The Edge of Evolution
Page 25
Notice Bostrom’s remark, apparently intended without irony: “It is even logically consistent with all our evidence that we are such freak observers.” But if he is a freak observer, who does he mean by “we”? And if you are the freak observer, who is Bostrom? And in either case, what could possibly be meant by “evidence”?
Here is an even-more-outlandish possibility, perfectly consistent with the infinite multiverse scenario: There actually are no lawful conditions compatible with the gradual development of intelligent life. There are zero possible combinations of laws and constants that allow some orderly progression of a universe that leads to life. The only possible “observers” are freaks. An infinite multiverse must contain freak observers, but there’s no need for it to contain “real” ones.22 Don’t object that you know of one universe—ours—where such laws and constants do exist. What you are at this very moment “thinking”—as well as any detailed memories you have of the past, no matter how seemingly realistic, including memories of what you may think you know about “nature”—could be due to a random collocation of matter that just popped into existence. The very concepts of “gravity,” “protons,” “stars”—all you think you know about nature—could be just the pitiful delusion of a freak observer. Reality might be utterly different. Such is the intellectually toxic bequest of the infinite multiverse hypothesis.
There are even stranger possibilities, but there’s no need to go further. The point is this: Humans have the extraordinary ability to reason. But in order to take even the first step in reasoning, one must apprehend that reality exists and have confidence that what one perceives with one’s senses is generally a reliable reflection of reality. Reality is not something that can somehow be independently verified without begging the paralyzing question. Once reality is doubted, there is no way back. No person—Darwinist, design proponent, or other—who wants to make a rational argument can seriously entertain an idea that pulls the rug out from under reason.
Here’s a subtle problem. Some intriguing ideas that at first blush appear reasonable actually contain the poison pill of radical skepticism that undermines reason. One classic notion that undercuts reality is solipsism, which in its pure form holds that nothing exists outside the solipsist’s mind—everything else, including other apparent minds, is an illusion, a product of the thinker’s own mind. Some other ideas aren’t exactly solipsism, but still entail the conclusion that we can know nothing except what’s going on in our own minds. A famous example from the history of philosophy is René Descartes’s question, How do you know your thoughts aren’t being controlled by a demon? A modern version of the same issue might be termed the Matrix problem: How do you know you’re not really just a brain in a vat, hooked up by scientists to wires that feed you a wholly false perception of reality? The short answer is that you know directly that reality exists. And you must have confidence that your senses are generally reliable. Without those twin, bedrock premises, thought itself is stymied.
Infinite multiverse scenarios are no different from brain-in-a-vat scenarios. If they were true, you would have no reason to trust your reasoning. So anyone who wants to do any kind of productive thinking must summarily reject the infinite multiverse scenario for intelligent life and assume that what we sense generally reflects the reality we know exists. And what we sense, as elaborated through modern science’s instruments and our reasoning, is that we live in a universe fine-tuned for intelligent life. Moreover, unlike the lonely solipsist who refuses to recognize the existence of other minds, we can perceive the work of other minds in the purposeful arrangement of parts, which reaches its zenith in the arrangement of the many parts of the universe for life.
Two leading ideas compete to explain fine-tuning in nature: purposeful design or a multiverse. Yet life looks far richer than we have a right to expect on a finite random multiverse scenario, and on an infinite multiverse scenario we have no ability to expect—or even think about—anything. There’s every reason to trust our basic human insight that we live in a purposefully designed world.
WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?
Whenever we ask fundamental questions such as where the universe came from, how life originated, or what is the nature of mind, we bump into philosophy. Over the remaining sections of the chapter I’ll consider several philosophically related topics, starting with the question of who the “agent” might be who designed the universe for life.
Many people are impatient with that question. Since the great majority of the population of the United States and the world believes in God (as a pretty conventional Roman Catholic, so do I), “designer” is often seen as a not-too-subtle code word for God, both by those who like the implications and by those who don’t. Although that reaction is understandable among the general public, the leap to God with a capital G short-circuits scholarly arguments that have been going on for millennia across many cultures. Aristotle argued that nature reflected a “Prime Mover,” but his conception would scarcely be recognized by adherents of most modern religions. In summarizing the design hypothesis, philosopher Nick Bostrom notes that:
The “agent” doing the designing need not be a theistic God, although that is of course one archetypal version of the design hypothesis…. We can take “purposeful designer” in a very broad sense to refer to any being, principle or mechanism external to our universe responsible for selecting its properties, or responsible for making it in some sense probable that our universe should be fine-tuned for intelligent life.23
Like it or not, a raft of important distinctions intervene between a conclusion of design and identification of a designer.
