Prometheus Unbound

I think that these two questions, when answered with two yeses, represent the thrust of what Intelligent Design proponents are up to in their critiques of evolution, as William Dembski recently (and concisely) stated at his blog:

The theory [of evolution] purports to give a materialistic account of life’s development once life is already here, but it has a gaping hole at the start since matter gives no evidence of being able to organize itself from non-life into life. The fossil record, especially the sudden emergence of most animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, sharply violates Darwinian expectations about the historical pattern of evolutionary change. The nano-engineering found in the DNA, RNA, and proteins of the cell far exceeds human engineering and remains completely unexplained in Darwinian terms. Darwin lovers are quick to reject such complaints.  After all, as novelist Barbara Kingsolver declares, Darwin’s idea of natural selection is “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.”

Dembski seems to be critiquing evolution on solid grounds here. I know he is an Evangelical, and that he is thus highly motivated to make such critiques, but my question is this: do these lines of critique, with regard to evolution, have at least some validity? I think that they have. If I’m wrong about this, what, as an agnostic, am I missing?

Dembski, in the same blog post, continues:

Any theory that explains everything and that can and must be true is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest swindle ever foisted on gullible intellectuals. The intelligent design community takes the latter view, siding here with Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” Still, it’s easy to understand why so flimsily a supported theory garners such vast support. It provides the creation story for an atheistic worldview. If atheism is true, then something like Darwinian evolution must follow.

I’m not sure which side—the Intelligent Design side or the Darwinist side—will be laughed at, say, a century from now. I suspect that it will be the Intelligent Design hypothesis, at least in terms of its current critiques of evolutionary biology, but it’s hard for me, as a nonscientist, to say. My hunch is that the gaps in evolutionary theory that Intelligent Design currently exploit will be filled over the next century in ways that will make the evolutionary conclusion even more compelling than it appears to be now.

But notice that this is merely a prediction, a guess really. And whether you’re a scientist or not, when it comes to the future, that’s really all we have. In the meantime, a bit of humility might suit all of us—religionist, agnostic, and atheist alike. I think that Dembski often comes across as unduly arrogant and overconfident, as do, say, atheists like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. Everybody seems just so darn cocksure, as if the other side consisted of fools. But competing confidence poses should not be mistaken for anything other than that. Maybe at profound and fundamental levels, both sides have elements to their arguments that, a hundred years from now, will be shown to be not just wrong, but spectacularly so.

Let’s see what happens. And keep an open mind.

Those who follow this blog know what I think about this (strict evolutionary naturalism is primarily a philosophical position), but Phillip Johnson and William Provine debated the issue back in 1994 at Stanford University, and I think the exchange is worth viewing. Here’s part 1 of 11:

Sometimes we think that if we could just have a stunning visual demonstration of something we believe in, that it would convince the nonbelievers in our midst. So it is that alien enthusiasts fantasize about UFOs on the White House lawn, and Evangelical enthusiasts fantasize about Jesus coming in the clouds (“See, we told you so!”).

But what, then, do atheist evolutionary biologists, whose beliefs about evolution are resisted by large majorities of the human population, fantasize about? Well, if you are Richard Dawkins, you fantasize about the recovery of prehuman primate species as an example of something that would “change everything.” 

But would the recovery of, say, a Neanderthal from recovered genetic material, or the creation of a genetic hybrid between chimps and humans really “change everything”?

Though Richard Dawkins thinks it might, I’m not so sure. Most persuadable and reasonably educated people already know that the Earth is old, that evolution occurred (and is occuring), and that we share a common ancestor with other hominids. They’ve seen artist reconstructions of these creatures. They’ve seen images of their bones. And they have read what science writers have to say about them. I think it would be a shock and novelty to see, for example, a real Neanderthal baby in a human crib, and it would be a fascinating story following its birth—and it would have a Truman Show quality to it—but I just doubt that it would cause an earthquake in the psyche of most people.

I think that Dawkins is being a bit naive about how a piece of evidence functions in the minds of the determined-to-be unconvinced. I would guess, for example, that most fundamentalists, though rocked backward a bit by news of the birth of a baby Neanderthal, would ultimately be unswayed to believe in evolution by such an event. Fundamentalists are very, very good at ad hoc  reasoning, and would quickly come up with some bullshit to explain the cute little baby Neanderthal.

I can think of a quick rationalization that would preserve their worldview already: “See—the book of Revelation is full of monsters—and scientists are creating the very monsters that will mark the last days!”

See how easy that was?

Happy Halloween!

