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Scientific Orthodoxies

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

He didn’t get the reaction he wanted. Celeste tells me she and the other kids in the class shrugged. What’s the big deal? My own experience was similar. I learned about the spectacular power of Darwinian evolution at St. Margaret Mary Alacoque grade school and Bishop McDevitt high school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We were told that God could make life in any way He saw fit, and if He wanted to use secondary causes like natural selection rather than some special action, well, who were we to tell Him otherwise? It arguably shows even more power, the lesson went, for God to create relatively simple matter and laws which in the fullness of time would give rise to living creatures, including men and women who could respond with a free will to His love. It sounded fine to me.

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Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Who Rules in Science? is a marvelous book that ranges from the most basic questions to the most contentious: the author considers not only how we should use reason to estimate truth but also how we should apply reason to public policy. His unhelpful handling of the second topic does not at all detract from his successful illumination of the first. On the contrary, his inconsistency is a useful reminder that one can know the value of reason without always being able to apply it properly.

The author, James Robert Brown, is a philosopher of mathematics at the University of Toronto. He wrote the book primarily to defend reason and objectivity in science but secondarily to persuade his allies on the political left that science can be their friend. Brown begins by adverting to the notorious Sokal hoax.

In 1996 the editors of the academic journal Social Text published an essay by New York University physicist Alan Sokal entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” In opaque postmodern prose, the essay claimed to show how even gravity is nothing but a social construct. Soon thereafter Sokal revealed in another journal that he had made up the whole thing out of pomo patter and thin air; physics had nothing to do with it. The hoax got a lot of press, and once the horselaughs had died away the lesson most people took from it was the emptiness of postmodern criticism of science. But Sokal (whose paper pointed out that he lectured “during the Sandinista government, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua”) averred that he intended the escapade to shake the left out of its attachment to unavailing intellectual fluff so that it could become a more effective political force. Brown, with this book, also wants to help the left toward that goal.

Much of Who Rules in Science? is a primer in the history and philosophy of science. Scientists and other naïfs often think that science proceeds in a linear fashion, steadily accumulating data, refining theories, and improving its understanding of the world. But even a brief trip through science history shows that progress can scarcely be called linear. For example, sun-centered astronomy replaced earth-centered, oxygen superseded phlogiston, and absolute space gave way to curved space. Brown roasts Nobel-laureate physicist Steven Weinberg for his confident affirmation that no matter what other differences we may have with intelligent space aliens if and when we meet them, we will find that they have discovered the same scientific laws that we have. “It’s hard to imagine anything less likely to be true,” huffs Brown, noting that we humans haven’t even had the same laws throughout our own history. “There are so many accidents, so many little things that affect the course of intellectual life, that it is extremely unlikely that two unconnected intellectual communities would have identical histories.”

For perspective, Brown gives the reader a Cook’s tour of the major modern schools of thought in the philosophy of science. He contrasts rationalism with empiricism, discusses Popper, Kuhn, and logical positivism, and gives the ins and outs of Bayes’ Theorem. Do things such as atoms actually exist? How about electrons? The vector field? Gravitons? (Answers: Yes. Yes. Maybe. It depends.) Does science really describe reality, or just delineate observable regularities? Brown shows just enough of the complexities to demonstrate that it isn’t easy to figure out exactly how science works.

The book then turns to its main topic”“social constructivists,” the chief belligerents in the “wars” of Brown’s subtitle, who think that science reflects social forces, rather than the results of reason applied to evidence. The main difference between constructivists and other schools of critical thought, says Brown, does not concern whether science actually describes reality (other groups have also argued that it does not). Rather, the critical difference is whether science can be epistemically objective”whether reason and evidence can actually be employed to understand or discover the truth about the world.

Social constructivism comes in a variety of flavors, which Brown sorts into two main categories that he calls the nihilist wing and the naturalist wing. The easily lampooned postmodernists”the folks who were stung by Sokal’s high jinks”comprise the nihilist wing. As Brown tells it, this group is hostile to science and is characterized by its antirationality, rejection of objective truth, and perspectivalism (the claim that accounts of science or history can be given only from local perspectives). What’s more, they seem not to understand the science they criticize.

