it into high entropy.
Most of the adjectives you use above have no real objective meaning. “Lucky”, “accidental”, even “against all odds”. What do they objectively mean? Next to nothing. It’s not an accident that a pot of water on a burner turns to steam. The droplets of water that appear on your window in your kitchen on a cold day may, you say’ ‘accidently’ form patterns but they don’t. ‘Against all odds’? Well again you have the odds of all things that could happen resulting in abiogensis divided by the odds of all things that could happen period. Again are you calculating that?
We know all about how paintings come about, so we don’t insist they came about mindlessly and accidentally on the walls of the Lascaux cave — that would be irrational.
But what is an accident here? Suppose the painters were playing a game, spin a wheel and paint whatever it lands on…..it lands on ‘mammoth’ so they paint that. Why is there a mammoth painted there? Its an accident of the game. If the spinner hand landed on ‘make a big splotch’ then you’d say the splots of paint was ‘random’….but it was fully intentional by the player!
On the other hand, something like abiogenesis might indeed have taken place due to an environment that met the necessary requirements because it was set up by an intelligent agent,
Problem, the universe is a big place, lots of environments form ‘randomly’. If Abiogensis happens when some very particular ‘receipe’ is followed, then you will get abiogensis happening in the universe because you will get the receipe happening by ‘sheer luck’ if you will. In other words, if say an intelligent agent set up abiogensis by having a planet 93 million miles from a yellow star, got a certain percentage of salts dissolved out of rocks into a liquid H2O ocean, a particular number of lightening strikes on that ocean, certain amount of heavy elements coming in from meteor impacts etc. Well that ‘receipe’ will be replicated elsewhere in the universe for the same reason a billion bar tenders mixing random drinks will almost certainly ‘accidently’ stumble upon the special customized drink you perfected last year.
Problem 2: The visible universe is very, very big. There’s good reason to believe, though, the actual universe is infinite which means that just about anything that could happen does happen somewhere at some time….even violations of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
So here is your problem. If abiogensis is from some intelligent agent setting up a ‘right mix’, the laws of probability say that the ‘right mix’, even if its very, very exacting, will almost certainly happen somewhere on its own at sometime. So for any given case of life (we only have the earth, so far), there’s no way to tell from this fact that it was ‘accidental’ or ‘intentional’.
Let’s put it in a very simple analogy….you have a very clumsy bar tender who keeps knocking bottles over when she turns her back. She gets on order for 2 cokes and 2 rum & cokes. She lines up 4 glasses of coke, pours rum in 2 then sets the bottle on the bar, she turns her back and the bottle knocks over pouring rum into the other 2 cokes. The waitress picks up the 4 drinks and brings it to your table. You, a scientist specializing in intelligent design, attempt to examine the drinks to see which ones were ‘designed’ (the intentional rum and cokes) and which were ‘accidents’. There is no test you can do to determine this. You may say a rum & coke should be about 1-1 in terms of rum to coke….a chemical analysis may give you the ratios but since the ‘accidental’ rum and cokes are random there’s a chance they too will fall near 1-1 and since the bartender is clumsy, there’s no way to be sure her ‘accidental’ drinks aren’t technically better than her ‘intentional ones’.
The other out here is to say there’s no way abiogensis can happen under the laws of physics. But there you go back to computing all possible combinations of atoms…..which you can’t do.
on PZ Myers
You miss Ray’s point. His neutrality is not needed. On the subject of the papers he is criticizing, whether or not he unfairly hates creationists is irrelevant. What matters only is the question is he correct in the flaws he points out. Whether or not hes a propagandist for atheism is irrelevant. If he picks out valid flaws in creationist papers, they don’t magically become smaller flaws because their critic is ‘unbiased’.
is impossible for him to approach the subject with the utter neutrality and relentless objectivity that is required by true science.
Oddly its not. Science is filled with stories about utterly non-objective, non-neutral scientists. How many theories were created because Scientist A hated Scientist B? Hated him for reasons that were utterly non-neutral, non-objective? Because he slept with his wife, because he hated his nationality, because he hated that he got a promotion or got to speak at the big conference or had his name attached to some other theory? That PZ Myers bashes a creationist paper because he hates creationists is no different than numerous other clashing scientists who’ve battled each other for purely personal reasons. What matters is has PZ Myers identified flaws in the paper(s) or not? If you think about it, you’d realize his unbiasedness can be an asset in that regard. If he hates creationists, for example, then he will be highly motivated to find flaws in their work and legitmate flaws will be so much better to find because legitimate flaws will work better than false ones to enhance his reptuation and diminish theirs!
October 25th, 2011 | 8:59 am
Hi, Boonton,
A living cell “sucks up” disordered matter and arranges it into a highly ordered state. But we aren’t talking about living cells yet. We are considering how lifeless matter was transformed into a living cell with DNA-based reproduction and metabolic functionality.
DNA is a medium. The information it contains is no more inherent to it than the meaningful letters on a piece of paper are due to inherent properties of the paper. And just as a piece of paper could have written on it meaningless arrangements of letters, or a block of computer memory could contain a series of zeros and ones that didn’t mean anything, so could the DNA medium have written into it only gibberish — but it doesn’t. It contains the assembly instructions for many intricate protein machines that will be used in the cell.
If it is unlikely that one could fly over a huge, empty parking lot and dump out millions of Scrabble pieces, and have them mindlessly and accidentally arranged such that they composed an interesting mystery novel, it is far more unlikely that the meaningful information written into the DNA molecule got there mindlessly and accidentally.
No matter how the Scrabble pieces landed, it would have all been according to the laws of physics – but it is highly unlikely that the laws of physics will produce what it appears in every other instance a mind is required to produce. My use of words like lucky and accidentally do indeed have an “objective meaning,” yet still don’t convey the absurdity of the proposition that meaningful information can be arrived at mindlessly.
October 25th, 2011 | 11:59 am
Hi, Boonton,
Yeah, and they often promulgated much misinformation which was really just propaganda and which slowed down genuine scientific progress. It is not without reason that true science is utterly neutral and relentlessly objective regardless of the implications of its discoveries for a given religious/philosophical viewpoint.
October 25th, 2011 | 12:47 pm
A living cell “sucks up” disordered matter and arranges it into a highly ordered state. But we aren’t talking about living cells yet.
No it doesn’t. It sucks up relatively ordered matter, burns it to produce waste energy that is typically higher entropy.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to the entire system, not just one tiny piece of it. Yes the matter in a living cell is ‘more ordered’ than those very same atoms before they became part of that cell. However to get those atoms into the cell, much more disorder had to be created.
Look at it this way. When you were a baby you weighed maybe 9 pounds. Today you weigh 160 pounds. You gained 151 pounds of atoms that are nicely ‘ordered’. To do that, though, every day you ate a few pounds of food very little of which ended up ‘ordered’ in your body. Most of those thousands of pounds of food over the year were burned off and transformed into disordered waste energy as your body radiated it away at 98 degrees or so. Your ‘intelligence’ has done nothing to help you buck the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
If it is unlikely that one could fly over a huge, empty parking lot and dump out millions of Scrabble pieces, and have them mindlessly and accidentally arranged such that they composed an interesting mystery novel, it is far more unlikely that the meaningful information written into the DNA molecule got there mindlessly and accidentally.
But it is highly likely that out of those millions of scrabble letters you’d get a single word or maybe even a sentence.
Here’s where your analogy breaks down. If we were talking about something analogous to living things, achieving a single word is all you’d need. The word would be able to ‘eat’ the less ‘wordy’ arrangements of scrabble letters and reproduce into new words with offspring competiting for resources. Initially the first word and its immediate children would have a field day since they are along in a sea of nearly limitless ‘food’ but very quickly there would be thousands of words fighting each other and larger sentences or even novels would have an advantage eating the little two letter loner words up and churning them into new novels but maybe when a big novel died its body would be ripped apart by thousands of tiny two and three letter words who’d still exist is ‘microrobes’ in this planet of ‘Scrabble letter based life forms’.
