Kicking the Sacred Cow
Page 7
Second is the condition that most people would agree, that of "complexity," which is another way of describing a situation that has a low probability of occurring. Of all the states that the components of a watch might assume from being thrown in a pile or joined together haphazardly, if I see them put together in precisely the configuration necessary for the watch to work, I have no doubt that someone deliberately assembled them that way.
But complexity in itself isn't sufficient. This is the point that people whom I sometimes hear from—and others writing in books, who should know better—miss when they argue that the information content of a genome is nothing remarkable, since there's just as much information in a pile of sand. It's true that spelling out the position and orientation of every sand grain to construct a given pile of sand would require a phenomenal amount of information. In fact it would be a maximum for the number of components involved, for there's no way of expressing a set of random numbers in any shorter form such as a formula or the way a computer program of a few lines of code could be set up to generate, say, all the even numbers up to ten billion. But the only thing the numbers would be good for is to reconstruct that specific pile of sand. But the specificity means nothing, since for the purposes served by a pile of sand on the ground, one pile is as good as another and so you might as well save all the bother and use a shovel. But the same can't be said of the sequences of DNA base pairs in a genome.
Suppose someone comes across a line of Scrabble tiles reading METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, with spaces where indicated. Asked to bet money, nobody would wager that it was the result of the cat knocking them out of the box or wind gusting through the open window. Yet it's not the improbability of the arrangement that forces this conclusion. The sequence is precisely no more or no less probable than any other of twenty-eight letters and spaces. So what is it? The typical answer, after some chin stroking and a frown, is that it "means something." But what does that mean? This is what Dembski was possibly the first to recognize and spell out formally. What we apprehend is that the arrangement, while not only highly improbable, specifies a pattern that is intelligible by a convention separate from the mere physical description. Knowledge of this convention—Dembski calls this "side information"—enables the arrangement to be constructed independently of merely following physical directions. In this case the independent information is knowledge of the English language, Shakespeare, and awareness of a line spoken by Hamlet. Dembski's term for this third condition is "specificity," which leads to "specified complexity" as the defining feature of an intelligently contrived arrangement.
Specifying a pattern recognizable in English enables the message to be encoded independently of Scrabble tiles, for example into highly improbable configurations of ink on paper, electron impacts on a screen, magnetic dots on a VHS sound track, or modulations in a radio signal. Michael Behe's irreducible complexity is a special case of specified complexity, where the highly improbable organizations of the systems he describes specify independent patterns in the form of unique, intricate biological processes that the components involved, like the parts of a watch, could not perform if organized in any other way.
Philosophers' Fruit-Machine Fallacy
A process that Richard Dawkins terms "cumulative complexity" is frequently put forward as showing that Darwinian processes are perfectly capable of producing such results. An example is illustrated in the form of a contrived analogy given by the philosopher Elliott Sober that uses the same phrase above from Hamlet. 39 The letters are written on the edges of randomly spun disks, one occupying each position of the target sentence like the wheels of a slot machine. When a wheel happens to come up with its correct letter it is frozen thereafter until the sentence is complete. Ergo, it is claimed, pure randomness and selection can achieve the required result surprisingly rapidly. The idea apparently comes from Richard Dawkins and seems to have captured the imagination of philosophers such as Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett, who also promote it vigorously.
But their enthusiasm is hard to understand, for the model shows the opposite of what it purports to. Who is deciding which disks to freeze, and why? What the analogy demonstrates is an intelligence directing the assembly of a complex system toward a preordained target already constructed independently of the mechanics by other means—in this case the creativity of Shakespeare. Yet the whole aim of Darwinism was to produce a nonteleological explanation of life, i.e., one in which purpose played no role. Hence, either these advocates don't understand their own theory, or they fail to register that they've disproved their assumptions.
Testing for Intelligence
Given that little if anything in life is perfect, how confident could we be in a test using these principles to detect the signature of intelligence in nature? As with a medical test it can err in two ways: by giving a "false positive," indicating design when there isn't any, or a "false negative," by failing to detect design when it was actually present.
We live with false negatives all the time. When the information available is simply insufficient to decide—a rock balanced precariously on another; a couple of Scrabble tiles that happen to spell IT or SO—our tendency is to favor chance, since the improbabilities are not so high as to rule it out, but we're sometimes wrong. Such instances are specific, yes, but not complex enough to prove design. Intelligence can also mimic natural processes, causing us to let pass as meaningless something encrypted in an unrecognized code or to accept as an accident what had been set up to appear as such when in fact it was arson or a murder. Although we have entire professions devoted to detecting such false negatives, such as police detectives, forensic scientists, and insurance claim investigators, we can get by with imperfection.
False positives are another thing entirely. A test that can discern design where there is none is like reading information into entrails, tea leaves, or flights of birds that isn't there, which makes the test totally useless. Hence, a useful test needs to be heavily biased toward making false negatives, rejecting everything where there's the slightest doubt and claiming a positive only when the evidence is overwhelming. Thinking of it as a net, we'd rather it let any number of false negatives slip through. But if it catches something, we want to be sure that it's a real positive. How sure can we be?
