SCIENCE, DELUSION, AND THE APPETITE FOR WONDER

Conversation : CULTURE

SCIENCE, DELUSION, AND THE APPETITE FOR WONDER

A Talk with Richard Dawkins [12.29.96]

Introduction by John Brockman 
 
The universe is changing in time, and it has evolved from something simpler to something more complex. That is the lesson to be learned from recent advances in evolutionary theory; the emergence of order has colored biology since Darwin and twentieth-century cosmology alike. 
 
In Darwin's day, the exact manner of the inheritance of characteristics was not known; Darwin himself believed that certain characteristics were acquired by an organism as a result of environmental change and could be passed to the organism's offspring, an idea popularized by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. In 1900, the work done by Mendel some fifty years earlier was brought to light, and the gene, though its exact nature was unknown at the time, became a player in "the modern synthesis" of Mendel and Darwin. This synthesis, which reconciled genetics per se with Darwin's vision of natural selection, was carried out in the early 1930s by R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright, and augmented a few years later by the work of the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, the biologist Ernst Mayr, and the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who expanded on this neo-Darwinian paradigm. Nevertheless, there is still discord in the ranks of evolutionary biologists. The principal debates are concerned with the mechanism of speciation; whether natural selection operates at the level of the gene, the organism, or the species, or all three; and also with the relative importance of other factors, such as natural catastrophes. 
 
Richard Dawkins is firmly in the Darwinist camp. "It rapidly became clear to me," he says, "that the most imaginative way of looking at evolution, and the most inspiring way of teaching it, was to say that it's all about the genes. It's the genes that, for their own good, are manipulating the bodies they ride about in. The individual organism is a survival machine for its genes."
 
Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene (1976, 2d ed. 1989), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River out of Eden (1995), and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). He is a gifted writer, who is known for his popularization of Darwinian ideas as well as for original thinking on evolutionary theory. He has invented telling metaphors that illuminate the Darwinian debate: His book The Selfish Gene argues that genes—molecules of DNA—are the fundamental units of natural selection, the "replicators." Organisms, including ourselves, are "vehicles," the packaging for "replicators." The success or failure of replicators is based on their ability to build successful vehicles. There is a complementarity in the relationship: vehicles propagate their replicators, not themselves; replicators make vehicles. In The Extended Phenotype, he goes beyond the body to the family, the social group, the architecture, the environment that animals create, and sees these as part of the phenotype—the embodiment of the genes. He also takes a Darwinian view of culture, exemplified in his invention of the "meme," the unit of cultural inheritance; memes are essentially ideas, and they, too, are operated on by natural selection.
 
Richard Dawkins enjoys the high regard of his peers both for his writing and his thinking. Sir John Maddox, editor emeritus of Nature, notes that "Climbing Mount Improbable has the grandeur of Darwin's Origin of the Species, but that's not surprising—it covers the same ground. Nobody can look at this book and then put it down unread—and nobody who reads it can fail to understand what Darwin is all about." According to Danny Hillis, "notions like selfish genes, memes, and extended phenotype are powerful and exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these ideas. They're too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin."
 
In his role as the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University, Dawkins regularly talks to the public regarding his views on the wonders of science. Several weeks ago, on November 12th, 1996, he delievered the Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC1 Television in England, entitled "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder." The complete text appears below. 
 
—JB
 

SCIENCE, DELUSION AND THE APPETITE FOR WONDER

Here's a small sample of the things you could tell Aristotle, or any other Greek philosopher. And surprise and enthral them, not just with the facts themselves but with how they hang together so elegantly.

The earth is not the centre of the universe. It orbits the sun -- which is just another star. There is no music of the spheres, but the chemical elements, from which all matter is made, arrange themselves cyclically, in something like octaves. There are not four elements but about 100. Earth, air, fire and water are not among them.

Living species are not isolated types with unchanging essences. Instead, over a time scale too long for humans to imagine, they split and diverge into new species, which then go on diverging further and further. For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria. Aristotle was a distant cousin to a squid, a closer cousin to a monkey, a closer cousin still to an ape (strictly speaking, Aristotle was an ape, an African ape, a closer cousin to a chimpanzee than a chimp is to an orangutan).

The brain is not for cooling the blood. It's what you use to do your logic and your metaphysics. It's a three dimensional maze of a million million nerve cells, each one drawn out like a wire to carry pulsed messages. If you laid all your brain cells end to end, they'd stretch round the world 25 times. There are about 4 million million connections in the tiny brain of a chaffinch, proportionately more in ours.

Now, if you're anything like me, you'll have mixed feelings about that recitation. On the one hand, pride in what Aristotle's species now knows and didn't then. On the other hand an uneasy feeling of, "Isn't it all a bit complacent? What about our descendants, what will they be able to tell us?"

Yes, for sure, the process of accumulation doesn't stop with us. 2,000 years hence, ordinary people who have read a couple of books will be in a position to give a tutorial to today's Aristotles: to Francis Crick, say, or Stephen Hawking. So does this mean that our view of the universe will turn out to be just as wrong?

Let's keep a sense of proportion about this! Yes, there's much that we still don't know. But surely our belief that the earth is round and not flat, and that it orbits the sun, will never be superseded. That alone is enough to confound those, endowed with a little philosophical learning, who deny the very possibility of objective truth: those so-called relativists who see no reason to prefer scientific views over aboriginal myths about the world.

Our belief that we share ancestors with chimpanzees, and more distant ancestors with monkeys, will never be superseded although details of timing may change. Many of our ideas, on the other hand, are still best seen as theories or models whose predictions, so far, have survived the test. Physicists disagree over whether they are condemned forever to dig for deeper mysteries, or whether physics itself will come to an end in a final 'theory of everything', a nirvana of knowledge. Meanwhile, there is so much that we don't yet understand, we should loudly proclaim those things that we do, so as to focus attention on problems that we should be working on.

Far from being over-confident, many scientists believe that science advances only by disproof of its hypotheses. Konrad Lorenz said he hoped to disprove at least one of his own hypotheses every day before breakfast. That was absurd, especially coming from the grand old man of the science of ethology, but it is true that scientists, more than others, impress their peers by admitting their mistakes.

A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission? "Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response!

Yet there is hostility towards science. And not just from the green ink underlining brigade, but from published novelists and newspaper columnists. Newspaper columns are notoriously ephemeral, but their drip drip, week after week, or day after day, repetition gives them influence and power, and we have to notice them. A peculiar feature of the British press is the regularity with which some of its leading columnists return to attack science -- and not always from a vantage point of knowledge. A few weeks ago, Bernard Levin's effusion in The Times was entitled "God, me and Dr Dawkins" and it had the subtitle: "Scientists don't know and nor do I -- but at least I know I don't know".