Yeah, and they often promulgated much misinformation which was really just propaganda and which slowed down genuine scientific progress.
Irrelevant, you must review the theory/criticism/whatever presented by the scientist as science, not personal flaming. Einstein hated quantum mechanics for reasons that were simply a matter of taste. He had every right to seek out flaws based on totally emotional, biased motives. When he presented his papers, though, other scientists had to read that as science. If he found flaws in quantum mechanics, they couldn’t just wave their hands and say “let’s ignore this because he always had it in for the quantum people anyway”. Likewise you can’t dismissed PZ’s valid criticisms of creationist papers simply because you think he has it in for creationists. Maybe he does, that doesn’t make creationist errors any less errorful.
October 25th, 2011 | 2:59 pm
But it is highly likely that out of those millions of scrabble letters you’d get a single word or maybe even a sentence.
Not really. And when the unlikely did happen, even if the Scrabble pieces were somehow picked up except for the ones that had actually formed words or simple sentences, and dropped again on the parking lot, that would disrupt the order of the ones left behind that had formed into words and simple sentences. If a tornado actually formed something that might pass for a crude dwelling, the next one isn’t going to add central heat and air to it, it is going to destroy that “dwelling.” That is the thing about mindlessness — it doesn’t have any idea that one arrangement of things is “better” or exhibits progress towards another arrangement — mindlessness cannot have anything in particular in mind. The 2LT just keeps reducing things to a less ordered state. As everybody knows, ordered matter, left to itself, falls apart. An automobile slowly rusts away — there is no mindless, naturally occurring process that adds something like power steering to it, the waves along the beach don’t build sandcastles, they destroy them, and so on and so on. It is very likely that the most astounding and intricate example of functional complexity we are aware of — the nanotechnology of life — nanotechnology beyond that which the best minds of modern science know how to create from scratch — didn’t come about mindlessly.
Historical sciences must come up with theories to explain an existing phenomenon that has “causal adequacy,” that is, it must come up with causes that are known to have the ability to produce the effect in question. For example, Darwin, who read his friend Charles Lyell’s Principles of geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface, by reference to causes now in operation understood this. He was explaining what caused life to evolve with known causes currently in operation — but that was an explanation of how life evolved after it got started.
Today’s Darwinists need to explain how life got started with known causes still in operation. The fact that we can’t find any naturally occurring examples of lifeless replication on its way to becoming a single-celled life form with DNA based reproduction and metabolic functionality would rule that theory out according to Darwin’s own approach to science. The only known causes of massive functional complexity currently in operation are an intellect. By Darwin’s rules the ID movement is more genuinely scientific than PZ Myers.
October 25th, 2011 | 3:03 pm
But he didn’t find an error in a creationist paper, he construed something they got right as to be an error — which is propaganda, not science.
October 25th, 2011 | 3:59 pm
But it is highly likely that out of those millions of scrabble letters you’d get a single word or maybe even a sentence….Not really.
Errr, well if we’re talking scrabble letters and millions of them the chance of a word or two bring formed from random combinations is actually quite good. In fact, the odds are you’d almost certainly get quite a few words out of them if you’re talking millions of tiles randomly falling on the ground. How to calculate? # of words in the English language divided over the number of possible combinations of random tile letters (say cut it off at ten tiles)
If a tornado actually formed something that might pass for a crude dwelling, the next one isn’t going to add central heat and air to it, it is going to destroy that “dwelling.”
Dwellings don’t reproduce and compete with each other for fitness. Neither do automobiles, calculators, watches or any other noun you want to employ in your quest to find the perfect example of the fallacy of reasoning by analogy.
Now you can fall back on even a single type of ‘proto-life’ forming from this ‘random’ process is impossible. But there again you’ll have to contend with several facts:
1. Unlike scrabble tiles, atoms do not just ‘fall randomly’. They attract, combine or reject each other based on the principles of chemistry. If you throw twenty little red balls and ten larger blue balls up in the air the odds of them landing in perfect formations of two reds to one blue is very slim…But if you try the same with hydrogen and oxygen atoms you get H2O. Defying the odds? No, just misunderstanding what probability really is about.
2. You don’t really know what the simplest type of life form that could still function as a life form would be. The first type of ‘synthetic life’ created (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/scientists-create-first-self-replicating-synthetic-life/) is simplier than the simplest type of natural life form. Keep in mind the first living thing probably needed even less complexity. After all it had zero competition and a whole planet of raw material to work with. So the first type of life was most likely was much simplier than even the least complex types of life today? How simple? Well you need to know what the simplest arrangement of atoms would be that would still yield something that could function as a living thing.
3. Calculation: Take the simplest possible living thing arrangement(s) you found in #2, divide by all possible arrangements of atoms that made up the early earth. There’s your probability. What’s that? You don’t have those numbers? You can’t calculate probability period. Your argument ends with that statement. You can’t say what the odds are of winning the lottery if you aren’t allowed to know how many combinations there are or how many tickets you brought.
But he didn’t find an error in a creationist paper, he construed something they got right as to be an error — which is propaganda, not science.
Your responses to Ray seemed to fall along the lines not of disputing the arguments or facts he presented but simply dismissing him because he is ‘biased’ against creationists. Ray can pick up that discussion if he wishes as I haven’t read the piece(s) you guys are referring too.
October 25th, 2011 | 4:56 pm
Right. Mindless, lifeless matter doesn’t do that naturally — except in fanciful, imaginary scenarios we have no reason to believe ever really existed, unless one is frantically attempting to justify one’s belief in an irrational creation myth.
All analogies are imperfect, but they often do a pretty good job of conveying a truth — in this case the truth of the unreasonableness of coming up with imaginary scenarios that contradict all of our common experience, are not “causes now in operation” and are only being offered as “theories” because of the religious beliefs of atheists.
If you want to believe that mindlessness accidentally configured matter into an environment that would allow a complex process to execute within it, and that that complex process was also mindlessly brought about, and that the environment that allowed for that, the required complexity and precision of which would have made it very fragile, somehow managed to resist the relentless pressure of the 2LT long enough for the process to, among many other amazing things, mindlessly write the most intricate, functionally complex software known to man in the DNA molecule, a medium which it came up with quite accidentally, then you should be willing to believe that computers can come about accidentally and functionally complex software can come about on those accidentally created computers, too. If fact, you are free to believe in any creation myth you want to believe in. Yet those who do so should consider a remark frequently attributed to GK Chesterton, “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything.”
October 25th, 2011 | 5:16 pm
By the way, that mindlessly created environment also had to adjust itself to meet the increasingly complex requirements of the process executing within it as the units being replicated became more intricate and complex. The process had to — luckily — find the ability to re-create more complex versions of itself as things progressed as well. None of that represents a problem, of course, to those willing to believe in anything.
October 25th, 2011 | 10:01 pm
Right. Mindless, lifeless matter doesn’t do that naturally
Assuming our own conclusions are we? No pudding for you tonight!
All analogies are imperfect, but they often do a pretty good job of conveying a truth …
Very rarely, though, do they do a good job of uncovering the truth. They work best to illustrate a truth that is already known by the person using the analogy, reasoning by analogy rarely works.
in this case the truth of the unreasonableness of coming up with imaginary scenarios that contradict all of our common experience,
common experience? Are you an immortal entity that has observed millions of years of trillions upon trillions of chemical reactions? If not then your ‘common experience’ is about as useful as my ‘common experience’ would be if I were suddenly teleported to 3rd century Mongolia.
