The Pointless Universe
Sean Carroll
Theoretical physicist, Caltech; author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
The world consists of things, which obey rules. If you keep asking “why” questions about what happens in the universe, you ultimately reach the answer “because of the state of the universe and the laws of nature.”
This isn’t an obvious way for people to think. Looking at the universe through our anthropocentric eyes, we can’t help but view things in terms of causes, purposes, and natural ways of being. In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle saw the world teleologically—rain falls because water wants to be lower than air; animals (and slaves) are naturally subservient to human citizens.
From the start, there were skeptics. Democritus and Lucretius were early naturalists who urged us to think in terms of matter obeying rules rather than chasing final causes and serving underlying purposes. But it wasn’t until our understanding of physics was advanced by thinkers such as Avicenna, Galileo, and Newton that it became reasonable to conceive of the universe evolving under its own power, free of guidance and support from anything beyond itself.
Theologians sometimes invoke “sustaining the world” as a function of God. But we know better; the world doesn’t need to be sustained, it can simply be. Pierre-Simon Laplace articulated the very specific kind of rule that the world obeys: If we specify the complete state of the universe (or any isolated part of it) at some particular instant, the laws of physics tell us what its state will be at the very next moment. Applying those laws again, we can figure out what it will be a moment later. And so on, until (in principle, obviously) we can build up a complete history of the universe. This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the iron grip of an unbreakable pattern.
This view of the processes at the heart of the physical world has important consequences for how we come to terms with the social world. Human beings like to insist that there are reasons why things happen. The death of a child, the crash of an airplane, or a random shooting must be explained in terms of the workings of a hidden plan. When Pat Robertson suggested that Hurricane Katrina was caused in part by God’s anger at America’s failing morals, he was attempting to provide an explanatory context for a seemingly inexplicable event.
Nature teaches us otherwise. Things happen because the laws of nature say they will—because they are the consequences of the state of the universe and the path of its evolution. Life on Earth doesn’t arise in fulfillment of a grand scheme but as a by-product of the increase of entropy in an environment very far from equilibrium. Our impressive brains don’t develop because life is guided toward greater levels of complexity and intelligence but from the mechanical interactions between genes, organisms, and their surroundings.
None of which is to say that life is devoid of purpose and meaning. Only that these are things we create, not things we discover out there in the fundamental architecture of the world. The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it’s up to us to make sense of it and give it value.
The Copernican Principle
Samuel Arbesman
Applied mathematician; postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School; affiliate, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
The scientist Nicolaus Copernicus recognized that Earth is not in any particularly privileged position in the solar system. This elegant fact can be extended to encompass a powerful idea, known as the Copernican Principle, which holds that we are not in a special or favorable place of any sort. By looking at the world in light of this principle, we can overcome certain preconceptions about ourselves and reexamine our relationship with the universe.
The Copernican Principle can be used in the traditional spatial sense, providing awareness of our sun’s mediocre place in the suburbs of our galaxy and our galaxy’s unremarkable place in the universe. And the Copernican Principle helps guide our understanding of the expanding universe, allowing us to see that anywhere in the cosmos one would perceive other galaxies moving away at rapid speeds, just as we see here on Earth. We are not anywhere special.
The Copernican Principle has also been extended to our temporal position by astrophysicist J. Richard Gott to help provide estimates for lifetimes of events, independent of additional information. As Gott elaborated, other than the fact that we are intelligent observers, there is no reason to believe we are in any way specially located in time. The Copernican Principle allows us to quantify our uncertainty and recognize that we are often neither at the beginning of things nor at the end. It allowed Gott to estimate correctly when the Berlin Wall would fall and has even provided meaningful numbers on the survival of humanity.
This principle can even anchor our location within the many orders of magnitude of our world: We are far smaller than most of the cosmos, far larger than most chemistry, far slower than much that occurs at subatomic scales, and far faster than geological and evolutionary processes. This principle leads us to study the successively larger and smaller orders of magnitude of our world, because we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.
And yet despite this regimented approach to our mediocrity, we need not despair: As far as we know, we’re the only species that recognizes its place in the universe. The paradox of the Copernican Principle is that by properly understanding our place, even if it be humbling, we can only then truly understand our particular circumstances. And when we do, we don’t seem so insignificant after all.
We Are Not Alone in the Universe
J. Craig Venter
Genome scientist; founder and president, J. Craig Venter Institute; author, A Life Decoded
I cannot imagine any single discovery that would have more impact on humanity than the discovery of life outside our solar system. There is a humancentric, Earthcentric view of life that permeates most cultural and societal thinking. Finding that there are multiple, perhaps millions, of origins of life and that life is ubiquitous throughout the universe will profoundly affect every human.
