In his article, "Where Are They? Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing" (PDF here), Oxford University's Nick Bostrom has raised some very troubling questions.
According to Bostrom, one must wonder what to make of the apparent absence of intelligent civilizations in the universe: the statistical probabilities suggest the universe ought to be teeming with great varieties of Intelligent ETs. In light of the universe's great age and scope, it seems mathematically probable that, if the development of intelligent life happened on Earth, it's likely to have happened somewhere else in the universe at some finite time in the past. And knowing what we know about how life evolves and spreads, ET ought to have strung the firmament with neon panoply ages ago.
But, still no sign of ET.
So Bostrom wonders — just how freakish can this be, given that the universe is flush with galaxies and habitable planets galore? Bostrom thinks there must be gating factors — "Great Filters" that reap civilizations before they become spectacularly successful. I have seen this idea before: Bill Joy referenced it his article, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." He was quoting Carl Sagan from his book, Pale Blue Dot:
It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds – a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.
Bill Joy, Carl Sagan and Nick Bostrom all seem to issue a collective shudder of discomfort over the prospect of humanity's impending encounter with our own advancing technology. Somehow this dilemma reminds me of the Vorlons from the television show Babylon 5: an aging, advanced civilization finally realizes that they have outgrown their own galaxy — like fish who have outgrown the sea. Their exodus "beyond the rim" could be analogous to a fish crawling onto the land — or to angels ascending into heaven.
From the point of view of some highly advanced civilization of ETs, the cold comforts of our material, time-bound universe might seem about as inviting as a mud flat or a thermal vent. Maybe the hidden answer to Bostrom's question is that Intelligent Civilizations invariably discover Heaven, and once they do, they move there.
Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing (PDF here),
Reference:
- Bill Joy: Why the future doesn't need us
- nickbostrom.com
- http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
- View at Technology Review (requires registration)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlon
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(Babylon_5)
Mr. LaSalle – (The fact that the paper I pointed you to is hosted on a website sponsored by the NCSE isn’t directly related to the content of the paper. I think you’ll find that the flagellum isn’t quite the slam dunk for ID it’s been painted as.)
Same here. (Though I have dabbled here and there.) When I have looked into ID claims, however – to the extent that they make testable claims, anyway – they haven’t held up.
Who says there is a sharp dividing line? Day and night are as different as… well… day and night, but there’s still a fuzzy boundary between them – twilight – where it’s hard to say that it’s day or night. I’d say that when looking at larger populations of organisms, general patterns emerge. On the level of individual organisms, things are more granular, and when you get to individual genes, things are pretty chaotic.
Actually, it’s not quite so clear as all that. In addition to the fact that we don’t know all the constraints on universes (as Einstein famously asked, “Did God have any choice in creating the universe?”) it turns out that many preconditions for ‘life as we know it’ are not quite so sensitive as previously assumed:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35363/title/Stars_ablaze_in_other_skies
ID claims haven’t held up? As far as I can tell, the existence of a Creator is the only thing that makes sense. Macro evolution sure doesn’t.
Mr. Ingles said,
In support of this statement, three articles published on pandasthumb.org were cited, including this one:
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/05/behe-vs-lamprey.html#comments
According to Panda’s Thumb, Michael Behe has argued that blood clotting is an “irreducibly complex” system that only functions when all the elements of the system are in place. But according to PT, certain species of jawless fish are able to clot blood with only a few of the elements that are required in the mammalian blood clotting system.
Not withstanding the *merits* of the argument (since I don’t have enough informational background to make a sure call either way), I am struck by the stridency and emotionalism evident in the comments section of the article.
Example:
followed by this:
These are immensely ignorant comments that defy the simple rules of reason and dispassionate judgment required by any scientist. And it reminds me distinctly of a court room presided over by hizzoner Dr. Zaius.
There are currently 260 comments after the article in question. I don’t have time to go through them all, but judging by the first page of comments, this is the level of the debate at Panda’s Thumb: hateful, furious and breathless — a practical loony bin of emotional “Science Educators”, all lined up in perfectly straight rows of foaming-at-the-mouth dittoheads.
And all of them making Dr. Zaius proud.
Mountain Man – Evolution may seem counterintuitive, but that doesn’t make it wrong. A round Earth, heliocentrism, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics don’t ‘make sense’ – until you really study them, at least – but they’re as close as we’ve come to true so far.
Mr. LaSalle – What if – and this is just a possibility – ID proponents in general were intellectually dishonest? If it could be shown that Behe were, in fact, putting forth inaccurate, vacuous, or actually dishonest arguments, then would that opprobrium be expected?
Of course, one would have to evaluate the arguments themselves to determine this…
“evaluate the arguments”… supported by 3 links to Panda’s Thumb and one to their atheist soulmate at ERV.