If you want to believe that mindlessness accidentally configured matter…
You haven’t addressed my objection to this language. Until shown otherwise, adjectives like ‘mindless’ and ‘accidentally’ are not objective descriptions of matter but your subjective opinions about matter. Since I don’t believe you’re a relativist, why should your or my subjective feelings about matter enter into a scientific discussion of its properties?
By the way, that mindlessly created environment also had to adjust itself to meet the increasingly complex requirements of the process executing within it as the units being replicated became more intricate and complex.
You are assuming here that ‘more complex’ always equals ‘better’. This is hardly clear. Roughly speaking more complex means the possibility of having more ‘tricks up one’s sleeve’. It also carries a cost. More complexity opens the door to more possible errors, more possible weak spots that may be vulnerable to attack or breakdown. One would expect an evolutionary process to produce both organisms that specialize in very simple strategies and complex ones. I think you’re importing 19th century errors into your analysis.
But there is a pragmatic boundary. There’s no such thing as negative or zero complexity. While complexity is not inherently favored by evolution, when you have a population that’s the simplest possible types of life forms, the only place where there’s ‘room’ to evolve out too would be towards the more complex.
October 25th, 2011 | 10:09 pm
To illustrate the subjectivity of your ‘mindless’ or ‘accidental’ adjectives, consider this story:
One day a bar tender experiences an earth quake. Bottles tumble over causing a mix of different liquides to fall into the shot glasses below. She starts setting them right, but takes a sip from one or two…suddenly she realizes its the greatest mixed drink ever. But she has no idea what went in it!
She saves the drink and for a week spends her time trying to find the right combination again. Finally she does and compares the drink she created to the one ‘mindlessly, accidently’ created and is delighted to see they are a perfect match! You swing by and she puts both glasses in front of you.
There is no objective test you can do to either liquid to tell which one is ‘mindless’ and which one is ‘mindful’. You’re description of one as an accident is simply your subjective opinion backed up by no objective observation.
But wait! You say that ‘accidental’ and ‘mindless’ are historical descriptions of the process that created the drink, not the drink itself. You can say she did not purposefully create the drink. Sure. But then why wasn’t the first drink an accident? Because she didn’t intend it you say! But can you prove the earthquake wasn’t intended by someone or something? Show me how you can read a fault line or seismograph to tell the difference between the intended and unintended earthquake.
October 26th, 2011 | 10:05 am
;o) OK. It doesn’t appear that mindless, lifeless matter does that naturally.
It doesn’t appear that tornadoes, when they go through lumber yards, accidentally construct houses — that that might actually have happened is such a far fetched proposition, one might quite understandably respond with, “A tornado doesn’t do that naturally.”
Yet that actually happening isn’t nearly as far fetched as the proposition that a phenomenon way beyond the functional complexity of a computer running, say, scientific applications, came about mindlessly and accidentally along with the software running on it. Because that is an absurd proposition and everybody knows that intuitively, those making that proposition regarding life (only because of their atheistic religious convictions) have to find a way to make it seem less preposterous.
They do that with the notion of replication, which breaks up the obviously impossible into small incremental steps, each of which, they hope, doesn’t seem too improbable. The problem is that if the overall project is simply a virtual impossibility, due to the limited time and resources available to a mindless process that might allow it to accidentally accomplish all of that hardware and software engineering, and that an environment would come about that just happened to meet exactly its very precise requirements, and accidentally adjust them as needed as the complexity of the project increased over time, is also a virtual impossibility, then this breaking it up into smaller, less improbable steps is like thinking that if an impossibility is divided up into enough steps, the sum of the steps will add up to something that is possible. In some cases that may actually be true, but in this case it is not. Dividing zero by a trillion is just as illogical as attempting to divide zero by one or dividing it at all.
As for my use of words like mindless and accidental, I don’t see any problem at all with using them. Everybody understands what they mean. They represent valid concepts. If we dumped Scrabble pieces out of an airplane onto a parking lot, the pieces being arranged according to the laws of physics, it would be an amazing accident if they landed in an arrangement that had mindlessly spelled out an interesting mystery novel. This illustrates the notion that there are limits to what the laws of physics can reasonably be expected to accomplish mindlessly, and if something way beyond those limits happens, it is reasonable to assume it didn’t happen mindlessly.
By the way, life coming about mindlessly and accidentally is way beyond what can be rationally assumed based on our current scientific knowledge. Right now, by far, the best explanation is the involvement of an intelligent agent. That may change. It might not. Imagining highly unlikely scenarios we have no reason to believe ever really happened, unlikely in that they accidentally allow for mindless hardware and software engineering to take place, is not based on any of our real experience with how nature works — causes now in operation — but springs from the atheism’s panic, which was brought about by the discoveries of modern science.
October 26th, 2011 | 12:12 pm
;o) OK. It doesn’t appear that mindless, lifeless matter does that naturally.
Keep in mind the fact that abiogensis has to be rare to be consistent with common descent. If you got single celled life forms by just mixing up the right combo in a test tube then the theory would have a real problem. Your test tube might need to be the size of several oceans and the time might be a few hundred million years. Up your lab budget if you can.
Again your Scrabble analogy suffers from being just that, an analogy. Like all attemts to reason by analogy, there are too many areas where it breaks with what you’re trying to reason about. For example, if your random scrabble letters formed a simple word or sentence (“He ran there”), that wouldn’t reproduce in any way so you could only get to your interest mystery novel if it all came out at once.
But one doesn’t need the lifeform equilivant to a mystery novel. As you pointed out once you get a single living cell, evolution appears more than enough to get you from that to a planet full of life ranging from really simple stuff all the way up to Lady Gaga. And keep in mind you don’t even need a ‘living cell’ that would be today’s typical simple single celled life form. You’d need the simplest possible thing that could still be called a living thing. Such a thing might not even be able to exist today as it would find all its food gobbled up by the more sophisticated life forms on the block if itself didn’t get gobbled up.
So now your question is what is that simple thing and what are the odds of getting it given trillions to trillions of interactions on a planetwide scale over oodles of time? Let’s say its either 0 or 1 out of a million planets. If its 0 then all your criticisms are valid, if its 1 out of a million planets then there’s plenty of room for the Milky Way to have enough life forms to populate a Star Wars movie.
Now just consider what 1 out a million would look like. Say we created a full sized, full scale model of the early earth and watched it for a few hundred million years. 1 out of 1million means we’d almost certainly see nothing. Ditto if we made two, three, even 1,000 model earths as our ‘test tubes’. Yet the difference between 0 and 1/1,000,000 is not trivial. Its the difference between our galaxy having no life to having tens of thousands of life forms in it.
So in lab terms, we cannot measure such probabilities unless we have the power to either physically or at least virtually build millions of model earths down to the atomic level and observe them for very long time. At this thin measure, you’re appeals to ‘common sense’ or ‘intuition’ are unhelpful. We are talking about scales far beyond what we can measure using our everyday experience. You might as ask a weight lifter whose lifting 300 lbs how many ounces a small fly who landed on the weights while he was holding them up weighes.
Another method might be to evaluate the probability directly by applying mathematics. There again you’re back to figuring out the # of combinations that get you to the simplest possible life form and dividing by the total # of possible atomic combinations. A calculation you cannot perform because you know none of the relevant variables.
October 26th, 2011 | 12:22 pm
I said above that:
It is illogical to expect to get a result other than zero, when dividing zero by a trillion or dividing zero by one. Actually, it is logical to divide zero, in the sense that this frequently happens in program logic, but not with the expectation that in the flow of the program, when the value zero happens to be passed to program logic that does division, the result will be other than zero. ;o)
Division by zero will definitely make the program hiccup. ;o)
October 26th, 2011 | 12:37 pm
Harry – It appears the cite was in the email announcement of the paper (not archived on the web) and not in the paper itself; but the cite was authored by one of the authors of the ID paper, and thus must have been known to her.
