Do we make reality?

 I’ve read 2 articles, one in New Scientist (12 Oct 2024) and one in Philosophy Now (Issue 164, Oct/Nov 2024), which, on the surface, seem unrelated, yet both deal with human exceptionalism (my term) in the context of evolution and the cosmos at large.
 
Staring with New Scientist, there is an interview with theoretical physicist, Daniele Oriti, under the heading, “We have to embrace the fact that we make reality” (quotation marks in the original). In some respects, this continues on with themes I raised in my last post, but with different emphases.
 
This helps to explain the title of the post, but, even if it’s true, there are degrees of possibilities – it’s not all or nothing. Having said that, Donald Hoffman would argue that it is all or nothing, because, according to him, even ‘space and time don’t exist unperceived’. On the other hand, Oriti’s argument is closer to Paul Davies’ ‘participatory universe’ that I referenced in my last post.
 
Where Oriti and I possibly depart, philosophically speaking, is that he calls the idea of an independent reality to us ‘observers’, “naïve realism”. He acknowledges that this is ‘provocative’, but like many provocative ideas it provides food-for-thought. Firstly, I will delineate how his position differs from Hoffman’s, even though he never mentions Hoffman, but I think it’s important.
 
Both Oriti and Hoffman argue that there seems to be something even more fundamental than space and time, and there is even a recent YouTube video where Hoffman claims that he’s shown mathematically that consciousness produces the mathematical components that give rise to spacetime; he has published a paper on this (which I haven’t read). But, in both cases (by Hoffman and Oriti), the something ‘more fundamental’ is mathematical, and one needs to be careful about reifying mathematical expressions, which I once discussed with physicist, Mark John Fernee (Qld University).
 
The main issue I have with Hoffman’s approach is that space-time is dependent on conscious agents creating it, whereas, from my perspective and that of most scientists (although I’m not a scientist), space and time exists external to the mind. There is an exception, of course, and that is when we dream.
 
If I was to meet Hoffman, I would ask him if he’s heard of proprioception, which I’m sure he has. I describe it as the 6th sense we are mostly unaware of, but which we couldn’t live without. Actually, we could, but with great difficulty. Proprioception is the sense that tells us where our body extremities are in space, independently of sight and touch. Why would we need it, if space is created by us? On the other hand, Hoffman talks about a ‘H sapiens interface’, which he likens to ‘desktop icons on a computer screen’. So, somehow our proprioception relates to a ‘spacetime interface’ (his term) that doesn’t exist outside the mind.
 
A detour, but relevant, because space is something we inhabit, along with the rest of the Universe, and so is time. In relativity theory there is absolute space-time, as opposed to absolute space and time separately. It’s called the fabric of the universe, which is more than a metaphor. As Viktor Toth points out, even QFT seems to work ‘just fine’ with spacetime as its background.
 
We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity.
 
[However] what we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.
 
And this is where Oriti argues we need to find something deeper. To quote:
 
Modern approaches to quantum gravity say that space-time emerges from something deeper – and this could offer a new foundation for physical laws.
 
He elaborates: I work with quantum gravity models in which you don’t start with a space-time geometry, but from more abstract “atomic” objects described in purely mathematical language. (Quotation marks in the original.)
 
And this is the nub of the argument: all our theories are mathematical models and none of them are complete, in as much as they all have limitations. If one looks at the history of physics, we have uncovered new ‘laws’ and new ‘models’ when we’ve looked beyond the limitations of an existing theory. And some mathematical models even turned out to be incorrect, despite giving answers to what was ‘known’ at the time. The best example being Ptolemy’s Earth-centric model of the solar system. Whether string theory falls into the same category, only future historians will know.
 
In addition, different models work at different scales. As someone pointed out (Mile Gu at the University of Queensland), mathematical models of phenomena at one scale are different to mathematical models at an underlying scale. He gave the example of magnetism, demonstrating that mathematical modelling of the magnetic forces in iron could not predict the pattern of atoms in a 3D lattice as one might expect. In other words, there should be a causal link between individual atoms and the overall effect, but it could not be determined mathematically. To quote Gu: “We were able to find a number of properties that were simply decoupled from the fundamental interactions.” Furthermore, “This result shows that some of the models scientists use to simulate physical systems have properties that cannot be linked to the behaviour of their parts.”
 
This makes me sceptical that we will find an overriding mathematical model that will entail the Universe at all scales, which is what theories of quantum gravity attempt to do. One of the issues that some people raise is that a feature of QM is superposition, and the superposition of a gravitational field seems inherently problematic.
 
Personally, I think superposition only makes sense if it’s describing something that is yet to happen, which is why I agree with Freeman Dyson that QM can only describe the future, which is why it only gives us probabilities.
 
Also, in quantum cosmology, time disappears (according to Paul Davies, among others) and this makes sense (to me), if it’s attempting to describe the entire universe into the future. John Barrow once made a similar point, albeit more eruditely.
 
Getting off track, but one of the points that Oriti makes is whether the laws and the mathematics that describes them are epistemic or ontic. In other words, are they reality or just descriptions of reality. I think it gets blurred, because while they are epistemic by design, there is still an ontology that exists without them, whereas Oriti calls that ‘naïve realism’. He contends that reality doesn’t exist independently of us. This is where I always cite Kant: that we may never know the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but only our perception of it. Where I diverge from Kant is that the mathematical models are part of our perception. Where I depart from Oriti is that I argue there is a reality independently of us.
 
Both QM and relativity theory are observer-dependent, which means they could both be describing an underlying reality that continually eludes us. Whereas Oriti argues that ‘reality is made by our models, not just described by them’, which would make it subjective.
 
As I pointed out in my last post, there is an epistemological loop, whereby the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us. Whether there is also an ontological loop as both Davies and Oriti infer, is another matter: do we determine reality through our quantum mechanical observations? I will park that while I elaborate on the epistemic loop.
 
And this finally brings me to the article in Philosophy Now by James Miles titled, We’re as Smart as the Universe gets. He argues that, from an evolutionary perspective, there is a one-in-one-billion possibility that a species with our cognitive abilities could arise by natural selection, and there is no logical reason why we would evolve further, from an evolutionary standpoint. I have touched on this before, where I pointed out that our cultural evolution has overtaken our biological evolution and that would also happen to any other potential species in the Universe who developed cognitive abilities to the same level. Dawkins coined the term, ‘meme’, to describe cultural traits that have ‘survived’, which now, of course, has currency on social media way beyond its original intention. Basically, Dawkins saw memes as analogous to genes, which get selected; not by a natural process but by a cultural process.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that mathematical theorems and scientific theories are not inherently memetic. This is because they are chosen because they are successful, whereas memes are successful because they are chosen. Nevertheless, such theorems and theories only exist because a culture has developed over millennia which explores them and builds on them.
 
Miles talks about ‘the high intelligence paradox’, which he associates with Darwin’s ‘highest and most interesting problem’. He then discusses the inherent selection advantage of co-operation, not to mention specialisation. He talks about the role that language has played, which is arguably what really separates us from other species. I’ve argued that it’s our inherent ability to nest concepts within concepts ad-infinitum (which is most obvious in our facility for language, like I’m doing now) that allows us to, not only tell stories, compose symphonies, explore an abstract mathematical landscape, but build motor cars, aeroplanes and fly men to the moon. Are we the only species in the Universe with this super-power? I don’t know, but it’s possible.
 
There are 2 quotes I keep returning to:
 
The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. (Einstein)
 
The Universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe. (Wheeler)
 
I haven’t elaborated, but Miles makes the point, while referencing historical antecedents, that there appears no evolutionary 'reason’ that a species should make this ‘one-in-one-billion transition’ (his nomenclature). Yet, without this transition, the Universe would have no meaning that could be comprehended. As I say, that’s the epistemic loop.
 