The poem below by Walt Whitman expresses emotions akin to my own after I had recently spent a full day, and most of an evening, attending lectures by Richard Dawkins and other scientists at an atheist conference in Burbank, Ca.:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before

    me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,

    and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with

    much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Is this reaction to science on the part of Whitman, and my sympathy for it, a sign that an irrational spirit grips us? Or is this a proper and sane reaction to an excess of reductionism? Was William Wordsworth right—or merely hysterical—when he said, “We murder to dissect?”

Are the poets at war with the scientists?

Nope.

Canto 56 is part of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a long poem of 131 cantos, and it was written in 1850, fully nine years prior to the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species  (1859). Why, then, is Canto 56 linked in the public mind with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution? Richard Dawkins, for example, writes at the beginning of his brilliant and disturbing classic, The Selfish Gene (1976), and with his characteristic sharpness,

I think ”nature red in tooth and claw” sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably. (2)

But Tennyson, as I say, wrote his phrase before Darwin’s great book.

So what gives?

Might it be that Tennyson, being a poet, felt, ahead of others, in his muse’s bones, the philosophical (and therefore, emotional) implications of what the new biological and geological sciences were discovering about the Earth, and anticipated the sublime horror and terror to which they were beginning to testify?

Below is Tennyson’s Canto 56 in full. Notice that it begins with Nature giving witness, by the fossils buried in her rocks, of vast ages of birth, death, and extinction:

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

        From scarped cliff and quarried stone

        She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

 

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

        I bring to life, I bring to death:

        The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

 

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

        Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

        Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

 

Who trusted God was love indeed

        And love Creation’s final law—

        Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

 

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

        Who battled for the True, the Just,

        Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

 

No more? A monster then, a dream,

        A discord. Dragons of the prime,

        That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match’d with him.

 

Of life as futile, then, as frail!

        O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

        What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

I hear in this poem a kind of Western version of Nature anthropomorphized into a Hindu god, a Shiva, indifferent to the shrew of the self, dancing upon it, and creating and uncreating worlds over vast eons. Tennyson saw, via hints from the new discoveries of science, what Darwin’s book would make explicit a few years hence, and what the continental Indian poets intuited long before: a very old universe had arranged and unarranged worlds and multitudes long before us, and would unarrange us as well anon.   

I think my agnosticism extends, when it really comes down to it, to keeping an open mind to the possibility that mind precedes matter in some fashion—or even that there might be something recognizably human at the end of the rainbow, something that delivers poetic justice and makes the universe a cosmos and not, ultimately, a chaos. Emotionally, it’s just very hard to accept that at the center and beginning of the universe is a mindless spider. I don’t know if God’s existence is likely, or even probable, but being embedded in the system that I am trying to understand, and as stupid as I am with regard to even, say, how a lightbulb works, I don’t think that it is impossible that my current guesses about the universe are incorrect—even wildly so. I have been spectacularly wrong about things before. I guess I just don’t trust myself enough to be an atheist (let alone a theist), and that’s what agnosticism means to me.

Well, not exactly. But according to Harvard scientist Dan Lieberman, it was a big factor in making  you smart in the first place. Here’s his syllogism:

• Starting about two million years ago, our ancestors’s ever increasing ability to run long distances gave them broader access to high quality sources of protein (that is, game meat); and
• meat eating accelerates a species’s brain growth; therefore
• all this high quality meat-eating helped to “big brain” us (assisted the evolution of our large brains)

Got it? Good! 

Oh, and does this mean that vegetarianism (like, say, frequenting art museums) is a luxury—a boutique lifestyle born of advancing civilization—and that vegetarian practice in our earliest ancestors would have, in fact, consigned our species to the status of fruit-eating chimpanzees (in terms of brain power)?

It appears so.

This fact strikes me as a rather curious (and even stunning) illustration of contingency. You can’t possibly know, in the long run (pun intended), and often not even in the short run, what the consequences of your actions, however moral you imagine them, are likely to be. Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot, plays on this truth. The lead character acts like Jesus and at every turn messes up people’s lives in his “do-goodery.” And Kant said that since we cannot know the consequences of our actions, we may as well just do the “right thing” as opposed to the “wrong thing.”

But in terms of today, and with regard to vegetarianism, what’s the right thing? Welcome to the dilemmas and fogs of our human existence. What should we eat now, Mr. Long Distance Running Smarty Man?

“Because I could not stop for death . . .”

Emily Dickinson would have written a disturbing poem about this:

Do you suppose she would have laughed at the ants carting off the skull? There’s something funny about it somehow, don’t you think?