The more interesting branch for Brown is the naturalist wing, which pictures itself not only as friendly to science but, indeed, as rigorously applying the scientific method to the task of accounting for science itself. It is exemplified by David Bloor, whose “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge demands sociological explanations not only for questions such as why a certain scientist was interested in a particular problem but also for the content of scientific theories. Here is an example that Brown provides: physicists were in bad odor in Germany after World War I when German society turned away from a mechanical worldview and toward mysticism. According to a constructivist account, German scientists then developed the noncausal, nondeterministic, rather mystical theory of quantum mechanics in order to win back their high social standing. So quantum mechanics was generated by social ambition rather than by reason.

Brown asserts in reply that the constructivists aren’t consistent. First, though they claim that science (and all other knowledge) is a social fabrication, they don’t treat their own argument in the same way. The physicists’ facts are supposedly constructed, but the constructivists’ facts (for example, that German society did actually turn from mechanism to mysticism) are taken to be really true. What’s more, says Brown, even on the social constructivists’ own account those German physicists are behaving quite rationally”it’s just that they have a different goal from the one usually ascribed to them. If the physicists are actually aiming for better social standing, they are taking perfectly logical steps to achieve their goal. Finally, according to Brown, the constructivist account of the development of quantum mechanics is not in any way simpler or more powerfully explanatory than a rational account that would go something like the following: the older quantum theory of Bohr was not completely coherent; the new theory of Heisenberg accounted for the Zeeman effect and other anomalous phenomena; and so physicists accepted the new quantum theory.

That doesn’t seem so hard to see. So why do constructivists give such convoluted, implausible, and inconsistent accounts? Here’s where we cut to the chase. Brown call them the naturalist school of social constructivism because they are firmly committed to naturalism”that is to say, materialism. The naturalist school of constructivism views the world as containing only matter and energy, so any account of science has to be utterly naturalistic. Brown remarks, “This is just science as usual. Like other naturalists, social constructivists . . . give no credence to religious or platonic or any other sort of nonnatural explanation of science (or, indeed, of anything).” Besides social accounts, they also happily accept evolutionary and other naturalistic explanations.

What they don’t accept as valid explanations are reasons. Reasons cannot enter into constructivist explanations because reasons are nonmaterial, no more real than unicorns, and so cannot be causes. But, Brown argues, the constructivists quickly paint themselves into a corner. While rationalists (who accept reasons as causes) can happily admit that many human actions are motivated by nonrational factors, the constructivists by their own logic cannot cite reasons as causes for anything at all, not even for one little thing”no more than an atheist can allow just one or two little miracles. It is not only that full-blown theories cannot be based on reason; neither can minor decisions about what experiment to run, which chemical to use, or what button to push. If social climbing started quantum mechanics, what social factor made a physicist flip switch A instead of B? If he flips switch A for a reason, why can’t a physicist be persuaded of quantum mechanics by a reason?

Although he says he is an atheist, Brown affirms that reasons can be causes. This is because, like some other mathematicians, Brown is a Platonist and believes in a nonmaterial realm beyond space and time where concepts such as “triangle” and “magnetic field” actually exist. He has argued in a previous book, Smoke and Mirrors: How Science Reflects Reality (1994), that our minds can catch a glimpse of these platonic forms, particularly in scientific thought experiments.

To the extent that he persuades his associates on the political left that reason is necessary for effective action, Brown will have done them a profound service. (Recently Bruno Latour, a primary target of Brown’s, seems to have had second thoughts about deconstructing science.) But Brown’s standard of argument seems to go south in a hurry when he exchanges physics for politics in his last two chapters (and at scattered spots throughout the book), for he seems astonishingly unsophisticated in applying reason to politics. At first I thought maybe it was my fault”that because I am not sympathetic to many of his goals I was resisting his usual strong reasoning. But consider this example of Brown as political scientist. Seeking to explain the development of big brains in humans, male scientists advanced a “man-the-hunter” hypothesis (hunting requires a lot of planning), but a woman scientist came up with a “woman-the-gatherer” hypothesis (gathering requires a lot of planning). Thus, says Brown, we see that people of different types and backgrounds might come up with different hypotheses, with new things that hadn’t been thought of before. He concludes that the government should “impose ‘affirmative action’ policies on the scientific community. This is a very political act, but one that will result, paradoxically, in more objective science.”

In like manner, Brown opines on the death penalty, health insurance, and representative versus direct democracy. But to keep the focus on science and reason and public policy, let me offer just two of his recommendations in that area. One is that scientists should disclose their income level in science publications, so as to avoid class conflicts of interest. Another”and here is his best answer to the question of his book’s title”is that those who should rule in science are “the people.”