We live on a microbial planet. There are 1 million microbial cells per cubic centimeter of water in our oceans, lakes, and rivers; deep within the Earth’s crust; and throughout our atmosphere. We have more than 100 trillion microbes on and in each of us. We have microbes that can withstand millions of rads of ionizing radiation or acids and bases so strong they would dissolve our skin. Microbes grow in ice, and microbes grow and thrive at temperatures exceeding 100 Cº. We have life that lives on carbon dioxide, on methane, on sulfur, on sugar. We have sent trillions of bacteria into space over the last few billion years, and we have long exchanged material with Mars, so it would be very surprising if we do not find evidence of microbial life in our solar system, particularly on Mars.
The recent discoveries by Dimitar Sasselov and colleagues of numerous Earth and super-Earth-like planets outside our solar system, including water worlds, greatly increases the probability of finding life. Sasselov estimates that there are approximately a hundred thousand Earths and super-Earths within our own galaxy. The universe is young, so wherever we find microbial life, there will be intelligent life in the future.
Expanding our scientific reach farther into the skies will change us forever.
Microbes Run the World
Stewart Brand
Founder, Whole Earth Catalog; cofounder, the WELL; cofounder, Global Business Network; author, Whole Earth Discipline
“Microbes run the world.” That opening sentence of the National Research Council’s The New Science of Metagenomics sounds reveille for a new way of understanding biology and maybe of understanding society as well.
The breakthrough was the shotgun sequencing of DNA, the same technology that gave us the human genome years ahead of schedule. Starting in 2003, Craig Venter and others began sequencing large populat
ions of bacteria. The thousands of new genes they found (double the total previously discovered) showed what proteins the genes would generate and therefore what function they had, and that began to reveal what the teeming bacteria were really up to. This “meta”-genomics revolutionized microbiology, and that revolution will reverberate through the rest of biology for decades.
Microbes make up 80 percent of all biomass, says microbiologist Carl Woese. In one-fifth of a teaspoon of seawater, there are a million bacteria (and 10 million viruses), Craig Venter says, adding, “If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet. This is the planet of the bacteria.” That means that most of the planet’s living metabolism is microbial. When James Lovelock was trying to figure out where the gases come from that make the Earth’s atmosphere such an artifact of life (the Gaia hypothesis), it was microbiologist Lynn Margulis who had the answer for him. Microbes run our atmosphere. They also run much of our body. The human microbiome in our gut, mouth, skin, and elsewhere, harbors three thousand kinds of bacteria with 3 million distinct genes. (Our own cells struggle by on only eighteen thousand genes or so.) New research is showing that our microbes-on-board drive our immune systems and important parts of our digestion.
Microbial evolution, which has been going on for more than 3.6 billion years, is profoundly different from what we think of as standard Darwinian evolution, where genes have to pass down generations to work slowly through the selection filter. Bacteria swap genes promiscuously within generations. They have three different mechanisms for this “horizontal gene transfer” among wildly different kinds of bacteria, and thus they evolve constantly and rapidly. Since they pass the opportunistically acquired genes on to their offspring, what they do on an hourly basis looks suspiciously Lamarckian—the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Such routinely transgenic microbes show that there’s nothing new, special, or dangerous about engineered GM crops. Field biologists are realizing that the biosphere is looking like what some are calling a pangenome, an interconnected network of continuously circulated genes that is a superset of all the genes in all the strains of a species that form. Bioengineers in the new field of synthetic biology are working directly with the conveniently fungible genes of microbes.
This biotech century will be microbe-enhanced and maybe microbe-inspired. Social Darwinism turned out to be a bankrupt idea. The term “cultural evolution” never meant much, because the fluidity of memes and influences in society bears no relation to the turgid conservatism of standard Darwinian evolution. But “social microbialism” might mean something as we continue to explore the fluidity of traits and the vast ingenuity of mechanisms among microbes—quorum sensing, biofilms, metabolic bucket brigades, “lifestyle genes,” and the like. Confronting a difficult problem, we might fruitfully ask, “What would a microbe do?”
The Double-Blind Control Experiment
Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary zoologist, University of Oxford; author, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Not all concepts wielded by professional scientists would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit. We are here not looking for tools with which research scientists might benefit their science. We are looking for tools to help nonscientists understand science better and equip them to make better judgments throughout their lives.
Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts, three-quarters believe in angels, a third believe in astrology, three-quarters believe in hell? Why do a quarter of all Americans believe that the president of the United States was born outside the country and is therefore ineligible to be president? Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think the universe began after the domestication of the dog?
