PZ Myers links to a great Ted Rall cartoon on Stupid Design. The point being that the world around us isn’t anything close to being efficiently designed. If it is the reflection of the plans of some supernatural architect, many of us could have offered a few useful pointers. As with most such arguments, David Hume was there first:
In a word, Cleanthes, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.
Hume gets extra bonus points for writing before Darwin demonstrated how complex adaptive organisms can arise even without a designer. (But he loses some points for weaseling at the end of the Dialogues.)
Before Darwin, you couldn’t really fault someone for thinking “Gee, my two choices are between imagining that something as complicated as a human being just sort of came together by accident, or that someone designed it. I think I’ll go for Door Number Two.” But once we figured out that there was a Door Number Three — that such complexity could evolve through descent with random modification and natural selection — it boggles the mind how anyone could look at the natural world and conclude that it shows any signs of being intentionally constructed just this way.
One of the prevalent misconceptions about evolution is that, in response to a certain problem, organisms can (over the course of generations) simply “evolve an appropriate solution.” Of course they don’t always do so; sometimes they just die off. But more importantly, the space of possibilities that organisms explore via descent with minor modifications is most definitely not the space of small variations on bodies (or behaviors); it’s the space of small variations on genomes. Even if a certain physiological feature would be useful, we’re not going to be able to evolve it unless flicking a few switches in the genetic code would lead to an intrinsically useful mutation that would move us along that direction.
Years ago, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin borrowed the term spandrel from architecture to illustrate an important consequence of the way evolution works. A spandrel is an aspect of some form (whether from Renaissance arches or paedomorphic morphology) that arises as a side effect of some other trait that is useful, even if it doesn’t itself serve a necessary purpose. Those kinds of non-adaptations and accidents and anachronistic features are found all over the place in real organisms. Any intelligent designer with a shred of self-respect would be embarrassed to exhibit such shoddy workmanship.
The classic argument-from-design question is: What good is half an eye? Even when I was twelve years old, I could guess the answer to that one: it’s a lot of good! Imagine just a few photo-sensitive cells evolving on the skin of a sightless organism; that could be immensely useful, offering a decided advantage to its offspring. Continual reinforcement of that tendency could directly lead to better sensitivity and all the other highly-specialized upgrades that our own eyes come with.
On the other hand: What good is half a wheel? Now you’ve got me. The wheel is an excellent answer to a pretty obvious question, if you’re a person sitting there thinking about how to move heavy loads more quickly or efficiently. And it’s not hard to imagine wheels coming in useful on certain organisms. (Tell me that a snake with wheels wouldn’t be pretty efficient, if a bit scary.) But you just can’t get there from here, by ordinary evolutionary means. It’s hard to think of useful transitional forms.
All of which should teach us a lesson when we sit down to try to understand and reproduce the workings of actual organisms. The idea behind Strong Artificial Intelligence is that the brain is basically a computer — a thesis I’m happy to go along with. But reproducing brainlike behavior in actual computers has turned out to be much harder than many people anticipated. In retrospect it’s not hard to see why; the brain might be a computer, but it’s certainly not the same kind of computer that we are used to programming. Its functioning arose naturally, rather than through top-down planning, and this kind of “organic design” leads to very different structures than “synthetic design.” Rather than relatively straightforward sets of algorithms expressed in neurological lines of code divided into tidy subprograms, our minds are subtle machines with virtual processors distributed holographically and interacting nonlocally throughout the brain. As a result, computers still aren’t very good poets, but they’re definitely better at multiplication and division than we are. (Now you tell me which talent might have been more useful out there on the veldt.)
Peter –
Thanks for at least getting started on approaching my questions. Sure, I don’t know a lot about the subject, and was serving as gadfly man-in-the-street stimulator. Your answers are somewhat helpful, but you still didn’t really give me an adequate scoop on the issue of “how do the carriers of the important genes find each other”, versus all sorts of odds and ends of similar things happening and making more of a mess meanwhile. In brass tacks: a mutation helpful to feather formation happens in a reptile somewhere, then maybe another one far away thousands (?) of years later, etc – meanwhile, that reptile breeds and perhaps passes around the helpful gene. But somehow it seems to me that the creatures which are getting that way need to “get together” in some sense, to really make a distinct new group, more convincing than just some birds on an island that undergo minor changes. What principles of attraction would co-evolve, and how, to encourage that? A feathery reptile is more turned on by another feathery reptile? Seriously – who has done work on that particular issue?