Science might be that. Scientists aren’t. Various processes of science – peer review, replication, etc. – are designed to pit competing interests against each other. One set of biases counteracting another.
Again – you can accuse Myers of letting his biases distort his reasoning and affect his conclusions. But you cannot convict him of that without evidence. What evidence do you have that his reasoning and/or conclusions are faulty?
October 26th, 2011 | 3:51 pm
It is illogical to expect to get a result other than zero, when dividing zero by a trillion or dividing zero by one.
It’s even more illogical to think that you have an answer to a division problem when you don’t know either the top or the bottom of the fraction, yet amazingly you’ve pulled it off!
More seriously, you’ve made an error here in your reasoning.
First the whole novel out of scrabble letters thing is a red herring. AS you pointed out, you don’t need the ‘full novel’, just a simple word. In other words, as you said once you get to a single simple living thing, evolution does the rest of the job of populating the planet with a huge diverse array of lifeforms.
Second, you must specify the simplest arrangement of atoms that would constitute a single life form. We can set a lowerbond on the number of possible arrangements at 1. How? Well we know earth has lifeforms on it and if we take the common descent assumption to be true then there was at least one type of initial simple life forms. But there are likely multiple arrangements of atoms that could constitute a ‘simple life form’.
Third, you must specify all possible arrangements of atoms that a planet can take. This is, of course, a very very huge number.
Fourth, examine all the possible arrangements and determine how many have at least one of your ‘simplest life forms possible’ showing up in them. This will be much greater than 1 since even if there’s only 1 type of simple life form, there’s all sorts of variations on how that could show up in an arrangement of atoms (once in the north, once in the south, twice on opposite sides of the planet, thrice etc.)
Finally take the number in step 4 and divide it by the number in step 3.
So now you have several problems:
1. This number is clearly not zero since neither the numerator nor denominator are zero. This is a problem. Even if the odds are very tiny, you’re going to get a lot of life forming ‘accidently’. If the odds are 1 in a billion the galaxy is going to have thousands of ‘accidentally’ populated planets. If its 1 in a trillion our local cluster of galaxies will have thousands of life forms.
1.1 Now you run into the problem of how big is the universe? If the universe is infinite, which there is good reason to believe it is, then you’re going to get ‘accidental life’ no matter how tiny the number after you do your division above. In fact, you’re going to get a lot of life because even a lottery with odds of on in a trillion to a trillionith power will be won an infinite number of times if you buy an infinite number of tickets. You need to prove your number is not just really tiny but absolutely perfectly equal to zero. And you can’t do that since the existence of life itself gurantees that the number on the top of the fraction must be at least 1.
Of course this doesn’t prove that life on earth is an ‘accident’. But just like the bartender in my story that has one ‘accidental’ drink and one ‘designed’ drink, you’re going to have ‘accidental life’ in the universe even if it turns out that life on earth was planted here by some supernatural god or natural planter seeking to populate this side of the galaxy for whatever purposes.
October 26th, 2011 | 10:18 pm
The analogy of a novel being accidentally written by dropping Scrabble pieces from an airplane doesn’t sufficiently convey the absurdity of the notion that life came about mindlessly and accidentally. How insufficient is it? How much more unlikely is it that beings capable of writing novels would come about accidentally than it is that a novel would come about accidentally? The chances of the former happening accidentally, in comparison to the latter, makes the latter look very likely even though to propose that a novel could get written accidentally by dropping Scrabble pieces from an airplane is absolutely ridiculous. The formers is so absurd, I suppose, that its absurdity is sometimes beyond comprehension.
You said of a remark of mine:
I think you are referring to this remark of mine:
It is not a big issue to me. The big issue for me is whether or not life could have got started mindlessly and accidentally. That does not mean that I see no problems at all with mindless, accidental evolution bringing about the huge diversity in life forms after life got started. Here is why I point this out: Many mathematicians and other scientists doubt the feasibility of Neo-Darwinian theory. The problems with lifeless matter “evolving” into life are even more difficult than problems with evolution after life began. For example, after life got started it could build 150-amino-acid functional proteins per instructions already worked out and stored in DNA, whereas the odds of coming up with that first one stood at about 1 in 10^164 as mentioned previously. So, the following, wherever it refers to evolution after life began, applies even more so to lifeless matter mindlessly and accidentally assembling itself into single-celled life forms with DNA based reproduction and metabolic functionality.
Consider the following statement signed by twenty five Ph.D. Mathematicians:
Their names, along with the names of hundreds of other Ph.D. scientists from various fields who signed it as well, can be seen here:
http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/index.php
It seems that often outspoken opponents of Neo-Darwinism are mathematicians. A significant mathematical objection to the supposed creative powers of chance and physical laws was expressed at the Wistar Symposium. This took place in Philadelphia in 1966. Mathematicians and other scientists assembled to assess whether Neo-Darwinism is mathematically feasible. Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar chaired the conference. Many meeting participants were quite convinced that Neo-Darwinism is simply not mathematically feasible.
Sir Peter Medawar, at the outset, stated:
If it is obvious to a mere child that the prehistoric drawings of animals on the Lascaux cave walls were drawn by intelligent agents and didn’t happen accidentally, why is it so difficult for many biologists to see that actual, living instances of those animals all the more certainly didn’t happen accidentally?
If it is obvious to an archaeologist that a mere sketch of a man on a piece of a pottery is not a peculiar formation of clay, but evidence that he has indeed found a piece of intelligently designed pottery, why is it so difficult for many biologists to see that actual, living instances of men all the more certainly didn’t happen accidentally?
Does it make sense that mere caricatures of animals and humans do not come about accidentally, but actual, living instances of animals and humans do? No. It doesn’t. If it is so unlikely that it is irrational to propose that such caricatures of animals and humans come about accidentally, it is all the more irrational – sometimes beyond comprehension, apparently – to propose that actual, living instances of animals and humans do. What makes many biologists believe that is possible? Some people will believe in almost anything that is not the one thing they don’t want to believe in – God. That is why they so easily embrace the silly notion that lifeless replication solves everything, even though we don’t ever see it happening naturally, even though Darwin himself had the common sense to base his theory on “causes now in operation.” They want to believe in the nearly omnipotent creative power of an imaginary, mindless replication process. They don’t want to believe in God.
Yet they don’t have to do that. True science will never prove scientifically that God exists and should never attempt to do that. Modern scientific discoveries have already demonstrated that it is, by far, more likely that an intelligent agent was involved in the process that brought life about than that it was a mindless accident. (This did not surprise the vast majority of humanity which had already concluded, and quite reasonably so, that God was responsible for life on Earth.) That an intelligent agent of some kind was probably involved in bringing life about will eventually be accepted by most scientists. Theists and atheists can do with that whatever they want.
October 26th, 2011 | 10:35 pm
In the Stephen Meyer citation above
Should have been
October 27th, 2011 | 10:31 am
1. Your insistence on the scrabble analogy misses the problem with it. You don’t need the random distribution of tiles to spell out a novel if you have an evolutionary process at work that selects in favor of getting closer to a novel.
2. While I’m no biochemist, I think your RNA is likewise faulty. You don’t need to start with fully functioning RNA or amino acids. You need simply have some type of replicating reaction with modification going on. Once you get that you have the algorithm ‘zeroing in’ on functions that are highly fit from an evolutionary point of view but too highly complex to expect to come out of a ‘random throw’ of ‘scrabble tiles’.