How to accomplish that last objective? “They just need to hear more intelligent and informed voices.” But which intelligent and informed voices should they hear? Should “the people” listen, say, to the liberal Union of Concerned Scientists, who recently lambasted the Bush administration for its supposed politicizing of scientific findings, or to Bush’s Democratic science advisor John H. Marburger III, who rebutted their claims point by point? How do “the people” decide when experts differ, or when all experts have an interest in the outcome? Brown doesn’t say.

We are indebted to James Robert Brown for a compelling defense of reason in science, and for an unintentional demonstration of the limited role that reason sometimes plays in politics.

Michael J. Behe Who Rules in Science? is a marvelous book that ranges from the most basic questions to the most contentious: the author considers not only how we should use reason to estimate truth but also how we should apply reason to public policy. His unhelpful handling of the second topic does not at all detract from his successful illumination of the first. On the contrary, his inconsistency is a useful reminder that one can know the value of reason without always being able to apply it properly.

The author, James Robert Brown, is a philosopher of mathematics at the University of Toronto. He wrote the book primarily to defend reason and objectivity in science but secondarily to persuade his allies on the political left that science can be their friend. Brown begins by adverting to the notorious Sokal hoax.

In 1996 the editors of the academic journal Social Text published an essay by New York University physicist Alan Sokal entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” In opaque postmodern prose, the essay claimed to show how even gravity is nothing but a social construct. Soon thereafter Sokal revealed in another journal that he had made up the whole thing out of pomo patter and thin air; physics had nothing to do with it. The hoax got a lot of press, and once the horselaughs had died away the lesson most people took from it was the emptiness of postmodern criticism of science. But Sokal (whose paper pointed out that he lectured “during the Sandinista government, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua”) averred that he intended the escapade to shake the left out of its attachment to unavailing intellectual fluff so that it could become a more effective political force. Brown, with this book, also wants to help the left toward that goal.

Much of Who Rules in Science? is a primer in the history and philosophy of science. Scientists and other naïfs often think that science proceeds in a linear fashion, steadily accumulating data, refining theories, and improving its understanding of the world. But even a brief trip through science history shows that progress can scarcely be called linear. For example, sun-centered astronomy replaced earth-centered, oxygen superseded phlogiston, and absolute space gave way to curved space. Brown roasts Nobel-laureate physicist Steven Weinberg for his confident affirmation that no matter what other differences we may have with intelligent space aliens if and when we meet them, we will find that they have discovered the same scientific laws that we have. “It’s hard to imagine anything less likely to be true,” huffs Brown, noting that we humans haven’t even had the same laws throughout our own history. “There are so many accidents, so many little things that affect the course of intellectual life, that it is extremely unlikely that two unconnected intellectual communities would have identical histories.”

For perspective, Brown gives the reader a Cook’s tour of the major modern schools of thought in the philosophy of science. He contrasts rationalism with empiricism, discusses Popper, Kuhn, and logical positivism, and gives the ins and outs of Bayes’ Theorem. Do things such as atoms actually exist? How about electrons? The vector field? Gravitons? (Answers: Yes. Yes. Maybe. It depends.) Does science really describe reality, or just delineate observable regularities? Brown shows just enough of the complexities to demonstrate that it isn’t easy to figure out exactly how science works.

The book then turns to its main topic”“social constructivists,” the chief belligerents in the “wars” of Brown’s subtitle, who think that science reflects social forces, rather than the results of reason applied to evidence. The main difference between constructivists and other schools of critical thought, says Brown, does not concern whether science actually describes reality (other groups have also argued that it does not). Rather, the critical difference is whether science can be epistemically objective”whether reason and evidence can actually be employed to understand or discover the truth about the world.

Social constructivism comes in a variety of flavors, which Brown sorts into two main categories that he calls the nihilist wing and the naturalist wing. The easily lampooned postmodernists”the folks who were stung by Sokal’s high jinks”comprise the nihilist wing. As Brown tells it, this group is hostile to science and is characterized by its antirationality, rejection of objective truth, and perspectivalism (the claim that accounts of science or history can be given only from local perspectives). What’s more, they seem not to understand the science they criticize.