What the criterion of specified complexity is saying is that once the improbabilities of a situation become too vast (2728 possible combinations of the Scrabble example above), and the specification too tight (one line from Hamlet), chance is eliminated as a plausible cause, and design is indicated. Just where is the cutoff where chance becomes unacceptable? The French mathematician Emile Borel proposed 10-50 as a universal probability bound below which chance could be precluded—in other words a specified event as improbable as this could not be attributed to chance. 40 This is equivalent to saying it can be expressed in 166 bits of information. How so? Well, Imagine a binary decision tree, where the option at each branch point is to go left or right. The first choice can be designated by "0" or "1," which is another way of saying it encodes one bit of information. Since each branch leads to a similar decision point, the number of branches at the next level will be four, encoded by two bits: 00, 01, 10, and 11. By the time the tree gets to 166 levels, it will have sprouted 1050 branches. The information to specify the path from the starting point to any one of the terminal points increases by one bit for each decision and hence can be expressed as a binary number of 166 bits.
The criterion that Dembski develops applies a bound of 10-150. That's 100 zeros more stringent than the limit beyond which Borel said chance can be discounted. This translates into 500 bits of information. 41 According to Dembski's criterion, specified information of greater than 500 bits cannot be considered as having come about via chance processes. The bacterial cilium that Behe presents as one of his cases of irreducible complexity is a whiplike rotary paddle used for propulsion, driven by an intricate molecular machine that includes an acid-powered engine, stator housing, O-rings, bushings, and a dri
ve shaft, and is built from over 40 interacting proteins, every one of them essential. Its complex specified information is well above 500 bits. So are those of all the other cases Behe gives. And we've already come across improbabilities that are way beyond this bound, such as Fred Hoyle's figure for the likelihood of the full complement of human proteins arising through chance, or Lee Spetner's for speciation and convergence. Many other examples could be cited.
But those who commit a priori to a philosophy that says the universe consists of nothing but matter and motion must accept evolution. The worldview that they have stated as fact leaves no alternative. Things like fossils, genetics, probabilities, and complexity have no real bearing apart from a need for being somehow interpreted to fit, because the issue has already been decided independently of any evidence.
So, to repeat what we said above, either mindless, inanimate matter has the capacity to organize itself purposelessly into the things we've been talking about, or some kind of intelligence caused it to be organized. Now let's go back to the question posed right at the beginning. Based on what we see today, which belief system constrains permissible answers only to those permitted by a prespecified dogma, and which simply follows the evidence, without prejudice, to wherever it seems to be leading? Which, in other words, is the religion, and which is the science?
Some defenders of the Darwinist view evade the issue by defining science as the study of naturalistic, materialistic phenomena and the search for answers to all things only in those terms. But what if the simple reality is that some questions don't have answers in those terms? One response is that science could only be enriched by abandoning that restrictive philosophy and opening its horizons in the way the spirit of free inquiry was supposed to. The alternative could be unfortunate. For in taking such a position, science could end up excluding itself from what could well be some of the most important questions confronting us.
Section Notes
1 Himmelfarb, 1962
2 Dennett, 1995, p. 46
3 New York Times, April 9, 1989, Sec 7, p. 34
4 Dennett, 1995, pp. 515–516
5 Hogan, 1977
6 Hogan, 1988
7 Darwin, 1859, p.184
8 The Origin of Species, 1872, 6th edition, John Murry,
London, p. 468
9 The Origin of Species, 1872, 6th edition, John Murray,
London, p. 309
10 Sunderland, 1998
11 Denton, 1985, p. 190
12 Johnson, Phillip, 1991, p.51
13 Wells, 2000, Chapter 6
14 Sunderland, 1998, p. 86
15 Johnson, 1991, p. 79
16 See, for example, Sunderland, 1998, p. 94
17 Stanley, 1979, p. 39
18 Dawkins, 1986, p. 1
19 Macbeth, 1971, p. 5
20 According to Simpson, "anything tending to produce
systematic, heritable change in populations between one
generation and the next." Quoted in Macbeth, 1971, p. 48
21 Macbeth, 1971, p. 48
22 See Wells, 2000, Chapter 7 for more details and a
discussion on the implications of needing to falsify
textbooks when we're assured that the evidence for
evolution is "overwhelming." A full account of the story
is available online at the Nature Institute,
http://www.netfuture.org/ni/misc/pub/moth.html
23 Spetner, 1997, p. 63
24 Judson, 1979, p. 217
25 Denton, 1985, pp. 328–29
26 Spetner, 1997, p. 92
27 Hoyle, 1983, pp. 12–17
28 Sunderland, 1996, p. 152
29 Hoyle, 1983, Chapter 5
30 For examples of reviews see Ho and Saunders, 1979; Cook, 1977; Rosen and Buth, 1980
31 Original research reported in Hall, 1982
32 See Spetner, 1997, Chapter 7 for more examples
33 Spetner, 1997, p. 204
34 Simpson, 1951, p. 173
35 Behe, 1996
36 Behe, 1996, p. 20
37 Behe, 1996. p. 187
38 Dembski 1998, 1999, 2002
39 Sober, 1993
40 Borel, 1962, p. 28
41 Dembski, 1998, Section 6.5
TWO
Of Bangs and Braids Cosmology's Mathematical Abstractions
It's impossible that the Big Bang is wrong.