As for an ontic loop, that is harder to argue. Photons exist in zero time, which is why I contend they are always in the future of whatever they interact with, even if they were generated in the CMBR some 13.5 billion years ago. So how do we resolve that paradox? I don’t know, but maybe that’s the link that Davies and Oriti are talking about, though neither of them mention it. But here’s the thing: when you do detect such a photon (for which time is zero) you instantaneously ‘see’ back to 380,000 years after the Universe’s birth.

Revisiting Donald Hoffman’s alternative theory of evolution

 Back in November 2016, so 5 years ago, I wrote a post in response to an academic paper by Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness, where I specifically critiqued their ideas on biological evolution. Despite co-authoring the paper, I believe this particular aspect of their paper is predominantly Hoffman’s, based on an article he wrote for New Scientist, where he expressed similar views. One of his key arguments was that natural selection favours ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’.

 

...we find that natural selection does not, in general, favor perceptions that are true reports of objective properties of the environment. Instead, it generally favors perceptual strategies that are tuned to fitness.

 

One way to use fewer calories is to see less truth, especially truth that is not informative about fitness. (My emphasis)

 

What made me revisit this was an interview in Philosophy Now (Issue 147, Dec 2021/Jan 2022) with Samuel Grove, who recently published Retrieving Darwin’s Revolutionary Idea: The Reluctant Radical. According to Grove, Darwin was reluctant to publish The Decent of Man, because applying natural selection to humans was controversial, despite the success of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (full title). The connection to Hoffman’s argument is that Darwin struggled with the idea that evolution could ‘select’ for ‘truth’. To quote Grove:

 

Natural selection is premised on three laws: the law of inheritance, the law of variation, and the law of superfecundity (where organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive). Together, these laws produce selection, and over the course of time, evolution. Well, Darwin’s question was, how could evolution produce a subject capable of knowing these very laws? Or, why would evolution select for fidelity to truth or laws? Selection favours survival, not truth. (My emphasis again)

 

Darwin turned to arguments, that as Grove points out, were ‘the common garden variety racism of the time’ – specifically, ‘group selection’ that favoured Anglo Saxon groups. Apparently, Darwin was reluctant to consider ‘group selection’ (as opposed to ‘individual selection’), but did so because it led to a resolution that would have been politically acceptable in his day. I will return to this point later.

 

So, even according to Darwin, Hoffman may have a point, though I’m not sure that Darwin and Hoffman are even talking about the same idea of ‘truth’. More on that later.

 

For those unfamiliar with Hoffman, his entire argument centres on the fundamental idea that ‘nothing exists unperceived, including space and time’. For more details, read my previous post, or read his co-authored paper with Prakash. I need to say upfront that I find it hard to take Hoffman seriously. Every time I read or listen to him, I keep expecting him to say, ‘Ah, see, I fooled the lot of you.’ His ideas only make sense to me if he believes we live in a computer simulation, which he’s never claimed. In fact, that would be my first question to him, if I ever met him. It’s an idea that has some adherents. Just on that, I would like to point out that chaos is incomputable, and the Universe is chaotic on a number of levels, including evolution, as it turns out.

 

In a previous life, I sometimes became involved in contractual disputes on major engineering projects (in Australia and US), preparing evidence for lawyers, and having to address opponents’ arguments. What I found in a number of cases, was that people prepared simple arguments that were nevertheless compelling. In fact, they often delivered them as if they were a fait accompli. In most of these cases, I found that by digging a little deeper, they could be challenged successfully. I have to admit that I’m reminded of this when I examine Hoffman’s argument on natural selection favouring ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’.

 

Partly, this is because his arguments highlight contradictions in his own premise and partly because one of his key arguments is contradicted by evidence, which, I concede, he may not be aware of.

 

For a start, what does Hoffman mean by ‘fitness’?

 

He talks about fitness in terms of predators and prey:

 

But in the real world where predators are on the prowl and prey must be wary, the race is often to the swift. It is the slower gazelle that becomes lunch for the swifter cheetah. 

 

This quote is out of context, where he’s arguing that ‘swiftness’ in response, be it the gazelle or the cheetah, favours less information, therefore less time; over more information, therefore lost time. Leaving aside the fact that survival of either animal is dependent on the accuracy of their ‘modelling’ of their environment, if the animal being chased or doing the chasing ‘doesn’t exist unperceived’, then they might as well be in a dream. In fact, we often find ourselves being chased in a dream, which has no consequences to our ‘survival’ in real life. The argument contradicts the premise.

 

Hoffman and Prakash quote Steven Palmer from a ‘graduate-level textbook’ (1999):

 

Evolutionarily speaking, visual perception is useful only if it is reasonably accurate . . . Indeed, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate. By and large, what you see is what you get. When this is true, we have what is called veridical perception . . . perception that is consistent with the actual state of affairs in the environment. This is almost always the case with vision . . .  (Authors’ emphasis)

 

Hoffman and Prakash then argue that ‘using Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games and genetic algorithms, we find that natural selection does not, in general, favor perceptions that are true reports of objective properties of the environment’. In other words, they effectively argue that Palmer’s emphasis on ‘veridical perception’ is wrong. I can’t argue with their Monte Carlo simulations, because they don’t provide the data. However, real world evidence would suggest that Palmer is correct.

 

I read a story on Quora by a wildlife ranger about eagles who have had one eye damaged, usually in intra-species mid-air fights. In nearly all cases (he described one exception), an eagle who is blind in one eye needs to be euthanised because they would invariably starve to death due to an inability to catch prey. So here you have ‘fitness’ dependent on vision being accurate.

 

Leaving aside all this nit-picking about natural selection favouring ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’, how does it support their fundamental thesis that reality only exists in the mind? According to them, their theory of evolution ‘proves’ that reality doesn’t exist unperceived. Can you even have evolution if reality doesn’t exist (except in the mind)?

 

And this brings me back to Darwin, because what he didn’t consider was that, in the case of humans, cultural evolution has overtaken biological evolution, and this is unique to humanity. I wrote another post where I argue that The search for ultimate truth is unattainable, but there are 'truths' we have found throughout the history of our cultural evolution and they are in mathematics. It’s true that evolution didn’t select for this; it’s an unexpected by-product, but it has led to the understanding of laws governing the very Universe that even Darwin would be amazed to know. 

When evolution is not evolution

No, I’m not talking about creationism (a subject I’ve discussed many times on this blog) but a rather esoteric argument produced by Donald D Hoffman and Chetan Prakash in an academic paper titled Objects of Consciousness. Their discussion on evolution is almost a side issue, and came up in their responses to the many objections they’ve fielded. I read the paper when I was sent a link by someone who knows I’m interested in this stuff.

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist with a Ph.D. in Computational Psychology and is now a full professor at University of California, Irvine. Chetan Prakash is a Professor Emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino and has a Master of Science in Physics and a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics.

I should point out at the outset, that their thesis is so out there, that I seriously wondered if it was a hoax. But given their academic credentials and the many academic citations and references in their paper, I assume that the authors really believe in what they’re arguing. And what they’re arguing, in a nutshell, is that everyone’s (and I mean every person’s) perception of the world is false, because, aside from conscious agents, everything else, including spacetime, is impermanent.

Their paper is 20 pages long (including 5-6 pages of objections and replies) most of which are densely worded interspersed with some diagrams and equations. To distil someone’s treatise into a single paragraph is always a tad unfair, so I’ll rely heavily on direct quotations and references to impart their arguments. Besides, you can always read the entire paper for yourself. Basically, they argue that ‘interacting conscious agents’ are the only reality and that nothing else exists ‘unperceived’. They formulate a mathematical model of consciousness, from which they derive a wave function that is the bedrock of quantum mechanics (which I’ll refer to as QM for brevity). In other words, they argue that the Copenhagen interpretation of QM requires consciousness to bring objects into reality (except consciousness) which are all impermanent.

