Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

by Sagan, Dorion

  Combining the ethical precept that we are to be judged by what we do, not what we say, and the materialistic perspective of modern science that brackets intentions, looks for physical causes, and weighs material evidence, I did a Vonnegutian calculation of my own. I figured that the average human being produces roughly thirteen tons of shit over a lifetime. That’s going too far no doubt, but it could be used to argue, since 99.7 percent of “our” total weight is poop, that that is our purpose.

  I am aware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that just because something happens after something else does not mean that it was caused by it. But it is not that simple in a cyclical system, which we are. The odorless methane and smellier hydrocarbons of flatulence are thermodynamic waste gases. They are produced by cyclical thermodynamic systems during their ongoing operations. These operations, as rarefied and complex as they may have become, continue to perform the basic telic task of the second law. What is humorous about farting is not necessarily its inessentiality as is its status as a sign of our essential nature as thermodynamic systems. All of the living ones produce waste gases. Using solar and chemical energy, bacteria cycle these gases globally. We do not. We are a very partial, incomplete part of this system, and farting secretly alerts us to this outside, our insufficiency within the whole. We exclude what we exclude, but it comes back as a wake-up call: We are missing something, the essence of our nature, which is to reduce gradients and preserve ourselves as gradient-reducing beings. Our telonic nature comes before all discrete tasks. So I would say that Vonnegut, though he was joking, was basically right. We are here to fart around. It is funny because it’s true.

  IN THE BIOLOGIST’S MISTRESS the novelist Tori Alexander writes of how, having converted to atheism in college and having become an avid Darwinist, she would cross out teleological language in her textbooks; for example, she would change “Birds have feathers in order to keep them warm” to “Birds have feathers that happen to keep them warm.”4 Replacing purpose with chance in this way removed illicit, outmoded connotations of a hands-on deity unscientifically meddling with lawful nature. Since she grew up in the Bible Belt, she considered rooting out purpose, associated with religious superstition, to be part of her education. Later, however, when she became a novelist, she realized that purposefulness is fundamental to living systems, to the structure of art forms as well as organisms. Artists and organisms incorporate random factors, but they do not do so randomly, but purposefully. Such purposefulness, however, is not theological.

  As Stanley N. Salthe, a self-described “apostate from Darwinian theory [who has] described it as part of modernism’s origination myth,”5 points out, thermodynamics provides a level of final causation that is consistent with a natural law-governed cosmos, a source of purpose that is neither theistic nor evolutionary. Fidgeting such as tapping your foot serves no higher purpose but adds to gradient reduction. Lightning reduces an electrical energy gradient, thought the redox gradient of the blood sugar in your brain. But these are not the higher forms of purpose we usually associate with a plotting God. They are more like necessary activities in a universe with a cosmic energy mandate. Life shares traits with nonliving systems that maintain complexity and grow to accommodate energy’s tendency to spread. It is a natural form of energy transformation in a thermodynamic universe.

  Still, however, the fastest ones—and here we may consider ourselves, in our cosmic context as an energy-finding, energy-degrading system—may compromise their own effectiveness. As an energy theorist and pioneer ecologist, the mathematical polymath and insurance adjuster Alfred Lotka suggested, life seems more to optimize than maximize energy use. In a sort of trial run for what Sigmund Freud would later describe as the reality principle, life has learned, no doubt the hard way, to moderate the taste for resource destruction that nonetheless fuels it.

  Entropy production is something that happens anyway—it is codified as the second law of thermodynamics—but complex systems are better at it. They do it more efficiently—more quickly, more long lastingly, or both. From a view that the ghost of Vonnegut may share, there is no divine purpose in the sense of consecrating human beings as a “chosen” species. But there is, as his evolutionary thought experiment, Galapagos, shows, a little purpose, one that, at least in Vonnegut’s capable narrative, both we and our imaginary progeny share. From this admittedly evolutionarily reductionistic perspective, the big difference between us and them is that the big-brained species grew too fast and thus blew its chance, whereas the better swimmers kept things within limits, not becoming too big for their ecological britches. Along with Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, “Know yourself,” Μηδὲν ἄγαν—“Nothing in excess”—was inscribed in gold at the Oracle of Delphi, near the base of Mount Parnassus in the Valley of Phocis, near a rock called Omphalos, regarded as the center of wisdom in the classical world.

  IF YOU’VE EVER SEEN the Milton Bradley game of Mousetrap, you’ve seen how an initial impetus can lead to a cascade: like a line of dominoes, an initial impetus causes a chain reaction, leading to follow-on actions until the energy is dissipated. Each domino’s fall is caused by the previous domino. Life is different in that the dominoes never stop falling. Life’s trick has been to catch energy and not just send it spinning in a captivating series of Mousetrap-like secondary reactions but—beautifully, amazingly, stupendously—to store some of the energy that it takes in and then, later, exploit that stored inner energy to go out and find another finger (energy source) to push the first domino.