—Joseph Silk, astrophysicist
Can we count on conventional science always choosing the incorrect alternative between two possibilities? I would vote yes, because the important problems usually require a change in paradigm, which is forbidden to conventional science.
—Halton Arp, observational astronomer
Mathematical Worlds—
and This Other One
Mathematics is purely deductive. When something is said to be mathematically "proved," it means that the conclusion follows rigorously and necessarily from the axioms. Of itself, a mathematical system can't show anything as being "true" in the sense of describing the real world. All the shelves of volumes serve simply to make explicit what was contained in the assumptions. If some mathematical procedures happen to approximate the behavior of certain real-world phenomena over certain ranges sufficiently closely to allow useful predictions to be made, then obviously that can be of immense benefit in gaining a better understanding of the world and applying that knowledge to practical ends. But the only measure of if, and if so to what degree, a mathematical process does in fact describe reality can be actual observation. Reality is in no way obligated to mimic formal systems of symbol manipulation devised by humans.
Cosmologies as Mirrors
Advocates of this or that political philosophy will sometimes point to a selected example of animal behavior as a "natural" model that is supposed to tell us something about humans—even if their rivals come up with a different model exemplifying the opposite. I've never understood why people take much notice of things like this. Whether some kinds of ape are social and "democratic," while others are hierarchical and "authoritarian" has to do with apes, and that's all. It's not relevant to the organizing of human societies. In a similar kind of way, the prevailing cosmological models adopted by societies throughout history—the kind of universe they believe they live in, and how it originated—tend to mirror the political, social, and religious fashion of the times.
Universes in which gods judged the affairs of humans were purpose-built and had beginnings. Hence, the Greek Olympians with their creation epics and thunderbolts, and mankind cast in a tragedy role, heroic only in powers to endure whatever fate inflicted. These also tend to be times of stagnation or decline, when the cosmos too is seen as running downhill from a state of initial perfection toward ruin that humans are powerless to avert. Redemption is earned by appeasing the supernatural in such forms as the God of Genesis and of the Christendom that held sway over Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the stirring of the Renaissance.
But in times of growth and confidence in human ability to build better tomorrows, the universe too evolves of itself, by its own internal powers of self-organization and improvement. Thoughts turn away from afterlives and retribution, and to things of the here and now, and the material. The gods, if they exist at all, are at best remote, preoccupied with their own concerns, and the cosmos is conceived as having existed indefinitely, affording time for all the variety and complexity of form to have come about through the operation of unguided natural forces. Thus, with Rome ruling over the known world, Lucretius expounded the atomism of Epicurus, in which accidental configurations of matter generated all of sensible physical reality and the diversity of living things. A millennium later, effectively the same philosophy reappeared in modern guise as the infinite machine set up by Newton and Laplace to turn the epochal wheels for Lyell and Darwin. True, Newton maintained a religious faith that he tried to reconcile with the emerging scientific outlook; but the cosmos that he discovered had no real need of a creator, and God was reduced
to a kind of caretaker on the payroll, intervening occasionally to tweak perturbed orbits and keep the Grand Plan on track as it unfolded.
Even that token to tradition faded, and by the end of the nineteeth century, with Victorian exultation of unlimited Progress at its zenith, the reductionist goal of understanding all phenomena from the origin of life to the motions of planets in terms of the mechanical operations of natural processes seemed about complete. This was when Lord Kelvin declared that the mission of science was as good as accomplished, and the only work remaining was to determine the basic constants to a few more decimal places of accuracy.
That world and its vision self-destructed in the trenches of 1914–18. From the aftermath emerged a world of political disillusionment, roller-coaster economics, and shattered faith in human nature. Mankind and the universe, it seemed, were in need of some external help again.
Matters of Gravity: Relativity's Universes
In 1917, two years after developing the general relativity theory (GRT), Albert Einstein formulated a concept of a finite, static universe, into which he introduced the purely hypothetical quantity that he termed the "cosmological constant," a repulsive force increasing with the distance between two objects in the way that the centrifugal force in a rotating body increases with radius. This was necessary to prevent a static universe from collapsing under its own gravitation. (Isaac Newton was aware of the problem and proposed an infinite universe for that reason.) But the solution was unstable, in that the slightest expansion would increase the repulsive force and decrease gravity, resulting in runaway expansion, while conversely the slightest contraction would lead to total collapse.