Here’s the money quote from Panda’s Thumb that I think defines the entire approach of the anti-ID crusaders:
Just imagine if you and I were the judges in a trial in which evidence was presented to us under an a priori conclusion that all “claims” presented by the defense were “fallacious” before any evidence was even heard.
Would this not be an iconic representation of a classic “kangaroo court”?
It seems reasonable to assume that a certain percentage of ID supporters are intellectually dishonest. In light of the evidence, I think it’s safe to say the same about the fulminating ID detractors at PT, ERV, and really throughout the mainstream media.
So where does this leave us?
I have already admitted that I am not especially well informed about the biological arguments in favor of ID.
However, I am somewhat more informed about cosmological arguments for Intelligent Design.
I am certain you are already familiar with Frank Tipler’s Omega Point Theory describing a theoretical model in which a closed (3-sphere) universe may be converted en masse to Intelligent Purpose.
Despite the fact that Tipler is a well-known and respected theorist with a perfectly qualified pedigree, lesser scientists (like this knuckle-dragger) are notoriously quick critics of his conclusions.
But other more respectable scientists like David Deutsch are rather more credible sources. I always recommend that jerk-knee detractors of the OPT have a good look at chapter 14 of Professor Deutsch’s book, The Fabric of Reality.
While Deutsch does not hold Tipler’s conclusions about the emergence of a super-computational Intelligence at the far end of time, he nevertheless CONFIRMS Tipler’s theoretical model as entirely reasonable on its own terms:
To my way of thinking, in the multiverse, it is certain that some universes will go to Heat Death while others will go to Big Crunch.
The thing is, an intelligently-guided Big Crunch only needs to happen ONCE in order to establish the Omega Point.
God only needs to do it *one* time. All the other universes (either with stars or without) will subsequently fall into place under His Divine Will.
If ONCE is all it takes for God to create Himself in the multiverse, well, that’s good enough for me.
No, evolution does not seem counterintuitive. It seems anti-science.
Evolution certainly doesn’t belong in the ranks of the other things you cited. Putting evolution in such a list lends gravitas to it that is not warranted by the facts.
And it didn’t take long to being in the condescending “until you study them” comment. Yup, every one who believes in God is an idiot, while SCIENCE will lead us to truth and peace.
Mr. LaSalled –
But… that’s what you’d need to study up on to determine if the comments (you seem mostly to be focusing on the comments and not the articles themselves) were warranted or not. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, “You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong… Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is ‘wishful thinking.’ You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself… If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic…”
You may find the commentors, or even the article authors, to be uncivil. But the relevant question is whether or not they are wrong. From looking into those arguments, they do seem to me to have the right of it.
But current cosomological theory indicates (a) that our universe is headed for a Heat Death, and (b) that other universes, if they exist, are forever disconnected from ours, causally. Even if there’s a “Big Crunch God” out there in another universe, with infinite computational steps and effective energy supply… It still can’t affect this universe. At most, It could simulate this universe within that universe. (Then we get into the whole simulation hypothesis stuff, but that seems like the kind of chin Occam’s Razor was made to shave.)
Raymond said that the Observation Selection Effect is bordered by a “twilight” zone of sorts, wherein OSE occupies the night side, while the rest of reality is in daylight.
Okay. You haven’t provided any actual evidence to back up this claim, but in the interest of advancing the argument, let’s just say it’s true.
Now please answer part two of my question. That is, now that you have identified the boundary of the OSE, please let me know *where* in time and space this border exists. In other words, does this “twilight” exist only at the start of the universe, or does it exist much closer to our own time — let’s say within the last 5 billion years? Or is is possible that the OSE Twilight Zone is even closer than that?
Oh, and BTW, this video deserves its own post…
Mountain Man –
Well, you can have your opinion on that. But the evidence for evolution really does strike me as, well, staggering. Here’s a good one: The “twin nested hierarchies”.
Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It’s possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a ‘family tree’. “These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere…” This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces ‘family trees’, nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution.
Today, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected – that of DNA. This really is a ‘text’ being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it’s the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.
It didn’t have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life – like that of cytochrome C – have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don’t affect its function. (Genetic sequences for cytochrome C differ by up to 60% across species.) Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology – “this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue…” – conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We’d know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
The details of these trees are very specific and very, very numerous. There are billions of quadrillions of possible trees… and yet the two that we see (DNA and morphology) happen to very precisely match. This is either a staggering coincidence, or a Creator deliberately arranged it in a misleading manner, or… common ancestry is actually true.
Once you accept common ancestry, it’s a very short step to neo-Darwinian evolution. Lots more evidence there. But, as I recall, you’re one of the people here at IC who’s not sure about common ancestry.