2.1 Its quite possible then for this process to start with something that isn’t modern RNA or amino acids but ends up leading to them because they work so much better than their ancestors. Once that point is reached, the RNA or whatever you assert is too unlikely to form ‘by random chance’ is so successful it becomes the norm in nearly all life forms…so much that the original system has become all but invisible. A rough analogy here might be the stagecoach. Certainly cars were an evolution from the stagecoaches from ages ago. Yet once cars took over, nearly all stage coaches died out (aside from a few left behind as curiousities or for fancy, dramatic occassions).
3. You haven’t addressed the probability problems I presented to you. Instead you resorted to argument by authority, but I notice the mathematicians you cite often use lots of oddly fuzzy words….’feel’, ‘suspect’, ‘doubt’….When you calculate you use none of these words. The cube root of -8 is -2. You don’t ‘feel’,'suspect’,'believe’ that you know it by calculating it out. The fuzzy words you’re using lead me to suspect the mathematicians you are citing are not able to carry out the equations they would need to in order to make the statements they are making and are instead guessing.
3.1 You haven’t addressed the other problem with probabilities. If the universe is infinite then any probability other than zero means an infinite amount of ‘accidental life’ is a foregone conculsion. Your mathematicians need to be experts not only in math but also biology, chemistry and now cosmology for their calculations to be anything other than garbage in garbage out.
If it is obvious to a mere child that the prehistoric drawings of animals o…
If previously you were making the error of reasoning by analogy I suppose we could call this reasoning by false analogy. Drawings of animals do not reproduce, do not consume raw paint to make copies of themselves being more efficient at making copies of themselves if the original parent drawings are more skilled and lifelike than others etc.
October 27th, 2011 | 11:30 am
I just can’t muster up your huge faith in the creative powers of chance combined with the laws of physics. Do you believe there are any limits at all to what that combination can reasonably be expected to accomplish? If so, what is that limit? There is a difference between rational faith that rests upon reason and irrational, blind faith. Does your great faith even allow for a limit to what that combination can accomplish? If not, then nearly any theory is plausible. Yet that combination doesn’t seem to be capable of mindlessly producing significant functional complexity like that found in computers. Why is that? If it can’t do that how did it mindlessly and accidentally arrive at the vastly more significant functional complexity of the nanotechnology of life? Yeah, I know – lifeless replication, that magical phenomenon that doesn’t happen naturally – it only happens in the imaginations of those who desperately want to believe that it inexplicably took place and possessed powers that make the mightiest wizards look absolutely impotent.
Why don’t we find any sort of replication taking place that is producing significant functional complexity of some kind or another, not on the way to becoming life, but some other phenomenon that exhibits vast functional complexity? If the laws of physics combined with chance inevitably bring about lifeless replication that produces significant functional complexity we should see that happening somewhere to some extent, bringing something else about. But we don’t. Of course, that presents no problem at all for those with your great faith. But is it a faith that rests upon reason?
October 27th, 2011 | 2:08 pm
I just can’t muster up your huge faith in the creative powers of chance combined with the laws of physics. Do you believe there are any limits at all to what that combination can reasonably be expected to accomplish? If so, what is that limit?
I think I would object to your use of the word ‘creative’. In some ways evolution is highly creative but not in the intuitive sense that, say, Steve Jobs was creative to see that a mouse was a logical device to pair with the personal computer. Its creative in the sense that nearly everything possible is attempted with the things that don’t work getting discarded and the things that do getting picked up.
This method of creativity is not well suited for ‘mindedness’ because life is short for any given creature but not for the system as a whole. Hence if we are attacked by some new bacteria, trying every possible chemical as a novel antibiotic will, of course, be problematic. We as minded creatures would probably at least try to narrow our search down based on our studies of the bacteria’s functioning, genetic code etc.
The bacteria, though, has both time and numbers in its approach. Out of the billions of random changes which are mostly range from harmful to neutral, a few are helpful for the bacteria. Upon ‘finding’ those through the brute force method of essentially ‘trying all combos’, then the bacteria with those helpful changes finds it has a ‘clear field’ to multiply all over the place while its brother bacteria must contend with the old drugs that work.
Or to use another analogy….suppose you left your debit card inside a Mac machine. If I were to grab it and guess your pin # based on what I know about you (maybe the year you were born or graduated HS or got married etc.) that would be ‘creative’ and would require intelligence. If I just grabbed your Mac card and tried 4 digits and got lucky, that wouldn’t require intelligence. Evolution is roughly analogous to thousands of people leaving their cards laying around and thousands of would be thiefs picking them up and trying random pin numbers. Most will fail but its assured you will get successful thieves.
So its not really a matter of faith but applied logic….the same thing that says if you knock a glass of water off the table you’re going to end up with a puddle on the floor. You ask the right question, what is the limit? If you knock the glass off the table why *wouldn’t* you end up with a puddle? Well you wouldn’t if there was something that intervened to stop it from happening or if there was something about the glass or the floor that would have prevented it from happening.
In the case of the ATM cards, that something might be some technological limit…say people who leave their cards quickly report them missing so they are deactived so even lucky guessing thieves can’t get any cash or optical face software at ATM machines that will stop a transaction if the wrong face is using the machine.
In the case of evolution and abiogensis some limits might be combinations of atoms that cannot be produced by physics/chemistry. The use of atoms that don’t exist in the environment. I’m sure there’s also some element of ‘lock in’ that happens as well. Could you arrange atoms to make a ‘flying elephant’? I’m sure. But the dynamics of evolution allow changes that offer a net benefit or are neutral and discourage changes that are harmful. If there’s no series of positive or at least neutral steps between current non-flying elephants and flying ones, that would seem to set a limit. However to flesh out those limits would require you to master the space of all possible changes. Again you run into a calculation problem in that we lack the conceptual tools and computing power to tackle such questions in a way that’s not simply guessing.
Why don’t we find any sort of replication taking place that is producing significant functional complexity of some kind or another, not on the way to becoming life, but some other phenomenon that exhibits vast functional complexity?
I already covered this. Possible answers are:
1. There is, we just don’t notice it because its on such a small scale that it easily gets swamped or gobbled up by the vastly more ‘evolved’ life forms that have covered the earth to just about every possible corner. Why aren’t there any stagecoaches now? There are, but you may never see one if you’re looking at cars zipping by you on major highways.
2. Its a sufficiently rare event that in order to see it you need a lot of chances over a lot of time. For example, imagine you living in an apartment building of about 200 different people, most who play the lottery. One week your building has two people who win the lottery. Can this happen? Of course. Is it likely? Well over an infinite time, infinite # of players and infinite # of buildings it will happen an infinite # of times. But you’re not an infinite entity, a finite one. So you can live not only a full life and never see it happen, you may live many lives and never see it happen.
what you have yet to confront is the fact that very unlikely things *will* happen over large scales of time and reactions. In a pot of water, stuff that may only happen in 1 per 100 billion reactions will almost certainly happen. In an ocean there are things that will happen only once a year or even once every 500 million years.
The question you have to confront is what are the consequences of these low probability events? No doubt many of them have no consequences that are beyond trivial. Quantum mechanics, for example, may say a single proton floating around a living room in Kansas will disappear and appear in China once every ten billion years. Such an event, though, would produce nothing much that we could ever detect. But among the set of all these super-rare events some will have major impacts that can be measured.
So in explaining how the Earth got where it is today, your explanation will have to include some things that are caused by ‘super-rare accidents’ if you will.
Again returning to the lottery analogy, odds are against any one person winning the lottery but the odds are in favor of *somone* winning lottery. Unless you have some mechanism to show that all ‘super rare’ events will have no net impact on our macro-observations of the earth, you’re argument whose premise is that superrare events either can’t happen or can’t carry major explanatory weight is baseless.