When I said graded into each other, I meant more the speciated demarcations at a given time rather than change over time (i.e., why isn’t life more messily graded from one type to another at any given time, like color shades.) But since you mention gradation in time, the punctuated equilibrium idea puts more pressure on the need for all the right factors to literally come together within a relatively short time. Yes, I have heard of the changing of whole genes etc, which to me is part of the higher-lever anthropic fine-tuning of atoms and chemistry principles. Well, does that explain the “longitudinal evolution” of DNA that I asked about?
As for simulation, yes, it has been done in a general sense, but is that the same as simulating all the actual atoms and their properties to see how likely various molecules are likely to get together etc. or what “synchronicities” may or may not be involved? It doesn’t explain the origin of life from the molecular soup either, which is a good indicator to me of what can be called high-level anthropic tuning. PS – I suspect that because biology is “softer” than physics, that ironically makes practitioners defensive in reaction. Are they then less willing to admit that things in their field are unsettled, the way that astronomers freely admit that dark matter and dark energy are weird and ill understood?
Michael B. appreciates the marvel of how all this works very well, and I encourage him to explore anthropic concepts further. (Complaints about why Someone would hand-craft this or that particular are silly straw-God diversions anyway. Just about all of us posting here believe in the conventional history of the universe and life, and its apparently independent activity. Some of us are just looking for better answers about why it works the way it does, which is not the same issue.)
#33 Island,
I was considering the fourth option you mentioned. The gas cloud out of which our solar system formed gave rise to cars and computers all by itself…
The concept of the wheel was invented by A. Oop:
A. Oop, A supersymmetric version of the leg, Gondwanaland predraw (January 10,000,000 B.C.), to be discovered. 🙂
Hi, Count Iblis,
I was considering the fourth option you mentioned. The gas cloud out of which our solar system formed gave rise to cars and computers all by itself…
I think that you would have to ignore the continuity of solar, galactic, and intergalactic habitable zones in order to conclude that there can be that kind of independence.
Planets with “cars”, and “computers” are expected to arise numerously within a very restricted “layer” or “zone” of the observed universe, for the very same evolutionary reasons, so your logic doesn’t follow that I can see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_zone
http://www.daviddarling.info/images/galactic_habitable_zone.jpg
So there should be a lot of similarly developed dissipative structures, like us.
To island, #49 –
I think your dismissive comment simply because you read a short statement of some kind of faith on my part is quite haughty – my spirituality does not exclude science, or even really influence it. My point is that when people counter creationists by pooh-poohing the complexity of life and showing “stupid” things, it really misses the point. Evolution can explain every observation that I’m aware of in biology, there’s no question there. But that doesn’t rob life of it’s mystery and complexity. Whatever role anyone may imagine for a divine being in any of this, I think life is something to marvel at. That’s really all I wanted to say.
Hi Michael,
I think that you’re right, but I commonly run into two problems with biologists and physicists who also believe in a god:
1) They are often under extreme peer pressure to conform to the groupthink of their field, so with just as much extremity, they stick strictly to the consensus of the “cutting-edge”… they don’t even dare be conservative. This obviously can’t be you.
2) Or they find god in the logic that they recognize through science, and so they will essentially deny, or be “unimpressed” by implications that might run contrary to this.
I guess it’s just a matter of how abstract that old testiment god is, in the latter case, eh?… 😉
I think that just because everything CAN be explianed by evolution doesn’t really necessarily mean that it DOES explain all that we see in life. We could say that life was created by alien lifeforms that are using Earth as a test case. They had many lifeforms that didn’t work in the past, and many that did work well. And that is why there is a fossil record. Just because I say it and I can twist it to explain everything, doesn’t make it true.
“Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate” the simplest explaination is usually the most correct, or Occams Razor seems appropriate to me here. Evolution just creates far to many questions, far to few answers, and in many many cases is just science trying to prove itself.
Questions like the ones being studied right now by Michael
B, or questions like what evolved first, the eye or the optic nerve, or my stomach, or it’s ability to utilize the enzymes, and acids to digest food. Or even something as relatively simple as actin-myosin interactions with Ca+, ATP, Acetylcholine & ase and H20 to contract and relax muscles. Or neuro chemistry if you really want to blow your mind…
There are so many amazing features to life that although they may seem simple when you look from the outside, the complexity of it all when you really know even the most basic physiology is truly truly amazing. Mother
Nature couldn’t have gotten it right SO MANY TIMES without there being at least some species that just make you scratch you head and say “what in the world is THAT?” I mean can you imagine the evolution of a BAT? I mean how would a species with elongated fingers, that haven’t yet formed a membrane in between them to enable flight survive? Can you see it flopping around waiting to become a treat to whatever creature should want it? Then to suppose that it was successful enough to pass on it’s genetics with another crazy long fingered weasle is absurd. Yet evolution supposes many of these transitions.
Science is in conflict with itself with evolution. It breaks the law of entropy for one. It uses itself to test itself. It seeks to prove rather than disprove. It bases theory upon other theories upon yet more theories, and the whole foundation is a house of cards. The most basic questions, from the beginning haven’t been answered at all. Science still can’t answer how molecules can by chance combine to amino acids, have enough of them be left handed AA’s (necessary to all life), and then have all the left handed AA’s combine to form a membrane (science HAS been able to replicate this part) and then to have it form simple cell structures, and then have the cell spontaneously begin cytolosis, then have it metabolize from it’s environment, then have it reproduce something. Yet this had to happen over and over and over again, at the same time just to get a few cells. This is the foundation of evolution, the base of it all and it just didn’t happen.
So if you’re one of the many that has come to the conclusion that evolution is a farse, then what is true? Michael B admits faith in a creator. If there was a creator, wouldn’t he contact us? And if he did, would he lie to us?
Dr. Carroll,
I have my faults, like the hubris it may require to disagree with one of your intellect on occasion, but I deepy appreciate the hard work you put into science outreach, and the generally outstanding quality of the information you disseminate. My carreer is as a bio. researcher (just gave a talk in Seattle this month…I love it), and it’s really quite gratifying to see physicists show an interest in the field, as well as to see them taking the time to defend it from magical thinking.
But, reading some of the comments above, I have to wonder if it’s any use. The refractory nature of some minds never ceases to astonish, and discourage, no matter how many times I encounter the phenomenon. Oh well. Thanks for trying, anyway.
I have to wonder if it’s any use.
I don’t know about Sean, but no, it is absolutely no use whatsoever, except to validate this fact, as well as the ideologically motivated delusions of either side of the debate. Course, that’s not what you wanted to hear, and it’s easy to deny that science isn’t being forsaken by both sides of the debate, but I constantly prove otherwise.
The extremely sad fact of the matter is that people, in general, are ideolgically warped, and they do not change.
If there is one truth in this universe that requires both sides to set aside their ideological belief systems in order to recognize, then it might as well not even exist!
You can write that in stone.
Like ole’ Sam Clemens wisely noted…
The rule is perfect. Both sides know that in matters of opinion, (like the interpretation of evidence), the other is insane.
He was as correct about that as a person can be.
Okay, I return you’s to fantaslyland…
“…it’s easy to deny that science isn’t being forsaken by both sides of the debate, but I constantly prove otherwise.
The extremely sad fact of the matter is that people, in general, are ideolgically warped, and they do not change.”
Except for you, I suppose I’m meant to understand. No “matter of opinion” there, of course. Gotcha.
Except for you, I suppose I’m meant to understand.
No, I have a very strong opinion… that isn’t distorted by unscientific prejudice.