(Single-celled organisms are much more ‘promiscuous’ in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a ‘web’ of life than a ‘tree’. But even if the tree of life has tangled roots, it’s still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life.)
Um… no. Not what I said at all. I said they were counterintutive – which is pretty much the opposite of “only idiots doubt them”. You might need to be a genius to discover something like heliocentrism or Relativity, but you certainly don’t need to be a genius to learn about them and decide that they are solid theories with a lot of compelling evidence, that make testable predictions that are borne out again and again.
Like evolution.
Please point me to the studies that have confirmed the scientific testability of macro evolution. You know, the lab data, the double blind studies, the repeatability achieved in a controlled environment that shows the process in action.
Regarding copy-with-modification, yes, ancient documents were reproduced that way, with the attendant scribal errors. The errors are always regarded as corruptions, diluting the integrity of the document, sometimes to the point where the document had to be discarded. The original document, with enough errors, could be reduced to gibberish.
A particularly bad analogy, I would say. Those very document errors are used by skeptics to cast doubt on the veracity of the Bible, and yet the process is also used to illustrate (however loosely) the process of evolution. And you call ID’rs dishonest?
I will post this on behalf of FightingGadfly who has responded to my good-natured provocations on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/FightingGadfly
@FightingGadfly’s comments are indented:
I would say that your citation of the Uncommon Descent FAQ is not a particularly valuable source for a wider understanding of the concept of Intelligent Design.
The uproar over ID in the schools and in the media (not to the mention the courts) has greatly politicized the very idea of a “search for the best models” when it comes to First Principles. Sure, the Discovery Institute is essentially a PR organization. What else is new? The same thing can be said about the National Center for Science Education, whose motto is: “Defending the Teaching of Evolution in Public Schools”
There is a discussion in the thread above regarding the Omega Point Theory. I understand part of the argument to underline the value of Chaos in helping to define emergent systems. Eg., The Incompleteness Theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems wherein it is stated that, in any formal mathematical system, there are solutions which can never be discovered from within the said system.
I would say that’s pretty devastating to anyone who wants to lock in a Materialist view of the universe.
“They see a designer because they want to see one.” I don’t necessarily buy the premise, but in any case SO WHAT? Discoveries are driven first by observation and ideation. Your comment implies that scientific facts are somehow tested before the test is even conceived. How could Isaac Newton have developed a Theory of Gravity before first conceiving of it?
To the extent that a child can *conceive* of a threat in the shadows, that threat exists. Fundamentally it does not matter if the threat is real or not — what matters is that the idea itself was manifested.
In other words, a *thought* is quite literally the same thing as an *action*. It can be identified as a particular set of electrical impulses within the brain. But a thought is still the product of a dynamic mind. Each thought occurs within the story arc of a particular life.
Did Isaac Newton’s insight about gravity occur at the instant he saw an apple fall from a tree as the moon rose in the Eastern sky?
Does it matter if the story is a parable or not?
No. The idea is plain enough: The moon is falling around the earth for the same reason the apple fell from the tree: gravity.
So where did the Theory of Gravity originate? In the thoughts of Isaac Newton.
Ideas are real. At least they are representative echos of real events in the brain of a human being at a particular point in their life. Each idea is generated within the causal stream of consciousness that occurs within each individual. Every person manifests their thoughts first as electrical impulses in the brain, and thereafter as a cascade of physical effects that echo through the body and touch off causal waves of human interactions across whole societies and even across time.
Indeed this concept could be applied to any animal with a nervous system.
What about “superstitious ideas”? I submit that these individual instances of superstitious belief are independent ingredients in an soup of collective thoughts that looks something like Jung’s Archetype.
Reference the Beast of Dr. Morbius in the movie Forbidden Planet.
Here you are reaching back into antiquity yourself, and holding up the earth-centered solar system as an example of a bad idea once excepted at true by the establishment.
The irony here is that you yourself are appealing to the Principle of Mediocrity to prove your point that there’s nothing special going on in the Creation of Life on Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_mediocrity
Ironic because accounting for the Observation Selection Effect is a methodological requirement in any argument that tries to explain the origins of the Universe. I suspect the OSE may even be required to explain the origin of life itself.
In more ironic contrast, the theory of the Big Bang was quite a hard pill to swallow for those anti-design proponents of the Steady State theory of the universe. Even Hubble went to his death in 2001 convinced that universe was not created at a specific moment in time that we call the Big Bang.
Matter of fact, it took Penzias and Wilson — two COMMERCIAL astronomical technicians — to discover the proof of the Big Bang BY ACCIDENT.
Could you imagine: what if the Standard Model of a static universe were the accepted rule of cosmology right now — today?
Could you imagine and grandsons of Penzias and Wilson asking their department heads for a grant to study the background radiation of the universe in an attempt to validate their hypothesis that the universe had a beginning?