The more interesting branch for Brown is the naturalist wing, which pictures itself not only as friendly to science but, indeed, as rigorously applying the scientific method to the task of accounting for science itself. It is exemplified by David Bloor, whose “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge demands sociological explanations not only for questions such as why a certain scientist was interested in a particular problem but also for the content of scientific theories. Here is an example that Brown provides: physicists were in bad odor in Germany after World War I when German society turned away from a mechanical worldview and toward mysticism. According to a constructivist account, German scientists then developed the noncausal, nondeterministic, rather mystical theory of quantum mechanics in order to win back their high social standing. So quantum mechanics was generated by social ambition rather than by reason.

Brown asserts in reply that the constructivists aren’t consistent. First, though they claim that science (and all other knowledge) is a social fabrication, they don’t treat their own argument in the same way. The physicists’ facts are supposedly constructed, but the constructivists’ facts (for example, that German society did actually turn from mechanism to mysticism) are taken to be really true. What’s more, says Brown, even on the social constructivists’ own account those German physicists are behaving quite rationally”it’s just that they have a different goal from the one usually ascribed to them. If the physicists are actually aiming for better social standing, they are taking perfectly logical steps to achieve their goal. Finally, according to Brown, the constructivist account of the development of quantum mechanics is not in any way simpler or more powerfully explanatory than a rational account that would go something like the following: the older quantum theory of Bohr was not completely coherent; the new theory of Heisenberg accounted for the Zeeman effect and other anomalous phenomena; and so physicists accepted the new quantum theory.

That doesn’t seem so hard to see. So why do constructivists give such convoluted, implausible, and inconsistent accounts? Here’s where we cut to the chase. Brown call them the naturalist school of social constructivism because they are firmly committed to naturalism”that is to say, materialism. The naturalist school of constructivism views the world as containing only matter and energy, so any account of science has to be utterly naturalistic. Brown remarks, “This is just science as usual. Like other naturalists, social constructivists . . . give no credence to religious or platonic or any other sort of nonnatural explanation of science (or, indeed, of anything).” Besides social accounts, they also happily accept evolutionary and other naturalistic explanations.

What they don’t accept as valid explanations are reasons. Reasons cannot enter into constructivist explanations because reasons are nonmaterial, no more real than unicorns, and so cannot be causes. But, Brown argues, the constructivists quickly paint themselves into a corner. While rationalists (who accept reasons as causes) can happily admit that many human actions are motivated by nonrational factors, the constructivists by their own logic cannot cite reasons as causes for anything at all, not even for one little thing”no more than an atheist can allow just one or two little miracles. It is not only that full-blown theories cannot be based on reason; neither can minor decisions about what experiment to run, which chemical to use, or what button to push. If social climbing started quantum mechanics, what social factor made a physicist flip switch A instead of B? If he flips switch A for a reason, why can’t a physicist be persuaded of quantum mechanics by a reason?

Although he says he is an atheist, Brown affirms that reasons can be causes. This is because, like some other mathematicians, Brown is a Platonist and believes in a nonmaterial realm beyond space and time where concepts such as “triangle” and “magnetic field” actually exist. He has argued in a previous book, Smoke and Mirrors: How Science Reflects Reality (1994), that our minds can catch a glimpse of these platonic forms, particularly in scientific thought experiments.

To the extent that he persuades his associates on the political left that reason is necessary for effective action, Brown will have done them a profound service. (Recently Bruno Latour, a primary target of Brown’s, seems to have had second thoughts about deconstructing science.) But Brown’s standard of argument seems to go south in a hurry when he exchanges physics for politics in his last two chapters (and at scattered spots throughout the book), for he seems astonishingly unsophisticated in applying reason to politics. At first I thought maybe it was my fault”that because I am not sympathetic to many of his goals I was resisting his usual strong reasoning. But consider this example of Brown as political scientist. Seeking to explain the development of big brains in humans, male scientists advanced a “man-the-hunter” hypothesis (hunting requires a lot of planning), but a woman scientist came up with a “woman-the-gatherer” hypothesis (gathering requires a lot of planning). Thus, says Brown, we see that people of different types and backgrounds might come up with different hypotheses, with new things that hadn’t been thought of before. He concludes that the government should “impose ‘affirmative action’ policies on the scientific community. This is a very political act, but one that will result, paradoxically, in more objective science.”

In like manner, Brown opines on the death penalty, health insurance, and representative versus direct democracy. But to keep the focus on science and reason and public policy, let me offer just two of his recommendations in that area. One is that scientists should disclose their income level in science publications, so as to avoid class conflicts of interest. Another”and here is his best answer to the question of his book’s title”is that those who should rule in science are “the people.”