The designer need not necessarily even be a truly “supernatural” being. Consider a peculiar fictional essay published a few years ago in Nature, the most prominent science journal in the world, entitled “The Abdication of Pope Mary III…or Galileo’s Revenge.”24 The gist of the story was that a future pope (yes, a woman) resigns, along with all the cardinals of the Catholic Church, because new scientific evidence proves that the designer of the universe is not a transcendent god. As one character in the tale observes, “The life-generating properties of the very specific fundamental constants that define reality are virtually impossible to explain except as the results of deliberate design.” However, “That creator is clearly not the God of the Bible or the Torah or the Qur’an. Rather, the creator is a physicist, and we are one of his or her experiments.” Although that scenario may be attuned less to reality than to the amusing fantasies of overgrown science geeks, it does helpfully illustrate that, if one wishes to be academically rigorous, one can’t leap directly from design to a transcendent God.
To reach a transcendent God, other, nonscientific arguments have to be made—philosophical and theological arguments. It is not my purpose here to rehearse what has been said over the millennia on that score, or to say why I myself find some of those arguments persuasive and others not. Here I’m content to “take ‘purposeful designer’ in a very broad sense.”
NO INTERFERENCE
How was the design of life accomplished? That’s a peculiarly contentious question. Some people (officially including the National Academy of Sciences) are willing to allow that the laws of nature may have been purposely fine-tuned for life by an intelligent agent, but they balk at considering further fine-tuning after the Big Bang because they fret it would require “interference” in the operation of nature. So they permit a designer just one shot, at the beginning—after that, hands off. For example, in The Plausibility of Life Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart hopefully quote a passage from an old article on evolution in the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia: “God is the Creator of heaven and earth. If God produced the universe by a single creative act of His will, then its natural development by laws implanted in it by the Creator is to the greater glory of His Divine power and wisdom.”25
This line of thinking is known as “Theistic Evolution.” But its followers are kidding themselves if they think it is compatible with Darwinism. Fir
st, to the extent that anyone—either God, Pope Mary’s physicist, or “any being…external to our universe responsible for selecting its properties”—set nature up in any way to ensure a particular outcome, then, to that extent, although there may be evolution, there is no Darwinism. Darwin’s main contribution to science was to posit a mechanism for the unfolding of life that required no input from any intelligence—random variation and natural selection. If laws were “implanted” into nature with the express knowledge that they would lead to intelligent life, then even if the results follow by “natural development,” nonetheless, intelligent life is not a random result (although randomness may be responsible for other, unintended features of nature). Even if all the pool balls on the table followed natural laws after the cue struck the first ball, the final result of all the balls in the side pocket was not random. It was intended.
Second, “laws,” understood as simple rules that describe how matter interacts (such as Newton’s law of gravity), cannot do anything by themselves. For anything to be done, specific substances must act. If our universe contained no matter, even the most finely tuned laws would be unable to produce life, because there would be nothing to follow the laws. Matter has unique characteristics, such as how much, where it is, and how it’s moving. In the absence of specific arrangements of matter, general laws account for little.
Finally, a particular, complex outcome cannot be ensured without a high degree of specification. At the risk of overusing the analogy, one can’t ensure that all the pool balls will end up in the side pocket just by specifying simple laws of physics, or even simple laws plus, say, the size of the pool table. Using the same simple laws, almost all arrangements of balls and almost all cue shots would not lead to the intended result. Much more has to be set. And to ensure a livable planet that actually harbors life, much more has to be specified than just the bare laws of physics.
Some people who accept design arguments for physics, but not for biology, nurture an aesthetic preference that our universe should be self-contained, with no exceptions to physical laws after its inception. The prospect of the active, continuing involvement of a designer rubs them the wrong way. They picture something like a big hand flinging a Mars-sized orb at the nascent earth, or pushing molecules around, and it offends their sensibilities. Some religious people, in particular, are repelled by that view, thinking it somehow undignified.
Well, we all have our own aesthetic preferences. It’s the job of science, however, to try to determine what type of universe actually exists. Like it or not, the more science has discovered about the universe, the more deeply fine-tuning is seen to extend—well beyond laws, past details, and into the very fabric of life, perhaps beyond the level of vertebrate classes. If that level of design required continuing “interference,” that’s what it required, and we should be happy to benefit from it.
But the assumption that design unavoidably requires “interference” rests mostly on a lack of imagination. There’s no reason that the extended fine-tuning view I am presenting here necessarily requires active meddling with nature any more than the fine-tuning of theistic evolution does. One can think the universe is finely tuned to any degree and still conceive that “the universe [originated] by a single creative act” and underwent “its natural development by laws implanted in it.” One simply has to envision that the agent who caused the universe was able to specify from the start not only laws, but much more.