Let’s not give the defeatist answer and blame it all on stupidity. That’s probably part of the story, but let’s be optimistic and concentrate on something remediable: lack of training in how to think critically and how to discount personal opinion, prejudice, and anecdote in favor of evidence. I believe that the double-blind control experiment does double duty. It is more than just an excellent research tool. It also has educational, didactic value in teaching people how to think critically. My thesis is that you needn’t actually do double-blind control experiments in order to experience an improvement in your cognitive toolkit. You need only understand the principle, grasp why it is necessary, and revel in its elegance.
If all schools taught their pupils how to do a double-blind control experiment, our cognitive toolkits would be improved in the following ways:
We would learn not to generalize from anecdotes.
We would learn how to assess the likelihood that an apparently important effect might have happened by chance alone.
We would learn how extremely difficult it is to eliminate subjective bias, and that subjective bias does not imply dishonesty or venality of any kind. This lesson goes deeper. It has the salutary effect of undermining respect for authority and respect for personal opinion.
We would learn not to be seduced by homeopaths and other quacks and charlatans, who would consequently be put out of business.
We would learn critical and skeptical habits of thought more generally, which not only would improve our cognitive toolkit but might save the world.
Promoting a Scientific Lifestyle
Max Tegmark
Physicist, MIT; researcher, Precision Cosmology; scientific director, Foundational Questions Institute
I think the scientific concept that would most improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit is “scientific concept.”
Despite spectacular success in research, our global scientific community has been nothing short of a spectacular failure when it comes to educating the public. Haitians burned twelve “witches” in 2010. In the United States, recent polls show that 39 percent consider astrology scientific and 40 percent believe that our human species is less than ten thousand years old. If everyone understood the concept of “scientific concept,” these percentages would be zero. Moreover, the world would be a better place, since people with a scientific lifestyle, basing their decisions on correct information, maximize their chances of success. By making rational buying and voting decisions, they also strengthen the scientific approach to decision making in companies, organizations, and governments.
Why have we scientists failed so miserably? I think the answers lie mainly in psychology, sociology, and economics.
A scientific lifestyle requires a scientific approach to both gathering information and using information, and both have their pitfalls. You’re clearly more likely to make the right choice if you’re aware of the full spectrum of arguments before making your mind up, yet there are many reasons why people don’t get such complete information. Many lack access to it (3 percent of Afghans have access to the Internet, and in a 2010 poll 92 percent didn’t know about the 9/11 attacks). Many are too swamped with obligations and distractions to seek it. Many seek information only from sources that confirm their preconceptions. Even for those who are online and uncensored, the most valuable information can be hard to find, buried in an unscientific media avalanche.
Then there’s what we do with the information we have. The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as “strong.” The great physicist Richard Feynman hailed “distrust of experts” as a cornerstone of science, yet herd mentality and blind faith in authority figures is widespread. Logic forms the basis of scientific reasoning, yet wishful thinking, irrational fears, and other cognitive biases often dominate decisions.
What can we do to promote a scientific lifestyle?
The obvious answer is to improve education. In some countries, even the most rudimentary education would be a major improvement (less than half of all Pakistanis can read). By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, edu
cation would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion.
However, even countries that offer everybody education can make major improvements. All too often, schools resemble museums, reflecting the past rather than shaping the future. The curriculum should shift from one watered down by consensus and lobbying to skills our century needs, for promoting relationships, health, contraception, time management, and critical thinking, and recognizing propaganda. For youngsters, learning a foreign language and typing should trump long division and writing cursive. In the Internet age, my own role as a classroom teacher has changed. I’m no longer needed as a conduit of information, which my students can simply download on their own; rather, my key role is inspiring a scientific lifestyle, curiosity, and the desire to learn.
Now let’s get to the most interesting question: How can we really make a scientific lifestyle take root and flourish?
Reasonable people have been making similar arguments for better education since long before I was in diapers, yet instead of improving, education and adherence to a scientific lifestyle are arguably deteriorating in many countries, including the United States. Why? Clearly because there are powerful forces pushing in the opposite direction, and they are pushing more effectively. Corporations concerned that a better understanding of certain scientific issues would harm their profits have an incentive to muddy the waters, as do fringe religious groups concerned that questioning their pseudoscientific claims would erode their power.
So what can we do? The first thing we scientists need to do is get off our high horses, admit that our persuasive strategies have failed, and develop a better strategy. We have the advantage of having the better arguments, but the antiscientific coalition has the advantage of better funding.
This Will Make You Smarter Page 4