October 27th, 2011 | 3:12 pm
Life is a single instance of massive functional complexity. If lotteries are ongoing, there are multiple winners over time. Why is life the ony winner? If nature is running a lottery, it is reasonable to expect that there would be multiple winners over time. Why is life the sole winner? Where are the others? Why are there no others? Nature stopped doing lotteries? There should be other winners if there has been on winner. Again, life is a spectacular exception to what mindless nature seems to be capable of bringing about.
October 27th, 2011 | 7:40 pm
I think you’re asking why abiogensis was a one shot deal. Again that is a bit like asking if your neighbor won the lottery why didn’t you? Either its really hard to win the ‘lottery’ or one person winning the lottery alters conditions in such a way that makes it harder for others to win the lottery.
Suppose the ‘odds’ of abiogensis are on the order of 1 in a million per year. We’d expect one instance of abiogensis every million years. On a galactic scale we’d have thousands to millions of life filled planets. One a local scale we’d have lots of abiogensis on earth over its 4B years or so, but for purposes of earth’s population only the first abiogensis event counted. Abiogensis events after that got lost in the mix of trillions upon trillions of life forms that fill every nook and cranny of earth.
October 28th, 2011 | 8:51 am
If nature can mindlessly and accidentally bring about massive functional complexity because it can mindlessly and accidentally bring about, maintain and adjust (in spite of the 2LT) an evironment the intricacy and precision of which must steadily increase to remain commensurate with the requirements of the ever increasing functional complexity it is bringing about — and can do all that up until functional complexity light years beyond any we know how to build ourselves is brought about, and continue with that until it comes up with ourselves — if that happens mindlessly and accidentally, then there should be other phenomena besides DNA-based life brought about by these same abilities of nature, being maybe 1/4 or 1/2 or 3/4 of the way towards the functional complexity of life. Units of those other phenomena, not being DNA based life, but still due to more magical replication taking place in magical environments, would have had the fittest survive in spite of the imperfections of the environment, including any hostility presented by DNA based life forms. If that kind of thing is what naturally happens, it should be naturally happening even now. But it isn’t. And doesn’t. And hasn’t. Life remains a spectacular exception to to what happens naturally.
October 28th, 2011 | 10:13 am
harry –
Boonton, I and others have addressed the inadequacies of the “Scrabble” model before. Since nobody claims “that beings capable of writing novels would come about accidentally” – both because it wouldn’t happen in one step, and because it would be only partially ‘accidental’, in the sense of a process that had random inputs but nonrandom filters.
That’s not a terrible point, actually. It does put constraints on how common ‘bootstrap-capable environments’ can be.
On the other hand, once a process is started, conditions can change rapidly. I mean, U-235 has a half-life of around 700 million years. But the fission rate can change drastically once a chain reaction gets going in a critical mass…
October 28th, 2011 | 10:42 am
Yeah. That explains everything. ;o)
The arguments for life having come about mindlessly and accidentally, for the most part, are not based on anything we currently see happening mindlessly and accidentally. Some of them depend upon replication artificially and intelligently brought about in the lab — which indicates that processes that are able to bring about replication are intelligently designed – yet nothing done in labs has come anywhere near demonstrating how we get from lifeless matter to DNA-based life. There is the terrible problem of explaining how the logic embedded in DNA that enables the production of intricate protein machines necessary for metabolism and reproduction got put there mindlessly. Embedded logic is put in place by logical minds.
What mindlessness requires a near eternity to do, minds can do very quickly because they are logical. A 500 piece jigsaw puzzle would take nearly forever to be correctly assembled mindlessly and accidentally, but a logical mind can assemble it in a matter of hours. If life happened mindlessly and accidentally we ought to be able to make much more progress than we have in bringing it about artificially. If it is in fact the product of a mind – a mind far greater than ours – then we should expect just what has happened: the best minds there are remain baffled as to how to build it from scratch.
October 29th, 2011 | 11:02 am
It looks like this discussion may be over, as it has been nearly a day since anything has been posted. For anyone who has been reading along as this discussion took place, I would like to submit the following closing thoughts:
It has been for me a very entertaining and interesting discussion. Many thanks to Ray and Boonton.
I have worked with the development and maintenance of software and the maintenance of hardware for years. I think that gives me perspective that apparently is not shared by Ray and Boonton.
It is obvious to me that the placement of vast amounts of A, C, G and T nucleotides in DNA’s coding region, which are arranged such that cellular processes use them to construct vast numbers of very different, unique and intricate protein machines that enable metabolism and reproduction to take place, that arrangement being very particular among a nearly infinite number of possible arrangements that would be gibberish and unusable by those cellular processes, shouts out loudly and clearly “Intelligent Design!”
To once again use that “millions of Scrabble pieces arranged on an empty parking lot” analogy that Ray and Boonton find so irritating, if it is found that those Scrabble pieces correctly spell out an interesting mystery novel instead of being just gibberish, it should be obvious to anyone with an open mind that they weren’t arranged mindlessly. The particularity of that arrangement is exactly what we find in the arrangement of DNA nucleotides. That they weren’t arranged mindlessly should be just as obvious as it is in the case of our Scrabble piece mystery novel. Even more so. An arrangement of matter that brings about a being that is able to write mystery novels is far more unlikely one that brings about a mystery novel.
Why isn’t that obvious to some people? It isn’t because we see naturally occurring replication mindlessly bringing about increasing functional complexity. We don’t, just like we don’t see particular arrangements of zeros and ones in computer memory, among a nearly infinite number of possible arrangements that would be gibberish and not an executable programs, coming about mindlessly. Logical, functional arrangements of things that bring about significant functional complexity are brought about by logical minds. That is what all of our experience tells us. None of our experience indicates that mystery novels, or functionally complex software or anything else exhibiting significant functional complexity comes about mindlessly.
Why is that concept so difficult for some people to grasp? I think it is because of indoctrination that has been very effective. That indoctrination is effective is why is it used. Again, if a mere child knows intuitively that the prehistoric caricatures of animals on the Lascaux cave walls didn’t get there mindlessly, why don’t many adults see that it is much less likely that actual instances of those animals came about mindlessly? Indoctrination. The child sees the obvious because he hasn’t been indoctrinated such that he doesn’t see it. The more we learn about the functional complexity of actual instances of animals, especially at the level of DNA, it becomes even more obvious that they didn’t come about mindlessly and accidentally.
I think since the so called Enlightenment aggressive atheism has brought about what will eventually be seen as an intellectual Dark Ages. Sure, science had figured how some things were taking place quite naturally that were previously attributed to supernatural causes. That is good and what science is supposed to do. What it had never before done was to pretend that those kinds of discoveries created some kind of conflict between science and religion, that science had explained things such that theism was silly and that atheism was scientific. The modern discoveries of science are indicating that atheistic materialism naming itself “science” was done a little hastily. The Universe did have a beginning. The Universe is fine-tuned for life. Life has turned out be of such functional complexity that it is as silly to attempt to explain how it came about mindlessly as it is to attempt to explain how the inscription on the Rosetta Stone was really the product of mindless, incremental erosion. That some people don’t see that is a tribute to the power and effectiveness of indoctrination.
October 30th, 2011 | 2:52 pm
If that kind of thing is what naturally happens, it should be naturally happening even now. But it isn’t. And doesn’t. And hasn’t. Life remains a spectacular exception to to what happens naturally.
It is an avoidable fact that spectacularly exceptional things not only happen naturally but must happen naturally. ‘Naturally’ stuff that happen 1 per billion years is no less likely to exist in the unierse than stuff that happens once ever minute.
and can do all that up until functional complexity light years beyond any we know how to build ourselves is brought about
And yet oddly you would have us believe we can accurately calculate probabilities for this down to dozens of decimal places?