How to accomplish that last objective? “They just need to hear more intelligent and informed voices.” But which intelligent and informed voices should they hear? Should “the people” listen, say, to the liberal Union of Concerned Scientists, who recently lambasted the Bush administration for its supposed politicizing of scientific findings, or to Bush’s Democratic science advisor John H. Marburger III, who rebutted their claims point by point? How do “the people” decide when experts differ, or when all experts have an interest in the outcome? Brown doesn’t say.

We are indebted to James Robert Brown for a compelling defense of reason in science, and for an unintentional demonstration of the limited role that reason sometimes plays in politics.

Michael J. Behe is Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University.

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A New Kind of Science

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 -0500

One should hesitate to review a book that threatens pulling a muscle just by lifting it. Apart from the danger to one’s health, it likely will turn out to have been written by: 1) the unabomber or some other crank; 2) a fellow who unwisely declined the services of an editor; or 3) a genius who ranges over subjects way beyond anyone’s (that is, my) ability to comment intelligently. Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science fits firmly into categories 2 and 3. I’m still undecided about 1.

Wolfram fills almost twelve hundred pages (not counting the index) with discussions of subjects as disparate as free will, the fundamental laws of physics, evolution, the free market, extraterrestrials, and much, much more. In fact, he not only discusses them, but places them in relationship to each other. For example, the index includes entries for “Economics, and extraterrestrial trade” and “Economics, and free will.” The sheer breadth of the book elicited several waves of reaction in this reader. At first, a sense of awe that any person could know so much about so much. Next, excitement at the prospect that Wolfram might really be on to something fundamental. But, finally, déj vu as the subject eventually turned to topics I know something about.

Wolfram is a prodigy even among geniuses, being the youngest ever recipient of a MacArthur Foundation award. He published his first physics paper at age fifteen, earned a Ph.D. from Caltech in a single year, and joined the faculty there at the age of twenty. A few years later he headed to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. By the age of thirty he had written a computer program called “Mathematica” that helps engineers and scientists deal more easily with complicated mathematics. Marketing the software has made him independently wealthy, requiring neither an academic position nor the largesse of government research grants to pursue his interests.

With a start like that it’s understandable that Wolfram is enormously self-confident, thinking he can entirely change the way science views the world—pretty much by himself, thank you very much. For the past decade he has closeted himself in his study, working on his book and neither publishing his interim results nor attending scientific meetings. Yet the word leaked out that he was writing a putative scientific blockbuster, and, given Wolfram’s reputation, in some circles the book has been very eagerly anticipated.

The Wolfram phenomenon has gotten quite a ride from the media, too. A Lexis-Nexis search on the word “wolfram” shows 193 articles in the past six months, including stories in Newsweek , Business Week , and the Guardian , Telegraph , and Times of London. The New York Times has run three articles in the past few months, one from the science desk, another from the arts and ideas desk, plus an official book review. The leading science journal Nature ran an article plus a book review.

Certainly the bulk of the attention is due to Wolfram’s impressive biography and mysterious ways. But surely some of the anticipation can be traced to widespread awareness that something big is missing from our understanding of the world. Too many problems that should have been solved by now remain intractable”problems like forecasting the weather or the course of epidemics, understanding the origin of life or the behavior of economic markets, or even predicting things as trivial as how a rising column of smoke will curl. There must be some simple trick or basic insight, the thinking goes, that is being overlooked. Once we figure out the trick, everything will fall into place. In the past few decades there have been a number of candidates for this New Insight—catastrophe theory, chaos theory, complexity theory. All claimed to have wide-ranging implications, from physics to economics and social interactions. All have been trumpeted for a while. None have lived up to the hype.

Although Wolfram draws connections to virtually every corner of the universe, A New Kind of Science is basically a book about computing. In particular, Wolfram investigates a type of computer program called a cellular automaton (CA). To get the gist of what a CA does, imagine a very large piece of graph paper, with a grid of squares. In the middle of the top line color one square black. Now move down a line and choose a simple rule to decide if the square underneath should be blackened or not. For example, one rule might be to color a square black on the next line if the square directly above it was itself black, its left hand neighbor was also black, and its right hand neighbor was white. Now move down another line and apply the same rule again. Repeat forever. There are exactly 256 such rules (Wolfram provides pictures of over half of them), where the outcome depends only on nearest-neighbors. Most of the rules yield pretty simple patterns—a solid black triangle, a triangle with alternating white and black squares, and so on.