It is no mean task to plumb the full depths of what Mr Bernard Levin does not know, but here's an illustration of the gusto with which he boasts of it.

"Despite their access to copious research funds, today's scientists have yet to prove that a quark is worth a bag of beans. The quarks are coming! The quarks are coming! Run for your lives . . .! Yes, I know I shouldn't jeer at science, noble science, which, after all, gave us mobile telephones, collapsible umbrellas and multi-striped toothpaste, but science really does ask for it . . . Now I must be serious. Can you eat quarks? Can you spread them on your bed when the cold weather comes?"

It doesn't deserve a reply, but the distinguished Cambridge scientist, Sir Alan Cottrell, wrote a brief Letter to the Editor:- "Sir: Mr Bernard Levin asks 'Can you eat quarks?' I estimate that he eats 500,000,000,000,000, 000,000 quarks a day."

It has become almost a clichŽ to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics. In Britain, that is. I believe the same is not true of our more successful economic competitors, Germany, the United States and Japan.

People certainly blame science for nuclear weapons and similar horrors. It's been said before but needs to be said again: if you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

An equally common accusation is that science goes beyond its remit. It's accused of a grasping take-over bid for territory that properly belongs to other disciplines such as theology. On the other hand -- you can't win! -- listen to the novelist Fay Weldon's hymn of hate against 'the scientists' in The Daily Telegraph.

"Don't expect us to like you. You promised us too much and failed to deliver. You never even tried to answer the questions we all asked when we were six. Where did Aunt Maud go when she died? Where was she before she was born? . . . And who cares about half a second after the Big Bang; what about half a second before? And what about crop circles?"

More than some of my colleagues, I am perfectly happy to give a simple and direct answer to both those Aunt Maud questions. But I'd certainly be called arrogant and presumptuous, going beyond the limits of science.

Then there's the view that science is dull and plodding, with rows of biros in its top pocket. Here's another newspaper columnist, A A Gill, writing on science this year inThe Sunday Times.

"Science is constrained by experiment results and the tedious, plodding stepping stones of empiricism . . . What appears on television just is more exciting than what goes on in the back of it . . . That's art, luvvie: theatre, magic, fairy dust, imagination, lights, music, applause, my public. There are stars and there are stars, darling. Some are dull, repetitive squiggles on paper, and some are fabulous, witty, thought-provoking, incredibly popular . . ."

The 'dull, repetitive squiggles' is a reference to the discovery of pulsars in 1967, by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish. Jocelyn Bell Burnell had recounted on television the spine-tingling moment when, a young woman on the threshold of a career, she first knew she was in the presence of something hitherto unheard-of in the universe. Not something new under the sun, a whole new KIND of sun, which rotates, so fast that, instead of taking 24 hours like our planet, it takes a quarter of a second. Darling, how too plodding, how madly empirical my dear!

Could science just be too difficult for some people, and therefore seem threatening? Oddly enough, I wouldn't dare to make such a suggestion, but I am happy to quote a distinguished literary scholar, John Carey, the present Merton Professor of English at Oxford:

"The annual hordes competing for places on arts courses in British universities, and the trickle of science applicants, testify to the abandonment of science among the young. Though most academics are wary of saying it straight out, the general consensus seems to be that arts courses are popular because they are easier, and that most arts students would simply not be up to the intellectual demands of a science course."

My own view is that the sciences can be intellectually demanding, but so can classics, so can history, so can philosophy. On the other hand, nobody should have trouble understanding things like the circulation of the blood and the heart's role in pumping it round. Carey quoted Donne's lines to a class of 30 undergraduates in their final year reading English at Oxford:

"Knows't thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow, Doth from one ventricle to the other go?"

Carey asked them how, as a matter of fact, the blood does flow. None of the thirty could answer, and one tentatively guessed that it might be 'by osmosis'. The truth -- that the blood is pumped from ventricle to ventricle through at least 50 miles of intricately dissected capillary vessels throughout the body -- should fascinate any true literary scholar. And unlike, say, quantum theory or relativity, it isn't hard to understand. So I tender a more charitable view than Professor Carey. I wonder whether some of these young people might have been positively turned off science.

Last month I had a letter from a television viewer who poignantly began: "I am a clarinet teacher whose only memory of science at school was a long period of studying the Bunsen burner." Now, you can enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. You can be a discerning and informed concert critic without being able to play a note. Of course music would come to a halt if nobody learned to play it. But if everybody left school thinking you had to play an intrument before you could appreciate music, think how impoverished many lives would be.

Couldn't we treat science in the same way? Yes, we must have Bunsen burners and dissecting needles for those drawn to advanced scientific practice. But perhaps the rest if us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

It's here that I'd seek rapprochement with another apparent foe of science, Simon Jenkins, former editor of The Timesand a much more formidable adversary than the other journalists I've quoted, because he has some knowledge of what he is talking about. He resents compulsory science education and he holds the idiosyncratic view that it isn't useful. But he is thoroughly sound on the uplifting qualities of science. In a recorded conversation with me, he said:

"I can think of very few science books I've read that I've called useful. What they've been is wonderful. They've actually made me feel that the world around me is a much fuller . . . much more awesome place than I ever realised it was . . . I think that science has got a wonderful story to tell. But it isn't useful. It's not useful like a course in business studies or law is useful, or even a course in politics and economics."

Far from science not being useful, my worry is that it is so useful as to overshadow and distract from its inspirational and cultural value. Usually even its sternest critics concede the usefulness of science, while completely missing the wonder. Science is often said to undermine our humanity, or destroy the mystery on which poetry is thought to thrive. Keats berated Newton for destroying the poetry of the rainbow.

"Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -- Unweave a rainbow . . ."

Keats was, of course, a very young man.

Blake, too, lamented:

"For Bacon and Newton, sheath'd in dismal steel, their terrors hang Like iron scourges over Albion; Reasonings like vast Serpents Infold around my limbs . . ."

I wish I could meet Keats or Blake to persuade them that mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved. Quite the contrary. The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle, and anyway the solution uncovers deeper mystery. The rainbow's dissection into light of different wavelengths leads on to Maxwell's equations, and eventually to special relativity.

Einstein himself was openly ruled by an aesthetic scientific muse: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science", he said. It's hard to find a modern particle physicist who doesn't own to some such aesthetic motivation. Typical is John Wheeler, one of the distinguished elder statesmen of American physics today:

" . . . we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say each to the other, 'Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!'"Wordsworth might have understood this better than his fellow romantics. He looked forward to a time when scientific discoveries would become "proper objects of the poet's art". And, at the painter Benjamin Haydon's dinner of 1817, he endeared himself to scientists, and endured the taunts of Keats and Charles Lamb, by refusing to join in their toast: "Confusion to mathematics and Newton".