It’s a well known philosophical conundrum that you can’t prove that you’re not a ‘brain-in-a-vat’, and theirs is a similar point of view in that it can’t be proved that they’re wrong, even though, as they point out themselves, we mostly all believe their view is wrong. I don’t know of anyone (other than the authors) who think that the world ceases to exist when they’re not looking. This is known as solipsism and there is a very good argument against solipsism even though it can’t be proved it’s wrong. In fact, solipsism is absolutely true when you’re in a dream, so it’s not always wrong. The point is that when we’re in a dream, despite all its inconsistencies, we actually don’t know we’re in a dream, so how can you be sure you’re not in a dream when you’re consciously awake? The argument against solipsism is that it can only be held by one person: it’s impossible to believe that everyone else is a solipsist too.

In the objections, item 6, they ‘reject solipsism’, yet ‘also reject permanence, viz., the doctrine that 3D space and physical objects exist when they are not perceived [but not conscious agents]. To claim that conscious agents exist unperceived differs from the claim that unconscious objects and space-time exist unperceived.’ In other words, consciousness is the only reality, a point they make in response to Objection 19: ‘reality consists of interacting conscious agents.’ But if one takes this seriously, then even the bodies that we take for granted don’t exist ‘unperceived’ whilst our consciousness does. It’s utter nonsense, except in a dream. What they are describing is exactly the reality one perceives in a dream, so their theory is effectively that the reality we all believe we inhabit is, in effect, a dream. Which is logically a variation on solipsism. The only difference is that we all inhabit the same dream together. So we’re all brains in a vat, only connected. The authors, I’m sure, would reject this interpretation, yet it fits exactly with what they’re arguing. Only in a dream do objects, including our own bodies, cease to exist unperceived.

Evolution comes up a lot in their paper because one of the centrepieces of their thesis is that evolution by natural selection produces perceptions that favour ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’. They claim to run 'genetic algorithms’ that show that evolution by natural selection benefits perception for ‘fitness’ over ‘accuracy’. The point is that we must take this assertion on face value, because we don’t know what algorithms they’re using or how they even define fitness, perceptions and truth. In fact, Objection 12 asks this very question. Part of the authors' response goes: ‘For the sake of brevity, we omitted our definition of truth and perception… But they are defined precisely in Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games and genetic algorithms…’

In particular, the authors use vision to make their case. It’s well known that the brain creates a facsimile of what we see in ways that we are still trying to understand, and to which, to date, we’ve failed to engineer to the same degree of accuracy in artificial intelligence (AI). But theoretical algorithms and Monte Carlo simulations aside, we have the means to compare what we subjectively see with an objective representation.

It so happens that we have invented devices that create images (both stationary and dynamic) through chemical-electronic-mechanical means independently of the human brain and they show remarkable, but unsurprising, veracity with what our brain perceives subjectively. Now, you might say that the same brain perceives this simulated vision, so one would expect it to provide the same image. I think this is a long bow to draw, because the image effectively gets ‘processed’ twice: once through the device and once through the brain, yet the result is unequivocally the same without the interim process. In fact, the interim process can show what we miss, like the famous example of a gorilla moving through a room while you are concentrating on a thrown ball. But, in the context of their thesis, the camera is not a conscious entity yet it captures an image that is supposedly nonexistent when unperceived. And cameras can be set up to capture images without the interaction of so-called ‘conscious agents’.

Now the authors are correct when they point out that colour, for example, is a completely psychological phenomenon – it only exists in some creature’s mind, and it varies from species to species – this is well known and well understood. We also know that it’s caused by reflected light which can be scientifically explained by Richard Feynman’s (I know it’s not his alone) QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) and that the subjective experience of colour is a direct consequence of the frequency of electromagnetic radiation.  But the fact that colour is subjective doesn’t make the objects, from which the effect is consequential, subjective as well.

Regarding the other mathematical contribution to their thesis, the authors have created a mathematical model of consciousness, from which they derive the wave function for QM. I’m not a logician, so I can’t say one way or another how valid this is. However, it should be pointed out that Erwin Schrodinger, who originally proposed the wave function, in his famous eponymous equation, didn’t derive it from anything. So the authors claim they’ve done something that the original creator of the wave function couldn’t do himself. As Richard Feynman once said: ‘Schrodinger’s equation can’t be derived from anything we know.’ However, the authors claim it can be derived from consciousness. I’m sceptical.

You may wonder what all this has to do with the title of this post. Well, in response to objection 19, the authors propose to come up with a ‘new theory of evolution’ based on their theory of conscious agents. To quote: ‘When the new evolutionary theory is projected onto the spacetime perceptual interface of H. Sapiens we must get back the standard evolutionary theory.’ This means that the DNA, and the molecules that make the DNA, that allowed consciousness to evolve are actually dependent on said consciousness, so the ‘new theory of evolution’ must logically contradict the ‘standard theory of evolution’.

As part of their thesis, the authors make an analogy between a computer desktop and spacetime, only, the way they describe it, it appears to be more than an analogy to them.

Space and time are the desktop of our personal interface, and three-dimensional objects are icons on the desktop. Our interface gives the impression that it reveals true cause and effect… But this appearance of cause and effect is simply a useful fiction, just as it is for the icons on the computer desktop.

(The interface, to which they refer, is a ‘species-specific interface’, which means it’s a human consciousness interface. They don’t say if this interface applies to other sentient creatures, or just us.)

The issue of cause and effect being a ‘useful fiction’ was taken up by someone (authors of objections are not given) in objection 17, to which the authors of the theory responded thus:

Our views on causality are consistent with interpretations of quantum theory that abandon microphysical causality… The burden of proof is surely on one who would abandon microphysical causation but still cling to macrophysical causation.

I could respond to this challenge, but it’s not relevant to my argument. The point is that the authors obviously don’t ‘cling to macrophysical causation’, which I would contend creates a problem when discussing evolutionary theory. The point is that according to every discussion on biological evolution I’ve read, extant species are consequentially dependent on earlier species, which means there is a causal chain going back to the first eukaryota. If this causal chain is a ‘useful fiction’ then it is hard to see how any theory of evolution that excludes it could be called evolutionary. With or without this useful fiction, the authors ‘new theory’ turns evolution on its head, with conscious agents taking precedence over physical objects, including species, all of which are impermanent. In spite of this ontological difficulty, the authors believe that when they ‘project’ their ‘new theory’ onto the ‘species-specific interface’ of impermanent spacetime (which doesn’t exist unperceived), the old ‘standard theory of evolution’ will be found.

I’ve left a comment on the bottom of the web page (link given in intro above) which challenges this specific aspect of their theory (using different words). If I get a response I’ll update this post accordingly.

Creation Science: a non sequitur

A friend of mine – someone whom I’d go to for help – leant me a ‘Creation’ magazine to prove that there are creationists who are real scientists. And, I have to admit, my friend was right: the magazine was full of contributors who had degrees in science, including one who has a PhD and honours and works at a run-of-the-mill university; but who wrote the following howler: ‘Cosmology is unscientific because you can’t do an experiment in cosmology.’ I wonder if said writer would be willing to say that to Australian Nobel Prize winner, Brian Schmidt. Only humans can be living contradictions.

Creation science is an epistemological contradiction – there’s no such thing – by definition. Science does not include magic – I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree with that, but I might be wrong. Replacing a scientific theory with supernaturally enhanced magic is anti-science, yet creationists call it science – as the Americans like to say: go figure.

The magazine was enlightening in that the sole criterion for these ‘scientists’ as to the validity of any scientific knowledge was whether or not it agreed with the Bible. If this was literally true, we would still be believing that the Sun goes round the Earth, rather than the other way round. After all, the Book of Joshua tells us how God stopped the Sun moving in the sky. It doesn’t say that God stopped the Earth spinning, which is what he would have had to do.

One contributor to the magazine even allows for ‘evolution’ after ‘creation’, because God programmed ‘subroutines’ into DNA, but was quick to point out that this does ‘not contradict the Bible’. Interesting to note that DNA wouldn’t even have been discovered if all scientists were creationists (like the author).