Two years ago, journalist Bryan Appleyard wrote an interesting review of The Spiritual Brain, a book by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, and started his review this way:

Neuroscience is a combat zone. It is here, in the human brain, that the final conflict between materialism and, to invent a word, soulism is being fought. For materialists, the outcome is not in doubt. Our minds, our selves, our awareness are merely the outcome of the electrical activity of the few pounds of hyperconnected matter between our ears. All claims to the contrary are wishful thinking or superstitious remnants. But the materialists have two problems. Their certainty of victory is, for the moment, a leap of faith. There is no clear scientific consensus on how the brain produces the higher functions we call being human. And, second, the great mystery, the ultimate hard question, remains: How does matter produce mind, how can it? Irrespective of religious belief, immaterialism cannot easily be dismissed. What is the nature of what I am thinking and feeling now? To tell me that it is all a by-product of my brain is to tell me nothing. What I am is at least as real as the chair I am sitting on, and what I am seems to be immaterial.

I’ve been reading The Spiritual Brain  and intend to blog on various parts of it in the near future. For now I’ll just say that I highly recommend the book. Oh, and Appleyard’s full review of the book can be read here.

Remember how, during the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama said that we are the change we have been waiting for? Well, I was thinking about this in terms of paranormal phenomenon. So many people are looking beyond themselves, out into the world, for evidence of God, UFOs, monsters, and ghosts. They think that this kind of search would be a vindication of the idea that we are not alone and we are more than blind and determinate physics and chemistry shuffling in the void.

But then it occurred to me. The very first paranormal phenomenon in history appears to be, well, us. Think about it. How weird the first one of us was when he or she entered the scene just one hundred thousand years ago! Who would have believed it? One of us, at some point in history, had a barely conscious mother, an animal really, and yet we found ourselves to be thinking in ways unlike our mother. In fact, we found ourselves thinking like absolutely nobody before us had ever done before (at least insofar as we know). And then we reproduced and found that our kids were more like us than our animal grandparents. And then they reproduced, and there was suddenly a sort of alien invasion of self-conscious minds that had invaded the blind, atheist, and materialist universe. There were ghosts in the machines! Meat was making cave wall art! A world that might have seemed, at first look, to be exactly the kind of universe any atheist would expect to see (that is, one of matter acting like, well, matter), suddenly saw the intrusion of ghostly minds (with free will!) in a way akin to the shattering appearance of the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In other words, we are the paranormal phenomenon that we have been waiting for! If you’re young and smart, and think there might be something to paranormal phenomena, and maybe want to even be a paranormal investigator, throw yourself into becoming a neurologist, because that’s where the action is! Absolutely nobody looking at the way things had gone for fourteen billion years previous to us would have believed that we were coming. But here we are. Our very existence is a disjuncture as huge and baffling as any landing of UFOs on the White House lawn or Jesus coming in the clouds would be. We need accounting for. In an atheist universe we don’t make sense.

Cornelius Hunter is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute, and earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology from the University of Illinois. At his blog today, I noticed that he offered an argument for life’s probable design that I had not seen before, and it struck me as a pretty good one. At the very least, it raised questions in my own mind. Here it is: 

[T]he same DNA code is found in all species. And that code is so efficient it is sometimes labeled as ‘optimal.’ . . . The near universality of the code means it was present in evolution’s purported universal common ancestor. It would be too unlikely (even for evolutionists) for the identical unique code to have evolved independently in the different evolutionary branches, so it must have been present from the very beginning. In other words, evolutionists must explain the universality of the code as arising from a common ancestor, not from the repeated evolution of the code. If that is true, then evolutionists must say that evolution somehow created such an efficient code very early in the history of life. But evolutionists typically refer to these early stages of life as elementary, inefficient, crude and so forth. For instance, in their abiogenesis narrative evolutionists often appeal to “crude” chemical processes to account for the variation in replication they need. But if life was elementary and crude, how did such an optimal code arise—a code that is remarkably suited for the more advanced cells that had not even yet arisen? Furthermore, the fact that the DNA code is so efficient means that evolution performed a tremendous search operation. Only by creating an abundance of such codes could such a good one be found. Remember, evolution is a blind process. But while evolution must be very adept at creating new codes, it must paradoxically also be unable to create new codes. The code must be frozen, otherwise it would not be universally shared amongst the species. So evolutionists must say that at one time evolution was adept at evolving the code, but later it became inept at evolving the code.