“Gotcha”
Neil B. (#51):
Your answers are somewhat helpful, but you still didn’t really give me an adequate scoop on the issue of “how do the carriers of the important genes find each other”, versus all sorts of odds and ends of similar things happening and making more of a mess meanwhile. In brass tacks: a mutation helpful to feather formation happens in a reptile somewhere, then maybe another one far away thousands (?) of years later, etc – meanwhile, that reptile breeds and perhaps passes around the helpful gene. But somehow it seems to me that the creatures which are getting that way need to “get together” in some sense, to really make a distinct new group, more convincing than just some birds on an island that undergo minor changes. What principles of attraction would co-evolve, and how, to encourage that? A feathery reptile is more turned on by another feathery reptile? Seriously – who has done work on that particular issue?
You’re misunderstanding how evolution works. All it takes is one beneficial mutation in one creature. If the mutation really is beneficial, then that creature will tend to have more offspring than its fellows, and those offspring will have more offspring of their own than their contemporaries, etc., until — hundreds or thousands of generations later, probably — the last organisms without that mutation die out and all living members of that species are descendants of that initial mutant. At which point, it’s a generic feature of that species. (How fast this happens — how fast the mutant version of the gene “spreads” through the population — depends on how beneficial it is. If it just gives you a slight advantage, then it’s a slow process; if it helps you survive a widespread disease or poison, then it will spread faster.)
So it’s more like: some dinosaur had a mutation that made its scales slightly featherlike and better at keeping it warm, so it could survive cold weather better, lived longer, and had more offspring. Eventually, its descendants ended up dominating the population. At some point, there was another mutation which happened to make the scales slightly better insulators (a little longer? a little more feathery?), and eventually its descendants dominated the population. And so on, for millions of years.
(And of course there were bad mutations, which made things worse, but their carriers tended to die out.)
I believe the mathematical basics of this process were worked out in the first few decades of the 20th Century, as part of what’s called “population genetics.” And it’s been observed, in detail, in experimental studies of bacterial evolution. (As well as things like the spread of pesticide or antibiotic resistant in historical times, of course.)
Neil B. (#51):
When I said graded into each other, I meant more the speciated demarcations at a given time rather than change over time (i.e., why isn’t life more messily graded from one type to another at any given time, like color shades.)
Have you heard of ring species?
People who study individual organisms recognize that there are gradients within populations of a single “species”; these are sometimes called “subspecies” and sometimes just “populations.” And careful study also shows that what to the casual eye might seem a single species turns out to be two or more closely related species — see the discussion of scrub jays, for example.
Once two species become unable to breed with each other (“reproductively isolated”), they will tend to drift apart. New mutations will appear in one species, but be unable to spread to the other, because the two groups of organisms are no longer one big breeding population.
Yes, I have heard of the changing of whole genes etc, which to me is part of the higher-lever anthropic fine-tuning of atoms and chemistry principles. Well, does that explain the “longitudinal evolution” of DNA that I asked about?
Sure, if by “longitudinal evolution” you meant DNA growing (or shrinking) in length. Go read the Wikipedia “Mutations” article, and you’ll see that some of the mutations end up duplicating stretches of DNA (or deleting stretches).
PS – I suspect that because biology is “softer” than physics, that ironically makes practitioners defensive in reaction. Are they then less willing to admit that things in their field are unsettled, the way that astronomers freely admit that dark matter and dark energy are weird and ill understood?
My impression is that biologists are happy to admit that things on the cutting edge are weird and ill understood (e.g., What’s going on with “junk DNA” — is it really all non-functional? How did the first eukaryotic cells arise and become differentiated from bacteria? Are there limits to how fast or slow evolution can work in practice? etc.). But just as astronomers don’t feel there’s anything “unsettled” about whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice-versa, or whether there really was a Big Bang of some sort, biologists don’t feel there’s anything unsettled about the basic fact of evolution.