  The idea of purpose is usually avoided in science. It seems to imply a mystic reverse causation that cannot be scientific. The reticence is that effects in the material world flow from a prior cause to a future event, while effects in the realm of purpose, which seem to belong only to the realm of the mind, explain present activities in terms of goals not yet achieved. We don’t mind attributing such behavior to us, because that’s how it feels, but we are stingy to see its existence in others, even the “higher” animals (e.g., similar to us). But the truth is, purposive behavior is everywhere in nature and doesn’t require brains. An amoeba swims toward nutrients, a bacterium toward sulfate or oxygen. Sunflowers follow the sun.

  A cue ball slamming into an eight ball sends it flying, mechanical cause and effect. But your hand reaching for a key is a different story. The key was lifted because it was your purpose to get it to open the door. This is a very different kind of operation, outside the usual scientific realm of immediate cause and effect. Indeed, many people would think that intention, in the form of wanting something for the future, then achieving it through an act of will, is something that happens only to people and some animals, and God.

  The truth is, we act as loops in which past and future are intimately conjoined. We know from our experience the familiar feeling of desiring something and doing it, satisfying a drive. There is nothing mystical about such causation in life.

  In Mousetrap, a ball bearing, sent rolling, zigzags down a blue ramp into a red slide. There it trips a yellow lever. Which releases another ball bearing that falls through a miniature plastic bathtub onto a toy blue diving board. This seesaws a green plastic diver into a yellow cup. The cup, vibrating, jostles a yellow pole. Which in turn releases a red mesh bell—the final goal of the whimsical contraption—the fall of the mousetrap.

  Why do we find this series of connected actions so intriguing—spellbinding in a way similar to a child arranging and then watching a Slinky curl down the stairs? The reason is that it is kinetically familiar. It is a setup in which a series of actions come together surprisingly to give unity to mechanical behaviors. Energy is gathered and transformed, and its release triggers another phase in an unfolding routine.

  Life’s animation is similar. It is as serendipitous as the stair-walking Slinky, as intricately connected as the colorful toys of Mousetrap. Like them, life stores and redeploys energy in a series of connected actions.

  But the “goal” of life appears not to be to catch a plas
tic mouse or arrive at the foot of the stairs. Life is like a Slinky, but its parts are connected chemically rather than mechanically, and the final result is not a modulated drop down a discrete number of stairs but continuous energy expenditure via structures that release energy to build new, similar structures.

  You are one of these structures.

  PART IV

  CLOSING THE OPEN CIRCUIT

  CHAPTER 11

  PRIESTS OF THE MODERN AGE

  Scientific Revolutions and the Kook–Critic Continuum, Being a Play of Crackpots, Skeptics, Conformists, and the Curious

  One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.

  —Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness

  People nowadays no longer believe in originality of single people and small groups. Everybody believes in the big group and in the joint power. We have a Maoism in science. Let flowers grow. It’s no longer likely to happen. Everybody believes the ideology that it’s no longer possible to be a Poincaré or an Einstein. But we also live in the Age of everybody believing in the Big Bang, which is the greatest nonsense of all, if my co-workers are right. And yet it’s impossible to get rid of it. We live in a dogmatic age. People want to derive certainty from common opinions. They don’t believe it’s possible to find something really original. It’s a pity for our young people. They’re not allowed to believe in themselves anymore.

  —Otto Rössler, “Interview: Professor Otto Rössler Talks on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)”

  The moral of the tale is the power of reason, its decisive influence on the life of humanity. The great conquerors from Caesar to Napoleon influenced profoundly the lives of subsequent generations. But the total effect of this influence shrinks to insignificance, if compared to the entire transformation of human habits and human mentality produced by the long line of men of thought from Thales to the present day, men individually powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the world.

  —Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

  WALLS OF ORTHODOXY—AND THE REBELS WHO BREAK THROUGH THEM

  “Scientists are the priests of the modern age, and they must be watched very closely,” wrote Samuel Butler at the end of the nineteenth century. Butler had converted to an evolutionary view after he read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Since Butler had freed himself, with great difficulty, from his father’s religious doctrine and its ambience, Victorian hypocrisy, he refused subjugation of his critical, curious mind to yet a new authority.

  If Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake and Galileo Galilei put under house arrest for following their open minds and engaging the evidence—threatening the ecclesiastical arbiters of truth in the form of religious doctrines—so the rise of science as a thought-style threatened to erect a new repressive social structure, one ironically created by science’s institutionalization of open-mindedness and error correction in the form of the scientific method. Butler’s comments were provoked both by his great intellectual excitement upon reading The Origin of Species—he was convinced—and his disenchantment (after reading some of the predecessors Darwin himself had acknowledged) with Darwin’s too-mechanical presentation. In treating organisms as objects created by natural selection presented as a Newtonian-like law, Darwin had removed one of the most important characteristics of organisms themselves from his description: their agency and autonomy, their self-originating ability to alter themselves and their environment. The New Zealand–based Butler became further disenchanted when he tried to contact his former neighbor and was given the cold shoulder by both Darwin and Thomas Huxley, his articulate champion and “bulldog.” Although Butler wasn’t a scientist, he accused Darwin of taking the life out of biology, and stonewalling dissent as a new authoritarian social structure began to arise.