Some of them depend upon replication artificially and intelligently brought about in the lab — which indicates that processes that are able to bring about replication are intelligently designed
This is the sort of argument that gets creationists promptly dismissed from the realm of serious debate. Lab conditions are created with intelligence in order to see what will happen in those conditions, conditions themselves are not intelligent. That a scientist puts some hydrogen and oxygen in a container and discovers water after setting off a spark demonstrates that the water we see all around us was created by hydrogen and oxygen combining, it doens’t demonstrate that the entire ocean was filled by intelligence scientists…..
October 30th, 2011 | 9:10 pm
Right. But if nothing like a scenario artificially created in the lab ever happens naturally, and there is no reason to believe it ever has or ever will, except to relieve the panic of one who feels his atheistic religious beliefs are being threatened, then about all you can say about the scenario and what results from it is that it has been demonstrated that it can happen in the lab if intelligent agents set things up.
October 30th, 2011 | 11:03 pm
Right. But it looks more and more all the time like life coming about mindlessly isn’t one of those things. Insisting it did via a replication process that there is no reason to believe ever happened, and wouldn’t have been able to embed massive amounts of logic in DNA even if it did happen, is not scientific.
Let’s say we have two blocks of memory in a computer, both filled out with zeros and ones. The series of zeros and ones in the first block is meaningless gibberish. The second is filled with zeros and ones that correspond to the instruction set of the computer’s processor, and when read in and executed, instantiates a spreadsheet application. The second block contains information because of the correspondence it has with something exterior to itself.
The series of zeros and ones in the second block of memory is not the spreadsheet application. It is information necessary to instantiate the spreadsheet application. There are three distinct realities at play here. The information, the spreadsheet application that can only be instantiated with the information, and the computer’s processor which, when it applies its instruction set to the information in the second block of memory, instantiates the spreadsheet application. Without the computer processor’s instruction set, the second block is just gibberish like the first block, since it wouldn’t correspond to anything exterior to itself.
Mindlessness, obviously, cannot make the distinction between those three realities. Information can really only exist in a mind that is able to perceive that there is a correspondence between data of some kind (alphabetical, digital …) and some other reality. Mindlessness just can’t do that, nor build things using information and processes to apply to that information that result in an instantiation of some intended, functional reality. This is because mindlessness cannot “intend” anything. Mindlessness cannot use information, because, as previously mentioned, information really only exists in minds when they recognize a correspondence between data and something else. Mindlessness, by definition, isn’t cognizant of anything.
Mindlessness just doesn’t and cannot build things that way. Copying errors in a mindless replication process could alter the zeros and ones in the first block of memory that is just gibberish forever, and it will always remain gibberish and not information, if there isn’t yet anything for it to correspond to. And if there was, there is no way for mindlessness to be cognizant of that, nor to intend on that correspondence, nor to intend that a process applied to it would instantiate something else, nor to intend on a process being applied to it. Only minds are capable of constructing functionality that way. All that we have said here applies to the information in DNA. Cellular processes are applied to it that instantiate intricate protein machines that are functional, that do something useful.
I suppose one could argue that there were two replication processes going on at once.
But the replication process altering the gibberish by occasional copying errors can’t ever turn that gibberish into information. This is because there isn’t yet a cellular process for it to correspond to, and if there ever was, there is no mind around to be cognizant of that. It must remain gibberish.
Another replication process could be – this is really far fetched – bringing about the cellular process that would be applied to the information if it was ever brought about, but it can’t make any real progress because there is no information yet for it to correspond to, or any benefit yet in it “processing” at all.
And if miraculously there was at some point in time a correspondence between the ever changing gibberish and the ever changing cellular process that would be applied to the gibberish, it would be another miracle if the cellular process applied to the “information” instantiated anything that was functional.
It takes a mind to construct the functional complexity we find in life or in anything else that uses information and a process applied to that information to instantiate a functional reality.
October 30th, 2011 | 11:48 pm
Should have been
I said there were two replication processes, one altering the gibberish and one creating a cellular process. So the cellular process exists, but not one the gibberish corresponds to making it information, not gibberish.
October 31st, 2011 | 11:47 am
harry –
Boonton’s pointed out one problem with that. Another issue is that I pointed out Oklo to you before, the naturally-occurring nuclear reactor a 1.7 billion years ago. Today, nuclear reactor can only come about via intelligent intervention. Things were different back then.
Except, as I’ve pointed out to you before, there are exceptions to that rule. (Ones used practically, in fact.)
And what’s really interesting is that life doesn’t display that kind of logic. There’s mixing of all three levels at play. E.g. RNA, which carries information and catalyzes reactions. There’s not just the DNA code itself, but how it’s written and how it’s stored exercising regulatory control. This ‘mixing of levels’ is what you’d expect of a process like natural selection that only ‘judges’ based on results and not details of implementation.
Yeah, like freezing and thawing cycles.
October 31st, 2011 | 12:14 pm
Ray, your sweeping generalizations no more realistically explain anything than does the assertion that tornadoes sometimes assemble things in a crude way, therefore given enough tornadoes, and assuming the most firmly, accidentally assembled things aren’t destroyed by the next tornado, only modified, the best modifications resulting in even more sturdy assemblages, that eventually a house could be constructed.
October 31st, 2011 | 12:55 pm
But if nothing like a scenario artificially created in the lab ever happens naturally, and there is no reason to believe it ever has or ever will, …
True if some mix of chemicals is put in a vat and its discovered that very simple one-celled life forms come into existence then one still has to ask did that particular mix of chemicals exist on earth billions of years ago? Its quite possible, for example, that there’s dozens of different mixes of chemicals and that one particular one never existed on earth….or its even possible God himself supernaturally created life on earth BUT certain particular random mixes of chemicals will also create life. But that’s not your original argument which was that ‘lab conditions’ are intelligent because they are created by intelligent scientists. By that reasoning you’ve crossed from theism to pantheism since there’s no such thing as ‘mindless matter’. Since everything we know about matter was discovered in a lab of some sort you can’t ever get matter without ‘mixing’ intelligence in with it!
Right. But it looks more and more all the time like life coming about mindlessly isn’t one of those things….
Actually no its not. But you haven’t really addressed the core probability problems I’ve presented you with.
1. In an infinite universe, very low probability is not good enough. You must prove your probability is exactly zero. If it isn’t then not only will you get that very improbable something, you’ll get it happening an infinite number of times! You’re assertions require you to prove that the universe is finite AND/OR that the odds of even a very simple life form coming from ‘random’ jigglines of atoms is absolutely zero. No rounding off to zero is allowed, even if you’re taking it out to a trillion decimal places!
2. You neglect to consider how introducing a something alter probabilities. You seem to be saying “yea it might be that you get a single life form, but what are the odds of getting billions?” But once you get a single life form on a planet filled with easy food it won’t be long before its covered with life forms.
3. You neglect to consider the alternation of the environment. Its quite possible the first life form was much simplier than even our simplest natural and even synthetic life forms. BUT once you start the competition rolling, the super-simple original life form no longer becomes viable because natural selection ups the degree of competition so much. Sort of like amateur atheletics versus professional sports. Back when they were very young, it was easier for amateurs to get picked up by professional sports, but now when there’s so much money and specialized training involved its almost impossible. Mr. Super Simple A. Biogensis might have had it easy 750 million years ago when he was the only cell on the block. Soon afterwards, though, life got more dense and more nasty with life forms developing weapons, defenses and so on. Even if once every hundred thousand years Mr. Super Simple A.B. reappears from the ‘mindless’ matter he doesn’t last long enough to make any impression on the world.