Now, here's an apparent confusion: T H Huxley saw science as "nothing but trained and organized common sense", while Professor Lewis Wolpert insists that it's deeply paradoxical and surprising, an affront to commonsense rather than an extension of it. Every time you drink a glass of water, you are probably imbibing at least one atom that passed through the bladder of Aristotle. A tantalisingly surprising result, but it follows by Huxley-style organized common sense from Wolpert's observation that "there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea".

Science runs the gamut from the tantalisingly surprising to the deeply strange, and ideas don't come any stranger than Quantum Mechanics. More than one physicist has said something like: "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory."

There is mystery in the universe, beguiling mystery, but it isn't capricious, whimsical, frivolous in its changeability. The universe is an orderly place and, at a deep level, regions of it behave like other regions, times behave like other times. If you put a brick on a table it stays there unless something lawfully moves it, even if you meanwhile forget it's there. Poltergeists and sprites don't intervene and hurl it about for reasons of mischief or caprice. There is mystery but not magic, strangeness beyond the wildest imagining, but no spells or witchery, no arbitrary miracles.

Even science fiction, though it may tinker with the laws of nature, can't abolish lawfulness itself and remain good science fiction. Young women don't take off their clothes and spontaneously morph themselves into wolves. A recent television drama is fairytale rather than science fiction, for this reason. It falls foul of a theoretical prohibition much deeper than the philosopher's "All swans are white -- until a black one turns up" inductive reasoning. We know people can't metamorphose into wolves, not because the phenomenon has never been observed -- plenty of things happen for the first time -- but because werewolves would violate the equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics. Of this, Sir Arthur Eddington said:

"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

To pursue the relationship between werewolves and entropy would take me too far afield. But, since this lecture commemorates a man whose integrity and honesty as a broadcaster is still an abiding legend 30 years after his death, I'll stay for a moment with the current epidemic of paranormal propaganda on television.

In one popular type of programming, conjurers come on and do routine tricks. But instead of admitting that they are conjurers, these television performers claim genuinely supernatural powers. In this they are abetted by prestigious, even knighted, presenters, people whom we have got into the habit of trusting, broadcasters who have become role models. It is an abuse of what might be called the Richard Dimbleby Effect.

In other programmes, disturbed people recount their fantasies of ghosts and poltergeists. But instead of sending them off to a kindly psychiatrist, television producers eagerly hire actors to re-create their delusions - with predictable effects on the credulity of large audiences.

Recently, a faith healer was given half an hour of free prime time television, to advertise his bizarre claim to be a 2000 year-dead physician called Paul of Judea. Some might call this entertainment, comedy even, though others would find it objectionable entertainment, like a fairground freak show.

Now I obviously have to return to the arrogance problem. How can I be so sure that this ordinary Englishman with an unlikely foreign accent was not the long dead Paul of Judea? How do I know that astrology doesn't work? How can I be so confident that the television 'supernaturalists' are ordinary conjurers, just because ordinary conjurers can replicate their tricks? (spoonbending, by the way, is so routine a trick that the American conjurers Penn and Teller have posted instructions for doing it on the Internet!

It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine. Telepathy and possession by the spirits of the dead are not ruled out as a matter of principle. There is certainly nothing impossible about abduction by aliens in UFOs. One day it may be happen. But on grounds of probability it should be kept as an explanation of last resort. It is unparsimonious, demanding more than routinely weak evidence before we should believe it. If you hear hooves clip-clopping down a London street, it could be a zebra or even a unicorn, but, before we assume that it's anything other than a horse, we should demand a certain minimal standard of evidence.

It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. I'm not asking for all such programmes to be suppressed, merely that the audience should be encouraged to be critical. In the case of the psychokineticists and thought-readers, it would be good entertainment to invite studio audiences to suggest critical tests, which only genuine psychics, but not ordinary conjurers, could pass. It would make a good, entertaining form of quiz show.

How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium -- in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away. Less portentously, it may be an attempt to cash in on the success of The X-Files. This is fiction and therefore defensible as pure entertainment.

A fair defence, you might think. But soap operas, cop series and the like are justly criticised if, week after week, they ram home the same prejudice or bias. Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses. But it is only fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar?

Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's only fiction, only entertainment".

Let's not go back to a dark age of superstition and unreason, a world in which every time you lose your keys you suspect poltergeists, demons or alien abduction.

Enough, let me turn to happier matters. The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy. Perhaps it is this appetite that underlies the ratings success of the paranormalists.

I believe that astrologers, for instance, are playing on -- misusing, abusing -- our sense of wonder. I mean when they hijack the constellations, and employ sub-poetic language like the moon moving into the fifth house of Aquarius. Real astronomy is the rightful proprietor of the stars and their wonder. Astrology gets in the way, even subverts and debauches the wonder.

To show how real astronomical wonder can be presented to children, I'll borrow from a book called "Earthsearch" by John Cassidy, which I brought back from America to show my daughter Juliet. Find a large open space and take a soccer ball to represent the sun. Put the ball down and walk ten paces in a straight line. Stick a pin in the ground. The head of the pin stands for the planet Mercury. Take another 9 paces beyond Mercury and put down a peppercorn to represent Venus. Seven paces on, drop another peppercorn for Earth. One inch away from earth, another pinhead represents the Moon, the furthest place, remember, that we've so far reached. 14 more paces to little Mars, then 95 paces to giant Jupiter, a ping-pong ball. 112 paces further, Saturn is a marble. No time to deal with the outer planets except to say that the distances are much larger. But, how far would you have to walk to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri? Pick up another soccer ball to represent it, and set off for a walk of 4200 miles. As for the nearest other galaxy, Andromeda, don't even think about it!

Who'd go back to astrology when they've sampled the real thing -- astronomy, Yeats's "starry ways", his "lonely, majestical multitude"? The same lovely poem encourages us to "Remember the wisdom out of the old days" and I want to end with a little piece of wonder from my own territory of evolution.

You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells. Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed.

The oldest human documents go back a few thousand years, originally written in pictures. Alphabets seem to have been invented about 35 centuries ago in the Middle East, and they've changed and spawned numerous varieties of alphabet since then. The DNA alphabet arose at least 35 million centuries ago. Since that time, it hasn't changed one jot. Not just the alphabet, the dictionary of 64 basic words and their meanings is the same in modern bacteria and in us. Yet the common ancestor from whom we both inherited this precise and accurate dictionary lived at least 35 million centuries ago.