Why do you think the ‘Dark Ages’ are called the dark ages? Because science, otherwise known as ‘natural philosophy’, was considered pagan, as the Greeks’ neo-Platonist philosophy upon which it was based was pagan. Someone once pointed out that Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob (around 400AD) signalled the start of the dark ages, which lasted until around 1200, when Fibonacci introduced the West to the Hindu-Arabic system of numbers. In fact, it is the Muslims who kept that knowledge in the interim, otherwise it may well have been lost to us forever.

So science and Christianity have a long history of contention that goes back centuries before Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. If anything, the gap has got wider, not closer; they’ve only managed to co-exist by staying out of each other’s way.

There are many religious texts in the world, a part of our collective cultural and literary legacy, but none of them are scientific or mathematical texts, which also boast diverse cultural origins. It is an intellectual conceit (even deceit) to substitute religious teaching for scientifically gained knowledge. Of course scientifically gained knowledge is always changing, advancing, being overtaken and is never over. In fact, I would contend that science will never be complete, as history has demonstrated, so there will always be arguments for supernatural intervention, otherwise known as the ‘God-of-the-Gaps’. Godel’s Incompleteness theorem infers that mathematics is a never-ending epistemological mine, and I believe that the same goes for science.

Did I hear someone say: what about Intelligent Design (ID)? Well, it’s still supernatural intervention, isn’t it? Same scenario, different description.

Religion is not an epistemology, it’s a way of life. Whichever way you look at it, it’s completely subjective. Religion is part of your inner world, and that includes God. So the idea that the God you’ve found within yourself is also the Creator of the entire Universe is a non sequitur. Because everyone’s idea of God is unique to them.

How chaos drives the evolution of the universe and life

The Cosmic Blueprint is the very first book of Paul Davies I ever read nearly a quarter of a century ago, and I’ve read many others since. I heard him being interviewed about it on a car trip from Melbourne to Mulwala (on the Victorian, New South Wales border) and that was the first time I’d heard of him. The book was published in 1987, so it was probably 1988.

Davies received the Templeton Foundation Prize in 1995, though not the wrath of Dawkins for accepting it. He’s also received the 2002 Michael Faraday Prize from the Royal Society and the 2001 Kelvin Medal and Prize from the UK Institute of Physics. He was resident in Australia for a couple of decades but now resides in the US where he’s an astro-biologist at the University of Arizona.

In America, Davies has been accused of being a ‘creationist in disguise’ by people whose ignorance is only out-weighed by their narrow-mindedness (they think there are atheists and there are creationists with nothing in between). The 2004 edition of this book is published by the Templeton Foundation and the first word in the opening chapter is ‘God’ as part of a quote by Ilya Prigogine, who features prominently in the book. But anyone who thinks this is a thesis for Intelligent Design will be disappointed; it’s anything but. In fact, one of the book’s great virtues is its attempt to explain complexity in the universe and evolution as a natural occurrence and not a Divine one.

I’ve long believed that Davies writes about science and philosophy better than anyone else, not least because he seems to be equally erudite in the disciplines of physics, cosmology, biology and philosophy. He’s not a member of the ‘strong atheist’ brigade, which puts him offside with many philosophers and commentators, but his argument against ID in The Goldilocks Enigma (2006) was so compelling that Stephen Law borrowed it for himself.

I remember The Cosmic Blueprint primarily as introducing me to chaos theory; it was the new kid on the block in popular consciousness with fractals and Mandelbroit’s set just becoming conspicuous in pop culture. Reading it now, I’m surprised at how much better it is than I remember it, but that’s partly due to what I’ve learnt in between. A lot of it would have gone over my head, which is not to say it still doesn’t, but less so than before.

More than any other writer on science, Davies demonstrates how much we don’t know and he doesn’t shy away from awkward questions. In particular, he is critical of reductionism as the only method of explanation, especially when it explains things away rather than explicating them; consciousness and life’s emergence being good examples.

I like Davies because his ideas reflect some of my own ruminations, for example that natural selection and mutations can’t possibly explain the whole story of evolution. We think we are on the edge of knowing everything, yet future generations will look back and marvel at our ignorance just as we do with our forebears.

There is an overriding thesis in The Cosmic Blueprint that is obvious once it’s formulated yet is largely ignored in popular writing. It’s fundamentally that there are two arrows of time: one being the well known 2^nd law of thermodynamics or entropy; and the other being equally obvious but less understood as the increase in complexity at all levels in the universe from the formation of galaxies, stars and planets to the evolution of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere. Both of which demonstrate irreversibility as a key attribute.  And whilst many see them as contradictory and therefore evidence of Divine intervention, Davies sees them as complementary and part of the universe’s overall evolvement.

Davies explains how complexity and self-organisation can occur when dynamic systems are pushed beyond equilibrium with an open source of energy. Entropy, on the other hand, is a natural consequence of systems in equilibrium.

In the early pages, Davies explains chaotic behaviour with a simple-to-follow example that’s purely mathematical. In particular, he demonstrates how the system is completely deterministic yet totally unpredictable because the initial conditions are mathematically impossible to define. This occurs in nature all the time, like coin tosses, so that the outcome is totally random but only because the initial conditions are impossible to determine, not because the coin follows non-deterministic laws. This is a subtle but significant distinction.

A commonly cited example is cellular automata that can be generated by a computer programme. Stephen Wolfram of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, has done a detailed study of one-dimensional automata that could give an insight into evolution. Davies quotes Wolfram:

“…the cellular automaton evolution concentrates the probabilities for particular configurations, thereby reducing entropy. This phenomenon allows for the possibility of self-organization by enhancing the probabilities of organized configurations and suppressing disorganized configurations.”

Wolfram is cited by Gregory Chaitin, in Thinking about Godel and Turing, as speculating that the universe may be pseudo-random and chaos theory provides an innate mechanism: deterministic laws that can’t be predicted. However, it seems that the universe’s innate chaotic laws provide opportunities for a diverse range of evolutionary possibilities, and the sheer magnitude of the universe in space and time, along with a propensity for self-organisation, in direct opposition to entropy, may be enough to ensure intelligent life as an outcome. The truth is that we don’t know. (Btw, Davies wrote the forward to Chaitin’s book.)

Davies calls this position ‘predestiny’ but he’s quick to qualify it thus: ‘Predestiny is a way of thinking about the world. It is not a scientific theory. It receives support, however, from those experiments that show how complexity and organization arise spontaneously and naturally under a wide range of conditions.’

This view is mirrored in the anthropic principle, which Davies also briefly discusses, but there are two version, as expounded by Frank Tipler and John Barrow in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle: the weak anthropic principle and the strong anthropic principle; and ‘predestiny’ is effectively the strong anthropic principle.

Roughly twenty years later, in The Goldilocks Enigma, Davies elaborates on this philosophical viewpoint when he argues for the ‘self-explaining universe’ amongst a critique of all the current ‘flavours’ of universe explanations: ‘I have suggested that only self-consistent loops capable of understanding themselves can create themselves, so that only universes with (at least the potential for) life and mind really exist.’ This is effectively a description of John Wheeler’s speculative cosmic quantum loop explanation of the universe’s existence – it exists because we’re in it. Davies argues that such a universe is ‘self-activating’ to avoid religious connotations: ‘…perhaps existence isn’t something that gets bestowed from outside…’

Teleological is a word that most scientists avoid, but Davies points out that the development of every organism is teleological because it follows a ‘blueprint’ or ‘plan’ entailed in its DNA. How this occurs is not entirely understood, but Davies makes an analogy with software which is apposite, as DNA provides coded instructions that ultimately result in fully developed organisms like us. He explores a concept called ‘downward causation’ whereby information can actually ‘cause’ materialistic events and software in computers provide the best example. In fact, as Davies hypothesises, one could imagine a software programme that makes physical changes to the computer that it’s operating on. Perhaps this is how the ‘mind’ works, which is similar to Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of a ‘strange loop’ that he introduced in Godel Escher Bach (which I reviewed in Feb. 2009) and later explored in another tome called I am a Strange Loop (which I haven’t read).