But some rules produce remarkably complex patterns. Some show nested arrangements of triangles within triangles, while others yield triangles in which the left side consists of straight lines, but the right side swirls with larger and smaller triangles in no discernible pattern. With other rules a regular pattern is suddenly cut off by a random jagged line of dots apparently coming out of left field. Wolfram stresses that, unlike previous ideas such as chaos theory, where randomness and uncertainty derived from the physical environment, the randomness of CAs is generated by a simple, regular, discrete, numerical process. We start with the simplicity of pure integers, yet somehow end up with capriciousness and unpredictability.

From this basic result, Wolfram draws a number of large conclusions. He claims that since the colors of squares in some CAs appear random, there is no way to predict ahead of time what color a given square will be when the computer program is run. This illustrates a principle he calls computational irreducibility. In short, the outcome of many types of processes cannot be calculated from an equation or set of equations. There is no mathematical shortcut. One simply has to watch the actual process unfold to see what will happen. This pretty much spells doom to long-range weather forecasting. Another result is that some CAs can act as “universal computers,” performing any calculation that a desktop computer can perform. For example, he shows that the output of a particular CA contains lines spaced according to the prime numbers.

Another big conclusion is called the Principle of Computational Equivalence (Wolfram’s capitalization). This is a little harder to grasp. Wolfram summarizes it this way: “Whenever one sees behavior that is not obviously simple—in essentiallyany system—it can be thought of as corresponding to a computation of equivalent sophistication.” One consequence, he thinks, is that our minds cannot grasp most complex processes because those processes have the same computational sophistication as our brains. Our thinking fails to keep up with the processes.

Much of this is interesting and, for all I know, may have important implications for mathematics and computational theory. But Wolfram wants his work to go beyond computation to explain all of nature. Here he is unconvincing. The problem is that there are no obvious physical rules in nature that correspond even to Wolfram’s simplest computer CAs, let alone to the more complex ones. The fact that a program running on a computer lights up pixels in a pattern reminiscent of, say, curling cigarette smoke does not at all mean that the same causes underlie both the computer image and the real smoke.

When Wolfram turns to biological evolution he, like proponents of complexity theory before him, rudely dismisses Darwinian theory as overblown. But, again like those before him, Wolfram defends his ideas by pointing to a few simple features of life that may possibly fit with his math while passing over in silence the more complex underlying features that don’t. He writes, for example, that the geometric patterns of coloration in butterflies and sea shells may arise from simple physical constraints rather than specific coding in DNA. Well, maybe so. But the pigments that cause the coloration are the products of enzymes that are made by ribosomes that contain scores of complex macromolecular components. Do CAs have anything to do with that? Wolfram give us no reason to think so.

These examples of overreaching, though disappointing, are at least understandable. A more serious problem arises at a more fundamental level. Wolfram emphasizes that underwriting much of his thinking is a peculiar presupposition: “All processes, whether they are produced by human effort or occur spontaneously in nature, can be viewed as computations.” And he does mean all processes. In his view, rocks rolling down a hill are computers, taking input at each step and updating the system according to a set of rules, just as a PC does. Indeed, “fluid turbulence in the gas around a star” has made “more computation than has by most measures ever been done throughout the whole course of human intellectual history.” Moreover, in the same physical, unknowing sense, the human brain is only a computer. The main reason Wolfram thinks his ideas can be applied to all of nature is because by this definition the universe itself is a computer.

Stripped of the computer talk, this is just good old-fashioned materialism: in either a desktop computer, the universe at large, or a human brain, there’s nothing but particles bouncing around. That’s fine with Wolfram, who repeatedly states that one of his goals is to remove all notions of purpose from science. But when a definition of computation explicitly repudiates the mind that comprehends the calculations, we quickly descend into absurdity. When prodded in a New York Times interview, Wolfram agreed that a bucket of nails rusting quietly in a corner is a universal computer, comparable in pertinent features to the human mind. So, according to his assumptions, in the end Wolfram’s own genius can be reduced to the equivalent of a bucket of rusty nails. One notes the irony that Wolfram wrote his book to overcome faulty premises in science.

Michael J. Behe is Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

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God...Sort of

Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 -0400

The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life.
By Paul Davies.
Simon & Schuster. 400 pp. $25.

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