What changes is the long programs that natural selection has written using those 64 basic words. The messages that have come down to us are the ones that have survived millions, in some cases hundreds of millions, of generations. For every successful message that has reached the present, countless failures have fallen away like the chippings on a sculptor's floor. That's what Darwinian natural selection means. We are the descendants of a tiny Žlite of successful ancestors. Our DNA has proved itself successful, because it is here. Geological time has carved and sculpted our DNA to survive down to the present.

There are perhaps 30 million distinct species in the world today. So, there are 30 million distinct ways of making a living, ways of working to pass DNA on to the future. Some do it in the sea, some on land. Some up trees, some underground. Some are plants, using solar panels - we call them leaves - to trap energy. Some eat the plants. Some eat the herbivores. Some are big carnivores that eat the small ones. Some live as parasites inside other bodies. Some live in hot springs. One species of small worms is said to live entirely inside German beer mats. All these different ways of making a living are just different tactics for passing on DNA. The differences are in the details.

The DNA of a camel was once in the sea, but it hasn't been there for a good 300 million years. It has spent most of recent geological history in deserts, programming bodies to withstand dust and conserve water. Like sandbluffs carved into fantastic shapes by the desert winds, camel DNA has been sculpted by survival in ancient deserts to yield modern camels.

At every stage of its geological apprenticeship, the DNA of a species has been honed and whittled, carved and rejigged by selection in a succession of environments. If only we could read the language, the DNA of tuna and starfish would have 'sea' written into the text. The DNA of moles and earthworms would spell 'underground'. Of course all the DNA would spell many other things as well. Shark and cheetah DNA would spell 'hunt', as well as separate messages about sea and land.

We can't read these messages yet. Maybe we never shall, for their language is indirect, as befits a recipe rather than a reversible blueprint. But it's still true that our DNA is a coded description of the worlds in which our ancestors survived. We are walking archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas, walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading such messages and die unsated by the wonder of it.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been standing in my place but who will never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara -- more, the atoms in the universe. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Donne, greater scientists than Newton, greater composers than Beethoven. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.

There is an appetite for wonder, and isn't true science well qualified to feed it?

It's often said that people 'need' something more in their lives than just the material world. There is a gap that must be filled. People need to feel a sense of purpose. Well, not a BAD purpose would be to find out what is already here, in the material world, before concluding that you need something more. How much more do you want? Just study what is, and you'll find that it already is far more uplifting than anything you could imagine needing.

You don't have to be a scientist -- you don't have to play the bunsen burner -- in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.

Reality Club Discussion

lee_smolin's picture
Lee Smolin
Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution

To: Richard Dawkins

I have two kinds of questions for Richard Dawkins about the further implications of evolutionary theory. These are about his responses to the ways that some of us physicists have been thinking about natural selection, both to try to apply our methods to biology as well as to use it to try to resolve the puzzles of our own science.

The first is about the possible applicability of the mechanism of natural selection outside of biology. Dawkins himself has invented the notion of the meme, an idea which propagates from mind to mind and survives as long as it reproduces itself. But there are a few of us who have wondered whether it might apply on a much larger scale, perhaps even to the laws of physics themselves. This seems a possibility that might be looked into as the current status of our search for a unified theory of all the interactions is that the best candidate so far-string theory, seems to have a large number of different solutions, each of which describes a different world. These worlds may differ in dimensionality as well as in the kinds of elementary particles and forces that are observed. They are something like different phases of the fundamental theory, rather analogous to the different phases of water, except there are many more. We cannot draw definite conclusions about this because we only have an approximate form of the theory under our control, but it seems possible that a principle is needed to pick out which combinations of particles and forces we find in our world that is not in the fundamental theory itself.

In this case it seems natural to wonder if some kind of historical explanation might account for how the actual particles and forces we see were picked out of a large set of possibilities. Such an explanation would have to account for the fact that it seems that the present set allows a much more complicated world-in terms of the existence of a large variety of different kinds of atoms and molecules-than the average set. This makes possible galaxies, stars and, of course, life. Some people have tried to account for this with the anthropic principle, but a few of us have felt that it might be possible to do better and explain it through a genuine mechanism of natural selection whereby regions of the universe reproduce themselves, with some small variations in the properties of the elementary particles and their forces. Given plausible assumptions about physics at very small scales, you can actually make such a theory work. I will not go into this here, but one can actually make a testable theory along these lines.

This idea was anticipated by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce, who wrote about a hundred years ago:

"To suppose universal laws of natural capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and rational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only way of accounting for the laws of nature, and uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution."

I would thus be very curious what Richard Dawkins thinks of the possibility that the logic of natural selection might apply to the laws of nature and the history of the universe itself.

My second question is what Dawkins thinks of the possibility that collective effects can occur in systems in which many species are evolving together via natural selection. For example, Per Bak, Maya Paczuski, their collaborators and others have simple models of many species evolving together in which the system as a whole reaches a self-organized critical state in which one sees collective effects including punctuated equilibrium and a power law distribution of extinctions (both of which are observed in nature.) To physicists such as myself these do not seem in conflict with the point of view of Dawkins, but it seems also necessary to take these kinds of effects into account as they can occur in a system of many selfish genes interacting in such a way that their "extended phenotypes" overlap. I have the impression from some conversations and remarks that some evolutionary theorists dismiss this mistakenly as a kind of mystification. I would be very curious what Dawkins thinks of these issues.

Lee Smolin

murray_gell_mann's picture
Murray Gell-Mann
Theoretical Physicist

I enjoyed reading on my email the piece by Richard Dawkins on the present state of siege in which science finds itself, under attack by all sorts of silly people with different silly agendas. Its interesting though that we are not alone. It is not only science that is under attack, in fact any sort of expertise is resented, such as the expertise of the historian. Of course I like to include history among the sciences as it is regularly included in, say, Russia. But if we go into the arts it's the same thing. Many people resent the expertise of artists, as well. Any implication that there is somebody who knows or understands more than the average person in some area or is capable of doing things better in some area than the average person is terribly resented. Although this is not true apparently of sports or of entertainment. But apart from these two areas, if people have expertise in something other than entertaining the public, it seems to provoke a lot of resentment today in many quarters. And so the attack on science should perhaps not be viewed separately but included in the defense of expertise, and intellect generally

richard_dawkins's picture
Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life

To: Lee Smolin

I have long been intrigued by Dr Smolin's idea of a natural selection of universes. It is the only correct way known to me of applying the word 'evolution' to cosmology. Usually, when people speak of the 'evolution' of the universe, they mean 'development' (an individual animal develops, changes in its own structure, it does not evolve. A lineage evolves, and it is an individual sequence of successive developments. Authors speak of stars 'evolving'. Stars do not evolve, they develop. For things to evolve, they have to give birth to a changing lineage of daughter things.

