Asking Questions about Evolution

View 799 Saturday, November 23, 2013

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito.

Ambrose Bierce

It hasn’t been a great week. Starting with the ache from the wisdom tooth and the residual pain after its removal, which is bad enough that I suspect there’s more wrong in there than I thought. I’ll find that out next Tuesday.

The result is that I haven’t got much done. I’ve read a couple of books, and Peter has been turning my office suite into a place I can actually have visitors, and I got most of my errands done although some resulted in only temporary removal of a problem. We did get some good discussion of the health care dilemma and I made a start at summarizing what we actually know about climate, so it wasn’t all a waste. I’ll try to do better.

Tomorrow, Sunday 23 November, I’ll be on TWIT (This Week in Technology) at 1500 i.e. 3 PM Pacific Standard Time. I don’t know who is on with me, other than Leo of course., but you can find us at TWIT.TV tomorrow at 1500.

I don’t agree with Fred on everything, but he raises a number of really interesting questions, he’s right a lot of the time, and he doesn’t swallow fads.

His latest essay on evolution reads like something I might have written a few years ago, or yesterday for that matter if I had as much energy as he has. The latest essay is The Bugs In Darwin, (http://fredoneverything.net/BotFly.shtml) and he does a great job of summing them up. Doubting the sufficiency of Evolution as an explanation of everything will get you in more trouble than being a Climate Change Denier, but there are a number of “bugs in Darwin” – things that it is very difficult to see any possible explanation for in Darwinian evolution. We know that there is “evolution”; we can see it, and we can breed animals to our specifications; but the problem is that cellular biology is far more complicated than Darwin dreamed of, and indeed that anyone thought until fairly recently.

About thirty years ago I wrote an essay on evolution and origins using the analogy of a watch: you can take all the components of a watch, but them in a bag, and shake them forever and the probability that they will fall into place still remains vanishingly small with relation to the age of the universe. You can make the probability a bit larger by adding multiple copies of some of the components, but a bit larger still leaves you a vanishing probability. You can shape the parts such that there’s only one way they will fit together, and the probability they they’ll become a watch rises again, but it’s still small; and now of course you have to explain how the parts got made. If you find a watch in the woods, that’s pretty overwhelming evidence for the existence of a watchmaker. Now what do you look for if you find a watchmaker?

Fred looks at a number of highly complex processes and asks how they might have ‘evolved”; and his conclusion is the same as mine has been since I was in high school: We don’t know, but it sure isn’t Darwinian survival of the fittest, and it looks a lot more like design than chance. I came to that conclusion before I knew just how complex the universe it, and I have never been shown any reason to change it.

Now by design I don’t mean that there are no elements of chance in the evolution: it’s more complicated than that. I can think of a number of random steps that if made in the correct order will take you from a light sensitive cluster of cells to an eye as that exists in nature; but not all of those steps have any obvious utility or advantage to the organism. Something that isn’t on that path could and more probably would have happened. By design I mean that somewhere in there is a glimmer of what you’re after. It was something of this sort that Augustine had in mind when he postulated that creation was in causes, not in completion. When I was in high school I wasn’t converted to the Church by any refutation of Evolution, because I learned Evolution from Brother Fidelis despite the fact that it was still illegal to teach Evolution in the state of Tennessee in 1949. Indeed I didn’t start to question the standard theory until I learned just how complex cellular biology appears to be.

Interestingly enough another friend named Fred, Sir Fred Hoyle, came to much the same conclusion. It is presented in his Evolution From Space http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Space-Sir-Fred-Hoyle/dp/0671492632 and it is a lot more plausible than Darwin. Fred presents the case for design, although I caution you that his notion of both design and a designer will horrify priests, mullahs, imams, ministers, mambas, but possibly not witch doctors.

I have to get a haircut for tomorrow’s appearance on TWIT – since I’ll be on a couple of panels at LASCON next Friday it was time anyway – so it’s lunch time. I’ll try to come up with something else later, but if you read Fred’s essay you’ll have plenty to think about. Fred asks a lot of the right questions. I wish there were more writers, particularly in the scientific community, who dared ask them.