In other words, there are two big issues here:

1. The ealiest DNA code would seem to be efficient in excess of the demands of the first cells, for that very same code also proved itself more than sufficient to the demands of all the more complex cells that arrived later
2. There must have been intense selection pressure placed upon the code early on, and then once an optimum was reached, the selection pressure stopped and all competing codes simply died away

But wouldn’t the Earth, in its early stages of evolution, have been something like Australia (that is, an uncrowded world)? In other words, wouldn’t the Earth have been a place with lots of open spaces for organisms to avoid direct competition with others? In such a world, how did the code face so intense a competition with variations, and reach its optimal state so relatively fast and efficiently, and then hold itself steady for so long (that is, all the way to us)?

Odd.

Does anyone know of a good atheist biologist’s response to this early DNA code optimization puzzle? How, exactly, did such an optimal code find it’s way into the earliest life, and then basically stop evolving from there? It sounds to me like a more than fair question.

Was the following said by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, or Hitler:

Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself.

Answer: Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self Reliance” (1841).

How about this one:

It is absolutely true that first of all the law of selection exists in the world, and nature has granted the stronger and healthier the right to life. And rightly so. Nature knows no weakling or coward, it knows no beggar, etc., but rather nature knows only those who stand firm on their soil, who sacrifice their life, and indeed sacrifice it dearly, and not those who give it away. That is an eternal law of nature. You see it if you gaze into the forest, you see it in every meadow, you see it in the struggle of individual organisms in the world, and you see it throughout the millennia of human history . . .

Answer: Hitler, in an address to construction workers, cited in Richard Weikart’s new book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress  (Palgrave Macmillian 2009).

And while we’re having fun, who said this:

[I]f the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members will tend to supplant the better members of society. Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his rapid multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher he must remain subject to a severe struggle.

This one belongs to Charles Darwin. It’s among his concluding observations in the last chapter of his Descent of Man  (1871).

Richard Weikart is Professor of Modern European History at California State University, Stanislaus. He has a new book that has just come out. It is titled Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress  (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). I got the book and am reading it now. Here’s Weikart giving a lecture on his previous book, From Darwin to Hitler (2004):

Illustra Media is the outfit that produced the two Intelligent Design DVDs: Unlocking the Mystery of Life  and The Privileged Planet. As an agnostic who is open minded with regards to Intelligent Design arguments, I found both of these documentaries stimulating. And now, as a kind of completion of a trilogy, Illustra Media is about to release its documentary on the Cambrian Explosion titled Darwin’s Dilemma. Here’s the trailer:

The trailer is a bit on the melodramatic side, but the subject is inherently interesting, and perhaps the film itself will be good.

In thinking about biologist Jerry Coyne’s recent forays into the realms of PZ Myers-style religion bashing, I can’t help but wonder:

• Unless something else is going on psychologically (such as a hatred of religion as such), should religion be the central target for an evolutionary biologist’s outrage?

I would say no, and offer two other much larger cultural phenomena for potential intellectual ire, of which religion (particularly fundamentalist religion) is but a symptom:

1. the post literate society; and
2. the conservative reaction to Modernism in general

In other words, isn’t religious fundamentalism, when it comes right down to it, a byproduct of a broader illiteracy problem and the reaction to Modernism? 

Put simply, a lot of Americans just don’t read all that much, and have never been taught critical thinking skills, and the America they remember from childhood (or imagine that they remember) is gone, and that’s scary to them. And so the snarky urban-dwelling evolutionary biologist who does not decouple science qua science from the Modernist project as a whole, and shows contempt for religion, is suddenly smack dab in the middle of the culture war, and reinforces to Red State “heartland” Americans that science is inimical to them. I think this is a strange strategy for generating a broader comfort with evolution as a scientific theory. Evangelical geneticist Francis Collins and Catholic biologist Ken Miller are bridges to the religious community that Coyne appears to want to burn down. Collins and Miller are trying to decouple science from the larger culture war, and Coyne wants it coupled and front and center (exactly as the far right does).

But when you treat science as more than science, and put this other thing on it—religion bashing and atheism—you are now no longer in the realm of science, and people know that. Drudge, for example, delights in posting the headlines of climate scientists who are overtly political or who indulge in unqualified generalizations or exaggerations. It undercuts science for conservatives and reinforces their prejudices about scientists and their motivations in certain areas of science. Perhaps Coyne hopes someday to generate a banner headline at the DrudgeReport. But if the DrudgeReport wants to stand you up front and center before a conservative audience and talk, what’s that tell you? You must be shooting yourself in the foot, right? Drudge wouldn’t be trying to make you look good, would he?