The reason Smolin's idea is interesting is that it may answer the challenge, "The universe is too good to be true. It looks like a put-up job." But, note that the Smolin hypothesis cannot be used to account in particular for the BIOLOGICAL part of that "too good to be true". Smolinian selection may account for the fact that our universe has the necessary constants, dimensionality and laws to last for last for a long time (not fizzle out or crunch immediately its initiating bang), long enough to spawn daughter universes (and INCIDENTALLY long enough to breed life). But Smolinian selection cannot account for the fact that our universe is specifically congenial to life, or to intelligent life, or to us. My negative conclusion would break down only if life itself is in the habit of engineering the spawning of daughter universes. As far as I am aware, this hasn't been suggested, but it is, I suppose, a theoretical possibility that daughter universes are generated as a consequence of the fooling around of highly evolved physicists.

Note that any Darwinian theory depends upon the prior existence of the strong phenomenon of heredity. There have to be self replicating entities (in a population of such entities) that spawn daughter entities more like themselves than the general population. This appears to be true of the Smolin model of Darwinian universes. It is certainly true of the normal Darwinian selection of genes I suspect that it is not true of the "collective effects" mentioned at the end of Smolin's note. I suspect that these collective effects are best handled in an alternative way. Replicators (such as genes) flourish in their environment, but what is often forgotten is that an important part of the environment is the other genes. Therefore you get mutually compatible partnerships evolving, NOT because the partnerships themselves are units of selection but because the lower level units (genes or whatever the replicators are) are selected for their mutual compatibility. I suspect that this may be what Smolin means when he says 'in a system of many selfish genes interacting in such a way that their "extended phenotypes" overlap.'

But this may not be very coherent since I am suffering from flu (like most other people in England at the moment).

Richard Dawkins
 

milford_h_wolpoff's picture
Milford H. Wolpoff
Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan; Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology

I really think if we could give Aristotle a tutorial he would ring up the loony bin to get us committed-too much difference in world view and basic assumptions for him to every understand what we were talking about or why. Actually, Rachel Caspari and I talk quite a bit about this in Race and Human Evolution, and I hope you get a chance to read it.

Happy Holidays.

nicholas_humphrey's picture
Nicholas Humphrey
Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust

Smolin refers to C.S.Pierce as having anticipated the idea that the universe evolved by some kind of selection. But there was a much earlier statement of a similar idea by Denis Diderot in his "Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those who See" published in 1749. In this "Letter" he imagines the blind Cambridge mathematician and atheist, Nicholas Saunderson, arguing furiously with a clergyman about whether or not the existence of order and beauty in nature implies the existence of a divine creator. In an extraordinarily prescient passage, he first discusses how living animals might have evolved by competitive elimination of "unfit" forms, and then goes on to argue that what was true of animals might have been true of the universe as a whole. The following is Jonathan Kemp's 1937 translation:

"You may imagine, if you wish, that that order which impressed you has always existed. But leave me free to think it has done no such thing, and that if we went back to the birth of things and of time, and perceived matter in motion and chaos becoming unravelled, we should encounter a multitude of shapeless beings instead of a few highly organized beings. . . I can maintain to you that . . monsters annihilated one another in succession; that all the defective combinations of matter have disappeared, and that there have only survived those in which the organization did not involve any important contradiction, and which could subsist by themselves and perpetuate themselves. . .

"But why should I not believe about worlds what I believe about animals? How many worlds, mutilated and imperfect, were perhaps dispersed, reformed and are perhaps dispersing again at every moment in distant space, which I cannot touch and you cannot see, but where motion continues, and will continue, to combine masses of matter until they shall have attained some arrangement in which they can persist. O philosophers, transport yourselves with me to the confines of the universe; move over that new ocean, and seek among its irregular movements some trace of the intelligent Being whose wisdom so astounds you here!"
 

reuben_hersh's picture
Reuben Hersh
Professor emeritus, University of New Mexico

Dawkins talk is rich with his eloquence and learning. From my perch, I would say also that he is on the side of the angels.

With his main shtick, "science is wonderful," I of course can but assent.

Therefore, I turn to my two bones to pick.

Bone number 1 is his amazing and absurd discovery that we are but devices created by our genes for their own survival. In an era when reductionism is generally being discredited and rejected, this is a piece of reductionism carried to fantastic new heights. Dawkins evidently admires Charles Darwin. Would he say that Darwin developed his theory of evolution for the sake of propagating his genes?

No doubt the same for Newton, Tolstoy, or Beethoven. We should think of them and their work in terms of genetics, not in terms of human consciousness.

Fifty years ago some eminent physicists liked to say that we are nothing but molecules, or nothing but atoms, or nothing but protons, electrons, and neutrons (this was before quarks.) That has gone out of style. Genetic or biological reductionism is just as foolish.

My second bone has to do with the talk as a whole. If I agree with his main point, that is no surprise, I am somewhat of a mathematician.

There is something called "preaching to the choir." It's a satisfying thing to do. You tell it like it is and your audience agrees with you. But when you're done, nothing much has changed. If Dawkins was preaching to the unconverted, I'm not sure how far he got with them. If he was preaching to the converted-great! What fun!

brian_goodwin's picture
Brian Goodwin
Professor of Biology at Schumacher College

I think that Lee Smolin's ideas about the differential abundance of universes that have different degrees of self-reproductive potential are extremely interesting, not to mention other similaritites he has identified between biological and physical processes such as excitability in galactic dynamics and the properties of autonomous agents. However, there is a fundamental point that needs to be clarified in order to pursue these analogies (possible homologies). In physics, the objects of investigation (e.g., the elements, superconductors, galaxies) are all regarded as natural kinds - that is, structures generated by dynamic processes that have distinctive intrinsic natures described by the causal factors at work in their production and maintenance. In the current biological view of evolution (i.e., Darwinism, or NeoDarwinism), the fundamental objects of study (species) are not natural kinds. They are historical individuals, accidental conglomerations of parts (characters originally, now genes) that have passed the survival test. The philosopher of biology, David Hull, has given definitive expression to these concepts. So looking for analogies between evolutionary and physical processes may get bedevilled by this basic difference of explanatory mode between the two subjects: biology as a historical science (no natures, only contingencies), physics as a rational science that has both contingent factors (e.g., initial and boundary conditions) and causal dynamics that explain intrinsic natures. My own view is that Darwinism is a scientific aberration that needs to be embedded in a more comprehensive dynamic theory that will bring it into line with the rational tradition in science. Then life and its manifestations can be understood as expressions of intrinsic organisational principles in particular states of matter (those we call living). Species, the attractors of this dynamic order, are then natural kinds, though of course their manifestation requires particular contingencies, just as does carbon or water.