Davies introduces the concept of ‘downward causation’ in his discussion on quantum mechanics because it’s the measurement or observation that crystallises the quantum phenomenon into the real world. According to Davies, Wheeler speculated that ‘downward causation’ in quantum mechanics is ‘backwards in time’ and suggested a ‘delayed-choice’ thought experiment. To quote Davies: ‘The experiment has recently been conducted, and accords entirely with Wheeler’s expectations. It must be understood, however, that no actual communication with the past is involved.’

It’s impossible to discuss every aspect of this book, covering as it does: chaos theory, fractals, cosmological evolution, biological evolution, quantum mechanics and mind and matter.

Towards the end, Davies reveals some of his own philosophical prejudices, which, unsurprisingly, are mirrored in The Goldilocks Enigma twenty years on.

The very fact that the universe is creative, and that the laws have permitted complex structures to emerge and develop to the point of consciousness – in other words, that the universe has organized its own self-awareness – is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all.

This last phrase elicits the ‘design’ word, many years before Intelligent Design was introduced as a ‘wedge’ tactic for creationists, but Davies has been an outspoken critic of both creationism and ID, as I explained above. Davies strongly believes the universe has a purpose and the evidence supports that point of view. But it’s a philosophical point of view, not a scientific one.

This leads to the logical question: is the universe teleological? I think chaos theory provides an answer. In the same way that chaotic phenomena, which includes all complex dynamics in the universe (like evolution) are deterministic yet unpredictable, the universe could be purposeful yet not teleological. In other words, the purpose is not predetermined but the universe’s dynamics allow purpose to evolve.

Speciation: still one of nature’s great mysteries

First of all a disclaimer: I’m a self-confessed dilettante, not a real philosopher, and, even though I read widely and take an interest in all sorts of things scientific, I’m not a scientist either. I know a little bit more about physics and mathematics than I do biology, but I can say with some confidence that evolution, like consciousness and quantum mechanics, is one of nature’s great mysteries. But, like consciousness and quantum mechanics, just because it’s a mystery doesn’t make it any less real. Back in Nov.07, I wrote a post titled: Is evolution fact? Is creationism myth?

First, I defined what I meant by ‘fact’: it’s either true or false, not something in between. So it has to be one or the other: like does the earth go round the sun or does the sun go round the earth? One of those is right and one is wrong, and the one that is right is a fact.

Well, I put evolution into that category: it makes no sense to say that evolution only worked for some species and not others; or that it occurred millions of years ago but doesn’t occur now; or the converse that it occurs now, but not in the distant past. Either it occurs or it never occurred, and all the evidence, and I mean all of the evidence, in every area of science: genetics, zoology, palaeontology, virology; suggests it does. There are so many ways that evolution could have been proven false in the last 150 years since Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory of natural selection, that it’s just as unassailable as quantum mechanics. Natural selection, by the way, is not a theory, it’s a law of nature.

Now, both proponents and opponents of evolutionary theory often make the mistake of assuming that natural selection is the whole story of evolution and there’s nothing else to explain. So I can confidently say that natural selection is a natural law because we see evidence of it everywhere in the natural world, but it doesn’t explain speciation, and that is another part of the story that is rarely discussed. But it’s also why it’s one of nature’s great mysteries. To quote from this week’s New Scientist (13 March, 2010, p.31): ‘Speciation still remains one of the biggest mysteries in evolutionary biology.’

This is a rare admission in a science magazine, because many people believe, on both sides of the ideological divide (that evolution has created in some parts of the world, like the US) that it opens up a crack in the scientific edifice for creationists and intelligent design advocates to pull it down.

But again, let’s compare this to quantum mechanics. In a recent post on Quantum Entanglement (Jan.10), where I reviewed Louisa Gilder’s outstanding and very accessible book on the subject, I explain just how big a mystery it remains, even after more than a century of experimentation, verification and speculation. Yet, no one, whether a religious fundamentalist or not, wants to replace it with a religious text or any other so-called paradigm or theory. This is because quantum mechanics doesn’t challenge anything in the Bible, because the Bible, unsurprisingly, doesn’t include anything about physics or mathematics.

Now, the Bible doesn’t include anything about biology either, but the story of Genesis, which is still a story after all the analysis, has been substantially overtaken by scientific discoveries, especially in the last 2 centuries.

But it’s because of this ridiculous debate, that has taken on a political force in the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world, that no one ever mentions that we really don’t know how speciation works. People are sure to counter this with one word, mutation, but mutations and genetic drift don’t explain how genetic anomalies amongst individuals lead to new species. It is assumed that they accumulate to the point that, in combination with natural selection, a new species branches off. But the New Scientist cover story, reporting on work done by Mark Pagel (an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK) challenges this conventionally held view.

To quote Pagel: “I think the unexamined view that most people have of speciation is this gradual accumulation by natural selection of a whole lot of changes, until you get a group of individuals that can no longer mate with their old population.”

Before I’m misconstrued, I’m not saying that mutation doesn’t play a fundamental role, as it obviously does, which I elaborate on below. But mutations within individuals don’t axiomatically lead to new species. This is a point that Erwin Schrodinger attempted to address in his book, What is Life? (see my review posted Nov.09).

Years ago, I wrote a letter to science journalist, John Horgan, after reading his excellent book The End of Science (a collection of interviews and reflections by some of the world’s greatest minds in the late 20th Century). I suggested to him an analogy between genes and environment interacting to create a human personality, and the interaction between speciation and natural selection creating biological evolution. I postulated back then that we had the environment part, which was natural selection, but not the gene part of the analogy, which is speciation. In other words, I suggested that there is still more to learn, just like there is still more to learn about quantum mechanics. We always assume that we know everything that there is to know, when clearly we don’t. The mystery inherent in quantum mechanics indicates that there is something that we don’t know, and the same is true for evolution.

Mark Pagel’s research is paradigm-challenging, because he’s demonstrated statistically that genetic drift by mutation doesn’t give the right answers. I need to explain this without getting too esoteric. Pagel looked at the branches of 101 various (evolutionary) trees, including: ‘cats, bumblebees, hawks, roses and the like’. By doing a statistical analysis of the time between speciation events (the length of the branches) he expected to get a Bell curve distribution which would account for the conventional view, but instead he got an exponential curve.

To quote New Scientist: ‘The exponential is the pattern you get when you are waiting for some single, infrequent event to happen… the length of time it takes a radioactive atom to decay, and the distance between roadkills on a highway.’

In other words, as the New Scientist article expounds in some detail, new species happen purely by accident. What I found curious about the above quote is the reference to ‘radioactive decay’ which was the starting point for Erwin Schrodinger’s explanation of mutation events, which is why mutation is still a critical factor in the whole process.

Schrodinger went to great lengths, very early in his exposition, to explain that nearly all of physics is statistical, and gave examples from magnetism to thermal activity to radioactive decay. He explained how this same statistical process works in creating mutations. Schrodinger coined a term, ‘statistico-deterministic’, but in regard to quantum mechanics rather than physics in general. Nevertheless, chaos and complexity theory reinforce the view that the universe is far from deterministic at almost every level that one cares to examine it. As the New Scientist article argues, Pagel’s revelation supports Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion: ‘that if you were able to rewind history and replay the evolution on Earth, it would turn out differently every time.’

I’ve left a lot out in this brief exposition, including those who challenge Pagel’s analysis, and how his new paradigm interacts with natural selection and geographical separation, which are also part of the overall picture. Pagel describes his own epiphany when he was in Tanzinia: ‘watching two species of colobus monkeys frolic in the canopy 40 metres overhead. “Apart from the fact that one is black and white and one is red, they do all the same things... I can remember thinking that speciation was very arbitrary. And here we are – that’s what our models are telling us.”’ In other words, natural selection and niche-filling are not enough to explain diversification and speciation.