  Butler’s statement of scientists as priests may surprise some, especially in the United States where religion and science, especially evolutionary biology, are often seen to be at each other’s throats. But his comment was sociological. As an iconoclastic freethinker who had resisted his family’s attempts to push him into the clergy, who had stopped saying prayers, and who had fearlessly explored Victorian society’s hypocrisies and pretensions, Butler was acutely aware religion had no monopoly on dogma. The closing of minds around received wisdom, even ideas that were rebellious in their own days, seemed a natural process, like hardening of the arteries. Dogma was mercenary, and already metastasizing to the culture founded by those who stood up to religion. It is no coincidence that, as Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, both Galileo and Darwin published important scientific treatises in a popularly accessible form. Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems made the case for heliocentrism in a popular tract that put words in the mouth of a Galilean detractor named Simplicio, and was published in Italian, the language of the common people, at a time when serious scientific pronouncements were as a matter of course published in Latin, the cultured, would-be universal language of both science and the church. In 1633, based on this popular science book, Galileo was placed under “grave suspicion of heresy.” Not only was the Dialogue placed on the Index of Forbidden Books (and not taken off until 1835), but a secret edict agreed to ban anything else Galileo had written or would write.

  Although not as flamboyantly, Darwin also stood up to the church. He had gathered an immense amount of material that refuted the church’s contention that species were created once and for all. Darwin could have aimed his book at specialists but instead published it in common language as a trade book. In both cases, Gould argued, the main ideas—for Darwin, evolution by natural selection, for Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus’s counterintuitive Sun-centered solar system—were too important to be adjudicated by ossified institutions of knowledge. Sometimes science is too important to be left to scientists: here we see two world-class scientists implicitly agreeing that the public must directly be informed, that they have the right to vet the ideas themselves. Darwin was more cagey than Galileo—he mentioned a Creator at the end of The Origin1—and censured Galileo was more politically savvy (or cautious) than poor Bruno, but both chipped away at the absolute authority of the church, assaulting faith with facts and introducing falsifiability in place of infallibility. And as the star of science, in the hands of such brave and savvy men, rose, so did their own authority and that of science as an institution. Today of course, for many if not most people in the world, science is granted greater powers to peer into the truth of things than religion, which skeptics and atheists regard as an atavism, its texts preserving contradictory doctrines, superstitions, and knowledge current thousands of years ago that has been buttressed by faith and repetition rather than being put to the test.

  Still, belief systems and the authority of those who propound them are irreducibly human. As an institution, science, like religion, is subject to the quirks of hierarchical social relationships. Laypeople—we retain the term from those not in the clergy—must trust in the seemingly far more knowledgeable pronouncements of those in the knowledge business. (Science comes from scientia, Latin for “knowledge.”)

  One might argue that the more radical a new theory is, the less likely it is to be accepted by established authority and the more likely it is to offend those who’ve invested their careers in a threatened scenario. This essentially conservative dynamic stymies pseudoscience and crackpottery but also presents hurdles for those with more correct, or useful, ideas who come up against the prevailing authoritarian intellectual power structures. More daring than Darwin, Galileo himself was skeptical of the groupthink not only of religionists but of scientists themselves, who were by no means immune to ignoring evidence and reining in originality and testing in the face of consensus. “Assignment of the Science is not to open a door to endless knowledge, but to set a barrier to the endless
ignorance,” he wrote. For Galileo, a lone thinker in his basement could be more productive, get closer to truth, than a group of pontiffs or experts whose judgment was clouded by peer pressure. “That man,” he writes in The Assayer (1623), “will be very fortunate who led by some unusual inner light, shall be able to turn from the dark and confused labyrinths within which he might have gone forever wandering with the crowd and becoming ever more entangled. Therefore, in the matter of philosophy, I consider it not very sound to judge a man’s opinion by the number of his followers.”2 The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche espoused a similar sentiment, to wit, that madness in individuals was rare but common in crowds.

  Science, unlike religious dogmatism, is supposed to be methodologically open to novelty, welcoming new perspectives if they are supported by the evidence. Unlike the ecclesiastical authorities, disparaging our demotion from the center of the solar system, Galileo was very excited not only about the more realistic, new view but about change in general. No longer at the center, Earth became part of a “dance” of changing celestial objects. Whereas the old view of a central Earth and fixed spheres of stars offered the solace of stability and confirmation of biblical and Aristotelian astronomy, the new view, based on telescopic observations, showed a universe full of surprises that included Earth and its organisms in a kind of cosmic community. Change, even if it threatened the religious doctrine of eternal life, was to be welcomed, not feared. “If the Earth were not subject to any change,” wrote the astronomer in the 1632 Dialogue, “I would consider the Earth a big but useless body in the universe, paralyzed . . . superfluous and unnatural. Those who so exalt incorruptibility, unchangeability and the like, are, I think, reduced to saying such things both because of the inordinate desire they have to live for a long time and because of the terror they have of death. . . . They do not realize that if men were immortal, they would never have come into the world.”3