In relation to Lee's particular enquiry, natural selection operating on universes that vary with respect to reproductive potential would be a perfectly natural expectation. What this shows is that natural selection, seen from the perspective of dynamical systems, is a statement about dynamic stability: those entities that make more of themselves (other things being equal) will tend to predominate. But natural selection in biology does not explain anything about the entities to which it gives rise, except that they survive (tautology), and this is as far as current evolution theory goes. Some of us are exloring explanations of life and its expression in species and other taxa at a somewhat deeper level than this, akin to the causal explanations used in physics. This of course is within the tradition that goes back to Goethe, Cuvier, Geoffroy St Hilaire and includes W. Bateson, D'Arcy Thompson, Needham, and Waddington. A recent book dealing with the conceptual issues is: Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology, by Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin. Cambridge UP, 1996. Excuse the advertising. I hope that Lee's query will initiate a dialogue on all these issues.

Brian Goodwin

karl_sabbagh's picture
Karl Sabbagh
Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public

I saw Dawkins lecture on TV and thought it was first class-and probably entirely ineffective at changing the views of those he targets. Even Bernard Levin, if he bothered to watch the lecture or read the text, would delight in ignoring or parodying Richard's style as yet another example of the arrogance of scientists and those who support the scientific method. And we are arrogant, if arrogance means not tolerating loose and ignorant thinking. And ignorance can operate in the most intelligent brain, if it has never bothered to understand what the scientific method is and that it should be applied to a far wider range of situations than the profession of scientific research. We need the Dawkins approach, but we also need to find new ways of shaming the people who really need to be brought down to earth-to the realities of science.

best karl

jaron_lanier's picture
Jaron Lanier
Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future?

The most intriguing passage in Lee Smolin's note is the assertion that inheritance, selection, and evolution among universes is a testable idea. I would love to know more about this.

It's possible to derive mathematics from the most minimal initial ideas, and that makes it all the more annoying that the physical universe seems to arise from quirky and seemingly irreducible features. The program of finding an evolutionary reduction of the arbitrariness of cosmology is vulnerable, however, to falling into an infinite regress. There would have to have been some proto-cosmology analogous to the primordial soup that launched life, and then the question would be whether THAT had evolved. (This is not a problem for biology, since biology doesn't have to explain its origin from a void, only from chemicals.) Is it possible to pose ultimately simple, non arbitrary, initial conditions that could give rise to an evolution of physical universes?

It might be the case that there's only a layer of evolution that has risen from non-trivial initial conditions that were themselves not evolved, but that would make our universe out to be even more capricious than we had initially feared.

Best,

Jaron

Duncan Steel
research astronomer at the Joule Physics Laboratory at the University of Salford

Re: the Dawkins' lecture. I thought it inspirational and effective-but then to me, it would be, wouldn't it? In fact I saw RD deliver the lecture on TV a few weeks back, whilst I was in London. It came over very well. I'd note that it was not transmitted in prime time, but what can one expect...? Of course, this is part of the problem that RD addressed.

That paragraph was meant to deliver some well-deserved praise before I make two criticisms. The first is to point out an error; the second is (perhaps) a matter of opinion.

RD wrote: "Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium-in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away. "

Oh, dear, RD has fallen victim to the popular delusion that the next century/millennium begins on 1st January 2000. In fact it is still four years (and a bit) until the start of the next millennium. No year zero, and all that stuff.

He also wrote: "Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Donne, greater scientists than Newton, greater composers than Beethoven. "

There are three bases to my objection to that sentence. The first is the simple value-judgment side of things: who is to say who was greater in any sphere?

The second stems from a query about what might disqualify anyone from consideration: should Newton be disqualified on the basis of his alchemic (and other) beliefs? Let me give an extreme example, to show the point: should Hitler be considered a great humanitarian because he was responsible for the introduction of the VW Beetle, still a workhorse in the 1st and 3rd Worlds?

The third comes from a recognition that none of these men came out of a vacuum; as the saying goes, "Cometh the hour, cometh the man" (or woman). The conditions were right, the time was right, for what they did. [Before someone says, "Yes, of course, Newton himself wrote that `If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'" I'll point out that in fact IN wrote those words to a hunch-backed dwarf, Robert Hooke]. In the context of RD's comment, then, I'd point out that almost certainly there have been many DNA combinations which have occurred in homo sapiens which-potentially-could have produced "greater" poets/scientists/whatever than Donne or Newton, but the conditions were never right for them to blossom. There are likely several around now, living in China, India, or the Bronx.

I left out Beethoven there since I have to admit that my reason for taking the time to write the above-and for halting in my reading of RD's lecture at the "offending" paragraph-was the mention of that indisputably great MAN. It is in my psychological makeup (I worded that so as to avoid writing "in my nature", as one usually would) to object to any statement which might hint even the merest inflection against Beethoven. Here, for example, it could be construed that RD's statement reduces Beethoven's greatness to the mere product of his chance combination of genes. That would be to ignore his psychological makeup, and how his character was shaped by the environment in which he existed, and his reaction to it. How could anyone who has read the Heiligenstadt Testament believe that Beethoven was a product solely of his genetic makeup?

Finally, since we are comparing (to some extent) scientific and artistic (in the broadest sense) creativity, let me make a statement to which some might take umbrage. In media interviews, I am often asked questions along the lines of whether scientists view themselves as similarly creative as artists. My answer is that they might well do, but that belief is (in my opinion) misfounded: because artists create something new (Beethoven's 7th did not exist before it entered his head), whereas "all" that scientists do is to reveal the secrets of the universe. Like solving a crossword puzzle, whether you believe that some deity constructed that puzzle (and put in some damned difficult clues) or not. It is a different pursuit, needing a form of imagination and creativity; but I don't think that it is the same type of creativity as that displayed by an "artist."

Having written that, I note that the pursuit of the Third Culture does not represent in itself, but the pursuit has a foot on the "other side": there is no intrinsically higher value to a piece of creative writing about art or life compared to one about science.

My thanks to Richard Dawkins for his fine lecture.