What I find interesting is that wherever we look in science, chance plays a far greater role than we credit. It’s not just the cosmos at one end of the scale, and quantum mechanics at the other end, that rides on chance, but evolution, like earthquakes and other unpredictable events, also seems to be totally dependent on the metaphorical roll of the dice.

Addendum 1 : (18 March 2010)

Comments posted on New Scientist challenge the idea that a ‘bell curve’ distribution should have been expected at all. I won’t go into that, because it doesn’t change the outcome: 78% of ‘branches’ statistically analysed (from 110) were exponential and 0% were normal distribution (bell curve). Whatever the causal factors, in which mutation plays a definitive role, speciation is as unpredictable as earthquakes, weather events and radio-active decay (for an individual isotope).

Addendum 2: (18 March 2010)

Writing this post, reminded me of Einstein’s famous quote that ‘God does not play with dice’. Well, I couldn’t disagree more. If there is a creator-God (in the Einstein mould) then first and foremost, he or she is a mathematician. Secondly, he or she is a gambler who loves to play the odds. The role of chance in the natural world is more fundamental and universally manifest than we realise. In nature, small variances can have large consequences: we see that with quantum theory, chaos theory and evolutionary theory. There appears to be little room for determinism in the overall play of the universe.

Is evolution fact? Is creationism myth?

Most people reading this already have preconceived answers, but they would be pushed to defend them beyond: 150 years of scientific investigation can’t be wrong, or the Bible is the ‘Word of God’. At the heart of this, however, lies another question altogether: what constitutes truth? In fact, it was tempting to title this essay, What is truth? But I wished the topic to be more specific. Truth is often subjective, and objective truth only becomes apparent over time. Truth usually requires longevity in our cognitive world to gain validity. But truth can also be found in myth in the form of allegory. To give a biblical example, the story of the good Samaritan is a parable, but many would argue it contains a profound truth about human nature. Is the Genesis story also allegorical? I will return to this point later.

To bring the discussion back to the topic at hand, one needs to ask another question: are there any scientific facts? Many philosophers, perhaps most, would argue that the answer is no. They would say that all scientific ‘facts’ or ‘truths’ are contingent, meaning tomorrow (any tomorrow) we may find evidence to the contrary, no matter what we’ve observed in the past. For example, we all assume the sun will rise tomorrow, but it may not, and certainly one day it will not. This is an extreme example, but let’s look at the same example in another way. Does the earth go around the sun or does the sun go around the earth? One of these is true and the other false, which means, that as far as I’m concerned, the one that is true is a ‘fact’.

Now, 400 years ago, this very question was a huge issue: cost Galileo his job, almost his life. 400 years is not that long ago, if one considers that Western philosophy and science started with the Ancient Greeks about 2500 years ago, and astronomy had been practiced by a number of cultures well before then. But even 400 years ago, the answer to one of these questions was still a fact. Either the earth went around the sun, or it didn’t; there was nothing contingent about it. It didn’t go around the sun today and do something different tomorrow, or next year, or next millennium. It’s just that, at the time, it was still a disputable fact. It was a fact awaiting proof, if you like, which eventually came from Johannes Kepler using Tycho Brahe’s observations. Now, in case you think the Church was just being bloody-minded (which they were), the Vatican’s astronomer had a very good argument to counter Galileo. He said that if the earth went round the sun as Galileo claimed then why didn’t we observe a parallax shift against the distant stars over a one year period? The reason was that the stars were much further away than anyone could possibly imagine, and so the necessary parallax adjustment wasn't observable with the instruments of the day. It’s a bit like the argument Columbus had convincing people that if he sailed far enough west he would eventually encounter Asia. The boffins of their time knew his calculations were incorrect and he would only be half way there, which is why they were against his mission, not because they thought the earth was flat.

The reason I’ve spent so much time on this one topic is because it’s a similar situation of religion versus science, though, arguably, evolutionary theory is in a stronger position today than Galileo’s position was 400 years ago, because the arguments against Galileo were not as ignorant as people think, and Galileo was up against a 1400 year old theory (Ptolemy's). So are there any scientific truths? The only truth in science is that whatever we’ve discovered, there always remains some mystery still to be solved. In other words, science is an endeavour of endless depth and mystery, so there appears to be no ultimate truth as some would like to find it.

The best book I’ve read on science is Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind for a number of reasons, not least because it’s pitched at a level I can readily comprehend. Penrose provides the best exposition on entropy I’ve read, including its cosmological significance, as well as a philosophy of mathematics very similar to mine (see my post: Is mathematics invented or discovered?) But Penrose also provides an entire chapter on what constitutes a successful scientific theory. Penrose provides 3 categories for theories: TENTATIVE, USEFUL, and SUPERB (the capitalisation is his) which he then discusses in depth. I won’t repeat his discussion here, but it illustrates how theories evolve, with TENTATIVE and USEFUL being more contingent, and SUPERB being supremely successful over time. Interestingly, he includes Newton’s dynamics as a SUPERB theory even though it was overtaken by Einstein’s relativity theory. This is because many aspects of Newton’s theory, including the inverse square law for gravity, still apply under Einstein’s theory. Even if Einstein’s theory is overtaken, one would expect that many aspects, like the observed relativistic effects on time, would remain in any new theory. In effect, he is saying that a SUPERB theory, though it must satisfy the highest standards, does not explain everything. Outside of physics, Penrose argues that only Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory of natural selection comes closest to his idea of a SUPERB theory. Note that the theory of natural selection does not encompass evolutionary theory totally – there are other biological components to the theory that neither Darwin nor Wallace could have known about.

Science is a dynamic enterprise – we have never known the answers to all the mysteries that it uncovers, but what we do know is that future generations unlock secrets we can only speculate about. This is what has made science the most successful enterprise undertaken by humankind: a continous dialectic between existing knowledge and future discoveries. And this dialectic is epitomised in the case of Darwin’s acclaimed theory of evolution. When he proposed the theory he had no idea how traits were passed on from one generation to another, let alone how they could change or ‘mutate’. Everything we have discovered since has only confirmed the theory. We have discovered not only the mechanism of passing on traits (genes) but the message itself (DNA). DNA has allowed us to place every organism on earth in its correct evolutionary relationship to every other organism. DNA is the most compelling evidence yet that all life forms on earth have a common ancestor. (We share over 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and 63% with mice.) It’s not just simply that everything we have found ‘fits’ the theory, but if the theory was false, then the evidence would have told us that as well. In other words, the evidence is far from neutral. And, going back to the analogy with Galileo’s defence of Copernicus’s theory, it’s either true or it’s false: you can’t say evolution works some of the time or only works with some species and not others. It’s either true or false – it’s either a fact or it’s not – just like, in Galileo’s time, the earth went round the sun or it didn’t.

Richard Feynman notably won a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on QED (quantum electrodynamics), and worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project (the development of the atomic bomb in WWII). Most famously, he demonstrated on television how the Challenger shuttle failed: using a clamp, a pair of pliers and a pitcher of iced water he showed how the shuttle's O-rings lost elasticity under freezing conditions. He was not only one of the truly great physicists of his generation, but also one of the great teachers of science. In a book of his lectures on relativity theory, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, he describes how the amino acid, L-alanine, is only found in life in a left-handed form, while it exists equally in right-handed and left-handed forms outside of life (the right-handed version is called D-alanine). Using a combination of irrefutable logic and brilliantly realised imagery, he explains how this could only come about if all existing life forms have a common origin. Paul Davies makes the same point, less eloquently perhaps, but no less persuasively, in his book, The Origin of Life.