One of the frustrating realities of biology, which seems to plague the study of all complex systems, is that elegant and/or accurate mathematical models, the very stuff physics is most famous for, are of essentially no help for understanding anything remotely close to the complete system. Maybe some of us are defensive about a lack of math, or have physics envy, but unfortuately the skillset of a Fields Medalist would probably be largely wasted on problems like accurately parsing promotor regulatory sequences, or the above-mentioned putative functions of “junk” DNA. It’s all really kind of a big and rather chaotic mess, and I don’t think equations will make life much easier. Not until, at least, we’ve got monster computers that could, say, adequately model the intra- and inter-molecular interactions of a large number of molecules that are themselves enormously complex. Even then, we’ve probably already got the first principles from chemistry and classical physics, and if anything you’ve got to mercilessly simplify those or else even the most biochemically trivial of modeling tasks bring supercomputers to their knees. Same goes for population dynamics and realistic ecosystem modeling. Same goes for mind. It’s just too damn expansive for math.
This is not to say the physicist’s skillset couldn’t and doesn’t contribute enormously to many problems in biology and biochemistry. Protein folding, the fundamentals of enzymology, the inner workings of molecular motors and ion channels, ever more realistic models of nucleotide interactions, the means to organize and efficiently access the staggering amount of sequence data now available, many basic aspects of electrophysiology, new and better imaging technologies, the list goes on and on. Actually, folks like me have been utterly dependent on folks with the physics skillset just to do the experments we already do (I sure as Hell couldn’t design a flow cytometer, and would probably find even constructing a simple inverted microscope a career-busting challenge). Envious sometimes? Maybe. Defensive about it? Not really. Deeply grateful is more like it. There’s plenty of work to go around, and division of labor according to facility has always worked before. I do my job, and it makes me happy. What more could I really ask for?
Peter, your answers go a long way. However, the result of the processes you are talking about seem like they’d look more like traditional gradualist evolutionary perspectives than the punctuated reality that is supposedly found in the fossil record. I still don’t appreciate why there isn’t more extra junk and sloppiness that should leave it’s mark (visibly) and more intermediary states than we see – your little examples aside – but it isn’t necessarily the case that the best answer can be summarized the way most physical principles can be. Indeed, do we have a right to expect that nature has to be really comprehensible in all manifestations and levels of order? What if it isn’t?
As far as I remember computer theory, the “kind” of the computer can only influence the efficiency of performing a task, so stating this as a reason for the lack of success is avoiding the issue. If the brain is a state machine then writing software that imitates it in every way is possible. Period. One inevitable follows from the other. It is just a question of defining that which we wish to imitate, which, of course, is in the case of intelligence, is the hard part. The point being that it is the arguments against the brain being a state machine, that most often remind me of arguments for intelligent design.
“When I said graded into each other, I meant more the speciated demarcations at a given time rather than change over time (i.e., why isn’t life more messily graded from one type to another at any given time, like color shades.) But since you mention gradation in time, the punctuated equilibrium idea puts more pressure on the need for all the right factors to literally come together within a relatively short time. Yes, I have heard of the changing of whole genes etc, which to me is part of the higher-lever anthropic fine-tuning of atoms and chemistry principles. Well, does that explain the “longitudinal evolution” of DNA that I asked about?”
A lot of the “coming together” just happens through sexual reproduction. Also I think a lot of times we tend to have the wrong picture of evolution. We tend to have a mental picture of discrete mutations causing new things like feathers or eyes. But a lot of evolution is not about creating new things, its about taking old things and making very simple changes like increasing/decreasing size, changing number, rearranging things by making some developmental process happen earlier/later, faster/slower. An incredible amount of variation can just be accomplished by using these type of changes which doesn’t necessarily involve the creation of whole new genes but just very small tweaks to already existing genes which cause the genes to express themselves more strongly/weakly, duplicate gene sequences or alter timing.
In fact I would bet that most of our genes probably come from very early ancestors and all evolution has done is tweak this genes very very slightly to lengthen something here, shorten something there, increasing the number of something etc in order to create us.
This isn’t really that different that human technologies. For instance the latest Intel microprocessor is basically the same technology as the 8086. All intel has done is reduce size, lower voltages, enlarge buses, duplicate various functional blocks. There are some genuinely new ideas but a lot of the design is just small variations on old ideas.