Kind regards,

Duncan Steel
 

george_johnson's picture
George Johnson
Author; The Cancer Chronicles, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments; Columnist, The New York Times

The exchange between Dr. Smolin and Dr. Dawkins reminded me of a theme that obsessed me while I was writing Fire in the Mind. If you'll allow me to quote from the book:

"Traditionally, biology has been seen as a historical science, while physics is regarded as a search for absolutes. Physicists seek that which is constant throughout the universe. Biologists are supposed to be content to pick their way through the accretion of mechanisms and mechanisms built on top of mechanisms that evolution happened to lay down on earth, to describe natural artifices — organisms — that, with a different roll of the Darwinian dice, would be unrecognizable to us. But this division between physics and biology seems to be breaking down. Biologists like Stuart Kauffman are looking for timeless truths, principles of complexity — laws of the organism that might be reflected in all creatures, domestic or extraterrestrial, and even in metaorganisms like societies and economies. Conversely, physicists are seeking signs of contingency in the way the universe happened to crystallize from the big bang. Perhaps the particles and forces we observe and the laws they obey are 'frozen accidents,' just like biological structures. If so, it would be no more required that we have neutrinos than that we have hemoglobin, no more necessary that we have four fundamental forces than twelve ribs and thirty-three vertebrae."

stanislas_dehaene's picture
Stanislas Dehaene
Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Richard Dawkins's essay on your new website. Not only did it give me an "appetite for wonder", but also an craving thirst for more such exquisitely accessible presentations of scientific matters — I believe I'll be making frequent visits to your URL! It is a great honor to see my name mentioned amidst the prestigious figures of science that you are gathering at this site. I don't know if my own research would "thrill Aristotle to the core of his being", but I do appreciate the opportunity of giving it a try — do you plan to have him send comments from elysium.com

I was thinking, do you know if Dawkins's essay has been translated into French? If not, maybe I could suggest it for publication in the journal La Recherche, which the rising star of scientific publications for the general public nowadays in France (the French equivalent of Scientific American). What do you think?

My book will be out on January 17th in France. It already generates quite a bit of excitement in the press... and quite a bit of anxiety for the author! I'll let you know how it all comes out.

marcelo_gleiser's picture
Marcelo Gleiser
Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth College; Author, The Island of Knowledge

On chapter 6 of The Dancing Universe I start a discussion of how premature it is to attribute "intelligent design" to the Universe, when we don't even understand our own intelligence. I identify the discovery of "complex patterns" in Nature as a consequence of a brain that is the product of natural selection; as identifying complex patterns is one of our brains foremost powers, "finding" them is easy too. In a sense, this means that we are trapped within our one modes of functioning, so that our reconstruction of Nature is inherently "human".

joseph_ledoux's picture
Joseph LeDoux
Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU; Director Emotional Brain Institute; Author, Anxious

Richard Dawkins is a wonderful spokesperson for science. Not having had the opportunity to hear his BBC lecture, it's hard to know what the impact was or might be. The written text though is an upbeat infomercial for why science is important. But these comments (mine) are being directed to the wrong people. Presumably most people reading this are themselves scientists or are strong sympathizers. For this reason, like most of the others who have commented on the talk, I can only find small points to pick on.

The small point I want to pick on has to do with the war between scientists and social relativists. My wife is an art critic. When we first met in the early 1980s, we found that we read completely different philosophers. I peered into some of the post-structuralist material she was reading, but found it mostly unreadable. In other words, I had the typical knee-jerk scientific reaction to it. In the intervening years, it seems that the tensions between social relativism and science have increased. I have to admit that I've not gone very deep into poststructural theory or other aspects of contemporary social relativism, but feel that there might well be something of value in it. For example, the notion that words are defined by their relation to other words (rather than to physical objects) is strikingly similar to the functionalist position in cognitive science that mental states are defined by their relation to other mental states (rather than their relation to the brain). My personal take on this is that there must be a neural coding of mental states so that the "language of the mind" is ultimately the language of the brain. This makes me a hopeless materialist, but one who accepts that some aspects of mind and behavior might be functionally or even socially determined by processes in and between brains. In other words, I believe that materialism accounts for functionalism and socio-cultural relativism (even if it doesn't yet explain them). Actually, most functionalists are themselves materialists in their own way, but I doubt many social relativists are. It seems to me that we scientists should try to see what the relativists have to say. I'm as guilty as anyone of ignoring them, but feel that it wouldn't hurt to look a little closer.

At the same time, I appreciate why Dawkins takes relativists to task in his lecture and why John Brockman does in The Third Culture. In dogmatically dismissing absolutes, relativists leave scientists little choice but to either dismiss them or attack back. But this, I think, may lead us too easily down the path of throwing out the baby with the bath water. We aren't yet ready for "cultural neuroscience" but we may someday be. Certainly we should be open to what others have to say, even if they are fundamentally against what we do. We don't want to train young people to ignore and even reject the contributions of any field, even if the contributions are at this point remote.

I'm not saying that Dawkins is doing any dismissing of anyone. I'm just saying that we need to be to distinguish our distaste for the relativists' antipathy for science from their intellectual contributions.
 

lee_smolin's picture
Lee Smolin
Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution

 

The idea of cosmological natural selection is one that was concocted out of desparation, out of the apparent failure of string theory to lead to unique predictions for the spectrum of elementary particles. It took me a long time to take it seriously, I have recently been pleased to see that some biologists and astronomers do seem to think its plausible, if, of course, unproven.

As for Richard Dawkin's point that cosmological natural selection could not account for life in the universe, I think that there is a possibility that it might, or at least could go a long way in this direction. The reason is that carbon chemistry seems to play an important role in the processes that govern star formation. The clouds out of which stars form cool themselves to temperatures of as low as 10 degrees above absolute zero through processes in which carbon and oxygen play the key role. The main mechanism of cooling is believed to be rotational transitions of CO, the clouds are also filled with dust grains that are made largely of carbon, these serve both to shield the interiors of the clouds from star light and as sites for molecular binding. This is not nearly all of the role that carbon chemistry plays in astrophysics, but it gives a hint: it seems that the existence of carbon chemistry might be explained by cosmological natural selection because without it not so many massive stars that become black holes would be formed. Other conditions necessary for life, such as the fact that the universe has stars might also be explained by cosmological natural selection.

For me this is enough for the present, but two people I know have suggested that intellegent life might make a universe more fit, because they would make many black holes. Louis Crane, a mathematician who has contributed a lot to topics related to quantum gravity, has suggested that far in the future, after all the stars have burnt out, intellegent beings would make small black holes so as to provide energy and keep warm from the Hawking radiation. A great many small black holes would be necessary for this! Edward Harrison, a distinguished astrophysicst, has suggested that intellegent being, having figured out the game, might make black holes just to increase the probability of life like ourselves in future universes.