Coyne is not acknowledging his existential situation. He is an evolutionary biologist with a metaphysical commitment that exceeds the empirical (atheism). He is free to express that commitment, and I hope that he continues to do so. I, personally, find it highly informative. But it doesn’t follow that, in loudly proclaiming his contempt for religion, Coyne should harbor the illusion that he is actually advancing the public’s esteem for science or scientists. People know when you’ve said something beyond your area of expertise. And they know (at least in vague terms) when you’ve shifted from reason to passion.

Advancing the cause of atheism should not be confused with advancing the cause of science. Coyne imagines that a unified front of combative atheist scientists would, over time, reduce creationist beliefs in America. But to the contrary: I think it would simply reinforce broad conservative prejudices about the consequences of evolution to culture, and give the DrudgeReport bemused and alarmist weekly headlines to drive traffic to its site.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation (RDF) has started producing some really high quality, excellent videos and posting them to YouTube. Here’s Richard Dawkins briefly introducing the basics of whale evolution:

According to MSNBC today, astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic thinks we should look at younger stars as well as older ones for intelligent life, reasoning that it might not take 4.5 billion years, as it did on Earth, to arrive at an intelligent species. Cirkovic’s theory is that a planet’s life clock, via catastrophc events, can be reset numerous times throughout its history, and thus an intelligent species might arise between these events more quickly on some stars than on others. On Earth, for example, the comet that killed off the dinosaurs reset Earth’s life clock for a fresh round of global speciation, and ended up generating humans just 65 million years later. In other words, some planets may have hit the combination of multicellular life to intelligent life much quicker than Earth did, for really Earth only required 65 million years to do it (not 4.5 billion years). What this means is that there might be relatively young stars with relatively young planets that have civilizations on them more advanced than our own, and that evolved to their advanced states within, say, 65 million years after large, multicellular life forms appeared generally.

“The speed of evolution is very variable,” Cirkovic said. . . . Cirkovic also notes that the evolution of intelligent life could occur slower or faster in different settings, and need not follow the astrobiological history of the Milky Way. “Large-scale correlations might cause more such SETI targets to be contemporary with us than would be expected on the basis of planetary age distribution only,” Cirkovic said.

In other words, Cirkovic’s new theory is that we should be looking for intelligent life, not just in solar systems of our own age, but in newer ones as well. This means for astrobiologists a larger pool of search targets. We shouldn’t assume, according to Cirkovic, that a two billion year old solar system hasn’t had enough time to get to intelligent life yet. It may well be ahead of us!

Francis Bacon (from his 1625 essay “Of Nature in Men”):

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished. Force maketh nature more violent in the return.

And this from Emerson’s “Self Reliance” (1841):

Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself.

Herbert Spencer was a 19th century philosopher (and ally and popularizer of Darwin’s ideas). And for Spencer, beneath all the outward and diverse forms of religion there is a grappling by humans with an Ultimate Mystery that resists explication, and consists of only three possibilities, all of them equally mind-boggling:

• The universe is self-existent, and has always been here;
• the universe had a beginning, but it made itself; or
• something external to the universe made the universe.

Religion, however complicated its forms, is a wrestling with this mystery, this truth. Here’s how Spencer puts it (in Part 1 of his First Principles ): 

“Respecting the origin of the Universe three verbally intelligible suppositions may be made. We may assert that it is self-existent; or that it is self-created; or that it is created by an external agency. Which of these suppositions is most credible it is not needful here to inquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of them is even conceivable in the true sense of the word.”

In other words, both science and religion come up against impasses, or aporias, when it comes to comprehending certain ultimate things (one of them being the origin of the universe). In Part 1 of his First Principles, Spenser then discusses other conceptual impasses (or aporias ) in turn (such as the relation of matter and consciousness). It’s actually a good read, and reminds us that to be a believer in evolution (that the universe is old and plants and animals change over time) need not lead one to hasty atheist conclusions about the universe as a whole, the origin of information in the first cell, or the origin of mind.

In short, contra Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and Jerry Coyne, one needn’t be a confidence atheist—or faitheist—to be an evolutionist. One can be more like Herbert Spencer or Stephen Gould, who tried to make peace between evolutionary science and religion.

Scientist Elaine Morgan, now in her 80s, has long been advancing her theory that humans evolved from aquatic apes. She recently gave a talk succinctly defending her views. Is it pseudoscience? She certainly hasn’t persuaded more than a handful of her scientific colleagues. But it is intuitively interesting. Might we at least give her an audience, and think about what she has to say?