Here’s a cartoon example to help illustrate the point. Suppose the laboratory of Pope Mary’s physicist is next to a huge warehouse in which is stored a colossal number of little shiny spheres. Each sphere encloses the complete history of a separate, self-contained, possible universe, waiting to be activated. (In other words, the warehouse can be considered a vast multiverse of possible universes, but none of them have yet been made real.) One enormous section of the warehouse contains all the universes that, if activated, would fail to produce life. They would develop into universes consisting of just one big black hole, universes without stars, universes without atoms, or other abysmal failures. In a small wing of the huge warehouse are stored possible universes that have the right general laws and constants of nature for life. Almost all of them, however, fall into the category of “close, but no cigar.” For example, in one possible universe the Mars-sized body would hit the nascent earth at the wrong angle and life would never commence. In one small room of the small wing are those universes that would develop life. Almost all of them, however, would not develop intelligent life. In one small closet of the small room of the small wing are placed possible universes that would actually develop intelligent life.
One afternoon the überphysicist walks from his lab to the warehouse, passes by the huge collection of possible dead universes, strolls into the small wing, over to the small room, opens the small closet, and selects one of the extremely rare universes that is set up to lead to intelligent life. Then he “adds water” to activate it. In that case the now-active universe is fine-tuned to the very great degree of detail required, yet it is activated in a “single creative act.” All that’s required for the example to work is that some possible universe could follow the intended path without further prodding, and that the überphysicist select it. After that first decisive moment the carefully chosen universe undergoes “natural development by laws implanted in it.” In that universe, life evolves by common descent and a long series of mutations, but many aren’t random. There are myriad Powerball-winning events, but they aren’t due to chance. They were foreseen, and chosen from all the possible universes.
Certainly that implies impressive power in the überphysicist. But a being who can fine-tune the laws and constants of nature is immensely powerful. If the universe is purposely set up to produce intelligent life, I see no principled distinction between fine-tuning only its physics or, if necessary, fine-tuning whatever else is required. In either case the designer took all necessary steps to ensure life.
Those who worry about “interference” should relax. The purposeful design of life to any degree is easily compatible with the idea that, after its initiation, the universe unfolded exclusively by the intended playing out of natural laws. The purposeful design of life is also fully compatible with the idea of universal common descent, one important facet of Darwin’s theory. What the purposeful design of life is not compatible with, however, is Darwin’s proposed mechanism of evolution—random variation and natural selection—which sought to explain the development of life explicitly without recourse to guidance or planning by anyone or anything at any time.
BY ANY OTHER NAME
Is the conclusion that the universe was designed—and that the design extends deeply into life—science, philosophy, religion, or what? In a sense it hardly matters. By far the most important question is not what category we place it in, but whether a conclusion is true. A true philosophical or religious conclusion is no less true than a true scientific one. Although universities might divide their faculty and courses into academic categories, reality is not obliged to respect such boundaries. Understanding some aspects of the real world might require multiple modes of reasoning. Still, in what category is it best to pigeonhole design?
First, is any conclusion of design necessarily religious? Pope Mary didn’t think so, and she’s infallible.
Then is design a philosophical conclusion, a scientific one, or maybe both? Here’s where serious opinions diverge. On the one hand, some people think that, if a conclusion implicates an intelligent agent (even merely a human mind), or if it threatens to point beyond nature, it’s better classified as philosophy. On the other hand, I regard design as a completely scientific conclusion. For many years philosophers have struggled to come up with an airtight definition of science, without much luck. But as a rough-and-ready definition, I count as “scientific” any conclusion that relies heavily and exclusively on detailed physical evidence, plus standard logic. No relying on holy books or prophetic dreams. Just the data about nature that is pu
blicly available in journals and books, plus standard modes of reasoning.
If that’s one’s definition of a scientific conclusion, then design fits to a tee. The public data for design come from many branches of science—physics, astronomy, biology. The reasoning that leads to a conclusion of design for the universe and life is the same kind of reasoning that leads to a conclusion of design for anything—perceiving a purposeful arrangement of parts. The strength of the reasoning is publicly acknowledged, at least in regard to the general laws of the universe, by many scientists and philosophers.
PREDICTION AND TESTING
If my minimalist definition is the rough standard, then design is certainly science. However, some opponents of design demand two additional qualities of a scientific idea that they believe disqualify it. First, they say, design theory isn’t testable. It does not make specific predictions. Second, say the critics, design theory states that certain events happened by mysterious means that we cannot explain. They object to a videotape that never spots the pool shark.
Coming from Darwinists, both objections are instances of the pot calling the kettle black. Darwinism does not have a consistent record of confirmed predictions; quite the opposite. An eminent leader of the neo-Darwinian synthesis declared forthrightly a half century ago that “the search for homologous genes is quite futile.” Later work showed that “the view was entirely incorrect.” The president of the National Academy of Sciences stated that “the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered.” And since the new field of evolutionary developmental biology has led to big surprises—“The most stunning discovery of Evo Devo…was entirely unanticipated”—we’re justified in thinking that the theory that guided all these expectations was wrong. Yet what price has Darwinism paid for misleading scientists? Those who overlook the falsified predictions of their own theory are in no position to demand hard-and-fast predictions of another.