I myself prefer to let people far in the future worry about such things, and concentrate on the question of testing predictions from the original idea, on which some progress it seems can be made.

About Richard Dawkins response to my query about collective effects in natural selection: I am trying to suggest that his view is completely compatible with the behavior of the models of Bak and Kauffman. It is true that heridity strictly speaking is not necessary to get the kinds of collective effects one sees in some of the models of Per Bak and collaborators, where the only attribute things have is a number corresponding to fitness, and the only rule is that things with a lower fitness number are most likely to become extinct and be replaced by an entity with a random fitness. This is enough to get effects like power law distributions of extinctions (which is apparently what is observed and punctuated equilibrium.) But this is only a very simple model designed to explore such effects, the idea is that when the fitness is defined by the actual properties of the organism and its relation to its environment, it gets its meaning from heridity. That is, it is possible to model systems with heridity by using only an abstract attribute of fitness. But the model would not be relevant to biology were there not heridity. So I agree with the point that the genes are the units of selection, and that this is sufficient to understand collective effects, such as "partnerships". But I do also suspect that one needs to concepts that come from the study of self-organized critical systems to understand the general systematics of the history of life, such as rates of extinction.

What Brian Goodwin says is very provocative, because of his use of the concept of "natural kinds". The idea is that as he puts it, there are "structures that are generated by dynamical processes that have inrinsic natures described by the causal processes at work in their production and maintanence." Certainly there are things like this, and it is important to study them from this point of view. But I think there are some important things we don't know about them: Just how complex can such a thing be, in the absence of heridity, or control under some entity utilyzing coded information (i.e. DNA, RNA)? There certainly are such systems, such as the disks of spiral galaxies, that do appear to have spontaneously organized themselves. As there are enormous numbers of examples, it really seems that galaxies might be considered natural kinds. But they are much less complex than living things. Second, there perhaps are intrinsic organizational principles in non-equilibrium statistical physics, and I am among those who think the search for them is worth undertaking. But the burden is on us to find these principles and understand their scope. Third, I am not sure how powerful a concept of natural kinds can be in the absence of a general framework of natural selection. Perhaps I am reading in, but I suspect this concept carries with it a kind of Platonism, in which one imagines that one could enumerate and classify before hand all the possible "natural kinds". I think it is worth wondering whether this is even possible in principle. If not, then a science of natural kinds might be itself necessarily at least partly historical, and thus tied to the framework of evolution by natural selection.

Finally, to Jaron Lanier's point, yes of course, but there is nothing to prevent us from going step by step. If cosmological natural selection, or an idea like it, is going to be useful, it is going to be because 1) it leads to real predictions about what would happen if the parameters that come into fundamental physics were chosen differently, that are not contradicted by what we can deduce from our best astrophysical theory and observation and 2) our understanding of the fundamental principles of physics, (one candidate is string theory, or better the unknown exact theory behind string theory) leaves us in a situation in which there are many possible versions of elementary particle physics consistent with it. For the present, both of these conditions appear to be satisfied.

paul_davies's picture
Paul Davies
Theoretical physicist; cosmologist; astro-biologist; co-Director of BEYOND, Arizona State University; principle investigator, Center for the Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology; Author, The Eerie Silence and The Cosmic Jackpot

I greatly enjoyed reading Richard Dawkins' lecture, and I agree with almost all of it. Indeed, I have often expressed similar sentiments myself, especially in relation to the UK anti-science brigade, who were partly responsible for my decision to quit Britain and live in Australia. A couple of points I would like to endorse. Yes, science is a victim of its own success. Because it is so good at driving technology and generating wealth, its worth tends to be assessed in purely utilitarian terms. Yet science is also a cultural activity of the deepest significance. Martin Rees once made the point that Darwin's theory of evolution doesn't have many commercial applications, but few would deny its greatness or its significance. (Actually, it may have applications in modern biotechnology). It is good that we should know where we have come from and what our place is in nature.

I also liked Richard's point that in science there is "mystery but not magic". This is such an important point. Science demystifies the universe, but reveals something far more elegant and awesome than the crude antics of a cosmic magician. Finally, what are we to do about the rise and rise of pseudo-science and paranormal claptrap, without being accused of a scientistic conspiracy? Here is a drastic suggestion: If I set up a stall in downtown Adelaide and sell bottles of tap water for $100 each with the claim that they will cure baldness, keep the swimming pool free of algae and remove carpet stains, I will be jailed for fraud. If I claim to be able to bend metal without touching it, read your future, or call up your spirit guide (for a suitable fee) I am left alone by the authorities. Is this right? A London physicist I know once refused to pay his local taxes until the Council removed astrology from the list of evening classes. Perhaps peddlars of paranormal piddle should be compelled to attach a Government warning of the sort that cigarette manufacturers and investment fund managers use, along the lines of: "Scientific tests have consistently failed to provide any positive evidence that the claims made herein can be substantiated".

Best wishes,

Paul

robert_shapiro's picture
Robert Shapiro
Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Senior Research Scientist, New York University; Author, Planetary Dreams

Richard Dawkins' talk provides a brilliant beginning. I enjoyed the penetrating way in which he presented the scientific world view and demolished the fatuous criticisms of science by several of its critics. Despite the brilliant efforts of Dawkins and other spokesmen such as the late Carl Sagan, the problem remains: students in the United states are shunning the study of science, and the media continues to celebrate the paranormal and "New Age" thinking. We need to discuss what new things might be done to ensure the survival and prosperity of science in our culture.

Best Regards,

Robert Shapiro

carl_djerassi's picture
Carl Djerassi
Organic Chemist and Inventor

In his recent comments, dawkins speaks briefly about science fiction and its posible use in transmitting scientific ideas to a general public.

May I call to his and your attention the (to me) much more relevant genre of "science-in-fiction" which is rarely used but ought to be propagated much more widely. I myself have been working on a tetralogy of novels in that genre. Two of these volumes have already appeared as Penguin-USA paperbacks ("Cantor's Dilemma" and "The Bourbaki Gambit"-the latter describing the invention of PCR); the third ("Menachem's Seed") will be out later this year in hardback, and the entire series will be available first in German translation by the time of the 1997 Frankfurt Book Fair with the publication of the final volume ("No") which utilizes the recently discovered multiple biological functions of nitric oxide (e.g. in penile erection) to describe the role of "biotech" companies..

May I refer you to my web page ( http://www.Djerassi.Com) for more elaboration on that topic.

Carl Djerassi
Stanford University