3.1 And again, if the odds are something like 1 in 100,000 years per ocean amount of matter then you’re going to get quite a bit of abiogensis in the life of a planet, but will never see it in your lifetime even if your lab is the size of an olympic swimming pool
October 31st, 2011 | 1:38 pm
How about focusing on the real problem and explain how mindless replication builds a system where functionally useful complexity was brought about by mindlessly replicating into existence a cellular process that accidentally corresponds to accidentally and mindlessly arrived at “information,” the result of another mindless replication process?
The accidentally replicated into existence cellular process that processes information and from that instantiates useful functional complexity can’t really be improved upon or even have a reason to exist until there is some information that corresponds to it.
The gibberish can only become information by copying errors in a replication process that, by chance, happen to leave it in a state that corresponds to an ever changing cellular process, the changes to it being due to copying errors in another mindless replication process.
Since there is no reason to believe lifeless replication processes every naturally come about anyway, I am anxious to hear your “reasonable” and “scientific” theory as to how mindlessness produced functional complexity based on cellular processes reading information that enables the processes to instantiate mechanisms with useful functional complexity.
October 31st, 2011 | 2:35 pm
How about focusing on the real problem and explain how mindless replication builds a system where functionally useful complexity was brought about by mindlessly replicating into existence a cellular process that accidentally corresponds to accidentally and mindlessly arrived at “information,” the result of another mindless replication process?
I’m unclear here. Take a simple cell and watch it divide under a micrscope. What exactly do you see that isn’t ‘mindless’? So far as we know, everything that is happening consists of atoms behaving the way chemistry tells them to behave.
If the simple cell is able to ‘mindlessly’ divide into more complexity (i.e. two cells means the total system has twice the complexity than a single cell, even if the reproduction in this one transaction doesn’t actually alter the species), I’m not seeing any reason to think you couldn’t get what we’d consider a simple life from from more basic ‘proto-life forms’ reproducing and proto-life forms from more simple chemical reactions.
The gibberish can only become information by copying errors in a replication process that, by chance, happen to leave it in a state that corresponds to an ever changing cellular process, the changes to it being due to copying errors in another mindless replication process.
I think this is a weakness of using scrabble tiles or cave paintings as analogies here. The DNA of a cell is gibberish. The only meaningful information encoded in there is information for making various proteins and such that increases the cells ability to survive and reproduce itself. In that respect, its no different than lots of other information that is produced and preserved by so-called mindless processes (for example, the way geological strata records climate information over the ages)
October 31st, 2011 | 11:05 pm
Hi, Boonton,
Let me try once more to explain the problem. ;o)
What makes gibberish “information” and not just gibberish is that there is a correspondence between the data and some reality exterior to it. The “data” can be symbols on paper or the state of a block of memory in a computer or in DNA, or be stored in other mediums.
If a block of memory in a computer contains a series of zeros and ones that corresponds to the instruction set of the computer processor, it is not gibberish. That doesn’t mean that if the processor executes those instructions anything functional will take place; the instructions could just repeatedly move data from one processor register to another until it was moved back into the original register. That would be a case of memory containing information, but it would not be information that would instantiate an application with useful functionality.
So, you have a block of memory that contains information because it corresponds to the instruction set of the computer processor. You have a “process” – the operation of the computer’s processor – that reads that information and executes instructions as directed by that information. The execution of the instructions then either bring about useful functionality, or they don’t really do anything that is functional.
In DNA we have blocks of memory as well. Like computer memory, they can contain gibberish or information. Coding regions of DNA memory contain information because what is there corresponds to a cellular process that “reads” that memory, the contents of which direct its execution. That execution “instantiates” intricate protein machines with useful functionality.
There are three realities here.
1) The contents of DNA memory. Why does it contain information and not gibberish? How did the information get there? What made it correspond to a cellular process?
2) The cellular process the execution of which is directed by the contents of DNA memory. How did it come to have the ability to be directed in its execution by the information in the DNA? How did it come about at all?
3) The instantiation of *useful* functionally complex mechanisms – the intricate protein machines brought about by the process that was directed in its execution by the contents of DNA memory. How did the contents of DNA memory come to not only contain information in the sense that it corresponded to the process that read it such that it directs its execution, but also “intelligent” information in the sense that it directed the process that read it in such that it instantiated *useful* functionally complex mechanisms, not just intricate but useless mechanisms.
Lifeless replication with occasional copying errors (which we are unjustifiably assuming here is taking place) may explain how the gibberish in DNA memory can change (we have for no justifiable reason assumed the DNA molecule is already in place), but it can never be transformed into information that directs the execution of a process until that process exists. It can be changed into every possible state that the memory can assume and each of those states will be gibberish because there can be no correspondence between any of those states and something exterior to it until that “something” exists. The process we are waiting on to exist is not the replication process that makes a copy of the as yet lifeless unit as a whole, it is a process that, if it existed, would be a process directed by the information in DNA memory to create intricate, functionally complex mechanisms that are useful. What brings about that process? If it mysteriously comes about and if it even more mysteriously corresponds to the state of DNA memory such that its execution can be directed by it, what has made the state of DNA memory such that it directs the process to build functionally complex mechanisms that are useful and not do something useless?
Those are not questions about the odds of anything happening. Those are questions about known realities. What other reality besides intelligence can arrange the correspondence between the state of memory in the DNA and the process directed by the contents of that memory such that the state of DNA memory is not gibberish but information, and also information that won’t direct the process to do something useless, but make it the right information to instantiate useful functional complexity? How does the process come about to begin with? That had to happen first for the state of DNA memory to have something to which it corresponded. But there is no benefit in having such a process until there is information in the DNA to direct its execution. Replication of a chemical unit as a whole does not explain any of that. An intelligent agent is the ONLY known reality capable of setting all that up. Science is nowhere near providing an explanation of how such a system could be brought about mindlessly. As I have said before, currently the best explanation for life is an intelligent agent.
October 31st, 2011 | 11:49 pm
Ray, here is a link to Ann Gauger’s response to PZ Myers.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/10/on_protein_evolution_pz_myers052251.html
November 1st, 2011 | 10:41 am
I think you might be bitting off a bit too much with the whole DNA-living cell meachanism. Consider something much simplier, say just a molecule that self-replicates when it encounters other atoms in sufficient type and quanitity to make a replica. Such things do exist but its debatable whether that qualifies as a living thing.
Now some replications are harder to pull off, some are easier, so while a slew of self-replicating molecules may be in existence at any one time, some will do better than others depending upon their nature and the nature of the enviroment they find themselves. Now just suppose one self-replicator happens to ‘accidently’ encode a relatively simple feature that’s not strictly speaking part of its ‘code’ but nevertheless gives it an edge in replication. Say perhaps a few long ‘sticks’ that might just create something like a net that makes it easier for atoms necessary for another replication to be captured. So now you start to get the break between code which simply replicates itself and code which replicates tools and machinary to help replicate the code. From then on complexity builds but you may still be waiting millions of years before you find anything that looks like what we would call DNA or a single-celled entity.
You are then left to trying to assert that while replication may come about, themodynamics won’t let it build in complexity. But this isn’t the case because every increase in complexity requires an increase in entropy. Why? For the same reason you once weighed 9 pounds and now weigh 151 pounds. Yes you gained in ordered complexity but to do that you ate not just 142 pounds of food but thousnds of pounds of food most of which was burned away as waste of on sort or another increasing overall entropy as your body gained in ordered complexity.
November 1st, 2011 | 10:43 am
harry –
Are you actually incapable of constructing an analogy that involves replication as opposed to manufacture?
Seriously, you seem to have a major blind spot there. I don’t like accusing someone of willful disregard of their opponent’s points, and you seem like a nice enough guy, but it’s getting very hard to avoid that conclusion.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact