Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
• a longer profile of yours truly
• my calendar
• Nature Network
• RichardDawkins Network
• facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter
• Atheist Nexus
• the Pharyngula chat room
(#pharyngula on irc.synirc.net)
This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
Richard Dawkins
Stay abreast of your favorite bloggers' latest and greatest via e-mail, via a daily digest.
« What are the universities to do? | Main | Café Scientifique next Tuesday »
Category: Carnivals • Open Thread • Tangled Bank
Posted on: January 26, 2007 11:47 AM, by PZ Myers
There has been a call for submissions for the next Tangled Bank, to be held at Ouroboros next Wednesday. Send those links to Chris Patil, me, or host@tangledbank.net.
While you're waiting for the best carnival of them all, may I suggest that you browse these fine alternatives that are already available?
This is an open thread, too — chat away!
(TrackBack URL for this entry: )
YES! Send me a free issue of Seed.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $19.95. If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
(Non-U.S. subscribers, click here.)
Comments
Colby Cosh puts in a fine piece of writing at the National Post:
Posted by: quork | January 26, 2007 12:00 PM
Since this is an open thread, I'd like to congratulate PZ on his new job. Apparently, he now edits movies for airlines.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/25/god.bleeped.ap/index.html
:)
Posted by: Rick @ shrimp and grits | January 26, 2007 12:53 PM
Hey! If I were doing the censoring, I'd keep the nudity and sex in, and I'd disemvowel "Gd".
Posted by: PZ Myers | January 26, 2007 1:14 PM
I don't think there was much violence and nudity in "The Queen". Helen Mirren is known for taking her clothes off, I'm now trying to get the image of her making the beast with two backs with whoever played Tony Blair.
My eyes! The goggles! They do nothing!
Posted by: Dave Godfrey | January 26, 2007 1:27 PM
I don't think that the question of accident or intelligent design can be dismissed so casually. If you're going to dismiss intelligent design as an option, then it is incumbent upon you to explain the large and impressive number of anthropic properties without which human life could not exist. Prof. Hoyle and his associate W. Fowler pointed out the situation with carbon resonances back in the 1950's. Carbon is manufactured from helium inside stars but the key reaction proceeds only because of a lucky coincidence. Carbon nuclei are made by the simultaneous collision of three high speed helium nuclei. This reaction is quite rare, and can only proceed at a reasonable rate if the resonances are well defined. The lucky coincidence is that one of these resonances is just about right to correspond to the kind of energies that helium nuclei have inside stars. Further research has shown other such coincidences, without which carbon could not be produced inside stars. This caused Hoyle to remark that the universe "looks like a put-up job" as though someone had been "monkeying with the laws of physics".
The astrpophysicists Martin Rees, Brandon Carter and Bernard Carr have pointed out many other coincidences that seem to suggest that life as we know it depends on fortuitous accidents in the values that nature has chosen for various masses and forces. Something as simple as the masses of the nuclear particles would have a devastating effect on the universe if they were ever so slightly different.
Now theologians have no troubling concerns about these anthropic properties. They simply state that God designed the universe to suit our requirements and that's the end of it. Scientists likewise, have no troubling concerns about these anthropic properties because they have their anthropic principle, which says that if it were not for these specific coincidences, we simply would not be here to remark on them. The fact that we exist guarantees that they are as they are. Case closed. Both of these answers are cop-outs, in my opinion. Sure, they close the books on the question, but do they solve the problem?
This "weltanschauung" which underlies not only the anthropic principle, but also darwinism, smacks of nihilism, that no aspect of the universe can be thought of as a consequence of purpose. Every astonishing coincidence or transcendant quality or remarkable state of affairs is assigned to chance and dismissed from ones mind. It's not
that I necessarily want the universe to have purpose or *need* the universe to have purpose or that I'm afraid of facing a meaningless existence. I'm not even going to say that it's impossible that the laws of nature are not capable of organizing matter and energy into the complex forms and systems that we observe, even into living matter.
Likewise, I'm not willing to say unequivocally that the universe is a purposeless accident. And I'm certainly not willing to say unequivocally that there is an underlying purpose to our existence. As of now, it remains on of those great, unanswered questions.
Posted by: Sugarbear | January 26, 2007 3:04 PM
The luster of Stuart Kauffman and his associates at the Santa Fe Institute has somewhat tarnished. They were very "fashionable" for a while and they got a lot of press, but the truth of the matter is that there is a lot of rhetoric and very little reality in his work. Some people think that his mouth to brain ratio is just too high. He's a lot like Dawkins, in that respect. He makes a lot of speculative assertions and his story sounds good to the gallery, but there is little or no empirical evidence to support his claims. I'm not saying that the study of complexity theory or self-organizing systems may not have value. I'm a longtime supporter of a holistic approach to science and I was an early follower of chaos theory and fractal geometry. There's a lot of important stuff there, and I'm fond of making the asertion that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.
But this foray into self-organizing systems serves the purpose of drawing attention to the shortcomings of darwinian evolution. As Kauffman says in the preface to "At Home in the Universe": "As Darwin taught us, the order of the biological world evolves as natural selection sifts among random mutations for the rare, useful forms. In
this view of the history of life, organisms are cobbled-together contraptions wrought by selection, the silent and opportunistic tinkerer. Science has left us unaccountably improbable accidents against the cold, immense backdrop of space and time.
Thirty years of research have convinced me that this dominant view of biology is incomplete. As I will argue in this book, natural selection is important, but it has not labored alone to craft the fine architecutres of the biosphere, from cell to organism to ecosystem.
Another source---self-organization---is the root source of order. The order of the biological world, I have come to believe, is not merely tinkered, but arises naturally and spontaneously because of these principles of self-organization---laws of complexity that we are just
beginning to uncover and understand."
Like Eldredge and Gould, who did more damage than good to the cause of evolution by proposing punctuated equilibrium, which drew attention to what previously had been largely ignored: the gaps in the fossil record, so Kauffman's attention to self-organization has drawn attention to the weaknesses of natural selection.
Evolutionists are desperate to save darwinism. They have dragged out genetic drift, punctuated equilibrium, and a variety of other "band-aids" to try to stem the hemorrhaging. Unfortunately, the patient has passed on.
Posted by: Sugarbear | January 26, 2007 3:09 PM
A message for all Creationists AND Evolutionists:
http://carryabigsticker.com/images/militant_agnostic_500.gif
Posted by: Sugarbear | January 26, 2007 3:13 PM
As it happens, I saw that movie (in the loose sense of glancing at the screen intermittently while dozing or reading a book) on my most recent airplane flight. I don't know if we got the God-less version, as I didn't bother donning my earphones, ie. the whole thing might as well have been bleeped as far as I was concerned. Since I had no trouble figuring out what was going on (and I'd never even heard of the flick before that), I don't think I missed much.
Posted by: Steve Watson | January 26, 2007 3:13 PM
No, it's up to the people proposing Intelligent Design to provide actual models which explain these so-called "anthropic properties". They haven't done that yet, and they're not working on anything remotely resembling such a model. Intelligent Design Creationism is a public-relations campaign, not an effort to build a science.
It is also worth noting that every time — every blessed time — that anyone has held up a feature of the Universe and said, "This is the clear handiwork of God", a later and more knowledgeable generation has found a natural explanation for it. Newton believed that God's signature could be found in the fact that all the planets orbit in the same direction around the Sun and in (roughly) the same plane. Later, Laplace discovered an explanation for this fact in terms of natural law. It's rather similar to the reason why, when you pull the plug out of your bathtub, all the water swirls down the drain in a definite direction, all of it moving either clockwise our counterclockwise. And nobody deduces God from their bathwater.
Furthermore, none of the scriptures sacred to any of the world's religions say that the Creator chose the mass of the electron or the number of different quarks. Even if an intelligent being lurked behind the physical laws which we know today, that being shares few interests with the fellow who wrote Leviticus.
Also, it is quite vain to reason from "anthropic" grounds the way most people seem to enjoy doing. Carl Sagan explained why:
Finally, as I have said before, the "fine-tuning" argument really gets you nowhere.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | January 26, 2007 3:47 PM
Is "Sugarbear" Charlie's latest attempt to circumvent his banning? Shouldn't there be a word for using computing resources which you have been forbidden to use? Like say, "stealing"?
Posted by: quork | January 26, 2007 4:08 PM
Read more Nature. It will refer you to...
http://www.arxiv.org/hep-th/0407213
and
http://www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0303070
Enjoy reading. And, pray tell, explain what exactly you mean by "Darwinism".
Posted by: David Marjanović | January 26, 2007 4:41 PM
.... Oh, excuse me, is this the Troll Feeding area?
Posted by: Greg Laden | January 26, 2007 4:56 PM
Trolls that in reality know what they're talking about are much more fun. It's boring when they really believe what they write.
Posted by: David Marjanović | January 26, 2007 5:52 PM
Sugarbera:
In short, you present three claims.
You claim that something you erranously call "darwinism", but later show that you really discuss the whole of evolutionary theory, is incomplete. Since evolution theory is found to explain observations, you have to come up with a different theory and prove that it explains predictions to support that claim.
You claim design must be dismissed. Since there is no design theory at the moment, it is simply another unsupported claim.
Finally, you claim anthropic coincidences support your non-existent design theory. That is to state a variant of the sharpshooter fallacy. The a posteriori probability for an outcome is not the a priori probability. Or in Douglas Adams words, the puddle finds it remarkable that its hole fits its form; but in fact it was a sure thing that it would fit.
In a correct probability analysis the fallacy becomes obvious. More than that, using the same assumptions as some modern cosmologies one sees that finetuning in fact support a naturalistic universe. (Ikeda's & Jeffery's, Sober's, et al analysis.)
So yes, these models can not only answer the question, they can show that purpose is a fools errand, which as I understand it is your remaining 'problem'. Nihilism is that the world is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. It is safe to say that science does not deny objectivity, facts, but is the method which support them, nor does it deny value where we find it.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | January 26, 2007 11:08 PM
Blake Stacey: That's a new argument against the "fine tuning" crap. Not like we needed another one, but it is good to have anyway.
Posted by: Keith Douglas | January 27, 2007 9:48 PM
I'm not sure it is totally new - isn't it basically "who designed the designer" or the problem of infinite regress, with a twist? But in any case it is a new application.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | January 27, 2007 11:08 PM