This does not mean we understand everything we need to know about evolution. Quite the contrary: the biggest conundrum still to be resolved is how did the first DNA come about (refer Davies). Any ideas on this are very speculative – still very much in the TENTATIVE mode to use Penrose’s nomenclature. And this leads us to Intelligent Design (ID). When it comes to an exercise in complexity, DNA takes the cake, and according to the ID advocates, complexity stops evolution in its tracks. (For a brief discussion on complexity, including its role in DNA, see my later post: Is mathematics evidence of a transcendental realm?) Using the ID argument, DNA could have only been ‘designed’ by some ‘intelligent’ entity, a Creator or God, and evolution did the rest, or, evolution never happened. If we take the second argument first: evolution never happened; then genes, DNA and natural selection are irrelevant to nature, except for sexual reproduction. Speciation never occurred, which means everything was created all at once, or God came along every now and then, as was his whim, to create some new species. He manipulated the DNA so as to create new species whenever he wanted. Not only does this not ring true, it’s not accounted for in the Bible either (I'm leaving the biblical interpretation to last). Taking the first argument that God created DNA and let evolution do the rest, one is effectively saying that science can no longer answer any further questions on this: we have come to the end of science; only God can explain the origin of life.

Personally, I have no problem with admitting that we don’t know everything, but I would like to point out that history demonstrates continuously that only future generations can tell us how ignorant the current generation is. So I expect, that at some point in the future, the origin of DNA will be explained – in fact, I’m quite confident, even though I’ve no idea how.

The biblical interpretation, of course, does away with all of this nonsense: there is nothing to explain. And this brings me to Karl Popper, who instigated the proviso that a scientific theory needed to be able to generate falsifiable hypotheses. He did this to eliminate pseudo-scientific theories, which can explain everything no matter what we find, and his particular target at the time was Freud. In other words, a scientific theory needs to be put at risk. If you can’t prove it wrong then it’s purely speculative. Creationism is a pseudo-science in that it’s always right no matter what the evidence says. If we find something in nature then that’s the way God created it – all questions answered.

Now some people argue that evolution, on the basis of this criterion, is also a pseudo-science, because no one can observe it in progress. Well, natural selection is observed all the time, but no one can observe evolution en masse for even a fraction of the history of the planet. However, evolution can generate a number of hypotheses that can be proved false. The most obvious would be to find fossils of the same species in completely different geological time zones, or to find fossils out of sequence in the same line. With advances in DNA the most critical test is to find genetic relationships between species that contradict the fossil record. So the claim that evolution can’t be falsified is a nonsense.

The biblical interpretation is that all species were created everywhere in the world all at once. All the millions of species in the Amazon, all the weird and wonderful species that Darwin found on Galapagos, all the marsupials in Australia, all the dinosaurs, trilobites and millions of other species that have disappeared, but, strangely, only one race of humankind. All of these, of course, were also picked up in Noah’s ark and redistributed afterwards. At the same time, God created all the galaxies and all the light rays and all the quasars and all the neutrinos traveling through space – all within a 6 day period. The other interpretation is that all the scientific discoveries of the last century are completely fraudulent and none of these things exist, or not in the way we interpret them. Creationism not only does away with evolution but most of modern scientific knowledge, and certainly all of cosmology. I've argued with a number of creationists who claim they are not anti-science, only anti-evolution, but they seem unaware that their very claims of creationism make it impossible for them to be one without the other.

As recently witnessed in the 'Climate Change' debate, someone with a little knowledge can easily convince someone with no knowledge that they are right, even though a third person with a lot more knowledge can demonstrate that they are both wrong. I find it's the same with the Creationism/Evolution debate, even though it's really a debate about religion versus science, or, as I like to point out, myth versus science (see below). One of the favourite arguments of anti-evolutionists, is that evolution defies the second law of thermodynamics, also known as entropy. Both Roger Penrose (The Emperor's New Mind) and Paul Davies (The Origin of Life) provide excellent explanations of why this is a fallacy. But, without going into these arguments, I would like to give an everyday, millions of times repeatable, example of why the argument is false. Basically, the antagonists claim that entropy doesn't allow simple entities to develop into complex ones. A good example of entropy is breaking an egg and making an omelette (refer Penrose). It's impossible to take the omelette and get the egg back as it was before you started. In fact, Penrose points out that entropy is the only law in physics that really prohibits time from running backwards. Both quantum mechanics and relativity allow time reversal, mathematically speaking. Entropy says that everything goes from order to disorder, but there's a catch, which is energy. If you add nett energy you can go from disorder to order as we witness all the time. Now, the everyday example is every living organism on the planet, including each and every one of us. We all started out as simple cellular organisms (zygotes in the case of humans) and develop into extremely complex multi-cellular organisms without breaking the second law of thermodynamics. And it happens everyday, as it has done for millions of years, with swarms upon swarms of living entities all over the planet.

Ken Ham is an Australian, the same age as me as it turns out, who started www.answersingenesis.com and built the ‘Creation Museum’ in Kentucky. His entire premise is that humans are fallible but God is not, therefore the ‘Word of God’, the Bible, is the only criterion for validating a scientific theory. On his web site, I once submitted the following question: Since the time of Pythagoras (500 BC) to the present day, tell me one scientific discovery that arose from studying the scriptures? I never got a response, even though it was submitted over 2 years ago. The Bible tells us nothing about science: nothing about DNA, about the constant speed of light, about Euler’s famous equation or Einstein’s (E=mc2) or his theory of gravity; so why would it tell us anything about evolution or natural selection or genetics. The Bible was never written as a scientific text, even though people like Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes had already lived before the New Testament was written. So even the scientific knowledge of the day was not included.

Personally, I see the Bible as a book full of stories. A story, any story, can contain profound truths, but that doesn't mean the story itself is true, and that's how I see the Bible.

The Bible is full of mythical events: Jonah eaten by a whale, Moses parting the Red Sea, Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt and Jesus walking on water; are amongst the best known, and there are myriad others. But the Genesis story is arguably the most mythical story of them all. In Genesis you have a man being made out of dirt, a woman made from a man’s rib, a serpent who speaks and a piece of fruit, that, when ingested, makes people genetically inherently evil. Not to mention that, afterwards, God punishes the snake by making it forever legless. It’s a story full of mythical elements, so what does it all mean? Myths can be interpreted a number of ways, but my interpretation of the Genesis myth is that it contains a fundamental truth: that no one can go through life without having to deal with evil at some level. Evil is a part of our human nature but that doesn’t mean I believe we are born evil. Evil arises from a set of conditions, usually social, that turns human against human. Any one of us can become evil, given the circumstances, but it’s not because of our biblical origins, it’s because of our evolutionary heritage (I discuss this in detail in my posting on Evil).

Many people interpret the Genesis story as ‘original sin’, which is a fundamental concept in Christianity. Because we all have original sin, only Jesus can save us from eternal damnation. This requires an extension of the myth to include Satan and a place called hell in the afterlife. I have a serious problem with the concept of ‘original sin’, not only because of all these mythical extensions, but because it’s a most pessimistic view of humanity, and I strongly disagree with the idea of teaching children that they are born evil. But as a means of psychological control over large sections of a population, it’s brilliant, and the Church exploited it for centuries.

Coming back to the discussion at hand, I don’t believe you can credibly replace a valid scientific theory with a myth. I’ve said elsewhere that science and religion can’t answer each other’s questions (I discuss this in my posting: Does the Universe have a Purpose?). Many people, on both sides of the argument, disagree with this. They claim that they absolutely overlap, but I counter that they only overlap if you insist on it. Science is the study of natural phenomena in all its manifestations. Religion, on the other hand, is an internal experience, and this creates a fundamental epistemological divide that people seem to overlook in this debate.

One of the fundamental criterion for the success of a scientific experiment is that it has to be replicable – it can’t be a one off. This means that anyone doing the same experiment under the same conditions should get the same result. Without this predictability science would be useless, both as an enterprise for discovery and as a fount for new technology. Having said that, it’s the unpredictable events, and the inexplicable ones, that lead to new theories, often dramatically, as expounded upon by Thomas Kuhn in his treatise on 'scientific revolutions'.