Could you imagine the implications if Herr Doktor Professor Dawkins — our Grand Overseer — were to get wind of it? Heads would role, my friends.
“Proved vs. assumed” is not a credible rationale for dismissing the possibility of Intelligently Guided creation. You assume that the Scientific Method is always applied in the same measure to every question of science.
For example, the obvious fact that macro-evolution is THEORETICAL by definition is frequently overlooked or ignored by both the mainstream media and by lower level science educators. Even the Multiverse hypothesis is widely accepted by cosmologists, but in the end it too is a THEORETICAL MODEL that CANNOT be demonstrated or tested, but only inferred (eg., through the Double Slit Experiment).
It appears that the standard for “proof” is not set by the Scientific Method at all, but by the fuzzy measures of social consensus.
Anti-IDers love to have their cake and eat it too, and that is intellectually dishonest.
The trouble is that anti-IDers condemn any assumption or framework that conflicts with the popular sensibilities of unguided materialism.
That’s dishonest, and that is why anti-IDers have lost all credibility with me.
So Dembski is guilty by association with his faith? Guilt by association is a logical fallacy on its face.
This is a straw man argument: I have never hear the argument that “random patterns give rise to complexity.” That is not an observation but an introduced rhetorical device.
Back to abiogenesis. How did life start?
“There is no truly ‘standard model’ of the origin of life.” — wikipedia entry on abiogenesis.
If you don’t have a quick and glib answer to this question, then you CANNOT take Guided Intelligence off the table.
But that’s exactly what anti-IDers want to do.
Neither does the Many Worlds Interpretation of the Universe, but I don’t see any gangs of anti-Multiverse crusaders trying to shout the theory down at the top of their lungs as they do for Intelligent Design.
Frank Tipler is a signatory of the Dissent from Darwinism. He is a respected theorist whose book The Cosmologic Anthropic Principle was a standard text book for many years before the anti-IDers realized he was talking Heresy.
Tipler’s Omega Point Theory has been peer reviewed by Oxford’s David Deutsch (who won the Paul Dirac award for his work on Quantum computing). The theoretical model of the OPT has been found sound. Look up chapter 14 of Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality for a full analysis of Tipler’s OPT.
In the end, your argument rests almost entirely on the FAQ page from Uncommon Descent and on the supposed incredibility of one ID researcher. Additionally, your core argument seems based on a perfunctory dismissal of Guided Intelligence as a solution for any possible problem.
I can demonstrate the inaccuracy of this approach simply by directing you the theory of Directed Panspermia, in which many leading scientists (including Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick among many others) have found a solution to the origin of life.
If Directed Panspermia isn’t an example proposing a “Guided Intelligence Solution” I don’t know what is.
RI said,
That’s a worthy retort, but for me the evidence is murky and the jury is still out.
You will need to back that claim up with something solid.
Also, if as you say each universe is a closed system, that would make it subject to the Incompleteness Theorem, to whit: solutions exist which cannot be discovered using the internal formalities of said closed system.
Mr. LaSalle – I admit the question of whether separate universes are causally disconnected depends in some ways on what theory you’re using (see here) but I’m not aware of any detailed physical theory or hypothesis (except maybe ‘branes’) that allows causal interaction between separate universes.
As to the Incompleteness Theorem, I’m okay with that. It’s not clear that the universe is a formal system in the sense of Goedel in any case…
Mountain Man –
Just to be clear, by “macro evolution”, you mean “species changing into other species”? Well, there’s this, to start. As I said before, common descent – as established as anything can be in science – pretty much inevitably implies ‘macroevolution’. (Just looking at endogenous retroviruses is extremely convincing.)
BTW, the distinction between so-called ‘micro-’ and ‘macro-evolution’ is rather fuzzy at best. An illustrative quote I saw once: “There is no distinction in nature between microevolution and macroevolution. Macroevolution is just larger quantities of microevolution over much longer times. It’s like saying that there’s ‘microwalking’ which is what I do from the car park to the office every morning, and down to the shops on weekends, and that can result in changes of my location over time on a small scale; but the idea that people, over tens of thousands of years, walked out of central Africa into Europe, then over to Asia, across to North America and into South America – that’s ‘macrowalking’ and it’s impossible.”
I fail to see the inconsistency. Copy-with-modification is ubiquitous, and has consequences. Some of them are obvious (like nested hierarchies), some are less obvious (like evolution). Even in the Bible, though, some of the ‘mutations’ seem to have become ‘fixed in the population’, so to speak. (E.g. here.)
Now, copy-with-modification on functional ‘text’, like DNA or program code, can have effects and properties that prose doesn’t display. (The Bible is not a computer program or a genome.) I was curious back in the 90′s, and was able to swiftly duplicate the results of this guy myself, which I linked to above, and even find some new tricks evolving.