In the case of religion, however, any experience is unique to the person who has it. And this includes God, because God is an experience. The only manifestation of God that we know of is an internal one, albeit, it may feel like an external connection. And that experience is unique to that person. This means there are no religious truths, except at a very individual and intimate level. This creates a contradiction between personal religious experience and institutionalised religions that insist that everyone’s religious experiences must be the same, or of the same type (see my post on Religion). It’s when we attempt to rationalise these experiences, usually in the context of our cultural background, that we claim they are an ultimate truth. I contend that there is only one objective religious truth: we don’t know. Anything else is a dishonesty to the self, ‘mauvaise foi’, to quote Sartre.

People have a habit of confounding what they believe with what they know. When I studied philosophy, I was told that there are things that you know and things that you believe, and what you believe is contingent on what you know, but not the converse. (The Dalai Lama makes a similar point in his book on science and religion, The Universe in a Single Atom) When it comes to religion, I don’t expect anyone else to believe what I believe, because my experience is unique, and so is everyone else’s.

Footnote: The Dalai Lama was a good friend of, and heavily influenced by, the renowned physicist, David Bohm, who also worked on the Manhattan Project. David Bohm lived in exile in England following his refusal to testify in the McCarthy senate hearings. The Dalai Lama said it was something they had in common, ironically, by polar opposite political forces: one communist and one anti-communist. Late in his life, Bohm wrote a philosophical book called Wholeness and the Implicate Order. In it, he speculates (amongst other things) that quantum mechanics may be the manifestation of our universe being a 3 dimensional projection of a higher spacial dimensional world.

Addendum: I argue continuously that ignorance is the greatest enemy of the 21st Century. A view also shared by the Dalai Lama apparently, who said: 'ignorance is one of the 3 poisons of the mind.' Stephen J. Gould once made the point that this particular debate is very parochially American. The rest of the Western world appears to be less confused about the roles of religion and science, especially in education, and, for the most part, moved on from this debate generations ago. There is nothing wrong in admitting ignorance - in fact, it is to be commended - but passing on ignorance under the guise of education is inexcusable, and a serious backward step. At a very early stage in my education (adolescence), I realised that real knowledge comes from knowing how much one doesn't know.

Intelligent Design

Evolution is nature’s design methodology, so replacing evolution with something else called 'design' is a non sequitur if it includes evolution and is meaningless if it doesn’t. What does one mean by intelligent design? Its proponents say it’s the only explanation for the inherent complexity one sees in evolution. In fact, there are 3 possible interpretations of intelligent design; all of them inconsequential to science. Firstly, the official interpretation, given above, effectively says there are aspects of evolution we don’t understand, therefore we can only explain it by invoking a ‘Designer’, otherwise known as God. But any lack of understanding of evolution, is a clear result of our ignorance rather than a need to invoke Divine intervention. 

History shows that many of the gaps in our knowledge in the past were successfully uncovered in that past’s future. What’s more, history would suggest that there will always be gaps in our knowledge, so we should not be alarmed, nor afraid, to admit our ignorance of nature’s mysteries in the present, of which there are countless many. One of my favourite aphorisms is that only future generations can tell us how ignorant the current generation is. We always think, or claim, to know more than we do. The second interpretation is that we acknowledge evolutionary design as hugely successful, albeit imperfect, and that it was designed from the outset by God. Another way of looking at this, is that we acknowledge evolution as nature’s design methodology, and the only remaining argument is whether it’s blind or teleological. 

From a theological perspective, it can be argued to be part of God’s plan. But from a scientific perspective, bringing God into the picture explains nothing (see below). And this is why I always contend that science and religion are separate: they can’t answer each other’s questions. The third interpretation is that intelligent design is really a case of ‘wedge politics’: to introduce ‘creationism’ into American schools. Creationism is another argument altogether, which replaces evolution with a fairy tale scenario of spontaneous creation. Not only is this completely, and obviously, unscientific, but all evidence suggests that the universe is a dynamic entity that has never stopped creating. In other words, in nature, creation is a continuous process. 

In reference to the last paragraph, I would like to provide a further commentary based on an ABC radio interview I heard online in 2006. I would like to add an insight provided by Margaret Wertheim (author of Pythagoras’s Trousers and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace) in an interview on ABC Radio National (Australia). Wertheim made the pertinent point that both ID and ‘Creationism’ are the result of wedge politics to overcome the American Constitution’s requirement that religious teachings can’t be taught in State Schools. Therefore ‘believers’ attempt to introduce religion as science as an explicit Trojan horse. 

Her implied point is that, if the Constitution allowed religion to be discussed in State schools, the strategy and the controversy wouldn’t exist. This view is concordant with a quote in New Scientist, 9 September 2006, p.13 by Joseph Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Florida: ‘There’s a controversy in the United States because there is a lack of awareness of a thing called philosophy.’ This has been an argument I have used against proponents of ID ever since it raised its head. If people want to discuss this issue in an educational forum then it should be in a philosophy class, not a science class. People engage in this debate without being aware that they are discussing philosophy and not science. (See my March 08 posting, What is Philosophy?) 

A belief in God neither hinders nor supports science, unless you're a fundamentalist. Bringing God into science to explain natural phenomena is a 'science-stopper'. You've stopped doing science, because you are effectively saying: I don't understand this, so I will invoke God and stop any further scientific investigation. On the other side of the same coin, you cannot use science to prove or disprove the existence of God (though Richard Dawkins argues otherwise). 

There is no physical evidence of God; the only evidence is what people feel and experience internally, so it's outside the realms of science which studies natural phenomena only. (See my later posting on Religion.) See also my postings on Evolution and Does the Universe have a Purpose? For a more detailed argument on this same topic, see my later posting in Nov.07: Is evolution fact? Is creationism myth? On the question of 'complexity' and its role in describing life, Paul Davies provides an excellent exposition in his book, The Origin of Life.

Evolution

This is a letter I wrote to New Scientist recently, triggered by an article on 'Evolutionary design flaws' by Claire Ainsworth and Michael Le Page. It's not a critique of their article so much as a response. I need to admit that I consider New Scientist the best periodical on the planet. The other reference is to Paul Davies, whom, along with John Gribbin, are probably the best science writers I have read. Having said that, I would vote Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, The Best science book for mine. Not only is it the best exposition on physics, without equations, one can read, Penrose's philosophical perspective on mathematics is very close to mine, as is Davies' (refer The Mind of God). See my blog posting: Is mathematics invented or discovered? Reference: New Scientist, 11 August 2007, pp36-9. 

What’s amazing about evolution is not the design flaws, but that, as a process, it can design so well at all. Nature’s designs, the result of an interaction of genes, environment and biochemistry can design the most amazing attributes, that not just provide survival, but outperform most of human inventions – take the human brain or the liver. I once saw a BBC documentary on testing the diving performance of peregrine falcons and it is designed to within the absolute limits of what is physically possible. 

Evolution has no purpose, yet its strangest creation of all is imagination. It has evolved a species that can imagine a purpose where no purpose apparently exists. Einstein once said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. The universe eventually created the means to comprehend itself. Evolution evolved a species that could eventually examine and decipher evolution. What sort of paradox is that? I can’t help but find some agreement with Paul Davies’ thesis that he explores in The Goldilocks Enigma: 'it’s like the universe saw us coming' (quoting Freeman Dyson). 

For those who are sceptical, be aware that evolution is used as a design methodology in industrial applications as well, using computer programmes that combine the 'most successful' of design 'offspring' in an iterative process. This blog posting led me to write a companion blog on Intelligent Design. See also my later posting: Does the Universe have a Purpose? In a later posting I provide a detailed argument on this entire subject: Is evolution fact? Is creationism myth?